Cinéma L'Amour: The last porno theatre on Earth
Gooning to the classics in a melted lipstick palace
My old friend Jay used to say that he hated watching porn on his enormous television because he had no desire to see any asshole bigger than life-sized.1 I’m sure he would’ve shaken his head in bemusement at my new semi-regular Sunday routine of heading downtown to Montreal’s century-old adult moviehouse Cinéma L’Amour to watch hairy crotches the size of spacecraft attempting to dock on a 20-foot-wide screen. Recently L’Amour has been deviating from its usual steady diet of 2010s New Sensations and Evil Angel compilation DVDs (e.g. Babysitter Likes ‘Em Black, Evil Stepfuckers) by screening vintage pornos every Sunday from the cinema’s videotape archive that a perv friend of mine has spent the past year industriously digitizing. The response from moviegoers has thus far been mixed. There have been complaints about the amount of onscreen pubic hair (in fairness, the older regulars already had to live through two Bush Administrations), and the goofy plotting of films like 1992’s vampire parody Ejacula sometimes leads to decidedly unerotic moments like Ron Jeremy’s Renfield spending three minutes slurping down live worms while the cruising patrons below doggedly attempt to maintain their erections.
While the cinema occasionally hosts trendy midnight movie nights for a more mainstream audience, the Sunday vintage tapes are not the sort of recognizable “classics” from porn’s 1969 to 1984 Golden Age2 that a hip crowd might be ginned into watching on aesthetic/camp grounds. These late ‘80s to 2001 flicks are instead specimens of the little-loved transition period between the “actual movie” production values of the 35mm era and the gonzo shot-on-video cheapies that subsequently dominated the industry prior to the rise of digital cameras in the mid-’00s. It’s somewhat of a “worst of both worlds” scenario in that these films lack the genuine cinematic verve of the Golden Age while also presenting sex that looks way worse than most anything you’d find on a tube site today. Sure, contemporary porn has the same relationship to real life fucking that watching, say, John Wick has to actually shooting multiple people in the face, but it is downright naturalistic compared to something like recent L’Amour screening Goth (2000), a notionally straight flick that features so much zoomed-in footage of pistoning copper dicks soundtracked by trashy Italian house music that it is spiritually indistinguishable from gay porn.3 When the actors don’t look doped up, they look like they’re experiencing withdrawal; there are more weird piledriver positions than there is missionary sex. We should not yearn for a return to the era of Buttman.
So why go see this stuff?
One reason is that I am a good friend, and want to support my pal’s interests. Another is that the whole scenario of putting on these extremely niche clunkers for a not-exactly-consenting audience is pretty funny to me, especially when it’s something like 1986’s inexplicable Videodrome parody Video Bone4 playing every two hours for an entire day. Still another is that I am undeniably a voyeur and an exhibitionist, and having a quasi-journalistic pretext to watch people jerk off in public and/or to do so myself carries a small thrill. But the main thing is Cinéma L’Amour itself.
North America’s few remaining porn theatres tend to be modest affairs, little screening rooms tucked away in basements and the upper stories of adult shops. The basement “cinema” in Montreal’s Plaza Saint-Hubert5 for example consists of an unpleasantly lit row of white semi-enclosed booths where you (and perhaps a new friend!) can watch a movie, plus two tiny twenty-seat “theatres” (one playing gay porn, the other straight stuff). The whole place reeks like dog kibble soaked in a fetid tidepool, with top-notes of soda lye. L’Amour though, is something of another order.
