adult film dates back to the dawn of film. naturally it was illicit and not publicly accessible in a nickelodeon or elsewhere, but it existed almost as quickly as the Lumiere brothers' films about trains and factory workers. Very little survives.

I don't think it's really anything that officially started. People have liked to watch people fuck since there were people to watch fuck. I'm sure on some cave somewhere there is the stone age equivalent to Jenna Jameson getting the business from several cavemen, all with really bad tattoos.

Some of the first cave drawings were pornographic.

Some of the first ink on papyrus action were pornographic.

Some of the first drawings on paper were pornographic.

Some of the first tintypes were pornographic.

Some of the first photographs were pornographic.

Some of the first movies were pornographic.

Pornography has been around almost as long as the concept of depicting images in any format.

>>3682921
>>3682942
See and I already know that. There's artifacts of people having sex all over the world. I'm uniquely interested in film.

>>3682912
That sounds plausible. We watched some of the early 1870s "films" of Muybridge which were of nude women walking, picking up children, etc but I'd never qualify those as pornographic. I'm absolutely certain you're right, just looking for sources.

>>3682976
The earliest porn I've seen dates from the 1920s.

>>3682976
they're much harder to come across than pornographic early photographs due to the shitty quality of the film stock and the terrible state of storage given to that kind of material at the time. there's a couple of docs i can recommend that cover the topic, although mostly in part as an attempt to discuss pornography generally. you may have seen them.

Naughty! - A Report on Pornography and Erotica Through the Ages (1971)
Pornography : A Secret History of Civilisation (1999)

both are pretty serious looks at the history, as opposed to the ubiquitous "behind the scenes of the porn industry" bullshit "docs" that you find.

>>3683003
How did they get around censorship? I know Germany and the soviets had strict censorship laws, soviets primarily against anything that would hurt the image of the Soviet Union and Germany against anything immoral but nothing else has been brought up in class or in the reading.

This seems interesting

http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Independent-Film-Road-Movies/Pornography-BRIEF-HISTORY.htm
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found it by searching 'history of pornographic film'