Administrative/Biographical History:

The Under the Counter archive is the result of academic Oliver Carter’s 10 years of research into Britain’s hidden economy of hardcore 8mm films, which resulted in the book Under the Counter, published in 2023 by Intellect. Between the years 1960-1979, over 1000 hardcore short adult films were produced and distributed on 8mm, Super 8 and 16mm formats. They were sold ‘under-the counter’ in the backrooms of Soho’s bookshops, through mail-order and also exported to Western Europe. Known to those in Britain’s illicit pornography trade as rollers due to the way they would ‘roll’ when played through a projector, these films were manufactured in clandestine circumstances, it being legally problematic to sell such content under the Obscene Publications Act 1959. Entrepreneurial producers found ways to circumvent this law. For instance, they would use commercially available equipment to make and print rollers, while police corruption enabled their circulation through adult bookshops and mail-order.

While carrying out the research, author Oliver Carter found that no archive in the UK housed these films, with only the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana, USA having a significant holding. While poorly digitised captures of some rollers could be found online, it became apparent that physical copies were more significant because their material properties – the packaging, the film stock and its condition – were as equally, if not more, revealing than the actual films, offering us clues about their clandestine origins. Carter began to amass a private collection, seeking to obtain at least one title from each of the 38 labels, and an assortment of the unbranded releases from the early 1960s. Along the way, other private collectors kindly donated rollers to add to Carter’s growing archive. Many of these were digitally scanned, it being safer to scan these fragile films than project them.