Shortly after Edison’s invention of the Kinetograph in the early 20th-century, erotic movies became part of the cinematic reality. When the on-screen depiction of a short peck on the lips or a seductive dance was considered a shocking spectacle for the early mainstream realm, stag films were becoming an underground phenomenon.

The first stag films appeared in the United States, France, Austria, Germany, Russia, Argentina, and North Africa between 1907 and 1919. Produced “in camera” due to strict censorship laws, stag films depicted explicit or graphic sexual behavior intended only for male consumption in private screenings, from which women were excluded. In Europe, stag films were associated mainly with brothels, with their main purpose being to arouse the viewer to the point of purchasing the services of the women of the house. The films were brief —usually filling a single reel— and in most cases lacking coherence and continuity. The Kinsey Institute film archive currently holds a collection of 1697 historical 8mm and 16mm black and white stag films. Three of those films have received a lot of scholarly attention for being rare early examples of typical stag films.

1. Am Abend: The Typical Voyeur

Am Abend (In the evening) is a 10-minute German film, made in 1910 telling a rather simple story. A man is peering through a keyhole. He sees a woman masturbating with the help of various objects. After a while, he decides to enter the room and they end up engaging in various sexual activities. As simplistic as it might sound, the theme of a voyeur and a spied-upon was typical for a stag movie. According to film scholar Linda Williams1, this typical voyeuristic narrative has the dual purpose of arousing the characters and matching the characters’ gaze with that of the spectator, achieving a form of identification. Therefore, when the viewer and the voyeur see the same thing, the voyeur’s vision leads to the arousal that initiates the hard-core action.

2. El Satario: When the Satyr Found the Nymphs

El Satario (also known as El Sartorio) made somewhere between 1907-1912 is more cohesive in terms of narrative and has a basic plot. A group of nymph-looking naked girls goes for a walk in a meadow and while they enjoy the beautiful weather, a satyr-looking man appears out of nowhere. The girls get scared and run away but as luck would have it, one of them gets abducted by the satyr. One doesn’t need a great deal of imagination to guess what happens between them after the supposed abduction. Each shot of the film depicts another position as they enjoy themselves in the meadow until the rest of the girls return and beat the devil up. Even though El Satario follows a basic narrative structure, the hard-core scenes —as in most stag films— are characterized by a form of discontinuity, with the transitions being unjustified and abrupt. As L. Williams2 puts it, “narratives that are already rudimentary become truly primitive during their hard-core sequence,” since discontinuity seems to be an accepted practice within those sequences.  

3. A Free Ride: Directed by a Wise Guy

The earliest film in the Kinsley collection, A Free Ride (also known as Grass Sandwich), produced in the 1910s (for some scholars 1920s), revolves around a man who sees two young ladies walking alongside a rural road and offers them a lift. Sometime after, the man stops to urinate and what was supposed to be a stop for him to empty his bladder became a pleasure feast, with the three of them engaging in various sexual acts in a secluded location, under the bright sun. The film’s title cards employ the typical stag film humor to refer to the production team: Directed by A. WISE GUY/Photographed by WILL B.HARD/Titles by WILL SHE. Like Am Abend, A Free Ride incorporates voyeurism in its narrative, when the characters take turns peeping on each other, when they urinate, to obtain sexual gratification.

Reminiscences of the past

In an attempt to compare stag films with modern-day pornography, one can recognize a clear similarity between the two. Serving as a strategy to help the viewer to identify himself with the performer, both modern-day pornography and stag films use widely the so-called “meat shots” (the close-up of penetration). However, since stag films were aiming more towards the arousal of the spectator rather than his satisfaction, the “money shots” (the external penile ejaculation) are not as common as they are in modern porn.

The new visual technologies in combination with the beginning of the sexual revolution in the 1950s led to the gradual decrease in the production of stag films and their subsequent end. The later Golden Age of Porn or “porn chic” freed from porn’s outlaw status enjoyed the perks of a completely different form of visibility and appeal within the public sphere. Retrograde technology, amateurishness, and only-men-porn belonged to a past defunct form of the early porn experience.

1 Williams, Linda (1989) Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible, University of California Press, p. 62

2 Williams, Linda (1989), p. 80-81

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