An experimental film spliced together from the detritus of early 1980s Times Square’s porn and pawn shops, Tessa Hughes-Freeland’s ‘Play Boy’ (1984) feels gritty, sensorial, and hypnotic. A figurative and psychedelic experimentation with film language and voyeurism, the film offers a unique take on transgressive cinema.
Born out of Hughes-Freeland’s lack of liquid cash for new celluloid at the time, ‘Play Boy' combines found footage Super 8 film footage from westerns, stag films, to boxing matches to create new meaning. Her film places visual clichés common to cinema in conflict - a shot of a judge in a white wig is double-exposed with a pornographic tribal sacrificing. A naked woman tied in restraints meets a shot of two nuns. Just as a sentence combines pre-existing words to create new meaning, Play Boy combines pre-existing images to create moral transgression. The recycled images are textured and worn, and in its peepshow-like looped format, looking feels both seedy and pleasurable.
Hughes-Freeland is often associated with the ‘Cinema of Transgression,’ a loosely defined scene which combined music, performance, and film to challenge conventional taste and politics. Their films were localized to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s, and had its roots in the American avant-garde and underground art scenes. Many of their films emphasized the importance of visual assault and disgust to instate a new morality.
‘Play Boy’ uniquely demonstrates that a film does not need to be excessive or exaggerated to be transgressive. Here, conflict and violation of social code does not come from shock tactics, but instead from clever and disruptive collage.