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Sextool

Altered Innocence

15 min. Directed by Fred Halsted
Description:

One of the most ambitious and least successful pornographic films ever made, Sextool’s production history is rife with nearly as much expurgated desire as the film itself. Funded on the success of L.A. Plays Itself, Halsted’s next major feature was designed to be a crossover success in the arthouse market. Halsted shot much of the film on expired 35mm stock in hopes of securing a wider release, but the film was quickly deemed unviable by the art-film market.

Forty years later, the film plays as an astonishingly progressive broadcast from an era of deeply ingrained musculature. Halsted viewed the film as sexually political; he establishes visual dialogue between intense BDSM sequences (including some with his lover, Joe Yale) and trans women and drag queens at an upscale party.

Presented in a new 4K preservation reconstructed from MoMA’s archival 35mm print.

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