Excess is intrinsically tied up in our ideas about pornography, as a genre it is often shamed for its unfiltered, uninhibited dive into guiltless pleasure - bypassing the thinking brain and facilitating a deep dives into our urges.
But why is it looked down on to allow ourselves to take moments to revel in excess, in indulgence, in gluttony in a world that tells us to be neat, polite and careful, to not expect too much for ourselves? Why are we led to believe that experiencing pleasure is vapid, or worse, dangerous and degenerate in a world that’s invested in carefully feeding us pain and suffering and selling us the lie that Buying Things™ is the only tonic? When in all other parts of our lives we are encouraged to covet, buy and spend as much as possible, indulgence is sneered at when it’s not propping up the markets and making someone rich, richer. If we're led to believe that our only respectable access to the release and restorative aspects of pleasure are things connected to capital - then we have to pay in to get off. Sex is about inhabiting and connecting to your body and your mind, something that costs nothing and no one can hold hostage from you.
So fuck more if you want to, fuck yourself and your friends. Joy can be an act of resistance. So, in that spirit, orgies.
What makes group sex an orgy? How many people do you have to have? These are the great questions of our time.
i. The Decadence
We’ve always shot orgies as part defiance and part celebration, they’ve marked important times in the life of the project. Our first was shot way back in 2015 it was just after we’d really hit the ground running with building our fund on Patreon and we’d surprised ourselves (and probably everyone!) and for the first time we were making enough money to really fund the project, hire location, pay performers decently and get half decent equipment. We decided we wanted to shoot something extravagant for the first time, we’d made some films in the US and fallen in love with some incredible performers out there. This was still the time of NSFW Tumblr and we’d basically met and made connections with most of these people through the communities on there.
We decided to film our most expansive, opulent shoot yet, with 6 of our friends and favourite performers all in a Dionysian fuck pile. We wanted to fuck in Grapes and Wine and celebrate the gluttonous, joyous porn world we’d fallen into. Featuring amazing performers, Daisy, Nenetl, Owen, Mickey, Finch and me, Vex. Here's what I said at the time
"It’s called The Decadence for a number of reasons. Mostly, I like the word. It could be a cheesy porn title but when you unpack it it means ‘decline’ or ‘decay’ - with morals and standards but also in “skill at governing among the members of the elite of a very large social structure, such as an empire or nation state.” so it’s like fucking the system, kinda.
It’s also a period of time, which then marks this period of time in our project. Some of the people we’ve met and worked with and fucked have become my closest friends, We’re undoubtably better film makers, leading a more interesting life than when we started. Thank you for making this happen. Here take this ridiculous, messy and complicated sex pile as a small token of my gratitude."
Loosely basing the colours and set up on those amazing Caravaggio paintings, we hired a Dungeon space in San Francisco and hooked a camera to the ceiling pipe (with masking tape, DIY for life) and got to work covering the floor and ourselves in so much wine and lube that we started to stick to each other. We got so carried away that we basically entirely forgot to shoot anything with the grapes. It was intense and chaotic and we all kept fucking after the cameras turned off. Everyone were such incredible troopers because the shot looked so good I had everyone fuck on the hard dungeon floor which resulted in everyone, myself included, being bruised and achey the next morning.
(I will say that that hosting an orgy is basically 90% bureaucracy, it’s not exactly like you’d imagine from Eyes Wide Shut, a lot of emails and google calendar co-ordination before anyone actually gets naked)
The second part The Renascence was shot later that year at Berlin Porn Film Festival. It was our second year showing films there and it had quickly become the place were we went to connect to our community, porn people are spread (heh) across continents and we usually only get to connect online, the porn festival in Berlin has become a way to come together (heh again) and actually celebrate the work we make with our peers outside of a world that otherwise tells us it’s evil and culturally worthless. It’s basically porn summer camp and we all spend a week kissing, shooting and screening with all of the intense adoration and drama that comes along with it. We were right in the honeymoon period of festival bliss, drunk off the new friendships and the joy of sharing physical space together. We enlisted some of our favourites and shot part II in a grey October day in a Berlin apartment, laughing a lot.
We wanted to make these moving tableaus, like sentient renaissance paintings.
The performers here are Mickey and me (returning from the first orgy) Blath, Cas, Cah and Dwam. I love these shots were we are all feasting on Blath like hyenas on a carcass.
The third part, The Reverence we shot years later, in April 2018 - a lot had changed in that time. We’d made a lot more films, we’d been both censored and awarded and we were still here. We’d travelled and worked with people we never thought we'd get to meet. Learned a lot, made a lot of new friends and at that time, despite the introduction of devastating laws FOSTA/SESTA in the US we were still currently funding our project through crowdfunding on patreon.com, in fact we we had grown by that point to somehow be one the most successful Film & Photo funds on the site - it seemed almost miraculous? We were pretty sure it wouldn’t last forever but we wanted to stop and fuck in the roses for a second.
The Reverence was shot in the Spring just after we moved house, this one finally had space to host and shoot in and I jumped at the chance to hold my own porn sleepover. Featuring Dwam and me (returning from the second orgy) Lina, Bishop, Dante and Maria and when the door accidentally swung open, my cat. It was more of an endless tangle and ritual. We burned a lot of incense, and fucked under a very hot light so we were smokey and sweaty - there was no soft and slow build up the intensity when it started didn’t stop until we all collapsed together. I can’t describe the intense bonding you get after you sweat and kiss and come together. There’s this total blissful exhaustion and connection. I love getting lost in the mass of skin and bodies, sharing sucking dick while being un able to tell exactly who’s hand or mouth is on you at any one time.
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