For viewers who chase BDSM on film, the 1978 American short Black Box is a sharp stop. Scott B and Beth B directed; Lydia Lunch and Bob Mason star. Unlike later feature-length dungeon romances, this no-wave short keeps the focus on intimate torture and enclosure. The plot is blunt and tight.
A man is tortured by his girlfriend, then locked inside a black box. On screen, Lunch and Mason play a charged couple; the directors put the box and the torture in front of the camera. Film scholar Gwendolyn Audrey Foster called it a terrifying allegory of societal restriction of the individual — the girlfriend’s torture and the literal box as social confinement, not only private sadism. IMDb lists the short. The usable facts are few and hard: 1978, American, Scott B and Beth B, Lydia Lunch, Bob Mason, a man tortured by his girlfriend then locked in a black box, and Foster’s line about restriction.
