Strange New World: Sex Films of the 1970s

To look at the world of the past through films can be a sobering insight into how things have changed, but to look at the world of the 20th century through sex films is to witness a world that is almost inexplicable. In no decade is this experience more bizarre than the 1970s, and yet it is less than half a century in the past. Was society really so strange and different only forty years ago? These films were often not pornography, as we understand the term. But what were they? Who made these films and why, and who were they made for? What did they say then, and what do they tell us now? In some cases, what were we thinking?? But in others, what have we lost? Nothing even remotely like these films is being made today. What has replaced them, and how, and why? JON ABBOTT, born in 1956 and a teenager in the 1970s, looks back at the era through over two hundred films exploiting sex and nudity, some of which he loved, and some of which he… liked a little less!
This opinionated and fact-filled history looks at the strange new world that adults of both sexes and all ages found themselves in during the 1970s and surrounding decades, from the 1950s to the present day. It looks at films from all around the world, including America, Britain, France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Czechoslovakia, China, and Japan, at sci-fi, horror, crime thrillers, comedies that weren't funny, and serious-minded films that were hilarious. Some of the best-known masters of sexploitation are well represented–Stanley Long, Greg Smith, Joe Sarno, Russ Meyer, Mac Ahlberg, Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, Tinto Brass–as are some of the sex films' most beautiful and prolific practitioners–Sylvia Kristel, Gloria Guida, Lina Romay, Maria Forsa, Edwige Fenech, Felicity Devonshire, Christina Lindberg, Joelle Coeur… and such mainstream movie names as Jane Fonda, Jenny Agutter, Julie Christie, and Pam Grier.