Date: Monday, Jan 2
Time: 7pm ET
Admission: FREE (Must RSVP)

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To ring in the New Year, take a brisk stroll through a cinematic back alley with film historian and restorationist Bret Wood as he exposes the taboo-breaking, pseudo-educational exploitation films of the 1930s and ‘40s. At a time when Hollywood studios were muzzled by the Production Code, a wave of independent filmmakers played cat-and-mouse with the censors with a series of scandalous melodramas on explicitly forbidden topics, films such as Marihuana: Weed With Roots in Hell, Child Bride, and Elysia: Valley of the Nudes. No topic was off limits for exploitation filmmakers, who fashioned stories around eugenics, religious cults, artificial insemination, and even bestiality. By far the most transgressive (and popular) were the sex hygiene films that spliced graphic clinical footage into their narratives, and which traveled carnival-style from town to town with live lecturers and nurses in attendance.

For years dismissed as a stain on the fabric of American film, exploitation films have more recently been credited with helping tear down the Production Code, and for laying the groundwork for the contemporary independent cinema.

Wood’s lecture will be illustrated with film clips, photographs, and other ephemera from this forgotten chapter of film history.

WARNING: While most of these films are family-friendly by today’s standards, others contain graphic footage that some viewers may find upsetting. Viewer discretion is advised.

For more than three decades Bret Wood has produced archival film restorations for Kino Lorber, Inc., and is also the curator of the movie channel Kino Cult. He is the author (with wife Felicia Feaster) of Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film. Wood is the creator of the scripted podcasts The Control Group and The Seventh Daughter and has made several films, including Psychopathia Sexualis, The Unwanted and Those Who Deserve to Die.