When I was 24, I spent two days sitting next to Michael Stamp at his PC in his Portsmouth flat, helping him edit Acquiescence in Adobe Premiere. I’d never edited video before in my life.
Michael wanted to make sure he got the story sequencing right. The storyline I’d provided was (as per usual) overly-complicated, although it makes a bit more sense once you realise that Tom and I based it on V for Vendetta.
Michael owned the production and had paid us to perform in it, but we all knew it was my baby. That was the whole concept behind his Control and Reform project – dark dominance and submission films conceived by the submissive performers. How’s that for layers of control within control?
I’m a quick study. I learned Premiere over Michael’s shoulder while we cut the film to the haunting cello theme we’d fallen for.
It was the only video editing tutorial I needed.
In return for the skillshare – and a camera tripod, a piece of kit I still use – I allowed Michael to spank me in his “punishment room” upstairs. An unspoken deal that worked for both of us.
I’d written Acquiescence with my then-boyfriend Tom, who plays the smooth-talking Interrogator (and one of the two faceless Masked Men). The other questioner, who also sometimes wears the anonymising mask, is Stephen Lewis. Together they play good cop / bad cop to fuck with my head after I’m dragged from my bed in the night by government officials, stripped, cuffed, and interrogated in a dungeon in the middle of nowhere.
In the fantasy, I don’t know what they know, or what they think they can learn from me. I don’t know how long I’ve been there. I don’t know which Masked Man is beating me at any given moment. But I do know that I have friends to protect – friends these representatives of the authoritarian regime would love to get their hands on. The interrogators know how to break my spirit and get inside my head. Will I be able to endure the beatings long enough to hold out?
The fantasy was one I’d been toying with for years before we filmed it. The cell, the questions, the headgames. The slow erosion of resistance into surrender – and the kernel of unbreakable spirit that survives.
It’s also – although I didn’t get this at 24 – a fantasy of being important. Of being the one who has something worth protecting.
And it’s a fantasy of what can’t be taken: of what stays yours, even after they’ve taken everything else. There’s something terribly appealing about being the one hanging onto truth and justice in the face of dreadful violation. Which is I think is why I needed to write it, with the Iraq war grinding on and the surveillance state baked into the air. Have my body, not my mind felt like a manifesto.
I licensed Acquiescence for Dreams of Spanking last year, along with Cruel Corrections, another Michael Stamp production. Tragically, Michael lost all the Control and Reform films in a hard drive failure some time ago, so they’re no longer available for purchase anywhere else. I unearthed my DVD copies out of a cupboard, enlisted my partner Felix’s support in getting the full copy of Acquiescence off it when the disc turned out to be corrupted, and asked Michael’s permission to share these classic British spanking films with a new audience.
He was delighted. Far better that they see the light of day than languish in a cupboard in the dark.
You can watch Acquiescence in four parts on Dreams of Spanking now:
It’s one of the darker films I’ve made, and I’m intensely proud of it.
Pandora / Blake x
P.S. Speaking of taboo fantasy – I’m doing something new this week for women and non-binary folk who have a dark basement in their erotic minds. It’s an online experience called Dark Eros Reclaimed, with three live classes starting this Friday at 1pm UK time: 8-days of shame-releasing, Bad-B*tch-Mode-engaging, tantric-energy-activating erotic alchemy, deeply trauma-informed and grounded in embodied consent from start to finish. I’d love to see some Dreams of Spanking fans there!
