Sleaze mania, Euro-trash, and high art

Film Quarterly

Volumn 53, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 14-29

  Hawkins, Joan ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61949322750     PISSN: 00151386     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1213717     Document Type: Review

References (99)

1. See Jeffrey Sconce, "'Trashing' the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style," Screen 36:4 (Winter 1995), 372.
2. Michael Weldon calls this cinema "psychotronic." See Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983);
3. Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Video Guide (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1996).
4. Subsequent references to these three works will be given in the text. See also Michael Weldon, ed. Psychotronic Video (serial, Narrowsburg, New York).
5. Remarkably little has been written on the low end of the mail order video business. Fanzines and mass-market horror publications periodically publish addresses and lists. But, since they're preaching to the converted, they provide very little analysis of the phenomenon. At the time of this writing, Sconce's "'Trashing' the Academy" remains the only article which attempts to theorize the phenomenon and the aesthetic it represents. The best general interest articles on mail order video were published in the July-August 1991 issue of Film Comment. See Elliot Forbes, "The 'Lost' World"; Maitland McDonagh, "The House by the Cemetery"; and Peter Hogue, "Riders of the Dawn," Film Comment 27 (July-Aug. 1991), 41-49.
6. See also Richard Kadrey, "Director's Cuts," World Art 3/1996, 64-68, which discusses the aesthetic of bootlegs.
7. Tony Williams' "Resource Guide: Video Sales and Rentals," Jump Cut 37 (1992), 99-109
8. and "Mail Order and Video Companies II, "Jump Cut 41 (1994), 110-118, mainly list companies. It's interesting, though, that in an article geared mainly toward teachers and film professionals, Williams mentions paracinema companies as well as more upscale, traditional sources.
9. For years, scholars have been challenging the binary opposition of high art and popular culture, and have been problematizing the uninflected use of the two terms. But the 1993 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) discussions over audiovisual products illustrated the degree to which the North American mainstream press continues to reproduce and valorize a dichotomy which cultural scholars and fans of paracinema find problematic. See Matthew Fraser, "A Question of Culture: The Canadian Solution Resolves a GATT Standoff," MacLean's v. 106 n. 52 (Canada, Dec 27, 1993), 50;
10. David Lawday, "France Guns for Clint Eastwood," U.S. News and World Report v. 115 n.23 (Dec. 13, 1993), 72;
11. and Daniel Singer, "GATT and the Shape of Our Dreams," The Nation v. 258 n. 2 (Jan 17, 1994), 54.
12. Carol J. Clover, "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film," Representations 20 (Fall 1987), 187.
13. While most art-cinema mail order companies separate films into generic categories, Home Film Festival simply lists titles alphabetically - to similarly startling effect. In Program Guide #12, for example, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968)
14. comes between Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter (1955)
15. and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Night of Shooting Stars (1982).
16. Home Film Festival Program Guide #12, 140.
17. The 1996-97 Sinister Cinema catalogue does list "Mexican Horr/Sci-fi" and "Spaghetti Westerns" as separate categories.
18. Ginette Vincendeau, Encyclopedia of European Cinema (New York: Facts on File, 1995), 327.
19. Mondo Video Catalogue: Mondo Video, Cookeville, Tennessee, n.d., n.p.
20. One scholarly treatment which does emphasize the horror in Pasolini's films, albeit not as brutally as Mondo's catalogue, is Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, "Merde Alors: Pasolini's Salò," October No. 13 (Summer 1980), 23-35.
21. See Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992)
22. and Linda J. Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess," in Barry Keith Grant, ed., Film Genre Reader II (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 142. Subsequent references to the Williams article will be given in the text.
23. While most companies carry only softcore and exploitation titles, an increasing number are stocking hardcore and XXX European and Asian videos. Luminous carries some XXX titles. Video Search of Miami and European Trash Cinema carry hardcore (including hardcore S & M) titles. The descriptions for these titles always include a warning so that consumers of softcore porn will not purchase titles that are more violent and sexually explicit than they expect.
24. Internal quote taken from May Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 95.
25. Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: Random House, 1974), 277. Subsequent citations will be given in the text.
26. It's interesting to note that there is a Eurotrash film with a similar theme to Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes. Aftermath (1994), by Spanish director Nacho Cerda, has created what Luminous Film and Video Wurks Catalogue 3.0 calls "the most disgusting 30 minutes ever." Imagine that you have died, the catalogue invites, "and ... you end up in the Autopsy room. You see with your own dead eyes death after death and you feel the painful dissection of your innards.... Very realistic fake (I hope) human corpses are dismembered and sexually assaulted in this beautifully shot short film. You must be 21 and over to order this sick piece of cinema."
