Second coming for the pioneers of porn; Explicit film footage from

IN May 1912, Paris police confiscated 25 kilometres of pornographic film and threw the reels in the Seine. It was one way to deal with a new problem but it wasn't a method that was ever going to work in the long term and over the course of the 20th century adult film production became big business in France and throughout Europe.

One way or another, examples of that first, flickering smut have survived and now film-maker Michel Reilhac has compiled an anthology of these short, silent, monochrome erotic movies from the 1920s. Polissons Et Galipettes is currently showing at a cinema in London and is - possibly - coming soon to Edinburgh's Filmhouse. That's if the council grants a licence to screen it and if the cinema decides it's worth the hassle applying.

The French title of Reilhac's film translates roughly as Naughty Boys And Acrobatics. In English, the collection has been given a name that signifies a certain nostalgia - The Good Old Naughty Days. This newly-restored material is ooh la la, and then some. The various stories about frisky factory workers, nuns gone wild, and Musketeers at play unfold with the comically jaunty, over-expressive style of silent cinema, but there can be no doubt exactly who is doing what to whom in any given scenario. This, mes amis, is hardcore, even if Reilhac has edited out the most explicit close-ups.

"I don't deny that these films are pornographic," says Reilhac, "but I did want to make them more comfortable for a modern audience to watch together in theatres."

His point, the reason behind the project, is that in being so far removed from their own time and original context, the films have become something more than porn. Something illuminating. Lost documents. "I was interested in the historical value of this mat- erial," he says. "This project was not designed to attract the usual audience of pornography, seeking masturbatory pleasures."

Well established in France as a producer of respected international, independent movies, Reilhac discovered the hidden world of early sex cinema when co-ordinating a film festival a few years ago. The actor Pascale Gregory, invited to guest-programme some of the bill, requested to show some old porn. Reilhac worked out an interesting way to accommodate him, digging right back into the National Archive and finding 300 reels from the silent era, including a selection that had recently been donated by a prominent (but anonymous) Paris family, who found a stack of film cans in their grandfather's study after his death. "Instead of throwing them in the trash to avoid a scandal," says Reilhac, "they donated the films to the archive."

Polissons Et Galipettes was put together from that patriarch's private collection and from footage held by archive-agency Lobster Films. "We showed it at the festival and the audience had such a riot, such a good time, I thought we should show it to everyone."

The anthology went on to sell over 25,000 tickets at arthouse box- offices in Paris. It has since been released in other countries, each of which has had different reservations about aspects of the material. In Japan, says Reilhac, "they were horrified by the body hair on the women". In Spain, the involvement of priests and nuns caused offense. In Britian, the little white dog who takes an active part in one film does tend to slacken the jaw.

"Ugh, yeah, the dog," says Udall Evans, manager of The Other Cinema in London, the only place in the UK now screening The Good Old Naughty Days. "The film is pretty interesting, but I didn't like that bit much."

The British Board Of Film Classification has given this collection an R-18 certificate. That's the rating given almost exclusively to porn films, a genre which hasn't been exhibited in cinemas since video conquered the market in the late 1970s. To publicly show an R- 18 film, a special club licence must now be granted by the local council - in buying tickets audiences are applying for temporary "membership", and under-18s are prohibited from the premises. So far, only The Other Cinema has gone through what Evans calls the "rigmarole" of this process, but The Filmhouse has tentatively discussed the matter with Edinburgh City Council.

"This is unheard of," says programme director Rod White. "They haven't told us we can't show it, and we got the impression they were leaving it up to us - as long as we tell them exactly when we want to screen it, and make sure that everyone knows exactly what's involved. If we do show it, it will be for, let's say, anthropological reasons, rather than the porn aspect." Which are the only reasons Reilhac had in mind. His research has revealed a hidden tradition in France from before the second world war, before porn became a business - a tradition in which these "little libertine films", as he calls them, were made for fun by professional technicians and prostitutes on the sets of respectable early motion pictures, and screened in brothels as entertainment for waiting customers and as a form of sex- education for young men. (He thinks - he's not sure - that the best- made of the films was secretly shot by Renoir.) More generally, he says the films may help us better understand our ancestors. "They may be extremely useful," he says, "in the way they allow us to relate to our grandparents. I remember mine only as stiff people from formal photographs, but obviously their contemporaries had an appetite for sex which they expressed with all the creativity and playfulness available to them. Films like this might give you an insight into their psychology. They become more real."