Introduction to Sex and Hygiene Program

Hi everyone and welcome to the Chauvel Cinematheque for this program of short films entitled Sex and Hygiene. The six short films you are about to see are interesting not for their educational value but rather as a barometer for society’s attitudes towards sex and sex education. With the exception of of the first film, For Your Information, these films were shown to children and were part of a loose program of social engineering designed to foster healthy attitudes towards sex and hygiene.

I remember seeing my first sex education film as a 4th grader – a battered copy of Sexual Aspects of Puberty on a clattering 16mm projector at Denistone East public school. The film was shown outside of school hours and I was accompanied by my mother who after the film said warily, "Did you learn anything from the film?" I remember my reply was, "No, I already knew all that." Along with a terse, “If you’re going to do anything obscene, do it with the blinds down", from my father, this was the sum total of the sex education I ever received from my parents.

Years later, I found a copy of the film, and recognized it immediately due to the animated diagrams of the reproductive process. I even thought the film could possibly be the same copy. It was the first 16mm film I had ever seen and was to profoundly influence me – here I am today, still showing battered copies of 16mm sex education films.

I’ve programmed these films chronologically to give you a feel for the changing attitudes towards the subject – from the fear-mongering of the WW2 era For Your Information, intended for female recruits in the Canadian air force, to the enlightened view of the 1980s pro-condom film Condom Sense. There are a few missing links in this chain of chronology. Sex education films are highly sought after by film collectors and command huge prices on ebay and elsewhere when they are offered for sale. This program largely misses films from the 1960s and 1970s where the pendulum swung from the fear mongering right wing scare campaigns to the more enlightened view of the films from the period of the sexual revolution.

What’s interesting about these films is the way they reflect parental anxieties over sex education. This is particularly explicit in Human Reproduction, the second film I will screen today. Produced in 1947, this film sparked a controversy in America about the role of sex education in American public schools, a debate that is still (unbelievably) going on today. The information in the film is delivered in the usual animated diagrams with lecture format and is framed by sequences set in a 1940s suburban living room, where Mum, Dad and Little Johnny are discussing the arrival of a neighbour’s baby. This leads Little Johnny to the inevitable question of where babies come from, and with much nervous gulping and knowing glances to his wife, little Johnny’s father begins to talk on the subject and the film dissolves into the lecture w/diagrams format. The film is centred not so much on the facts of life, but on the anxieties Mum and Dad feel about presenting the facts of life to their children. These sequences are funny today because they reflect the nervousness around the subject.

You can view Human Reproduction here:

http://www.archive.org/details/HumanRep1947

Next up is How Billy Keeps Clean. Although not strictly a sex education film, this film is a good example of the hygiene film, a related genre of educational film shown to primary schoolers as a sort of warm-up for the full blown sex-ed film they would see later in high school. What makes these hygiene films compelling is the way they prime their audience to think about hygiene in the same way they will (hopefully) think about sex - not as a source of pleasure or intimacy but as a sort of battleground of desire, discipline and microbiology.

I am very excited about the prospect of screening the next film, Dance Little Children, a rarely seen 1961 educational film by cult director Herk Hervey, director of the B&W horror classic Carnival of Souls. In an earlier program I screened Hervey’s remarkable short film Leo Beuerman. I am obssessed with this filmmaker and hope to put together a two hour program of his industrial and educational films sometime in the future. In Dance Little Children, a film made for the Kansas Board of Health, a a Twist dance craze is the trigger for a syphillis epidemic in a small town. Produced as a narrative short film in gaudy colour, it is a unique little comic gem, and can be described as a suburban, film-noir, VD scare film.

The hard-hitting 1972 documentary film Vasectomy, unfortunately didn't arrive with the rest of the films and won't be screening. I guess you could say Vasectomy has had the chop!

The pro-condom film, Condom Sense, that closes the program, was produced in 1980 and is haunted by the spectre of the AIDS virus. Released just months before the first widespread reports of the virus, the film was rendered instantly obsolete. It's still worth seeing though as it encourages teenage boys to be more responsible for birth control and equates this responsibility with respect for women. The film doesn't moralise. Instead it works from the assumption that teenagers are having sex, and in stark contrast to the nervousness of the films of an earlier era, treats the subject with a light and humourous.

So I hope you learn something today. And if you know all this stuff already... remember to shut the blinds first.

Thank you.