Roberta Findlay’s Angel on Fire (1975) inspired what might be the first published close scholarly reading of a hardcore porn film. Its author harbored some doubts about her existence. Her name “is possibly a pseudonym,” warned Dennis Giles in a 1976 Velvet Light Trap article, as he clung to a psychoanalytic reading suspicious that the film “may well present only the appearance of a female subjectivity.” His doubts were not inane—plenty of male pornographers adopted female pseudonyms as marketing hooks, as Laura Helen Marks notes of Shaun Costello crediting himself as “Amanda Barton” to bestow a perceived “woman’s touch” in marketing strategies—but they also bore traces of his own sublimated desire, that of maintaining the coherence of a phallic Freudianism where “the unconscious fantasy of Angel on Fire is a masculine megalomania in which the sadist gives birth to his victim.” Or maybe it was the film’s success that prevented Giles from accepting that a woman could have made it; in New York, in its opening weekend, Angel was the top grosser, beating out Lenny (1974, dir. Bob Fosse) and Amarcord (1973, dir. Federico Fellini).

Pioneering feminist film critic Molly Haskell saw it quite differently, and in a rare moment of attention to pornography in her Village Voice column, she noted that having “two women greet their lovers with the unwelcome news that they are pregnant” was not only a “definite downer to Don Juan fantasies of quickie, no-fault sex” but also a potential indicator of female consciousness. What might have evolved into a robust interpretive debate—particularly given the ways in which many of Findlay’s films combined those explorations of female consciousness with unabashed “definite downer” narratives—instead dissolved into indifference, as scholars and critics alike outside the world of adult film magazines largely passed over Findlay for the next several decades.

Yet here was a filmmaker who helped build the hardcore porn industry, and who shaped softcore sexploitation cinema before that, an enormously talented craftsman who worked in front of the camera as a performer and behind it in multiple crew positions, and who regularly received onscreen credit for writing, producing, directing, and photographing a single film.