Про жанр "експплуатейшн" у кіно.
Exploiting Exploitation Cinema: an Introduction
David Roche
Texte intégral
- 1 For instance, one fan’s blog speaks of “[t]he exploitation genre” (See <http://popcornhorror.com/exploitation-film> accessed on 2/25/2016). Ano</http> (...)
- 2 The semantic refers to “linguistic meaning, i.e., the meaning in the dictionary, the syntactic to “ (...)
1What
is exploitation cinema? Exploitation cinema is not a genre; it is an
industry with a specific mode of production. Exploitation films are made
cheap for easy profit. “Easy” because they are almost always genre
films relying on time-tried formulas (horror, thillers, biker movies,
surfer movies, women-in-prison films, martial arts, subgenres like gore,
rape-revenge, slashers, nazisploitation, etc.). “Easy” because they
offer audiences what they can’t get elsewhere: sex, violence and taboo
topics. “Easy” because they have long targetted what has since become
the largest demographic group of moviegoers: the 15-25 age group
(Thompson and Bordwell, 310, 666). The exploitation film is not a genre,
and yet it is often described as such.1
This is, no doubt, because these movies do, as a group, share common
semantic, syntactic and pragmatic elements that, for Rick Altman, make
up the “complex situation” that is a film genre (Altman, 84).2
Semantic characteristics include excessive images of sex and violence,
bad acting, poor cinematography and sound; syntactic characteristics
include taboo themes, and flat characters or basic character arcs.
Evidently, these can mainly be put down to the mode of production. The
arguments for considering the exploitation film as a genre are, then,
mainly pragmatic: fans and critics often speak of the “exploitation
film” as if to designate a specific genre. That these movies have often
been exhibited in similar venues—grindhouses, drive-ins and today
direct-to-DVD—reinforces their commonality. Exploitation is not a genre,
then, but a label.
2Cinephiles,
film critics (Ken Knight, Richard Meyers) and scholars (Pam Cook,
Thomas Doherty) tend to associate exploitation cinema with a specific
period: the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. For Doherty, exploitation
cinema as we know it emerged in the 1950s with the advent of low-budget
teenpics. In the mid-1940s, exploitation designated “films with some
timely or currently controversial subject which [could] be exploited,
capitalized on, in publicity and advertising”; the A-feature The Pride of the Yankees
(Samuel Goldwyn / RKO, Sam Wood, 1942) is one such example (Doherty,
6), though one could argue that producer Darryl Zanuck’s taste for the
“headline type of title story” was already exploitative in that sense
(Bourget, 99). In 1953, still, a musical like The Band Wagon
(MGM, Vincente Minnelli), as Sheldon Hall kindly pointed out to me in an
email, could be promoted as “the exploitation picture of the year”
simply because it promised to be highly successful [Fig. 1]. So it
wasn’t until the mid-1950s that “exploitation” came to mean both “timely
and sensational,” and came to have such a “bad reputation” (Doherty, 7).
3Both Felicia Feaster and Brett Wood’s Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film
and Eric Schaefer’s “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!” A History of
Exploitation Films trace the history of exploitation cinema even further
back by examining a body of lesser known films of the 1920s-1950s that
Schaefer calls classical exploitation films. The emergence of this
industry on the margins of the U.S. film industry filled a vacancy left
by the latter in the 1910s. With Hollywood desperately trying to improve
its image (the Thirteen Points were issued in 1921), studios like
Universal and Triangle stopped making films about sex hygiene and the
white slave trade; the enforcement of self-censorship, with the Don’ts
and Be Carefuls of 1927 and the Production Code of 1930, confirmed that
imagery and narratives involving sexuality, homosexuality, drug use and
miscegenation were inappropriate. Exploiteers thus stepped in to profit
from an existing market for sex hygiene films, drug films, vice, exotic
and atrocity films, and nudist and burlesque films. With the exception
of burlesque, all these genres were meant to be simultaneously
sensational and educational, some of the sex hygiene films having been
solicited by the state or army (Schaefer, 27-28). Posters promised
nudity and often stressed the topicality of the film by drawing on
headlines, using words like “exposé” and “story” and asking questions
audiences would expect the film to answer (Schaefer, 106-9, 114) [Fig.
