Pleasure in/of the Archive: Porn Workshops at the Schwules Museum

Despite being one of the most common and mobile of audio-visual formats in the history of the moving image, hardcore pornography receives very little attention from archival institutions. It is everywhere, but we often hear nothing about it. It does finds its way into archives, when it is confiscated, when on the contrary it is interpreted as an artwork, or simply because it would be a shame to throw it away. But in the end it is hard to shake off the subliminal cultural agreement that porn films are “smutty little movies” (Alilunas 2016) that threaten the respectability and legitimacy of institutions and that might destabilize the status of cinema as one of the most important art forms of our time. It therefore often remains unclear what exactly exists in which archives. The afterlife of hardcore porn in the archive rarely goes beyond purely storing them, and its history seems fragile and inconsistent. So how, despite these circumstances, can we value porn? How can we deal with smut, archivally and curatorially? These are questions that have only recently been garnering notice in discussions about film archiving.[1] The Schwules Museum in Berlin has also begun to pose these questions more intensively with regard to its own collection of porn films. In cooperation with the Pornfilmfestival Berlin the museum regularly hosts archive workshops, to which I have contributed both in their conception and their direction.[2] In these workshops the museum invites porn filmmakers, sex workers, artists, and porn fans into its archive. They explore the museum’s extensive collection of gay and queer porn films, view films, and discuss the possibilities and marvels of a porn archive. Together they explore the often still undetermined place that desire, intimacy, kink, and excess have, both in the cinema as well as in the archive. This seamlessly leads to a reflection on the contours of a queer archival practice with film.

Living Porn Archive

The basic goal of the workshops is to create a space that, beyond cataloguing and storing porn films at the Schwules Museum, opens up a productive exchange about the explicit contents. It is meant to make the porn films more accessible, after all, they have been neglected for a long time in the museum’s collection work. Around two thirds of the porn collection, encompassing roughly 4,000 objects, remain unexplored (unlike the non-pornographic film holdings, approximately the same amount, which are for the most part catalogued by now). This work on the porn collection falls to volunteers and interns, which is typical in the museum in general for the work of processing the holdings. Their capacities, however, are often too limited to get such a copious collection completely under control. At least temporarily, the archival workshops are meant to counteract the precarity of queer collection work. In their efforts to open up a collection for a group of interested parties and to favor interactive use over pure storage, the workshops ultimately pursue the idea of a Living Archive. Conceived and mobilized by the Arsenal—Institute for Film and Video Art especially for film collections (see Schulte Strathaus 2013), the Living Archive unfolds, however, quite differently in the workshops. It consists first and foremost of involving queer communities and their intercommunication on the affective experience of pornography. In this sense, it ties in the character of the queer archive as influentially described by Ann Cvetkovich, as an “archive of feelings” (Cvetkovich 2003). This seeks to provide a space for a collective and egalitarian approach to queer memory that is as emotional as it is intellectual. This is why the personal interests of the participants are of particular consequence in the workshops; they are not required to prove any official position or professional standing. They are free to express their wishes, preferences, and fetishes so that the facilitators can find appropriate material, which sometimes produces wonderful coincidences and surprises. Through the alliance with the Pornfilmfestival Berlin, an important venue and community space for the sex-positive, post-pornographic scene in Berlin, not only have many porn fans been made aware of the workshops, but also persons who are professionally involved in the industry have registered. And their interest is not waning; the workshops are completely booked each time. More than a few participants decide, after the workshop, to support the collection work of the museum on a volunteer basis—a useful effect for the archive. One participant is now curating the film series ForteForte at the Club Culture Houze, a sex club in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Once a month the audience sits there on leather mats among cages, slings, and bondage chairs and watches queer-feminist porn films, partly from the collection at the Schwules Museum, on a small screen. Perhaps this is one way to realize the Living Porn Archive. The boundaries between the cinema as a static mode of film screening and the promiscuous cosmos of cruising and BDSM cultures seems to get blurred, as it has long been the cultural practice in porn cinemas and queer sex clubs. But only at the sex parties, which take place later in the day at the Club Culture Houze, does it in fact come to intimate bodily contact. This way of curating porn film screenings, less sexually than intellectually charged, which also characterizes the Pornfilmfestival Berlin (Bobák 2017, 52), initially seems to contradict the stimulating nature of porn. It achieves, however, according to Bobák, something remarkable: “a reinstatement of the sexual into public domains” (2017, 44). Such events suspend the dominant division of private and public, which traditionally relegates the presumably “obscene” cultures of pornography into the private sphere of the home or the back room of a video store. They release cultural norms from their rigidity and thus have immense political significance.

