From: Jim Carlile (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Sep 13 2009 - 14:57:08 PDT
In a message dated 9/12/2009 10:30:26 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
email suppressed writes:
Have you actually seen the Brakhage films under consideration here?
These films do not show child sex, but they also do not just show
totally "innocent" nudity of the beach-snapshot variety. In "Song 9,"
for example, there is a little boy with an erection. When I showed
this film in a small town in Connecticut in 1967, it elicited a very
angry response from an, um, older matron.
Childhood erections are not sexual. They're innocent. And in the past,
general child nudity was never considered to be sexual unless it was overt.
Nowadays it is. If anyone is considering Brakhage's film to be child porn,
then this is a fairly recent development (I'm not sure anyone is, but don't
get them started...)
It's because of this that I doubt Mekas or others condemned the film at
the time.
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