Show-it-all films borrow from classics.

By Marilyn Beck and Ellsworth Redinger

Hollywood, pushing for "the total human experience," is borrowing pages from classic art — and coming up with scatology, incest, rape, mutilation and more. It's all in the Bible and works of Joyce, Lawrence, Shakespeare, Dante and Chaucer. This is Part III of the three-part series on Hollywood's new “art” form.)

David F. Friedman, leading producer/distributor of "porno" pictures. claims that any successful erotic film must include the following ingredients: A Sado-masochistic scene; a heterosexual love scene; a lesbian scene; and an orgy.

So what's new about that? Creators of some of history's greatest literature have employed those erotic elements for centuries. Works containing these ingredients fill the shelves of college. libraries, state museums lowed halls of the Vatican.

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Since history began, man has set down, experiences in pictures, sound and in words. Painting, the dance, and literature have forever been outlets for the artist's inner urges and a podium for his ideas.

Art has been used to depict the forbidding, and fearful, the beautiful, bizarre and the brutal and how it has been accepted has varied according to the esteem of the creator and prevailing public tastes.

Often, pornography has seemed to be more a matter of packaging then of contents, for though classic litera-

ture has in its favor the grandeur of great language and sublime and elevated theses much of it contains more prurient matter than that available in the modern “adult” book shop.

Milton's "Paradise Lost" is replete

tempted to produce a literal film translation of the Bible, he would be arrested for making hard-core pornography.

He cites the book of Genesis to make his point. Abraham, afraid of the

in detail of the suffering and punish Egyptians, tells the beautiful Sarah to

ment of Satan.

David R. Friedman

Dante's trip through the inferno with the poet Virgil contains explicit description of sinners in the acts of selfmutilation, cannibalism, submersion in pits of human feces.

And the "Kama Sutra," a mystical book of India that is treated as a semisacred document and has been given loving translation by respected scholars

provides detailed descriptions of the positions and variations of sexual inter-

course.

Renowned French film maker Roger Vadim maintains that if he at-

say she is his sister and not his wife. She does so, goes to the court of the Pharoah, lives well, and leaves Egypt with Abraham a very rich woman Lot refuses the requests of his neighbors in Sodom to give them two male visitors so that they might "know" them, but offers his virgin daughters instead... Later, Lots daughters, “unwilling to be barren, get him drunk

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and he unknowingly begets his children with his children.

The narration of scores of sexual adventures in the Bible have resulted in the publication of modified versions of the stories for use in Sunday schools and early childhood religious education.

And in other times, in other areas, vigorous effort has been made withing the society to alter, subdue, sometimes to ban all forms of art.

Medieval monks expurgated and smothered literature they considered immoral. The Puritans drove the Restoration dramatists off the London stage. Nineteenth century critics required the painting over of the exposed genitals of the great Renaissance art of Michelangelo.

And American librarians and schoolteachers and school boards have forced the works of Mark Twain. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Walt Whitman off the shelves.