27. See for example, Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978);
28. Gilles Deleuze, "Coldness and Cruelty," in Deleuze, Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989);
29. and Jane Gallop, Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot and Klossowski (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981).
30. For related discussions on the cultural meaning of sadistic representations, see Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985)
31. and Linda Williams, "Power, Pleasure, and Perversion: Sadomasochistic Film Pornography," in Williams, Hardcore (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 184-229.
32. See Jane Gallop, "The Bodily Enigma," in Gallop, Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
33. Laura Kipnis, "(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading H ustler," in Kipnis, Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Gender, Capital and Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 220.
34. See Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws;
35. Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess" and Hardcore;
36. and Robin Wood, "Return of the Repressed," Film Comment (July-Aug. 1978), 25-32
37. "Gods and Monsters," Film Comment (Sept.-Oct. 1978), 19-25
38. and the horror chapters in Hollywood from Reagan to Vietnam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
39. Carlos Clarens, An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (New York: Capricorn Books, 1967), 147-48.
40. Eric Schaefer, "Resisting Refinement: The Exploitation Film and Self-Censorship," Film History 6, no. 3 (1994), 293-313.
41. André Balazs, ed., Hollywood Handbook (New York: Universe Publishing, 1996), 85.
42. See Film as a Subversive Art.
43. A.S. Hamrah and Joshua Glenn, "Monsters, Sex, Sci-Fi, and Kung Fu," Utne Reader no. 70 (July-Aug., 1995), 30.
44. Bernard Weinraub, "Directors Fight for GATT's Final Cuts and Print," New York Times (Sunday, Dec. 12, 1993), 14.
45. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), 14. Subsequent citations will be given in the text.
46. As Jeffrey Sconce has noted, however, paracinema culture does construct itself in opposition to cineaste or high cinema culture. Thus it is often in the odd position of both challenging/destroying and upholding binary oppositions.
47. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 86. Subsequent citations given in the text.
48. This is the Spanish-language version of Dracula which Universal Studios made at the same time that Tod Browning was shooting Dracula. Directed by George Melford, the film utilizes essentially the same script and sets. The film stars Carlos Villarias in the role of the count; Lupita Tovar plays Eva.
49. The Home Film Festival (HFF) list doesn't carry many low-culture titles. Interestingly, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), which is part of the Museum of Modern Art's film collection, is not part of the list, while Night of the Living Dead is. While HFF carries mainly art-horror titles, Facets handles an extensive list of slasher/cult/horror films.
50. Although upscale mail order video companies do tend to carry some low-genre titles, the sense that they are low-genre titles is clearly part of the marketing ploy. Facets Multimedia Catalogue No. 14, for example, contains a "Guilty Pleasures" section.
51. Peter M. Nichols, "A Hard Sell, Those Little French Films," New York Times (Sunday, June 23, 1996), H 29. Subsequent citations given in text.
52. Here I'm including the work of directors like Dario Argento, Jess Franco, Lucio Fulci, Jean Rollin, and Andrzej Zulawski.
53. Susan Sontag, "The Decay of Cinema," New York Times Magazine (Feb. 25, 1996), 60-61.
54. See Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991);
55. Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989);
56. and Jill Forbes, The Cinema in France after the New Wave (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
57. Peter Greenaway, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Bertrand Blier are some notable exceptions to this. I should also mention that post-1970 films by the "classic" directors are usually included - Godard's Every Man for Himself (1980)
58. Fellini's Intervista (1988). It's also interesting to note that not all the films have subtitles. Luminous Film and Video Wurks provide a wider selection of contemporary European art films than most other companies do.
59. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1987).
60. Richard Kadrey treats the paracinema subculture as part of a larger consumer (subculture) group which he identifies as "covert" or "fringe." See Richard Kadrey, Covert Culture Sourcebook (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993)
61. and Covert Culture Sourcebook 2.0 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).
62. This is the only qualitative distinction which the catalogues make - films which require ironized strategies of reading and those which don't. It's important to note, however, that films which don't are not considered better (or worse) than the ones that do - just different.
63. Sinister Cinema catalogue, 12.
64. The reviewer does admit that "Harvey's direction has a weird flair, sometimes suggesting a throwback to the silent days and drawing a kind of awkward honesty out of the actors." Phil Hardy, ed., The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 147. Subsequent references will be given in the text.
