Porn to Be Free (Porno & Libertà)

Pornography was the great revelation of the ’50s, ’60s

and the ’70s.

It’s actually unknown why

they...

opposed...

A great number of organizations, persons...

sexual freedom opponents.

So...

It was a good fight.

Now...

when they have other things to think about,

the sexuality slips in

where it's possible.

PORN TO BE FREE

My friend's brother got arrested in Genova.

Lasse Braun (Alberto Ferro) Director

He was caught with 3 suitcases... coming back from Monte Carlo

He also had some Danish magazines with nude women for painters.

And, obviously, he has bought them to sell them later.

So I called a friend of mine and asked about him. He was in prison.

In prison. Unbelievable...

It's like...

Like the Spanish Inquisition.

I mean, you imprison someone for looking at magazines...

with nude women... And they weren't all naked, some wore a bikini.

It's crazy... It's just completely crazy.

This had an enormous effect on me, so I sad to myself:

''Something has to be done about this.''

I was fluent in all languages, more or less

and I was a member of the Diplomatic Corp in Vienna,

so I could transport anything because at that time

the DC's were untouchable.

So I said: ''Now we are going to fill them up.''

We need to slap their faces with porn...

hit them really hard, from all angles.

I continued to go back and forth, non stop.

I carried all these ''packages'' that I would pick up in Denmark,

in Amsterdam...

and I would take them to Germany etc.

It was all prohibited, to be clear.

If pornographers were caught with these things in their hands

they would go to prison.

I mean, this is the highest example of stupidity.

In Italy we came from...

Giampiero Mughini, Writer

I remember because I was a boy-

from a cage...

whose chains were made firstly by the Empire

of the Catholic Church, which claimed that it was a sin.

Desire is a sin, a mortal sin...

Lust...

This is what we came from... And from another cage, too.

It's clear that the left communist wing was studded with puritanism,

And so we were fighting against these two puritanisms.

It's not like you could say:

Giuliana Gamba, Director

''Now I'm going to protest''

or ''Let's repeat the '68''

because I'm against this or that.

You were anxious.

You felt like strangled... Because of the authority,

the formalism, at home, in school, everywhere.

We had to break those patterns.

On January the 4th, 1968

'68, the revolution -

Pay attention, what I did was revolutionary.

It was a big revolution.

Because I said that we have to strike on sex,

which is their most vulnearable spot...

Because, who would listen to these four old imbeciles,

who tell you to cut here, there...

They can cut off their own balls, I said.

This is the best thing.

And we arrived to the point where, on June 4, 1969,

for the fist time a parliament,

an European Parliament

- not just any small country, but a big nation-

has abolished the censurnship on sex.

So basically they said that the pornography is free.

There was a big party and so on.

It was a marvellous thing.

And from that point onward actually, Denmark apparently became the center.

People from all over the world came to witness this situation.

Because it was severely prohibited in Europe and all over the world.

They surely realized that it could give birth to...

something big, something that strikes down right into intimacy.

Because I said that with sex...

we'll reach the intimacy of imagination,

the intimacy of desire...

Undercover, I started to organize and create selling locations.

I thought: If there's interest, we'll see it.

And it did, so a large quantity of money was in circulation...

Because without money, you can't do anything.

With this money

I managed to set up

a proper production.

In Sweden and in Denmark

I made these videos

which were connected to a certain concept

the Tropical series.

The three videos were shot in the Caribbean islands.

Than there was the Nymphomenia series

where we had 3 particular situations

connected to Sweden and Denmark.

The Vikings, I even thought about them.

And at a certain point all of this reached an American.

Robert Sturman was his name.

He had the idea of making ''peep shows'' machine.

Machines, he said... That was the idea.

He thought that we should put in some interesting videos.

In the United States porn didn't exist. Let's be clear about that.

They had Marylin Monroe movies in which she pretends to fuck.

So when they saw this...

There was no acting there, you could see everything.

For 450.000 dollars in cash they bought

the rights for my first 30 videos.

He made these peep-show machines and distributed them everywhere.

Including Miami, where this Damiano guy was...

Who after that immediately shot Deep Throat.

But it's not like they invented porn. Let's be clear about this.

I invented it, and that's the truth.

In Italy, the modern pornography,

was founded basically here in Rome

by a very particular person,

adventurer on one side,

intellectual and a businessman on the other.

His name is Riccardo Schicchi.

There’s Riccardo. Hi!

Hi!

At the church entrances you could find

handbooks which contained all the things one shouldn’t do.

Among other things, don't buy L'Europeo, don't buy L'Espresso.

I was in love with nature and therefore also with women. So I couldn’t understand their motive.

As I loved to paint, before I enrolled the academy,

and I couldn’t have a female model, I used to buy magazines.

On the pages of “Grazia” and in magazines

which accidentaly had half-naked girls I saw the models for my paintings.

Then a magazine called “Men” appeared, but even there the breasts were corrected.

Thank God because I could see more... I was pleased!

When the second edition was published,

it was taken out of my hands at the newspaper shop.

They were being confiscated!

I tried to keep my magazine but they took all the copies.

I was right there at the subway station.

I took the subway to the city center and went to the publisher.

I was climbing the stairs, the street number was 54,

and an old man opened the door.

He was Men’s manager, marvellous!

I realized that by listening to what he said

and by following his and others’ experiences,

I would not only reveal, understand, but enter that meccanism.

And actually, year after year, my experience at Men

made me a friend of all the female models.

But above all, it allowed me to start writing, to take photographs.

In my opinion...

Goa was a marvellous girl bathing under a waterfall

Afganistan was a woman breastfeeding her child.

Every county had this image of a woman in close up,

it could almost complete this magnificent nature.

At the same time, I was travelling as a photo reporter.

And these photographs were very charming

to Buttafava, head of Epoca,

and Dario Tibaldi, head of Panorama.

So I find myself, very young,

with photographs published in these magazines

which were like the big Bonatti.

A whole new world lay upon me.

The search for the woman's glance or body.

For me, photography was surely a way of...

Not only to make them look better and tell their stories,

but to try and understand who they are.

My photographs reached the hands of a fashion agent

who sent them to Roger Vadim

and to America,

to one of the biggest agencies in New York - the Ford.

And from that point onward

my extraordinary journey through Eros started.

French Blue is a documentary of mine, shot with my film crew,

in which why try to shoot an impossible scene

to put two cocks up a girl's ass.

So... A pretty crazy scene...

All in all, all sorts of things happened,

but we didn't make it.

I always liked to be in charge, so as I director,

I got furious and so on.

Here we inserted some videos that I made earlier,

they were cartoons made with my friend Sine

who was a great illustrator in Paris.

All of this made it possible for me to make this movie

which lasted circa 75 minutes,

And I absolutely wanted to take it to Cannes.

I wanted to get to Cannes

because my goal was...

for pornography to break out at the center of the cinematic world.

Because it was important to throw it into their faces,

to make them see it well, on the big screen.

I managed to smuggle this suitcase filled with 35 rolls

and to take it to Cannes

where I had an admirer

who immediately called the manager of the biggest cinema in Cannes.