2]. Because of their emphasis on spectacle rather than on narrative,
these films, Schaefer argues, owed more to the “cinema of attractions”
of early silent cinema, as analyzed by Tom Gunning (2004) (Schaefer,
38). Thus, “the classical exploitation film was a form firmly rooted in
modes of representation, financing, production, distribution, and
ideology left behind by the mainstream movie industry after WW1”
(Schaefer, 41). Indeed, these films changed very little from the 1920s
to the 1950s and could sometimes be re-released with a new poster and
title as long as ten years after their initial release—this was the case
of Midnight Lady (Chesterfield, Richard Thorpe, 1932), re-released as
Secret of the Female Sex, and of Polygamy (Unusual Pictures, Pat
Carlyle, 1936), re-released as both Illegal Wives and Child Marriage
(Schaefer, 59-60). The ballyhoo surrounding the event was instrumental
in drawing audiences: exploiteers suggested local displays, sold themed
books, included nurses and strippers, and invited so-called specialists
to give lectures (Schaefer, 118, 126-27). Audiences probably saw these
movies just as much to learn about shameful taboo subjects as to enjoy
the sexual titillation and carnivalesque atmosphere of the show: they
“were encouraged to look on their attendance at an exploitation film as
an experience with multiple dimensions, one that would arouse, thrill,
entertain, and educate” (Schaefer, 110).
Fig. 2
Advertisement from press book for The Desperate Women (1954)
Public domain
4Schaefer
attributes the disappearance of classical exploitation cinema both to
the retirement and death of the first generation exploiteers, and to the
fact that the Hollywood industry, because of competition from
television, increasingly explored forbidden topics in order to draw a
more mature audience (Schaefer, 326-37). Classical exploitation made way
for sexploitation. Historically, there are some connections between the
two. Russ Meyer was initially asked to make a classical exploitation
nudist film when he directed The Immoral Mr. Teas, which
Schaefer considers to have largely contributed to initiating
sexploitation (Schaeffer, 338). And the infamous Edward D. Wood, Jr.
launched his career with Glen or Glenda (1953), a movie about
tranvestites that retains the educational intent of classical
exploitation [Fig. 3], before moving on to horror (Bride of the Monster, 1955; Plan 9 from Outer Space, 1959) and sexploitation (Nympho Cycler,
1971). But sexploitation distinguished itself from its predecessor
because it had no claim to educate and adopted an ironic tone:
Sexploitation films can best be described as exploitation movies that focused on nudity, sexual situations, and simulated (i.e., nonexplicit) sex acts, designed for titillation and entertainment. Such films no longer required explicit education justification for presenting sexual spectacle on the screen—although they often made claims of social or artistic merit as a strategy for legal protection. (Schaefer, 338)
5The
pictures made by Allied Artists, DCA, Howco and AIP (American
International Pictures) have, Schaefer argues, more in common with the
B-movies the Hollywood industry stopped making in the 1950s (Schaefer,
330-31), namely that they are narrative films. So like their
predecessors, the new exploitation films filled a vacancy within the
mainstream industry.
6They
also testified to the industry’s growing awareness of the significance
of the youth market. In the 1950s, consumer society started not only to
target teenagers directly, but attempted to address them differently;
teenage advice books, for instance, were no longer written from the
superior perspective of the parent or teacher, but provided insight on
how to become popular at school (Doherty, 47). In Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s,
Doherty links the rise of the exploitation teenpic to the opportunity
to profit from the youth audience (Doherty, 12), either by creating
genres dealing with issues and topics they were interested in (the rebel
or rock’n’roll movie), or simply by integrating youthful characters in
pre-existing genres (like horror and sci-fi). With its hero who fails to
“adjust” and its gratuitous song and dance scenes, I Was a Teenage Werewolf (Sunset Productions, Gene Fowler, Jr., 1957), one of the top grossing films that year, does both (Fig. 4) (Doherty, 131).
Fig. 4
Advertisement for I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957)
Public domain
As a production strategy, the 1950s exploitation formula typically had three elements: (1) controversial, bizarre, or timely subject matter amenable to wild promotion (‘exploitation’ potential in its original sense); (2) a substandard budget; and (3) a teenage audience. Movies of this ilk are triply exploitative, simultaneously exploiting sensational happenings (for story value), their notoriety (for publicity value), and their teenage participants (for box office value). (Doherty, 7)
7In
spite of these differences—the target audience, the educational claims
or lack thereof, the emphasis on spectacle or narrative—the North
American exploitation film has always addressed topical issues and
resorted to exploitative images snubbed by the mainstream industry in
order to exploit the concerns of a specific market. In a sense, the
overt topicality of classical exploitation cinema made way, in
sexploitation, to more diffuse but just as pregnant themes, while I Was a Teenage Werewolf and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
(Vortex, Tobe Hooper, 1974) prove that the tabloid title remained
effective. Moreover, one of the main strategies Schaefer identifies in
classical exploitation cinema—the recycling of stock footage or images
from previous films—was just as central to later exploitation films
(Schaeffer, 56-57). Clearly, exploiting exploitation cinema entails not
only the economic exploitation of an audience and subject matter, though
it is its primary concern, but also the repeated exploitation of the
form: in both cases, this exploitation is deliberately excessive in
order to make up for its (chiefly economic) lacks, and it is, I would
argue, in its excesses that potential disruption of the mainstream lies.
