Disposable Passions by Church David

Author:Church, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

4

Preservational Ethics, Cultural Distinctions, and Vintage Pornoisseurship in the Internet Age

We could wait 20 years until we turn up a 35mm vault negative of [A] Climax of Blue Power [1974], or we can put out a watchable but unimpressive version now. Trust me[;] we would love a stellar version on DVD, but we need to serve fans and collectors in the now and not try to become the Criterion Collection of 70s porn.

—Jacy Catlin, Alpha Blue Archives1

We’re pornographers, if you will. We’re not even [pornographers]. We’re more historians, but the people in the business are pornographers.

—Steven Morowitz, Distribpix Inc.2

“You can’t censor memories,” reads the motto on the box for The Original Classic Stags, an 8-mm series of pre-1960s hard-core shorts sold for home consumption in the 1970s. And yet, as we have seen in the previous chapter, attempts at self-censorship have been present in the mainstream porn industry since at least 1973, becoming especially noteworthy with the industry’s moves toward corporatization and legitimization since the 1980s. “I’m sure that there will always be missing/edited footage here & there,” admitted the creative director of TVX in 2005,

which sadly is the game most classic companies play when releasing sevearl versons [sic] of the same title—which is better, which has the better cover, etc. […] Also, even though these films are (some) well over 25 years old—none of us ever know if we will fall under the hammer of the government’s microscope at any time—thus the reason for the editing & the accurate records we keep.

Certain “taboo” or non-normative sexual practices (in this TVX executive’s words, “pee, very rough rape enactment, certain foreign object insertion[s], etc.”) have been selectively rendered out of Golden Age films in their remediated video versions.3 Whereas veteran adult studios like VCA, VCX, and Caballero may promote these sanitized “classics” plucked from their compiled film libraries, a handful of smaller video labels have been working to flesh out the historical record by providing access to a far more diverse, and sometimes more “politically incorrect,” range of vintage pornography.

This question of access is a crucial one, since the meaning of surviving films is not ultimately shaped by the state of pristine prints or original camera elements safely locked away in archives, but rather by the practices that reproduce and circulate vintage films in the marketplace.4 Indeed, Caroline Frick argues that the film preservation community overwhelmingly fetishizes high-quality “original” materials secured within archives, since these materials can be upheld as safely stable containers of cultural heritage—a claim that would help legitimize film archives as cultural institutions. Conversely, she says, the process of offering consumers continual, active use of mass-reproduced copies (such as through home video distribution instead of just formal archivization) more appropriately evokes cinematic texts’ dynamic legacies among successive generations of viewers, belying the more conservative notion of a passively inherited heritage.5 With so many official archives reluctant to collect or preserve adult films—to say nothing of their relative rarity as “acceptable” programming for repertory theaters and other public venues

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