65. Kyrou wrote, "Je vous en conjure, apprenez à voir les 'mauvais' films, ils sont parfois sublimes" ("I beg you, learn to see 'bad' films; they are sometimes sublime"). Ado Kyrou, Le Surréalisme au cinéma, 276. Translation mine.
66. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), vii.
67. This is part of the "exploitation" definition given by Thomas Doherty, in Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 8.
68. Peter Lev, The Euro-American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 8.
69. That impression persists to this day. "People see 'French video' in the phone book," Donna Sayada, the owner of Video France, said in a 1996 interview, "and they think it's either highbrow cultural stuff or it's porno.... You should hear some of the calls we get." Peter M. Nichols, "A Hard Sell, Those Little French Films," H29.
70. See Pauline Kael, "Last Tango in Paris," in Pauline Kael, For Keeps (New York: Dutton, 1994), 450;
71. reprinted from Kael, Reeling (1976).
72. Michael F. Mayer, Foreign Films on American Screens (New York: Arco, 1965), 1-3.
73. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: An Introduction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 386.
74. "Parochial Uproar in Ft. Lee; Panics Before 'Foreign Art Films,'" Variety (Wednesday, Feb. 24, 1960), 24, 3.
75. In fact, Hollywood's attempt to compete for art film audiences has much to do with the fact that the traditional movie-going base had been eroded. Staiger points out that younger, better-educated people were more likely to go to the movies than older, less-educated people. These people had very different tastes from the "masses." As Staiger notes, "while the 'masses' were not especially attracted to 'realism' or 'message' pictures, art-house audiences were typified as preferring those films." Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 185.
76. For more information, see all of chapter 9. Douglas Gomery concurs, noting that audience studies "found that art theatres attracted persons of above-average education, more men than women and many solitary movie-goers. This was the crowd who attended the opera, theatre, lectures and ballet." Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1992), 189.
77. Staiger, Interpreting Films, 184.
78. Richard Kadrey, Covert Culture Sourcebook, 1.
79. A few minutes into Un Chien andalou, a man - played by Luis Bunũel - slices open a woman's eye with a razor. To gauge from student responses when I show the film in class, the segment has lost none of its power to shock and horrify the spectator, to act directly on the spectator's body.
80. Men, Women and Chainsaws, 21.
81. William Paul, Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 32. Subsequent citations will be given in the text.
82. Lack of cause and effect, and strategic use of discontinuous editing, also links these films with exploitation cinema, which, as Eric Schaefer points out, can utilize similar techniques because of their reliance on forbidden spectacle. And it's a key feature of almost all European horror films made during the 1956-84 period. As Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs point out, "Linear narrative and logic are always ignored in a fantastique [horror] film." Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs, Immoral Tales: European Sex and Horror Movies 1956-1984 (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1994), 5.
83. See Raymond Durgnat, "Freaks," Films and Filming vol. 9, no. 1 (Aug. 1963), 23.
84. See David F. Friedman (with Don DeNevi), A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1990).
85. See David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993)
86. and Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984).
87. I have written at greater length on the film elsewhere. See "One of Us: Tod Browning's Freaks," in Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 265-76;
88. and David J. Skal and Elias Savada, "Offend One and You Offend Them All," in Skal and Savada, Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning (New York: Anchor Books, 1995) 159-82. Future citations of The Monster Show will be given in the text.
89. Derek Hill, "Cheap Thrills," Tribune (London: April 29, 1960), 11.
90. S.S. Prawer, Caligari's Children: The Film as Tale of Terror (New York: Da Capo Press, 1980), 37-38.
91. Jim Collins, Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age (New York: Routledge, 1995), 131.
92. Robin Wood, "Ideology, Genre, Auteur," in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, fourth edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 478.
93. Gavin Smith, "Foreign Affairs: Which Foreign Films Must Be Seen At All Costs," Film Comment vol. 33, no. 4 (July-Aug. 1997), 40-41.
94. Comedy, thrillers, sci-fi, and melodrama all have this ability. Jim Collins has done an excellent job of analyzing the way "the eclecticism of the contemporary genre films involves a hybridity of conventions that works at cross-purposes with the traditional notion of genre as a stable, integrated set of narrative and stylistic conventions." Architectures of Excess, 126.
95. See Paul, Laughing Screaming.
96. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984);
97. William Paul, Laughing Screaming;
98. and V. Vale and Andrea Juno, "Introduction," in Jim Morton (guest editor). Incredibly Strange Films, RE/SEARCH #10 (San Francisco: RE/SEARCH, 1986), 4-6.
99. Quoted in Men, Women and Chainsaws, 21. See also note, 22.