Animal Farm (video) - History

History

In the early 1980s, during the British home video boom, a videocassette of indeterminate origin began to circulate in underground circles that became known simply as Animal Farm. It contained a plotless series of extremely graphic scenes of zoophilia, including acts of intercourse and fellatio performed with pigs, horses and even chickens ("avisodomy"), as well as a scene in which a woman inserts live eels into her vagina. To this day, Animal Farm remains one of the most notorious and controversial videotapes ever to find its way to British shores.

The material that constitutes the Animal Farm bootleg was apparently smuggled through British Customs in the Spring of 1981 by a tourist. It eventually found its way under the counters of various Soho stockists and was eventually prosecuted following a series of police raids — but not before countless bootlegs had gone into circulation. It was discovered that the video actually comprised several short XXX-rated films from the Danish company Color Climax, which had been producing a steady stream of extreme pornography since the Danish government made all pornography legal in 1969. To keep up with the growing demand for video titles, Color Climax had taken to transferring their stocks of 8 mm and 16 mm animal films onto cassette, and it was these films — mostly starring Bodil Joensen — that composed the Animal Farm video, hence its generic title (which at no point appears on the screen) and shadowy origins. It is possible that some of the material was taken from Alex de Renzy's 1971 cash-in feature Animal Lover, which actually managed a brief cinema run in the liberal atmosphere of San Francisco, and whose entire second half consists of the "distinctively amateurish, shaky, clumsily-shot lurid colour footage" familiar to anyone who has seen the Animal Farm bootleg.