synopsis
On her journey into the depths of pornography, Bonnie Sherr Klein chooses the burlesque performer Lindalee Tracey as her companion. Tracey represents the opposite pole: the freedom and joy of publicly performed eroticism within an industry produced for men and run by men. Woven through a compilation of interviews with sex workers, club owners and feminist writers is the story of Tracey’s transformation: following a photo shoot for
Hustler, arranged for her by the film crew, she describes the impact that manipulative desire has on her own body. The sexual explicitness of the scenes is matched by the explicitness of the arguments. The idea that the sex trade touches upon the deep-seated mechanisms of desire in both the individual and society resonates with the lines by Margaret Atwood, which she reads herself in the film: “…flesh made inert, the surge of your own uneasy power.”*
Two Canadian provinces refused to allow the film into cinemas. A dispute with Ontario’s censors, which also concerned other films, ultimately led to a court ruling that weakened censorship. Despite the ban,
Not a Love Story became one of the most talked-about documentaries produced by the National Film Board. Its reception was shaped by the escalating “porn wars”, which divided the second wave of feminism into anti-pornography and anti-censorship factions. In 1985, the Special Committee on Pornography and Prostitution recommended that regulations should be based not on obscenity and morality, but on dignity and equality. This was followed by a regulation requiring the mandatory display of an age “rating” on distributed films.
biography
Bonnie Sherr Klein (1941) is an activist and documentary filmmaker. In 1967, she moved to Montreal in protest against the US war in Vietnam. Together with Dorothy Todd Hénaut, she took part in the first Canadian community video project,
VTR St-Jacques (1969). From 1975, she worked at Studio D, the women’s section of the National Film Board, where
Not a Love Story was also made. Her latest film is
Shameless: The ART of Disability (2006), a portrait of the art scene created by people with disabilities. Her daughter is writer and activist Naomi Klein.
film details
| director: | Bonnie Sherr Klein |
| producer: | Dorothy Todd Hénaut, Mark L. Rosen |