The Manual Histories of Smut

Considering the porn collection at the Schwules Museum it makes sense to see sexual media practices included in the porn archive’s inventory. Since the museum has not had an acquisitions budget since its founding in 1985, and because the preservation of ordinary life is one of the cornerstones of its mission, it takes donations of all kinds from individuals who, for instance, have given the museum their private home video and porn collections. This is why the film collection today predominately consists of amateur formats such as VHS, Super 8, and DVD. It is mainly made up of commercial versions as well as private dubs and reduction prints. The porn films in particular reveal traces of a media practice. Privately collected porn films often come with hand-written sticky notes and cassette labels on which collectors indexed the contents of each copy or documented their personal modes of use. Such an “erotic index of desire” (Strub 2015, 126) reveals private collections themselves to be an archive, which can tell a story, albeit an intransparent one, of pleasure and desire. “What gets collected here is also collecting itself,” is how Peter Rehberg (2022, 47), the museum’s archive director, puts it. In the workshops this aspect becomes part of the viewing process, for example when a group views a VHS mix tape and attempts to use the attached handwritten indexes to discover a logic behind the mode of compiling the copied sequences and clips. In addition, the object registration form, which the workshop participants are given and that puts them in the role of archivists, contains an open field in which they can enter the labelings. It often seems difficult, however, to break the materials down into discrete facts to fill in the form, “because sex and feelings are too personal or ephemeral to leave records” (Cvetkovich 2003, 181). For instance, we can only speculate as to exactly what a collector wanted to register with the tally sheets for each of his porn films. In addition, much of the basic data, such as the film’s exact year of production or, in the case of many pirate copies, the original film title, cannot be easily determined. This “trace historiography” (Alilunas 2016, 30) required by the porn archive makes clear how fragile and vulnerable this history of pornography is. This becomes tangible, not least technologically, in expectation of media formats going obsolete. The Schwules Museum has within its resources consumer video recorders and Super 8 film viewers, which can also be used by the workshop participants. For many of them, this is their first practical experience with analog film technology. Manually turning the crank on the Super 8 viewer evokes feelings of media nostalgia, which obviously remain in many of the participant’s memories. Ultimately, they get a glimpse of how porn films were watched in the past and what kind of seductive role was played in that process by the media format. Or also how “media breakdown” (Gotkin 2017, 40) defines video pornography to this day, namely when video recorders and cassettes turn out to be defective just before or during the workshop, no longer able to produce any (satisfactory) image.

