Directed by Andrew Blake and released in 1989, Night Trips was considered absolutely revolutionary at the time. Blake had a background in glamour photography, and it shows in the film. It was shot on 35mm film, for one thing, at a time when most porn was shot directly onto video tape. And the way it’s photographed is just completely different from the way any porn had ever been photographed before. It is extremely stylized and elegant, and it gave rise to a whole wave of ‘art porn’, by such directors as Cameron Grant (e.g., Elements of Desire and Fantasy Chamber, both 1994) and Michael Ninn (e.g., Sex from 1994 and Latex from 1995). Blake himself would go on to direct a number of additional films in the same, instantly recognizable style.

Here’s the premise of the film. The film stars Tori Welles, who was shortly to become very popular (she’d win several awards in 1990). She is seeing a physician (played by Randy Spears) because she has been trouble sleeping. As it turns out, she is masturbating in her sleep and sleep-talking about the intensely sexual dreams she’s having. So the doctor calls in an expert on sexual health (Porsche Lynn) who also happens to have invented a device, the Mind Scan Imager, that will allow them to see Tori’s dreams as she has them. Most of the rest of the film involves these dreams, which of course represent Tori’s fantasies.

Many of the dreams are voyeuristic and involve Tori watching other people have sex. Sometimes, we see these ‘directly’, as it were, and sometimes we see them projected on the screen where the doctors see them. This simple technique puts us in something like the position of the doctors, and I’m also inclined to think that it makes the film at least somewhat ‘reflexive’, in the sense that serves to remind us of, and so to contemplate, our own position as viewers of pornography. In some ways, I think, pornography is all about bringing sexual fantasies to life on the screen.

There is some narrative progression in the film. At one point, Porsche Lynn (who is not otherwise named) goes over to reattach a sensor to Tori’s thigh. Tori senses her presence and asks her not to leave, remarking, “I’ve never been with a woman before”. The result is a dream sequence involving Tori and two other women, and, back in the real world, a very charged but not quite sexual interaction between Tori and Porsche, as well as a very funny shot of Randy Spears as a broad smile creeps across his face. There’s also a bit of a twist at the end, which I’ll not describe, so as not to spoil it.

There are various things one might complain about here. The sex is so stylized most of the time that it’s hard to imagine that anyone might enjoy it. I also get tired of women wearing stiletto heels while having sex. In one truly absurd moment, a woman sprouts a pair after having begun having sex in a pool. And, although there is a fair bit of cunnilingus in the film, a lot of it is your standard-issue porn cunnilingus, where the person doing it tilts their head to one side and sticks out their tongue, in an effort not to obscure the recipient’s vulva. No one (I hope) actually eats pussy that way. More generally, the sex sticks pretty close to the standard heterosexual script, though it is, noticeably, gentle, romantic, and even loving.

But the film is very much not trying to present sex in a realistic style, and it is very unconcerned with what Linda Williams calls the ‘hydraulics’ of sex. Nor, for that matter, does Night Trips strive for ‘maximum visibility’ or ‘involuntary confessions of pleasure’, which Williams take to be the main focus of pornography, at least up until when she was writing Hard Core. It is explicit; it is porn. But what Blake is doing here is more creating a sexually charged atmosphere than trying to convince us of the ‘truth’ of what we’re seeing. At least for this viewer, the film therefore is much more engaging than most porn (especially porn of that era), because it invites imaginative elaboration in a way that most porn does not.

I’ve had students watch this film a few times now. They are often been surprised by how beautiful the photography is. It really is quite stunning, especially if you’re used to watching stuff shot on people’s phones. (That makes it doubly unfortunate how poor the transfer from film to digital is.)

I’ve also had several students remark on how ‘progressive’ (their term, in some cases) the film is. For all its other problems, the film very much presents Tori as a sexual subject, with fantasies and desires of her own; she’s literally never the object of anyone else’s desires. The story is all about Tori’s becoming aware of, and becoming able to express, her own unique sexuality. The final sex scene, following her successful ‘treatment’, is all about her desire and her pleasure (though the film is pretty short on women’s orgasms).

And Tori’s not the only woman who is a sexual subject in the film. Following the interaction between Tori and Porsche mentioned above, they break for the day. When they reconvene the next day, Spears asks Lynn how she slept, and she says, “My husband and I had, let’s say, a second honeymoon”, and it’s pretty clear that that would have been at her instigation. None of this is the almost parodic presentation of women’s sexual desire that is typical of (way too much) pornography.

I always tell my students that we are not going to be seeing any perfect films. This one is certainly not perfect. But it was a very important film, one that started to show us what pornography could be.

Night Trips is available from Gamelink. If you enjoy this film, then I’d recommend almost any of Blake’s other films, though my own favorites are House of Dreams and Sensual Exposure.