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The process of researching and writing film history has changed significantly over the past fifty years. What gets written about has changed. Broadly dealing with masterpieces, select auteurs and a few national cinemas has given way to focused histories of marginal forms (as well as marginalized filmmakers and audiences), including films made by or for racial and ethnic minorities, the GLBT community, those made in postcolonial contexts, and a variety of "orphaned" forms - educational films, industrials, home movies, etc. How those movies are researched has also changed, moving from merely watching films and expounding on them in chronological order to conducting extensive archival research and rooting it in carefully considered theoretical propositions. This change finds a correlation in what David Bordwell has referred to as "middle-level research" and has expanded what constitutes our understanding of "film history".1' My current "middle-level research" is into the history of sexploitation movies. It has been a frequently fascinating and rewarding experience; it has resulted in a number of satisfying conference papers, some keynote addresses, and several published articles. But it has also proven to be frustrating. That frustration is borne out of the ways in which the films were situated historically, the challenges they present to any scholar who attempts to approach their history holistically (instead of as cult items or as an excuse to dabble in auterism), and because of the nature of the films themselves.
After completing my first book, "Bold! Daringl Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959, I decided to work on a history of sexploitation films.2' Even though the "classical"3' exploitation films about which I wrote in "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!" represented a variety of sub-categories (including sex hygiene films, drug movies, and nudist documentaries) almost all of them shared a fundamental concern with sexuality. Moving into the sexploitation era, which in popular accounts begins around 1959 or 1960 with the appearance of the first "nuche cutie" films, seemed to be a logical extension of the first book. The result would be Massacre of Pleasure: A History of Sexploitation Films, 1960-1979, a work, like the prior one, driven by questions without preconceived answers in mind, and based on a minimal number of guiding, evidence-based, assumptions. What I had hoped would be...