Queering—Perverting the Archive

“It enables intimacy to enter the archive, and it is valuable for that reason alone,” writes Tim Dean (2014, 9), lauding the place of pornography in the archive. The workshops seem to confirm this, for if there is anything we can all agree on in the closing discussions, it is the capacity for the workshops to create a space in which taboo topics can be spoken of openly and without shame—just as is also accomplished at the Pornfilmfestival Berlin (Bobák 2017, 48). Watching porn films together and discussing their imaginative power and historicity is a pleasure that is all too rare. Archival work is also community work, as the workshops signal. Intimacies in this context are not simply to be understood as bodily, but above all play out affectively between archive users and between collectors and object. But is there also space for genuine sexual arousal? As we found out in the discussions, the setting of the workshop and of archival work leads us to adopt the cerebral attitude that is expected of archivists. But the practice of collecting need not occur entirely without pleasure. In cataloguing porn films, the archive staff at the Schwules Museum have recourse to a keyword catalog conceived for porn. This favors a colloquial vocabulary over a “respectable” sexological one, and takes account of the diversity of sexual practices and fetishes. Making this diversity accessible is one of the great promises of the porn archive. Of course, against the backdrop of the specific genesis and history of the Schwules Museum, the porn collection cannot fulfill all promises.[3] The discussions make transparent: a queer ethics is needed for the archive. But alongside feminist and trans porn films that defy gender norms, and transgressive BDSM porn films, doesn’t this ethics also include preserving and exploring the unethical, problematic, or boring pornographies? As the participants have aptly remarked, there are two different perspectives from which we can approach pornography: on the one hand as an artwork, on the other as a field of resonances for practices and feelings that give it meaning. The porn collection at the Schwules Museum brings these two perspectives to the fore. It shows that gay and queer everyday cultures are impossible to imagine without porn. It is necessary to archive porn in its forms as art and also as smut, taking account of how it is passionately appropriated in everyday life and how it reverberates there. For film archival practice, whether porn or not, this means that film culture worth preserving is not only to be found in the public sphere, but also plays out in the intimacy and private sphere of the home. Queering the film archive therefore also means taking account of often common or covert places and contexts, in which the marginalized and the perverse have used film to imagine a better and more pleasurable life. If we think of the archive as a utopia, it is a place of liberated bodies and beautiful consensus free of hierarchy, where the canon gives way to a plurality of voices and a space for resistance opens up.

References

Alilunas, Peter. 2016. Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video. Oakland: University of California Press.

Bobák, Zsombor. 2017. Some Like It Hard: The Preservation and Presentation of Gay Moving Image Pornographies. Master thesis, University of Amsterdam. https://scripties.uba.uva.nl/search?id=record_22443.

Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.

Dean, Tim. 2014. “Introduction: Pornography, Technology, Archive.” In Porn Archives, edited by Tim Dean, Steven Ruszczycky, and David Squires, 1–26. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gotkin, Kevin. 2017. “Pornography’s Media Breakdown: Troubleshooting in Three Parts.” Porn Studies 4 (4): 406–18.

Meyn, Nils. 2021. Lust archivieren: Videopornographie und VHS-Raubkopien in der Sammlung des Schwulen Museums. Master thesis, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.

Rehberg, Peter. 2022. “Queere Archivarbeit im Schwulen Museum.” In Networks of Care: Politiken des (Er)haltens und (Ent)sorgens, edited by Anna Schäffler, Friederike Schäfer, and Nanne Buurman, 47–49. Berlin: NGBK Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst.

Schulte Strathaus, Stefanie, ed. 2013. Living Archive: Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice. Berlin: b_books.

Strub, Whitney. 2015. “Indexing Desire: The Gay Male Pornographic Video Collection as Affective Archive.” In Out of the Closet, Into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories, edited by Amy L. Stone and Jaime Cantrell, 125–47. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Notes

[1] Within film studies and with a focus on gay pornography in the archive, we can single out examples like Zsombor Bobák (2017) as well as my writing on the video cassette pornography in the collection at the Schwules Museum (Meyn 2021).

[2] I have been facilitating the Porn Film Archive Workshops since 2021 along with the filmmaker and curator Simon Schultz, the media researcher and archive director of the Schwules Museum Peter Rehberg, and the historian and board member of the museum Ben Miller. Some of the workshops take place as part of the official supporting program for the Pornfilmfestival Berlin.

[3] The Schwules Museum has transformed from an exclusively gay cultural space into an inclusively queer one, and this includes its collection and exhibition policies. The majority of the museum’s (porn) collection thus still refers to gay, white cis men. By contrast, the perspectives of BIPoC, lesbians, trans and inter persons are underrepresented, although they are being gradually strengthened.