Peter De Rome - Grandfather Of Gay Porn

Meet Peter de Rome, the perfect, middle-class, 90-something-year-old English gentleman. He minds his manners and lives a quiet life, sometimes checking on his family's burial plot. But he's equally at home discussing cock.

"I'm not trying to unload my theories about how gay porn should be," says de Rome. "I don't have any hard and fast rules about homosexuality, and I've never been terribly caught up in the gay movement. I just like making movies and anything that catches my eye goes into my movies."

De Rome loved movies of all sorts; his day job was working in the publicity department of one of the studios. He was well versed in visual language and so he became fond of making his own short, somewhat autobiographical 8mm films.

As an experimental artist, his films have all the qualities of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, James Broughton and even his idol Jean Genet. They have a strong narrative and are built with spare economic resources.

Part of what makes them beautiful is the color and grain in the 8mm Kodak film stock he used and the soft, ethereal movement characteristic of 24 fps. But there is also an unclear blend of narrative and documentary in some of his best films. It excites the most lurid voyeuristic impulses in the viewer and lets him participate in the director's most intimate fantasies.

Peter de Rome is not a well know name, but there is resurgence of interest in his work. He had associations with David Hockney, Derek Jarman and John Gielgud. The British Film Institute decided to include his pornographic short films in their archive, and have released two titles to DVD and Blu-ray (Region 2, only playable in Europe), "The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome" and "Encounters: Four Ground-Breaking Classics of Gay Cinema." The former earned its creator a Golden Phallus award from the Erotic Film Society for his lifetime contribution to erotic cinema.

This documentary records the last years in the life of a simple, but interesting, gay pornographer. There are many reasons to experience it: To journey onto a Kristian Bjorn porn set, see interviews with Wakefield Poole, and, not least, the experience of seeing the last film appearance of Greta Garbo -- in a gay porno. No kidding.

Still, this is very much a rough cut, as the narrative is not fully formed. Ethan Reid attempts to create drama by putting the sage pornographer in interesting situations and compelling conversations with famous and infamous people, but the documentary's structure is repetitious, sprawling and tangential.

The film feels longer than it actually is, because the narrative reaches a natural ending point several times but the film goes on, followed by yet another episode. This is a quality that was not present in the short films of Peter de Rome.