egafd.com

What does it mean when someone talks about loops in films, are we talking about a section of film say, 15 mins long that gets repeated again in the total movie running time.
Sorry to be so Ignorant on these matters, just curious.
Well I,ll fuck off and make a cuppa.

Yeah Lizard, that's about right. They are a short, or sometimes not so short, films which is just repeated continuosly without a break between the start and finish. Not to be confused with film 'shorts', obviously.


Two sugars, please..........and just a spot of milk!

They were developed in late 6o's New York to cater for the Times Square porno booths. Stick in a token and you get the same grainy footage running over and over, until you shot your muck (or indeed ran out of small change). The beauty was most punters coughed up for too many tokens, so they'd dump them on the street before travelling home to the suburbs, so they didn't have to explain the strange coins to their wives. NYC kids would collect them and sell them back to the booth owners for a small fee, meaning the fat bloke smoking a cigar, who was usually a front for the Mob, who really owned the majority of the sex arcade buisness would make even more money.
The main problem was the film would overheat and catch alight after a few hours in heavy rotation, meaning pornographers were among the first ever people in the States to experiment with video tape, the exact same system you see in the sleazy plastic booths in Amsterdam sex shops today.
There's an entire history of the 70's 'loop' industry in Alan Freidman's fantastic book 'Tales of Times Squars'. It was available at at one stage, and I'd recommend it without hesitation.

You could also buy them to view at home, although not in loop format obviously. They would come in a small square cardboard box and were supplied on 8mm film (first in b/w, then Standard 8, and later Super8). They only ran for (I think approximately) 5 or 6 minutes maybe less. You could play them on your normal Super8 cine projectos. Throughout the 70s they were about the only form of being able to watch porn movies at home. They died out around early 80s when video became popular. Video had a lot of benefits over 8mm films. You dont have to watch video in the dark. You dont have to rig up a noisy projector and manually load reels of film. You dont have to rewind a video before removing the tape. Videos DON'T often catch fire!! Even the home 8mm films would burn up if you didnt dim the bulb when pausing a frame.

Then there's also 'looping' in modern porn, which is the nefarious practice of padding out a scene by repeating sequences
of anonymous close-up thrusting to make the scene seem longer/hotter.
A more sophisticated technique is to shoot on multiple cameras and loop in several perspectives on the same few minutes of action.