Ray Selfe

Speaking of payment for material he shot for a 1968 television series, We Have Ways Of Making You Laugh, Ray Selfe, who has died of a heart attack aged 69, said: "I told London Weekend that I had a producer, a director, an editor, a title writer, a track layer and a neg cutter. What I omitted to say was that they were all me."

Selfe was active in film and television at a time when the untrained enthusiast could turn his hand to almost every aspect of the business. A captivating raconteur with a phenomenal knowledge of film history, he was proud to be a journeyman, but privately disappointed by lack of recognition and artistic success. During his last years, however, he gained respect within the industry as a private film archive curator.

Born into a working-class family in Croydon, Surrey, he was 10 when he discovered a passion for the cinema. He was expelled from Pitman's College at 14, after which he became a projectionist at a local picture palace and ran a mobile cinema, taking film shows to youth clubs. In 1950, he endured brief national service in the RAF, escaping with a discharge on medical grounds.

He later worked as an editor at Associated Television (ATV) and formed an amateur cine society at the Dick Shepperd school, in Brixton, south London, where he taught evening classes and also met his wife, Jean Bottle, whom he married in 1962.

The following year, Selfe formed his first film company, to make commercials. A later company, Rebel Films - so named because "We're not part of the union" - made movie trailers. The nearest he came to official recognition was when his short film, Look At Love, a satire on Look At Life, the dire programme fillers of the 1960s and early 1970s, was chosen for the 1971 London Film Festival.

Selfe's talent for doing anything cheaply was spotted by the soft porn industry. He variously produced, directed, photographed and edited several atrocious sex films, and worked on the 3D sequences of another, The Four Dimensions Of Greta (1972).

In 1972, he opened the Pigalle cinema on Piccadilly Circus. In need of extra finance, he became a director of David Hamilton Grant's Oppidan company, which opened eight more cinemas and produced and distributed exploitation films before it collapsed in 1978.

Selfe then worked in various capacities on Don't Open Till Christmas (1984) and other horror movies for Dick Randall. Tiring of tawdriness, he moved to Cliftonville, Kent, where he expanded his film collection and produced video compilations of the movies he preferred - comedies, musicals and westerns.

Jean loved music-hall, and persuaded her husband to play chairman and comedian in shows she toured throughout London and, in 1978, the United States. He even appeared at the Edinburgh festival fringe in 1982, in a play called Brainchild. He worked in music-hall until 1999.

Selfe was never really happy unless he was running old movies, reading film books or talking shop. 100 Years Of Hardcore, a documentary featuring Selfe and his archive's erotic section, is scheduled for transmission by Channel 4 next month.

He is survived by his wife and their son, Howard, who will curate the collection.

• Ray Selfe, filmmaker and archivist, born May 18 1932; died September 3 2001