Disposable Passions

Zusammenfassung "Through changes in archival and industrial practices, the very pastness of vintage pornographic cinema becomes a source of both eroticism and cultural conflict"--

This is one of the most unique approaches to porn studies that I've ever encountered, and surely a blueprint for how film history will have to evolve into the future.

Autorentext
David Church is a film historian specializing in genre studies, taste cultures, and histories of film exhibition and distribution. He is a Lecturer in Comparative Cultural Studies at Northern Arizona University, USA, and is the author of Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video, and Exploitation Film Fandom (2015).

Zusammenfassung
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 entrepreneursall 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.

Inhalt
Introduction Chapter 1: Eroticizing the Degraded Past: Stag Films, Cinephilia, and the Marketing of Necro-Erotic Desire Chapter 2: Ephemerality Between Fantasy and Reality: Sexploitation, Fan Magazines, and the Adults-Only Film and Publishing Industries Chapter 3: 'Whatever Happened to Gigi Darlene?: Object Lessons for a Disappearing and Reappearing Corpus Chapter 4: Preservational Ethics, Cultural Distinctions, and Vintage Pornoisseurship in the Internet Age Conclusion Bibliography Index