Originally dubbed Le Globe, the future L’Amour was opened back in 1914 as a combination movie house and live performance venue for the city’s sizable Jewish community. It is a proper theatre (pron. thee-ayy-turr) in the old style, with over a hundred floor seats and a looming balcony supported by enormous balustrades, its surfaces blessed with intricate stonework carvings and floral detailing by craftsmen who gave a shit about creating dignified public spaces. The screen hangs between two sets of curtains on the edge of what was once its stage, behind which (out of sight of the patrons) the rusting hulk of its original rigging still squats in the corner. Beneath the main floor, various disused dressing rooms and corridors contain decades of fascinating detritus—when I was given the tour some time ago, I found stacks of promo materials for vintage skin flicks, and some mouldering bankers boxes full of documents from an Argentine embassy. When it was converted into a porn theatre in the late ‘60s (first as The Pussycat and finally dubbed L’Amour in 1981) the old dame received a suitably garish makeover: columns and wall features painted a glossy shade of red that looks like it’ll leave lipstick smudges if you lean on it; row upon row of matching red plastic chairs; and huge red pleather-covered doors secured with heavy studs that do a modestly effective job of muffling the sounds of fucking for patrons standing in the charming little lobby (where you can indeed get popcorn, snacks, and some pretty cracky coffee). The balcony likewise has been fitted with a pair of spartan red boxes containing padded benches intended for premium-paying couples who want to play in the theatre without being within skeeting distance of the other patrons.
The overall effect of the (did I mention it’s red) décor is, unavoidably, pretty Lynchian,6 particularly during the dimly-lit, sparsely-attended regular screenings where shadowy figures saunter around the theatre scanning the rows for prospects and presenting themselves for inspection. Like any adult theatre in the age of internet pornography, L’Amour is primarily a gay cruising space and a haven for exhibitionists and voyeurs. The sound system is not up to the challenge of the cavernous room, loud but tinny like old grey computer speakers, giving everything a sonic hollowness that adds to the otherworldliness of it all. In a strange auditory quirk, despite the noise it is often possible from the main floor to pick up the sounds of panting and sharply in-drawn breaths when a couple is up on the balcony. During one of my visits, I joined a group of men standing silently at the front of the room with our backs to the screen, necks craned up to catch a glimpse of two just barely visible partners screwing high above—bare-breasted in the red light as she rode him in reverse, the woman looked like a carved maiden on the prow of a ship. The group stood there a long twenty minutes till they had finished before dispersing. I turned around and remembered Ejacula was still playing—a tall woman with a platinum blonde, very Berlin haircut was making a creditable effort at giving a blowjob while wearing a pair of dollar store vampire teeth to a pallid, clammy looking Rocco Siffredi, who was also wearing vampire teeth.
For the price of a ticket purchased when L’Amour opens at 11 a.m. you can spend up to 12 hours in one of the few remaining “free” places in the city limits7—though, in a nod to the public health priorities of our era, while it is permissible to (politely) ask random women to piss in your Camelbak and then walk around the theatre drinking it, you will be eighty-sixed for smoking in the bathroom. Though anyone in the theatre is very much being surreptitiously sized-up by the others, there is still a common understanding that people come here to do things that are to be hidden even as they put themselves on display. It is a different feeling of being observed than the usual surveillances of modern life—a relief to be in the shadows. These sorts of spaces are generally in decline of course, as are most places that involve leaving your house to get or do something fucked up, be they bathhouses or dive bars. Habits are changing, and while it would be very Discordia Review of me to plant my flag directly through my own foot and say that this sucks and is bad for the future prospects of people being able to socialize and discover themselves, the feeling I am personally experiencing and trying to alleviate through these Sunday sessions in the red room is a generalized nostalgia for a way of being in the world that is in the process of evaporating.
This isn’t to say there aren’t more contemporary things happening at L’Amour. There are sex-themed lesbian raves and rave-themed sex parties for dykes. Haut couture-coded smut-makers like filmmaker Ariana Molly premiere their movies here, and it’s an easy erotic-coded backdrop for any local artist (or, in at least one case, academic conference panel) that wants to add a frisson of transgression to their packaging. I even did a little voiceover work for an acquaintance’s upcoming art porn project, and if I someday get to hear my own honking voice blaring in the cinema I’ll be pretty jazzed about it. But to the extent that such events constitute vibrant, living entities in themselves, they tend to do so in a way that emphasizes that L’Amour as it actually operates on a day-to-day basis is the opposite—a relic, something of interest for its vintage aesthetic not its present viability. Like myself, they are tourists—I could probably have linked this video of local singer Lydia Képinski (whose music I generally like!) earnestly gushing about the architecture and demonstrating that it is safe to sit on one of the chairs in lieu of having written like a third of this essay. If there is a difference between myself and these guys, it’s that they want a place to be seen being horny in a hot and fashionable way, whereas I, I am discovering as I write this, want a place to be horny in a melancholy way so I can tell you how it feels.
