Disposable Passions

Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema

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by David Church

Type: Studies
Subject: Genre > Porn films
Keywords: pornographic films
Publishing date: 2016
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Collection: Global Exploitation Cinemas
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 296 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-1-5013-0757-7

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Book Presentation:
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.

About the Author:
David Church holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from Indiana University, USA, where he is Managing Editor of Film History. 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).

Press Reviews:
"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." - Brandon Arroyo, Porno Cultures podcast

"Disposable Passions’ greatest strength is that it offers an incredibly supple framework for understanding not only our historical connection to erotic media but also our erotic connections to historic media … [it] will no doubt become a foundational text in a number of disciplines, including affect theory, pornography studies, media studies, fan studies and archive studies. It is, on all accounts, a highly stimulating and nimbly argued book that deserves the critical attention it is sure to garner." - Screening Sex

See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic

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