Disposable Passions Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema

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.

David Church is the Managing Editor of Film History at Indiana University, USA, from which he received his Ph.D. in Communication and Culture. He is the author of Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video, and Exploitation Film Fandom (2015) and the editor of Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin (2009).

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