8I
started by noting that the use-value of the “exploitation film” is the
main reason it is sometimes considered as a genre. It is, in fact, the
“uses” made of exploitation cinema that will concern us here. As Pam
Cook has noted,
There is also a challenge for film-makers in the necessity of shooting fast and cheaply, in displaying ingenuity and in injecting ideas that do not entirely go along with hardcore exploitation principles. In other words, the director can also exploit the exploitation material in his or her own interests, and have fun at the expense of the genre. (Cook, 57)
The paradox of
“exploit[ing] the exploitation material in his or her own interests” is,
in effect, at the heart of many of the political and ethical
ambiguities that this issue will draw attention to. We aim to explore
the extent to which specific filmmakers, producers, actors and viewers
have exploited exploitation cinema as both an industry and a cinematic
form characterized by high economic constraints and, at least in some
respects, by a greater degree of latitude because of the necessity to
display taboo imagery and topics. In other words, to what extent do some
filmmakers and screenwriters turn the necessity to exploit
transgressive material into an opportunity to produce a subversive
subtext and/or aesthetics, one that challenges dominant and potentially
oppressive discourses and practices?
*
**
**
- 3 In Roy Frumkes’s documentary Document of the Dead (1985), producer Richard P. Rubinsten explains th (...)
9Before
the rise of the film school generation of the 1960s and 1970s, the
exploitation industry was a viable training ground for many filmmakers
and actors. Director/producer Roger Corman was to boast the “discovery”
of many of the big names of the period. His company, Filmgroup
Productions, founded in 1959, distributed the first movies starring Jack
Nicholson—The Wild Ride (Harvey Berman) and The Little Shop of Horrors (Roger Corman), both released in 1960—and produced Dementia 13 (1963) [Fig. 5], written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who had started out making nudie pics (The Bellboy and the Playgirls,
Defin Film/Rapid Film/Screen Rite Picture Company, 1962). As a producer
and director for AIP, founded in 1954, Corman cast Robert De Niro in
his own Bloody Mama (1970), one of the actor’s first parts, and produced Martin Scorsese’s second feature film, Boxcar Bertha, in 1972, and Brian De Palma’s Sisters in 1973. With New World Pictures, which Corman founded in 1970, he launched the careers of Joe Dante (Piranha, 1978), Jonathan Demme (Crazy Mama, 1975) and Jonathan Kaplan (Night Call Nurses,
1972). AIP and New World Pictures were the major players of U.S.
exploitation cinema, also producing some of the most successful
blaxploitation films, Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974), both starring Pam Grier and directed by Jack Hill, and distributing exploitation fare from Australia (Mad Max, George Miller, 1979), Canada (The House by the Lake, William Fruet, 1976), Sweden (Thriller,
Bo Arne Vibenius, 1973), Italy (the films of Mario Bava), Japan (the
Godzilla movies of the 1960s and 1970s) and Great Britain (many Hammer
films of the late 1960s and 1970s). The exploitation industry also
provided opportunities for women directors like Stephanie Rothman,
“produc[ing] some fascinating feminist films, which remain relevant”
(Cook, 64). Many of these exploitation films have retrospectively gained
a legitimacy they lacked upon release because fans and critics now view
them not just as exploitation films, but as early works evidencing the
talent and sometimes even personal signatures of major actors and
directors. In short, they have been salvaged by auteur theory, which has
long been integrated in both production,3
marketing and cinephile practices (Saper, 35; Verevis, 9-10; Roche,
2014, 13). Most of the articles in this issue confirm this trend by
recuperating auteurism to study specific filmmakers.
- 4 Baadasssss Cinema. Dir. Isaac Julien. Independent Film Channel, 2002.
