Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video, 1976-1986.

This dissertation examines the cultural and legal efforts to regulate, contain, limit, or eradicate pornography as the adult film industry transitioned from celluloid to home video. Beginning with the Panoram visual jukebox of the 1940s, through the peep show booths of the 1960s, and into the adult motels of the 1970s with their closed-circuit television systems, I trace the pre-history of privacy in terms of pornography and spectatorship, and then identify the key people, companies, and films involved in the early period of adult video in the late 1970s. The regulatory efforts against pornography signal larger cultural anxieties surrounding “appropriate” gendered and sexual behaviors for women. The industry self-regulated by appealing to narrative as a marker of “quality” and “respectability,” values that are central to the cultural battles over pornography and women’s sexuality. I explore how this historical struggle played itself out in a number of key texts and moments, including "Adult Video News," the first adult video trade journal, the formation of Femme Productions by former adult film performer Candida Royalle, and the establishment and consequences of the Meese Commission in 1986, which attempted to shift the national discourse on pornography. Drawing on a wide variety of material, including newspapers, mainstream and adult magazines, industry publications, trade journals, interviews, and other discourses to locate this somewhat liminal history, I de-center the film text in favor of industrial histories and contexts. In doing so, this dissertation argues that the struggles to contain and regulate pleasure represent a primary entry point for situating adult video’s place in a larger history, not just of pornography, but media history as a whole.PhDScreen Arts & CulturesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99760/1/alilunas_1.pd

Original Climax Films: historicizing the British hardcore pornography film business

This article presents findings from my research into the British hardcore pornography business. Porn studies has given little coverage to the British pornography business, with much of the academic literature focusing on the American adult entertainment industry. Recently, there has been a rising interest in the historical framework of porn cinemas both in popular culture and in academic work. This article contributes to this debate, taking both a cultural and an economic approach to explore the conditions that led to the emergence of British hardcore production as an alternative economy in the 1960s. In this economy, entrepreneurs make use of new technologies to produce artefacts that are exchanged for an economic benefit, while circumventing laws to distribute their artefacts. To historicize this economy, I draw on ethnohistorical research, which includes interviews with people involved in the British hardcore business and archival research. I argue that a combination of glamour filmmaking, a relaxation of political and cultural attitudes towards sexuality, the location of Soho, London, and emerging technologies for producing films collectively contribute to the emergence of an alternative economy of British hardcore production. I focus specifically on the practices of two entrepreneurs within this economy, Ivor Cook and Mike Freeman, considering how their actions inadvertently created the British hardcore film business, and played a significant role in the development of hardcore production outside of the United Kingdom

Harder than fiction: the stylistic model of gonzo pornography

This article reads gonzo pornography as a stylistic model, in order to go beyond current interpretations that see it as either a genre merely based on degrading sexual practices or a filmmaking form primarily based on the active role of the camera. Drawing on theoretical notions derived from cinema and media studies, we analyze the stylistic model of gonzo according to four different (albeit interrelated) dimensions: representative/performative; technical/expressive; enunciative/communicative; and semio-pragmatic. This integrated approach allows us to account for the semiotic and aesthetic complexity of gonzo pornography, as well as for its specificity