Helena Whittingham and Harlan Whittingham’s careful curation enthusiastically invites audiences to consider porn as artefact and art.
When cinematic subcultures enter the mainstream, there’s often a sense that magnifying what’s niche rids it of intrigue. Cinephilia at present seems driven from a place of curiosity, finding and discovering underseen directors, sourcing underground screenings in basements, or adding esoteric films to Letterboxd watchlists. Provocative cinema has really always flourished on the margins, and the same could be argued for the taboo in cinema. Yet while once controversial work such as Pasolini’s Salò, or David Cronenberg’s Crash now enjoy a status as operative kink classics, the concept of legitimate pornographic content screening at any British repertory cinema seems still completely out of the question.
In the 1980s, Soho was a hotbed of ‘adult entertainment cinemas’, a shift which saved many tiny indie screens UK-wide from the competition of the multiplex. Despite this, erotic theatres have fallen out of favour with the British audience, and genuine pornographic content is absent from almost all UK slates. What is it about un-simulated desire that remains so illicit, in an industry where the avant-garde is openly praised for challenging the boundaries of sexuality on screen?
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Speaking on the split between viewing sex in the private and public domain, Feminist theorist Alison Assiter speculates that while enjoying pornography online has become normalised, encountering erotic film as a public audience is “according to some, subjective and capricious and beyond the domain of reason.” However, these binary attitudes around consuming pornography are being challenged by curators who push back at these constraints of kink cinema in the mainframe. ‘Content Warning’ is the brainchild of duo Helena Whittingham and Harlan Whittingham, whose mutual fascination with the UK Fetish Archive and expertise in art history brought sex back into the institutional domain.
Helena and Harlan went on dates to the kink archive, researching the extensive history of British porn VHS tapes through a shared obsessive lens. At the invitation of the ICA, they launched their now acclaimed pornographic screening series ‘Late Tapes’, beginning with the sold-out film programme ‘Rubberists’ in 2024. With editions ‘Transformation’, ‘Punishment’ and most recently ‘Worship’, they cater to both the intrigue of the adventurous cinemagoer and the wider sex-positive kink communities of London. Teasing open sexual deviance, Content Warning crafts a space for erotic imagination to represent alternative pornographic experiences — fore fronting female pleasure, queer intimacy, and an entire range of kink and fetish ephemera.
On Valentine’s Day I was invited by Helena and Harlan to attend their takeover of the Bishopsgate Institute, ‘Kink in the Archive’, their most ambitious project to date. Kink community members, sex workers and casual voyeurs gathered for rescored porn screenings and sex operas in the Victorian Great Hall, bathed in suitably red lighting, while erotic readings and 8mm slide collections were on display in the antiquated libraries. Despite a true sense of the eclectic, I was surprised at how welcoming the atmosphere was towards audience curiosity. Materiality was a huge focus; audiences were encouraged to flip through pages of erotic film stills, 8mm slides, and cinema spaces occupied by VHS and celluloid formats. Lectures from adult filmmakers were incorporated, whose work ranged from traditional online content to the experimental and cinematographic. Whilst hardcore content is seen by the larger film community as a genre in itself, the archive demonstrated that within pornography lies a wealth of historiographies, materials, progressive sexual expression and subcultural representation.
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.