- 5 Thompson and Bordwell include companies like AIP and NWP and directors like Meyer and Romero in ind (...)
10The
transformation of some exploitation films into auteur films was
facilitated by the fact that many were independently produced. Fourteen
of Russ Meyer’s films—from The Naked Camera (1961) to Cherry, Harry & Raquel!
(1970)—were produced and distributed by Eve Productions, co-owned by
his wife. David F. Friedman and Herschell Gordon Lewis founded their own
company to produce Blood Feast (1963) and 2,000 Maniacs! (1964), as did George A. Romero for Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Wes Craven’s debut The Last House on the Left
(1972) was produced by his friend Sean S. Cunningham’s company. And
unlike many of the blaxploitation films that imitated it and that were
produced by exploitation companies like AIP and sometimes even by major
studios (MGM for Shaft, Gordon Parks, 1971), Melvyn Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song
(1971) was produced by the director himself who sought to arouse the
interest of African American investors (most famously Bill Cosby).4
These films were then distributed by companies specialized in
exploitation and sometimes pornography (Bryanston Distributing, which
distributed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, had distributed the hit Deep Throat
in 1972). Though usually not directly associated with exploitation
cinema, John Waters operated very much like the exploiteers of classical
exploitation cinema (Feaster and Wood, 194-95), as Elise Pereira-Nunes shows in this issue, producing and distributing three films from Pink Flamingos (1972) to Desperate Living
(1977) through his company, Saliva Films. Many of the exploitation
films of the period that have since garnered the recognition of fans,
critics and scholars are, in fact, independent films.5
- 6 Wes Craven was directly involved in the New York avant-garde (Becker, 44).
- 7 Van Peebles has always denied the influence although he lived in France in the 1960. <http://www.culturopoing.com/cinema/entretien-avec-melvin-van-peebles/20090212> Accessed on F</http> (...)
11This
explains, at least in part, the relative freedom the filmmakers had to
experiment artistically and sometimes to ground exploitative imagery in
radical political subtexts. In the early 1970s, many filmmakers
integrated techniques initiated by the French Nouvelle Vague and/or
1960s underground cinema.6 Pam Cook notes that the “drug-induced fantasy scenes” in Rothman’s The Student Nurses
(New World Pictures, 1970) are “more in line with European art cinema
than the rough and ready codes of exploitation” (59) [41:01-45:10;
61:23-62:22]. Sweet Sweetback’s contains many scenes edited in
jump-cut (when a white cop fires at Sweetback on a bridge
[70:30-70:58]), a scene with the hero running that utilizes the split
screen technique to portray a character trapped by the city and the
police [64:47-65:34], and ends on a freeze frame of the hills where the
black man is now lurking [96:04], recalling the end of another ode to
rebellion, François Truffaut’s Les quatre cent coups (1959).7 Waters’s Female Trouble
(1974) similarly ends on a freeze frame of Dawn Davenport’s distorted
face as she thanks her wonderful fans while being electrocuted on the
electric chair [96:37]. Coming from the underground movement (Muir, 90),
the penultimate scene of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the mad
dinner party, orchestrates an escalation of extreme closeups of the
victim’s (Sally Hardesty’s) face edited in jump-cuts [74:50-76:40]
(Thoret, 73; Roche, 2014, 200), so that, unlike the famous shower scene
in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) which also utilizes jump-cuts, the
editing does not mimic the physical violence (no one is stabbing her
yet) but effects the psychological violence of the scene; the sense of
anxiety that permeates the film is forcibly rendered by the physicality
of the concrete music score, composed and performed by Wayne Bell and
Hooper himself (Roche, 2014, 191-201). Filmmakers could also play with
generic conventions. Pam Cook argues that exploitation films “parody
rather than emulate” the mainstream productions they exploit (56). This
explains the ironic tone noted by Schaefer that can then be negotiated
from a camp perspective. In his analysis of The Toolbox Murders (Dennis Donnelly, 1978) included in this issue (“Unnatural, unnatural, unnatural, unnatural unnatural” . . . but real? The Toolbox Murders and the Exploitation of True Story Adaptations”), Wickham Clayton
analyzes the consequences of Donnelly’s placing the famous “based on a
true story” trope of exploitation horror at the end of the film, unlike
the famous opening carton of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; here, the exploitative claim to timeliness provides an excuse for both the film’s ambiguous polics and incoherent narrative.
- 8 Critics like Sumiko Higashi (1990) and Tony Williams feel that the “grainy black-and-white still im (...)
