Stag film

A stag film (also blue movie or smoker)^[1] 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 (about 12 minutes at most), were silent, depicted softcore or hardcore pornography 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.^[2] 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 artists. Today, many of these films have been archived by the Kinsey Institute; however, most stag films are in a state of decay and have no copyright, credits, or acknowledged authorship.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 1960s in combination with the new home movie technologies of the post-World War I decades, such as 16 mm, 8 mm, and Super 8 film. Scholars at the Kinsey Institute believe there were approximately 2,000 films produced between 1915 and 1968.^[3]

American stag cinema in general has received scholarly attention first in the mid-seventies by mainstream scholars, such as in Di Lauro and Gerald Rabkin's Dirty Movies (1976), and more recently by feminist and gay cultural historians, such as in Linda Williams' Hard Core: Power Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (1999) and Thomas Waugh's Homosociality in the Classical American Stag Film: Off-Screen, On-screen (2001).