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.

Genres: Film

296 pages, Paperback

First published June 2, 2016

Reviews

[Jack]

This is the third book in a row I've logged about adult films, so apologies for anyone who is getting annoyed. The Golden Age is legitimately fascinating to me. After decades of being illegal, x-rated movies flooded American culture during the 70s. These movies were shot on film, had plots, sets, costumes, characters who develop over the course of the story, and sometimes had themes, symbols, and motifs. All stuff you'd expect in "real cinema." While many hardcore movies existed for the purpose of "auto-eroticism," as Church frequently says, many other movies show an attempt by low budget filmmakers to create something artistic and innovative on the fringes of a taboo medium. Just as fast as adult films exploded onto the screen, they receded into the private domain with the adoption of videotape and VCRs.

Church's writing can be dense and overly academic at times, especially in his first chapter, but the content of his writing provides some great insight into the cultural and artistic development of sexploitation and hardcore movies in the 60s and 70s. Like my previous review on Erdman's "Let's Go Stag," this book is a similar reminder of why I enjoy the discipline of history. Film scholarship is more than just the analysis of the object itself. It is the analysis of the culture that surrounds it — the fandoms, the way we remember objects as time passes, the way we purposely forget other objects and the challenge that presents to those who value preservation. Church effectively argues for the value of adult cinema as a lens and a reflection of the sexual attitudes of the time, which makes their preservation worthwhile and their sidelining by many film historians unfortunate. Time tempers the shock of seeing sex on film, and the further removed we get from the era of production, the more these movies exist as more than just "auto-erotic." They exist as testaments to an American culture resdicovering and even inventing new sexual identities in the wake of the Sexual Revolution. Whether or not you think that's a good thing, it's still a thing that exists and deserves to be remembered.

[Ellison]

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.