At this point, L’Amour itself is essentially a clothing brand operating out of a theatre: its iconic (and not cheap!) merch is everywhere in Montreal, generally worn by people who wouldn’t dream of shooting a load there. It’s likely the business would be far more profitable if they simply sold the building and just kept their online store.
The fact that it still plays movies at all is down to the quirks of its owner, Steve Koltai. He inherited the business from his own father, and it’s clear from how little he’s changed about the place that it is intensely meaningful to him. Perhaps he simply wants the little corner of the world he controls to hang suspended in amber, perhaps he is bound to a hateful routine yet feels psychically incapable of altering it, or perhaps he is simply pathologically resistant to change. (And if he is himself a pervert, in terms of modestly rich guy toys the thrills of owning his own one-of-a-kind play palace is basically the Fetlife User equivalent of being the landlord of the old Montreal Forum had it never been renovated.) He comes off as a bit prickly, but ultimately civic-minded in his way in Aaron Hancox’s 2006 documentary short Cinéma L’Amour, a film worth checking out for how perfectly it captures the very Quebec brand of folksiness that lies beneath the business’s filth peddling. Like a hyper-local version of Hustler’s Larry Flynt, his years of scrapping with the city over obscenity and decency laws on his own behalf have helped to preserve some of Montreal’s notorious (and essential) licentiousness. Whatever his reasoning, the community benefits.
I’ve never met Steve, and so I find myself projecting onto him an almost certainly inaccurate image as a sort of sentimental custodian. It’s the same role that I imagine I play in my own world as a literary editor: keeping the lights on a little longer for the old ways and those who observe them, jury-rigging a few more years of life out of the rusting mechanisms they don’t make parts for anymore. I believe we are on the verge of changes both psychic and material to our culture (in literature and beyond) for which me and my kind are fundamentally ill-suited, even hostile to—but I recognize that this is the fate of everyone who has lived during the past 200 years or so, if not further still. And I am not someone who believes that every last scrap humanity has ever created needs to be preserved in some great archive; in fact there is sometimes a greater freedom when certain things are lost, leaving gaps in the procedural this begat that chains of historical cultural production through which it becomes easier to imagine something new. But, even so, there is this defect in my thinking that seems to demand things be mourned a little before they go, mourned and played with one last time. This applies even to those scorned bits of junk culture (e.g. porn tapes from an undistinguished era) that do not appeal to me specifically but that I can sense were, in the days of relative media scarcity, once loci for people’s secret dreams and fantasies.
When I have occasion to visit the Internet Adult Film Database to check a film credit, as I did a few times researching this blog, I often find myself landing on its modest, very web 2.0 tribute page to founder Peter van Aarle, who died back in 2005.8 If anyone ever treasured the kind of junk my friend’s been digitizing, it is surely a guy like van Aarle, an avid adult film conventiongoer who made his life’s work keeping records of things that were never meant to persist outside of Hideki Matsui’s house. And as he was in the process over years of doing that documenting, it eventually became natural to start IAFD’s now 1,887-strong “dead pornstar list,” a record of people who by some reckonings were never meant to persist either. Most entries list no cause of death but as I amble through details leap out: “sustained a massive head injury after getting punched”; “suffocated and then charred in a vehicle”; “shot and killed by her boyfriend, who later killed another girlfriend and then killed himself”; “OD’d on Carisoprodol; suffering from AIDS”; “died after a shootout with Glendale police over a domestic dispute”; “drowned by a mini-tsunami at the end of the shooting of his last film Private Club in the Seychelles.” This note on Milton Ingley, who acted for 23 years under the name Michael Morrison, says it all: “Some say Milton grew tired of life; diabetes had left him blind. He ate too much, lived hard, fucked a lot, loved a lot, and laughed more. For a man like that to be inactive is like a death sentence, I think.”
