 Perversion
for Profit is a 1965 propaganda film financed by Charles
Keating and narrated by George Putnam. A vehement
diatribe against pornography, the film attempts to link
explicit portrayals of human sexuality to a Communist
conspiracy and the subversion of American civilization.
The film is in the public domain, and it has become a
popular download from the Prelinger Archives. Perversion
for Profit illustrates its claims with still images
taken from various soft core pornography magazines of
the period, though with some portions of human anatomy
obscured by colored rectangles.
To bolster his position, Putnam makes several references
to "Dr. Sorokin, the renowned Harvard sociologist". This
individual is Pitirim Sorokin, a Russian-American who
founded Harvard's Sociology department and served as the
American Sociological Association's 55th president.
In an article discussing the Prelinger Archives for the
San Francisco Chronicle, Peter L. Stein observes that
the film has gained a different sort of utility than its
producers intended:
...as the parade of girlie magazine covers, men's
physique pictorials and campy S&M leaflets continues,
the film betrays a kind of prurience the filmmakers
could hardly have intended. What results is a remarkable
visual record of midcentury underground literature and
sexual appetites, and a gloss on the values of the
society that condemned them.
At the time the Chronicle article was written,
Perversion was the Archive's second most popular
download, superseded only by Duck and Cover. Ephemeral
film scholar Rick Prelinger, founder of the Archive,
views the popularity of such films as a sign the
"unofficial evidence of everyday life" has become more
interesting than "'official' documents from Washington
or New York".
In 2004, a Prelinger Archive user going by the pseudonym
"Trafalgar" produced a remix, in which short clips from
the film are rearranged to make a pro-pornography
advocacy video. Trafalgar's remix, entitled Come Join
the Fun!, is available from the Internet Archive's
open-source movie collection. The electronica band
3kStatic sampled audio from the original Perversion film
for the title track of their 2005 album Perversion: for
Profit.
Perversion For Profit
text made available under the terms of the GNU Free
Documentation License. Taken from Wikipedia.
Thank You.
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