In the opening session of Uncensored, the Erotic Film Society present Ole Ege’s 1971 film, Pornografi – En Musical, as they commemorate the original ‘naughty boy’ of Danish cinema.

Read the Run-Riot Interview with Lidia Ravviso, Artistic Director, UNCENSORED Festival.

In the 1960s Ole Ege celebrated voyeuristic pleasures in a series of increasingly explicit, colourful and clever 8mm shorts which were at the forefront of the celluloid sexual revolution. Among the multitude of moral panics which accompanied the social tumult of the sixties, few offered more opportunities for reactions – from sanctimonious ‘tut tutting’ to prophecies of moral apocalypse – than the emergence of explicit pornography.

In Denmark, a small number of film makers were pushing at the boundaries of what was considered acceptable, quickly moving from pin-up posing to explicit solo performances to unsimulated sex, in 8mm loops intended for home viewing. Foremost among them was Ole Ege. When it became clear that prohibition was unlikely to stop the tide of carnal entertainment, the Danish authorities took the momentous decision to decriminalise hard-core. The rest of the world looked on aghast. Would Copenhagen become the Sodom and Gomorrah of Scandinavia?

“Pornografi – En Musical” is a compliation of Ege’s short films – ranging from near abstract experimentalism to mini-narratives to context-free bdsm – with a soundtrack which includes a performance by jazz legend Dexter Gordon. Sadly, Ole Ege died in December 2018 and this UK premier screening is a tribute to a filmmaker who developed the language of sex on screen and helped explicit cinema emerge from the shadows.

The film will be introduced by Dr Oliver Carter, senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at Birmingham City University, whose research into the emergence of explicit pornography throughout Europe will inform a book that he is currently writing about British hard-core pornography during the latter half of the twentieth century.