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

From early 20th-century stag films to 1960s sexploitation pictures to the burst of 1970s "porno chic," adult cinema's vintage forms have seen reappraisal by a new generation of historians, collectors, archivists, and fans-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 fetishized more for their age than the explicit acts they show? And what are the political implications of recovering and re-releasing rare but still-visceral adults-only texts from a less "enlightened," pre-feminist past? 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. Often orphaned, mutilated, or left to rot, vintage pornography thus serves as the absent center of film preservation efforts in general.

With these films' ongoing moves from cultural emergence to concealment to rediscovery, the archive itself performs a striptease by permitting material contact with these corporeally stimulating forms at a moment when the physicality of media objects is undergoing rapid transformation. Chapters include discussions of cinephilia and stag films, the eroticism of sexploitation ephemera, archival practices, the porn industry's self-censorship, and an emerging generation of home video companies dedicated to preserving hardcore films. Addressing both film historians and film preservationists, Disposable Passions explores the archival and historiographic lessons that vintage pornography can teach us about which materials our society chooses to keep, how we interact with these anachronistic forms, and who plays a role in keeping them alive today.