Sssh.com's Angie Rowntree Brings Her Art Porn to the Ivy League (XBIZ)

Read the full article by Gustavo Turner at XBIZ.com

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Last Wednesday, XBIZ award-winning director Angie Rowntree was invited to Brown University to present her new short film “Alla Prima,” and to discuss the varieties of women’s porn, art porn and ethical pornography with an audience of Ivy League students.

The Brown students had seen Rowntree’s latest production, “Alla Prima,” ahead of time. During the talk, Rowntree showed them “Gone” and the trailer for “Invictus," her entry into the Florence international Film Festival.

All these productions can be found on Sssh.com, the website for projects she produces and directs, a project devoted to “ethically produced, sex-positive indie adult cinema.”

Brown University’s Corliss-Brackett House is a Gilded Age architectural landmark, formerly owned by legendary Hollywood producer, screenwriter and Billy Wilder collaborator Charles Brackett. The connection to the "Sunset Boulevard" screenwriter is quite fitting as a setting for Rowntree's talk—Brackett’s Golden Era scripts include porn-ready titles such as “Pointed Heels,” “Secrets of a Secretary,” “The Mating Season,” "The Model and the Marriage Broker,” “Teenage Rebel,” and, perhaps most suitable of all, 1935’s “College Scandal.”

The Corliss-Brackett House is now shared by Brown University's departments of Economics and Philosophy. An elite audience of undergraduates and grad students listened enraptured as Rowntree offered a survey of the current landscape of adult movies, especially as it concerns the category known as “Porn for Women.”

“There is such a misconception about the term ‘Porn for Women,’” Rowntree told the seminar. “I feel when people hear it they think soft lighting, candles, romantic music — and of course it can be [that], but it can also represent so much more, like hardcore explicit sex. The term also puts women in a box and it’s one I don’t particularly care for. To me, it’s a marker, a road sign if you will, that lets people know I’m doing something different.”

The "Porn for Women" label often receives mainstream press coverage, thanks to the success of directors as diverse as Erika Lust, Kay Brandt and Rowntree herself.

The director-producer-screenwriter offered the Brown students a more nuanced reading. “It’s empowering to depict women in charge of their own bodies and desires,” said Rowntree. “There is a need for female-driven stories, to balance the largely male-oriented fantasies that we currently see. There is a need for movies presented from a female perspective with an emphasis on female pleasure. It empowers us. It humanizes us. It tells our stories.”

Conscious that many in the audience are members of “the tube generation,” post-millennials who have grown up with the notion that porn is “free” and “universally available.” Rowntree encouraged the crowd to see the value of films like her “Alla Prima,” and to support the kind of filmmaking they hope to see with their wallets.