![]() This paper aims to investigate the body of Serbian horror film, which is slim in number of titles, but rich and diverse in their accomplishments. TABLE OF CONTENTS 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 Addressing both film historians and film preservationists, this study 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. Chapters include discussions of cinephilia and stag films, the eroticism of sexploitation ephemera, archival practices and the porn industry’s self-censorship, and an emerging generation of home video companies dedicated to preserving hardcore films. ZOMBIE BIKER PORN ART ARCHIVEWith these films’ ongoing moves from cultural emergence to concealment to rediscovery re-enacting the erotic visual strategies at their core, 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. Often orphaned, mutilated, or left to rot, vintage pornography thus serves as the absent center of film preservation efforts in general. 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. Pornįrom early-twentieth-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 figures both dependent on and helping shape the archive of film history. Just as the exploitation-cinema favorites have found their way into rerelease in beautiful packaging and remodeling for the DVD/Blu-ray connoisseur, so too " vintage " pornography has a market, both as collectable and as rerelease. Thus I come to another way in which porn as genre has walked in step with grindhouse. ![]() Production costs do not disappear even if consumers are clear they want their content for free. " We could talk of this as exciting evidence of consumer agency, 4 but for porn producers, maintaining the profitability of the pornographic text has proved difficult. ZOMBIE BIKER PORN ART PROFESSIONAL3 As we have moved into the twenty-first century, new patterns of consumption and engagement have taken their toll on professional pornographic productions, particularly through sharing outside of paid-for distribution channels with scenes ripped and repurposed online as vignettes, or converted to gifs as forms of " micro-porn. Porn has been understood as an engine of innovation: exploiting each new technology as it arrives and, according to some histories, guaranteeing the success of one format (VHS) over another (Betamax), but the picture may be more complex than the simple replacement of one delivery platform with another. ![]() Just as low-rent horror and exploitation films found a new lease of life on VHS, pornography was able to find a very comfortable and lucrative home on that format before, in turn, moving through DVD and into the digital online environment. There are similar parallels in histories of pornography itself a " most elastic textual category, " 2 porn arcades and cinemas were often located (at least in the United States) in the same geographical spaces, and were squeezed out by gentrification at least as quickly as the grind houses. 1 And in that morphing grindhouse found a new lease of life on the very technology that brought the films into the domestic sphere. David Church has explored the advent of domestic video technologies as the final nail in the coffin of the grind house as locale and the consequent morphing of the term to reference genre rather than exhibition. ![]() ![]() The history of the grind house is well trodden, offering a picture of exhibition spaces that even in their heyday were characterized by a pervasive stench of decline: their outer facades testaments to faded glories, while their interiors bore all the signs of mistreatment and neglect. ![]()
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