Easy Alice (Joey Silvera, 1975)

The 1975 film Easy Alice tells of a world of loneliness and rage, set against a backdrop of low-budget porn filmmaking. Furthermore, Silvera chose not only to direct but to star as a thinly veiled version of himself, a happy-go-lucky porn actor named Joey. In this article I examine how Silvera, in casting himself as both director and leading man, subverts pornographic expectations through the recontextualization of various sexual set pieces, including a rape scene and a sequence of voyeurism. These frequently utilized structural tropes are presented here as a means of calling into question their presumed pornographic intent, thus allowing the film a level of critical distance from its subject matter. Furthermore, I explore the methods through which Silvera’s casting of himself allows him to utilize his own vaguely autobiographical leading character to call into question the ethics and responsibilities he faces by appearing in explicit films. Although staunchly committed to maintaining an identity as a pornographic work, Silvera’s film reveals an intimate and self-aware examination of what it meant to be an actor in pornography at the time and also represents one of the earliest sexually explicit films to have been directed by the performer

Aesthetics · Art · Filmmaking · Literature · Loneliness · Movie theater · Pornography · Psychoanalysis · Reflexive pronoun · Subject (documents · Subject matter · Cinema and Media Studies · Computer Science · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Psychology · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology · Social Psychology

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