Kink in the Archive: The pleasures of porn in…

Treating adult film as a material, cultural object allows the Whittinghams to actually manage safe access to these explicit experiences. They describe how ​“platforms tend to ban certain bodies, kinks or expressions while allowing others, and legislation like the UK’s Online Safety Act increasingly requires ID verification to access adult material online” shifting the view on how the private viewing sphere of content viewing is affected by heteronormative bias. The idea that PornHub is an intentionally curated platform probably isn’t something which crosses most site user’s minds, but surely bringing these questions into play exposes the under analysis of porn as a format itself. Content Warning’s name derives from this mode of responsibility – the programme note warnings for our screening contained a 37-item long itinerary. Despite a shift to limit access to pornography online, an active curation of sex on screen is somehow more provocative, sensory, and yet educational than the digital private viewing sphere. 

In the old library room, writer Jessica Key detailed her recent escapades visiting the last adult cinema in the UK with her boyfriend (the Empire Theatre in Huddersfield for those asking). Most of these now obsolete adult film venues, ranging from sleazy VHS stores to grindhouse screens, catered to a largely straight, male viewing audience. Arguably, traditional sex cinemas are only an accurate reflection of traditional film history…just more obvious in their intentions. Despite this, transgressive venues around queer sexuality became pivotal, safe spaces of community expression, a world which has been obscured by the online home-viewing experience. Porn cinemas have played such a vital part of film history – I guarantee even your local squeaky-clean Picturehouse harbours a dirty past. Tiny venues such as the Empire Theatre (plus the deceased Fantasy Video in New Cross and ​‘The Office’ in Tower Hamlets) radicalised the definition of theatre: offering the ultimate voyeuristic take on the already erotic, liminal dark of the screen.

Recently London seems to have been struck by an interest in sexploitation; a genre that has been slowly climbing the ranks of cinephile rating. Japanese Pinku cinema, such as Hisayasu Sato’s Muscle and Toshiya Fujita’s Lady Snowblood alongside the films of Jean Rollin, Tinto Brass and Doris Wishman have made appearances in the roster of London’s cult cinema programming. However, do these screenings only replicate the misogynistic modems of outdated viewing practices? Who are they for? The key to Content Warning’s success is researched intervention: valuing authored representations over the tired objectivity of men-in-raincoat audiences. It seems porn cinemas and community viewing practices are just as erotic, hedonistic and valuable for the marginalized, and even more so, when they are allowed to take the lead. 

For the Whittinghams, there’s a clearly a romantic component to their curation of the kink archive which flouts expectation. One ruling I took with me from the unexpected world of the Bishopgate’s Institute is that there’s no certain emotion tied to porn. Unlike the function of online content, we weren’t simply asked to feel turned on or turned off, or to be either thoughtless or isolated in horniness. As viewers we picked microelements apart, discussing our personal interactions with the weird, ​‘out there’ and familiar. In red-lit halls the sex worker, voyeur, queer, heteronormative, kinky and the straight-laced were levelled to equal footing. Still, there’s something unshakeably nerdy about studying 8mm archive pornography film plates through a light sheet, reading about macintoshes and poring through faded latex catalogues in old libraries. And while still produced under subsets such as maid-dressing and pony play, I noticed how the roleplay within was underscored with fragments of feeling which flickered between the sweet, charming, artistic and unintentionally hilarious. 

Having that distance as viewers allowed for some real deconstructionism. Some of the men I spoke to were adamantly irritated by the rescoring – enthusiastically analysing a 8mm femdom digitisation with the same rigour shown towards a French arthouse matinée at the BFI. Beyond this, peeling back the illicit shame and desire which dictates the feeling around mainstream adult content, gave way to a new emotional language within sex and performance which more closely mirrored that of real-life interaction. It seems pornography when viewed as cinema allows it to be just that – an echo of reality, an exchange of emotion, and a reminder of how to exist in unified feeling.