The 5 Oldest Porn Films on Planet Earth
In the beginning, porn was surprisingly wholesome! Or at least for about a decade porn was surprisingly wholesome. Then they started producing media that caters to some of humankind’s more fraught “fantasies,” discovering a perfectly depraved formula in the process, and things haven’t changed much since.
1896: The First Proper Pornos
Filmmakers wasted no time harnessing the awe-inspiring power of this new medium for jacking off purposes. It’s likely that people were recording their naughty bits from the very beginning, but 1896’s Le Coucher de la Mariée is widely regarded as the oldest surviving porn. It was a film recording of a popular stage show: Actress Louise Willy plays a newlywed slowly disrobing in her honeymoon suite as her husband alternately peeks hornily over a room divider, and boringly reads a newspaper. It was seven minutes long, but the film rotted away in the French Film Archives, and only two minutes of the striptease remain.
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That same year, Thomas Edison dropped a one-minute banger called Fatima’s Coochee-Coochee Dance, featuring a belly dancer named Fatima. It was sold to nickelodeon and kinetoscope operators, who insisted it be censored halfway through, as it was said to portray the “most scandalous hip movements of the 19th century.” That also makes it the first known case of cinema censorship.
1896-1900: The World Goes Kiss Crazy
The May Irwin Kiss was a scandalous 47-second snogfest that was mostly nuzzling, followed by a short peck on the lips — the first known recording of a kiss. At the time, kissing in public was a lascivious act, and the Roman Catholic Church went characteristically nuts, calling for censorship and morality guidelines in the budding new medium.
Filmmakers, as is their wont, recognized where the heat was and started adding fuel to the fire. Several more films titled The Kiss were produced over the next few years, including a notable comedy short in 1899, The Kiss in the Tunnel. Filmmaker George Albert Smith was commissioned to create a “phantom ride” film, which usually involved POV footage from the front of a moving train. He took existing footage, and spliced in a few seconds of him making out with his wife. This film is a major part of the foundation of modern narrative editing, so you can thank that horny dork for reality TV.
1901: The First Softcore Porn
Filmmaker Frederick S. Armitage was possibly, for a time, the most sexually repressed man in America. His filmography includes accidentally porn-esque titles like Ladies Saddle Horses, The Dewey Arch, A Nymph of the Waves and How Tommy Got a Pull on His Grandpa, none of which, somehow, were actual erotica. Until, that is, 1901’s Birth of the Pearl.
He essentially recreated “The Birth of Venus” on film, hiring a model with long hair to put on a flesh-colored morph suit and strike a series of suggestive poses in front of a big shell. It doesn’t sound like much, but neither does the Sears summer catalog, and that got generations of teens where they needed to go before the internet.
1907: The First Hardcore Porn
The Argentinian and German porn industries reached simultaneous climax in 1907. El Satario was most likely a 1907 Argentinian film (or possibly a 1930 Cuban film, but whatever) that showed the first-ever close-up shots of wieners and buns. Just over a decade in, and pornographers had already landed on a style that’s still recognizable to smut connoisseurs to this day. Three naked women futz around in a river all sexily for a while, when a horned gremlin who looks like a 20th century QAnon Shaman captures one, which, yikes. The rest is chock-full of blow jobs, 69ing and a smorgasbord of penetrative doinking.
Germany’s Am Abend, or In the Evening, is an 11-minute epic that also has many of the same features that modern ‘hub and ‘tube aficionados can appreciate. Although it’s less imaginative in its storytelling — in this one, a Peeping Tom watches a woman masturbate with an array of items worthy of Batman’s utility belt, before being pulled into the action himself. Both of these films were considered so raunchy, everyone involved went uncredited.
1915: The First American Smut
The first hardcore porn made in America is most likely 1915’s A Free Ride. As you may have guessed, this is about a crusty mustachioed man who gives a ride to two young ladies, who eventually repay him with all manner of sucking and fucking. When they leave the car to go lie down in a field — the title cards repeatedly remind the viewer that “‘men are men’ in the open spaces” — they engage in the first-ever cinematic threesome.
Everyone involved remained uncredited in this one as well, although this may also be the first instance of punny porn names. The director is credited as “A. Wise Guy,” followed by photographer “Will B. Hard.”
