I don’t know what your relationship to pornography is but mine – let us try to be candid from the start – is an

I don’t know what your relationship to pornography is but mine – let us try to be candid from the start – is an unsuccessful emulsion of curiosity and bad conscience. I don’t know what your relationship to pornography is but mine ­ let us try to be candid from the start ­ is an unsuccessful emulsion of curiosity and bad conscience. I wouldn’t dream of buying it, naturally ­ I’m far too cowardly to make that kind of commitment ­ but then I wouldn’t avert my eyes either, should I happen to stumble across some. And this makes me ­ along with several million others ­ the perfect target audience for the porn documentary, that licensed peepshow that allows broadcasters to squeeze the sexually provocative through the narrow apertures of broadcasting regulations.

This isn’t a lap-dancing show, you understand, it’s a serious consideration of the lap-dancing phenomenon which ­ for the purposes of sociological clarity alone ­ requires several unblinking close-ups of lap-dancers at work.
At first sight, Hardcore, a documentary about a young woman trying to break into the porn industry in Los Angeles, would seem to be just the latest contribution to this useful television genre. It turns out to be something quite different ­ a documentary in which the innocence of the subject and the innocence of the film-maker crumble in tandem in front of your eyes. The result is both explicit and numbing ­ a film about commercial titillation which ultimately leaves you limp with disgust.It is not, by his own account, the film that Stephen Walker set out to make ­ even though he knew right from the start that he didn’t want to replicate the prurient tourism of most porn documentaries. “At one point I wanted to make a film that would have no pornography in it at all,” he explains. “I thought it would be a quite interesting challenge.” Not a challenge that many broadcasters would be prepared to fund, though.He was originally commissioned to make a film about a male porn star, hesitated over the obviousness of the subject matter, and then heard about Felicity ­ a single mother from Canvey Island who had been invited to Los Angeles by a porn agent called Richard, someone Walker had come across in previous research. Intrigued by the conflicts between motherhood and a career in porn, Walker agreed with his commissioning editor Stephen Lambert (with whom he’d worked on Modern Times) to take a chance with three days’ filming.

“I jumped on that plane going out to LA ­ the very same day that she was going, thinking I would be home 24 hours later. I arrived there, waited about four hours at the airport, met Richard and then she turned up. The film essentially starts with the very first frame I shot.”After making a series of documentaries about dark and difficult subjects in the early Nineties (including films about the Sabra and Chatila massacres and Mengele’s experiments on twins), Walker had self-consciously opted for lighter subject matter in his recent work. His last two documentaries had been Jewish Wedding, about a mixed marriage, and Waiting for Harvey, a light-hearted account of film-makers trying to network at the Cannes film festival.Hardcore wasn’t intended to be a return to the underbelly of human experience. Walker’s backers wanted something relatively light and his own attitude to the porn industry wasn’t weighed down by moral disapproval. “I’ve bought a porn film and I’ve watched porn films before ­ it would be absurd to say I hadn’t…

Interestingly enough, since making the film I’ve watched no pornography at all. But I had, and if I’m going to be totally honest, I was really curious to know what it was like to be on a porn set.”He soon found out “The fact was that I hated it I found it depressing and numbing and totally unerotic. I was prepared to find that I found it extremely erotic and quite interesting. But the truth is that having been on about 26 porn sets, it felt like being in the bottom of a lavatory bowl after a while.” The metaphor isn’t entirely surprising, given the first job that Felicity secures ­ a session of still photographs which required her to straddle a bucket and pee for the camera ­ or the almost obsessional emphasis on anal sex among her potential employers.What might notionally have been an intriguing spectacle quickly became a depressing obligation: “I can remember that we were supposed to be filming an orgy, an orgy which Felicity was participating in and it was going to be her first anal sex scene, so it was supposed to be an element in the telling of the story.. and I just couldn’t face it. It was on day seven and I turned to my recordist and my assistant producer and said, ‘Let’s go somewhere.’ So we played truant.