It’s probable that if given their druthers many of the people on the list would not be remembered for performing in skin flicks, the variously tragic and absurd circumstances of their demises (“cosmetic filler poisoning”) thrown in for completion’s sake. Surely at one point in his life Peter van Aarle would’ve had mixed feelings knowing his name would survive only on a porn database; and maybe a young Steve from L’Amour would’ve figured on having had a different legacy than he ultimately will. Yet there they are, captured as they were, available for whatever pleasure you may take of them, but quietly demanding dignity for having done their years of hard and strange work.
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Clearly not a vore guy!
Eris: What actually makes voraphilia so uncanny to me is that the so-called “soft” voraphiles often imagine being swallowed not just by giants but in fact by regular-sized people who will unhinge their jaws and consume them anaconda-style, often distending their stomachs in the process.
Sire: What, you mean like this?
E.g. The Devil in Miss Jones, Warhol’s Blue Movie, even Taboo (the oddly wholesome 1980 incest smash written and produced by Helene Terrie). The period when porn intermixed freely between the arthouse and the grindhouse, when a number of notable directors, including Abel Ferrara, Wes Craven, Jean Rollin, and Doris Wishman, moonlighted in adult film to put together money for other productions.
It might have the worst sex scene I’ve ever sat through: A young woman sitting by the side of a pool pretends to type on a (clearly powered-down) Lenovo Thinkpad until she is interrupted by another woman. The pair begin to robotically make out for a while before they are joined by a hotdog-hued man with spiky hair and sunglasses in an unforgivable speedo. With one woman’s butt pointed directly at the camera and the man, also awkwardly facing the camera and sort of leaning over her back, begins attempting to insert his finger into her unlubed asshole; when that doesn’t go, he just keeps licking his fingertip, rubbing her butt, licking finger, rubbing butt, repeat, for the longest two or three minutes of my life. I don’t know why this routine is so much worse than just properly eating her asshole, a fine and normal sexual practice, but it is just is. It felt like watching a kid who’s finished his cinnamon bun using his fingernail to scrape all the leftover sticky bits off his plate.
A superb excerpt from a Letterboxd review by one Paul of Omaha here: “This looks like it was filmed in an abandoned warehouse and that maybe everybody involved wasn’t too thrilled to be there. Which means the sex scenes are about as erotic as watching a hill woman give birth to an old tennis shoe. Half the whoopie occurs on whatever flat surface the director could find to place a blue gym mat on. There’s a scene where two dudes fingerpaint a woman’s body, wrap her flanks in cellophane, then have romance with her. It’s not necessarily a travesty, but it is kind of gross and will make things awkward if you watch this on a first date. One of the men wears a cheap digital watch and keeps his socks on during a sex scene. And there’s a part where a guy tickles a woman’s ass with a feather and it’s probably the most tender, loving thing you’ll see all day.”
Fun fact: Due to search crawlers’ charming incomprehension of a throwaway joke in a previous blog, the peep show is listed on Google Maps as Discordia HQ.
I know it’s hack to call things that at this point but if a little person in a red leisure suit pulled up to you at L’Amour he wouldn’t be remotely out of place. He would probably be looking to get his shit sucked though, so fair warning.
Pour one out for our former DIY venue home at Thrashcan (FKA Traxide), raided by police and permanently shuttered just this month.
For more on the particular generational vibes of websites from this era that have kept their classic design and functionality into the present day, see my piece on Wikipedia.
I'm in tears here reading about this. I've never even been in a Porno theatre in my life.