MUTZENBACHER

Responding to a casting call ad, one hundred men are confronted with and respond to excerpts from a notorious pornographic text.

Anonymously published in Vienna in 1906, the erotic novel ‘Josefine Mutzenbacher, or the Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself’ has sold more than three million copies over the course of the last century. Ruth Beckermann records men reading from the text; sometimes alone, occasionally in groups, but most often in pairs. Most of the excerpts detail a sexual act, and Beckermann questions the men about them. What emerges is a barometer of contemporary attitudes to sex, gender and morality, seen through the prism of a work whose perspective on carnal and personal human relations comes from a very different era.

Content Guidance: Film contains offensive language.