Event

PROSTITUTE

Dir. Tony Garnett, 1981
UK, 94 min.
English

Sandra, a street girl of Birmingham, moves to Londons West End hoping that a job at a high-class escort service will improve her financial situation. Her flatmate Louise, a social worker, tirelessly campaigns to reform the countrys severe prostitution laws which keep their sex worker friends in and out of jail. Both women will be stymied by the prejudices and hypocrisies of mostly male authorities. Though it is a fictional narrative, director Garnett (a celebrated producer of social-realist dramas, including Ken Loachs KES) spent years researching PROSTITUTE, his directorial debut, befriending both street girls and more expensive call girls (some of whom appear in the film), listening to their stories, and shaping their experiences into this naturalistic docudrama. Garnett intended to make a film from the girls point of view, not the clients...Just an insight into their daily lives. No judgements. A film about work.

"The representation of female prostitution in the movies takes place in a complex, dynamic field in which the forces of male fantasy and patriarchal ideology...merge or collide...." - Russell Campbell, Marked Women: Prostitutes and Prostitution in the Cinema

The films in this series attempt to eschew the usual trappings of sex work as portrayed in cinema (especially narrative cinema) by a adopting a neutral documentary-style approach, even as they all contain staged elements. Each film is, to varying extents, a hybrid of the two forms. The filmmakers adopt a non-judgmental (or sympathetic) view of sex workers even as they may define sex work itself as a symptom of larger forces of inequality within patriarchy, capitalism or communism. Each film is the result of active collaboration with their subjects (and, in some cases, their clients), and are predicated on an extraordinary level of access. While some of the films contain scenes of graphic sexuality, they are either neutral or aggressively anti-erotic, although the extent to which they may or may not be considered exploitative is a complex question which must ultimately be left to the viewer.