Stag film

Stag film or Smokers are terms used to describe a type of pornographic film produced clandestinely in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Typically, stag films had certain traits. They were brief in duration (about 12 minutes at most), were silent, depicted explicit or graphic sexual behavior intended to appeal to heterosexual men, and were produced clandestinely due to censorship laws. Stag films were screened for all-male audiences in fraternities or similar locations; observers offered a raucous collective response to the film, exchanging sexual banter and achieving sexual arousal. In Europe, stag films were often screened in brothels.

Film historians describe stag films as a primitive form of cinema because they were produced by anonymous and amateur male artists who generally failed in achieving narrative coherence and continuity. Today many of these films have been archived by the Kinsey Institute; however, most stag films are in a state of decay and have no copyright, credits, or acknowledged authorship. The stag film era ended due to the beginnings of the sexual revolution in the 1950s, in combination with the new visual technologies of the post-war era, such as 16 mm, 8 mm, and Super 8 film. Scholars at the Kinsey Institute believe there are approximately 2000 films produced between 1915 and 1968.

American stag cinema in general has received scholarly attention first in the mid-seventies by heterosexual males, such as in Di Lauro and Gerald Rabkin's Dirty Movies (1976), and more recently by feminist and queer cultural historians, such as in Linda Williams' Hard Core: Power Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (1999) and Thomas Waugh's Homosociality in the Classical American Stag Film: Off-Screen, On-screen (2001).

Before the age of internet pornography and a general acceptance of the production of pornography, porn was an underground phenomenon. Stag films, also known as blue movies, were made by men for men. The projections of such films were itinerant and were secret exhibitions in brothels or smoker houses. Stag films were an entirely clandestine phenomenon; not until the "porn chic" era of the 1970s would sexually explicit cinema gain any recognition or discussion in mainstream society. Unlike today, the on-screen display of satisfaction, such as male or female orgasm, was not a convention of stag cinema. Instead there was what Linda Williams called the "meat shot", which was a closeup, hardcore depiction of genital intercourse. As there are no direct quotes or oral histories by participants in this underground cinema, film scholars understand what they know of this stag films mainly through written accounts. Stag films persisted for such a great length of time, as Williams argues, simply because they were cut off from more public expressions of sexuality.

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