Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema

by David Church, Austin Fisher (Editor), Johnny Walker (Editor)

From early twentieth-century stag films to 1960s sexploitation pictures to the boom in 1970s “porno chic,” adult cinema's vintage forms are now being reappraised by a new generation of historians, fans, preservationists, and home video entrepreneurs-all of whom depend on and help shape the archive of film history. But what is the present-day allure of these artifacts that have since become eroticized more for their “pastness” than the explicit acts they show? And what are the political implications of recovering these rare but still-visceral films from a less “enlightened,” pre-feminist past? Drawing on media industry analysis, archival theory, and interviews with adult video personnel, David Church argues that vintage pornography retains its retrospective fascination precisely because these culturally denigrated texts have been so poorly preserved on political and aesthetic grounds. Through these films' ongoing moves from cultural emergence to concealment to rediscovery, the archive itself performs a “striptease,” permitting tangible contact with these corporeally stimulating forms at a moment when the overall physicality of media objects is undergoing rapid transformation. Disposable Passions explores the historiographic lessons that vintage pornography can teach us about which materials our society chooses to keep, and how a long-neglected genre is primed for serious rediscovery as more than mere autoerotic fodder.

296 pages, Paperback

First published June 2, 2016

Reviews

[Ellison · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lumbering slog of a read rescued only by occasional images of bare skin from films mentioned. Shares that laws in the 1950's made production and distribution of adult content hazardous to so retention of the product is questionable at best. Shares the changes and additional production. Swearing. Occasional insight.