Porn Film Archive Workshop

Workshop

By: Nils Meyn, Simon Schultz, Ben Miller

13:00 – 17:00

Maximum participants: 12 (all genders are welcome)

Fee: 10 Euro, 3 Euro reduced rate

Registration (required until October 23, 2023): fuehrungen@schwulesmuseum.de
Please let us know, why you’d like to participate

Location: Schwules Museum, Lützowstraße 73, 10785 Berlin

Accessible via wheel chair. Additional information about barriers is available here.

Concept

This workshop ran in the accompanying program of the Porn Film Festival 2022 and was completely booked out, so there will be a repeat. The Schwules Museum is opening its porn film collection, the largest of its kind in a German institution. We invite all porn lovers to view and discuss old gay and queer porn flicks on VHS, DVD and Super 8 at the archive.

The porn film collection houses roughly 3.000 items and shows the variety of gay pornography from the 1970s to the early 2000s, ranging from mainstream to kinky underground productions, and from commercial tapes to private video bootlegs. Over the past decades the films came into the archive as donations by private collectors who have left personal notes and marks with them. So far, only one third of the collection has been catalogued. Also, only a few lesbian and trans* porn films have been indexed.

Participants will be watching and discovering porn in groups, and together we will be examining the films’ importance as historical, archival and erotic artefacts. Participants will get to know the collection, its place within the larger queer archive as well as the materials’ endangered physical status. We especially invite porn and sex workers, filmmakers, artists, curators and researchers to the workshop as we are also open to starting future projects with them. Yet all participants may bring their own interests and desires to the table.

Our goal is to make the collection known and highlight pornography’s preservation-worthy histories. The workshop results might indicate in which directions further work on the collection can go, including digitization and public screenings.

Schedule

1. Introduction

• input on the Schwules Museum, its archival practice and the relevance of pornography within the museum’s collections
• introduction to the porn film collection
• film selection

2. Viewings

• independent viewings (VHS, DVD, Super 8) in small groups

3. Discussion

• Sharing of discoveries
• We have a discussion following these questions: Why is it important to archive porn? How has porn changed historically? What does it mean to collect porn and what work must still be done (archival, conversational, curatorial…)?