Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography is a Canadian documentary film about the pornography industry, directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein and released in 1981.[1]
Film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein and stripper (later journalist) Lindalee Tracy explore multiple facets of the sex entertainment industry. They interview porn actors, sex workers and notable feminists such as Robin Morgan and Kate Millett.[4]
The film had a budget of $503,519 (equivalent to $1,598,037 in 2023).[5]
Release
The film was banned in Saskatchewan. The Ontario Censor Board refused to classify it, resulting it not being allowed to be shown, but the film was seen by 40,000 people at 300 private showings in Ontario within the next year. The film became the NFB's highest-grossing film at that point in its existence after being shown in Montreal for nine months.[6] The film was retitled to A Film Against Pornography in the United Kingdom.[7]
Critical response
At the time, the local Canadian reviewers were hostile. The Globe and Mail called the film "bourgeois feminist fascism" and the Toronto Star judged it to be "a one-sided tract of outrage that only feminists and moral majority believers will take to their bosom".[8] Writing in the Village Voice, B. Ruby Rich dismissed the film as anti-porn propaganda.[9]Jay Scott criticized the film as an "unenlightening learn-a-long."[5]
The film is the subject of a book-length analysis for the Canadian Cinema Series published by University of Toronto Press. In its reassessment, it acknowledges that the film "was one of the first attempts to actually give voice to the women and men who worked in the sex industry without expecting them to recant or testify to their own exploitation."[9]
Bart, Pauline B.; Freeman, Linda; Kimball, Peter (January 1985). "The different worlds of women and men: Attitudes toward pornography and responses to Not a Love Story—A Film About Pornography". Women's Studies International Forum. 8 (4): 307–322. doi:10.1016/0277-5395(85)90012-3.