12Early
defenders of independent horror of the 1970s, however, were mainly
interested in its political potential. Robin Wood famously stated that
it became “in the 70s the most important of all American genres and
perhaps the most progressive, even in its overt nihilism—in a period of
extreme cultural crisis and disintegration, which alone offers the
possibility of radical change and rebuilding” (76). As a Marxist and gay
activist, Wood was interested in how films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
attacked capitalist patriarchy (Wood, 82; Williams, 2014, 188, 194).
North American horror films of the 1970s have often been said to reflect
or address some of the cultural anxieties of the time, including the
Vietnam War, the state of the economy, the civil rights movement and the
women’s movement (Waller, 12; Worland, 231; Roche, 2014, 28). A
director like Wes Craven encouraged this reading of the violence of his
first film The Last House on the Left as an expression of “the
newsreel footage of the American carnage in Vietnam playing on
television every night” (Robb, 24), a sort of way to “bring the war
home,” as the slogan went. Canadian director Bob Clark’s Dead of Night (aka Deathdream,
1974) tells the story of a Vietnam veteran who, on his return home,
becomes a ghoul addicted to violence, his monstrosity clearly operating
as a metaphor for PTSD. If Romero discouraged reading Vietnam into Night of the Living Dead (Fig. 6),8 his fourth film, The Crazies
(1973), which depicts a military quarantine in a small town turning
into a fascist regime, relies on imagery of guerilla warfare and human
bonfires (like the monks in 1963) that audiences would have associated
with the war [47:42-50:29].
- 9 This is equally true of the Australian film The Cars That Ate Paris (Peter Weir, 1974), which deliv (...)
13Romero’s second zombie movie, Dawn of the Dead
(1978), set in a mall, delivers a critique of consumer society, the
line between the living and the dead appearing increasingly thin as both
have internalized the drive to consume (Williams, 2015, 91). Canadian
filmmaker David Cronenberg had previously recycled Romero’s zombie
imagery in order to assault the capitalist structures—the apartment
building in Shivers (1975), the clinic in Rabid (1977)—that repress basic drives and thus fashion the subject into a consuming body (Roche, 2006, 165-70). In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
the cannibal family’s economic status—several members have lost their
jobs while others operate a gas station that is out of gas—is a
synecdoche for the nation in which energy is lacking, and yet the
cannibals are driven to waste energy in their pursuit and destruction of
human bodies (Roche, 2014, 22-24). All these films exploit the taboo of
cannibalism as a perversion of consumerism, its most quintessential
expression, and contain it within a microcosm (a family house) that
metonymically represents the macrocosm (U.S. society).9
The paradox in this political exploitation of exploitation cinema is,
of course, that it critiques the economic system that sustains those
very films that are, above all, made to be exploited.
14The
subtexts of these particular films are exceptionally coherent, yet this
is not the case of the majority of exploitation films whose politics
are far more ambiguous. Nowhere is this more patent than in the
portrayal of female characters and the treatment of race, sexuality and
gender. The most obvious and famous example is probably Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
(1965), which exploits a trio of bombshell pinups twofold by
fetishizing their bodies and depicting their sadistic violence on
normative society (the couple, the family), an attitude that is later
justified by the patriarchal family that legitimizes rape. In the end,
order is restored, as Linda avenges her previous boyfriend (Tommy) and
saves her new one (Kirk) by slaying Varla.
15Cook claims that
many of these films were made in response to public demand for more woman characters, and Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House (1971), or Joe Viola’s The Hot Box (1972), celebrated a popular version of “Women’s Lib”. In spite of the potential here for more active roles for women, these sexual role-reversal films generally cast super-aggressive women as mirror-images of men, without questioning those images too much. (61)
- 10 Apparently, it was also Downe who “got real women bikers as actresses” (Quarles, 37).
