page_title: Stag film
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Stag film / History
caption_attribution_description: Español: Cuatro fotogramas del film El Sartorio, quizás el primer film pronográfico de la historia.
context_page_description: A stag film is a type of pornographic film produced secretly in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Typically, stag films had certain traits. They were brief in duration, were silent, depicted explicit or graphic sexual behavior intended to appeal to 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 Today many of these films have been archived by the Kinsey Institute; however, most stag films are in a state of decay and have no copyright, credits, or acknowledged authorship.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.
context_section_description: Before the age of internet pornography and a general acceptance of the production of pornography, porn was an underground phenomenon. Stag films 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 these 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.
  The German film In The Evening, the Argentinian film El Satario and the American film A Free Ride (or A Grass Sandwich), produced between the years 1907 and 1915, are three of the earliest hardcore pornographic films that have been collected at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction.
caption: Some historians consider the Argentine film El Satario, filmed sometime between 1907 and 1912, to be the oldest surviving pornographic film.[4]
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