She-Devils on Wheels (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1968), which Kristina Pia Hofer’s “Exploitation Feminism: ‘Trashiness, Lo-Fidelity and Utopia in She-Devils on Wheels and Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls’”
analyzes in this issue, initially seems to prove Cook right: the bikers
“treat men like they’re slabs of meat” [7:30], have contests to
determine who will get first pick and reject members who want to commit
to a relationship [28:20-33:42]. That said, if the female characters
basically do unto men what they would do unto women, unlike Meyer’s
pussycats, the Maneaters form a heterogeneous group both in terms of
physique and social class (not, however, in terms of race), accepting a
newbie who rides a mere scooter! The characters’ bodies are not
fetishized—a shower curtain and towel are used to conceal Karen’s body
when she steps out of the shower [48:49]—only the male victims’ in gory
close-ups [43:24-48:48]. This utopian matriarchy is a microcosm in a
world of men (pointedly, they are the only female biker gang in the
film, they fight a male car gang for turf and the police is comprised of
men). The end of the film can be read as a reversal of Faster, Pussycat!,
as Karen gives up the possibility of founding a family and thus
integrating normative patriarchy to stay with her sisters [75:00]. The
film’s feminist potential, which the music reinforces, Hofer argues, is
an exemplary case of exploiting exploitation cinema, and may have
something to do with the female screenwriter’s (Allison Louise Downe)
appropriating man’s (Fred M. Sandy) highly original idea.10
16The Big Doll House
(Jack Hill, 1971) exploits a genre that has existed since the 1930s:
the women-in-prison film. These films seem to cater to the heterosexual
male fantasy of spying on women who are all alone, offering glimpses of
beautiful women taking showers and sharing close quarters. The film
shamelessly fetishizes the prisoners, keeping the promise in the title.
Some of the women pleasure themselves and each other in the shower
[31:20-37:22]. One of the main characters (Alcott), however, rejects
lesbian sex and prefers to perform for a male character (Fred) peeking
at them through a window. Fred, here, embodies a stand-in for the male
spectator. The irony is that he abandons the voyeuristic position when
the female character ceases to act as a passive performer and returns
his gaze. In other words, he is scared off by her desire to share in the
pleasure. Logically, then, the following scene has Alcott enacting the
male characters’ fantasy by trying to rape Fred in the storeroom,
demanding that he “get to work,” skip foreplay and that he “get it up or
[she]’ll cut it off.” Clearly, Alcott’s sexual assertiveness is
phallic, castrating, “masculine,” confirming Cook’s argument. Another
limitation to the film’s sexual politics is that lesbian sexuality is
typically imagined as a mere replica of heterosexuality: the character
of Grear, who calls her girlfriends “baby” and says she likes “being on
top” [7:43], mistreats them just as men mistreated her [22:25], almost
behaving like a pimp [64:15]. Yet The Big Doll House is more
ambiguous and hesitant in its gendered terms. The prison is first
presented as a matriarchy run by Miss Dietrich and her female guards;
patriarchy is soon introduced as the overarching frame when we find out
that Miss Dietrich works for Colonel Mendoza, a man who only comes to
watch the women get tortured. In the end, Mendoza turns out to be Miss
Dietrich in disguise. In other words, the sadistic male gaze was a
sadistic female gaze all along, a revelation foreshadowed by the
utilization of a POV shot when Lucian, the female guard, looks at her
victims through the bars [61:00-61:52]. Thus, four years before Laura
Mulvey’s famous “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” The Big Doll House
offers counter-examples to the equation between male and camera gaze,
replacing the “male” with the “masculine female.” The sensationalistic
exploitation of heterosexual male fantasies thus leads, quite
unexpectedly, to subvert the conventions of classical cinema.
17Jack Hill’s later and more famous films, Coffy and Foxy Brown, which exploited the success of Sweet Sweetback’s and Shaft,
are particularly ambiguous because their basic premises—a beautiful
black woman uses her body to get revenge—allow them to indulge in sex
and violence on a background of identity politics involving gender, race
and class. For one, the fetishization of the female body for the male
gaze is dramatized within the film as a strategy to manipulate the
diegetic viewer. In Coffy, for instance, the heroine’s body is
displayed in a slow frontal zoom-in when she undresses to seduce one of
her future victims, King George [38:20-38:59]. Typical of exploitation
cinema’s ambiguous politics is the all-girl fight scene [42:52-45:11].
To draw the attention of an Italian mafioso, Coffy starts a fight with a
group of white prostitutes, thus performing the racist stereotype of
the “wild animal” the white man desires. The scene inverts the outcome
of the mudfight scene in The Big Doll House, with the black
woman coming out victorious thanks to the razor blades concealed in her
afro. Yet this figure of beauty, power and cunning also enables the film
to cater to the audience’s desire for nudity, as she neutralizes her
opponents by tearing off their clothes. Foxy Brown is, in this
respect, far less exploitative: the brief glimpse of Foxy’s naked body
in the shadows in the opening scene turns out to be a false promise
[6:00-6:15], and the film systematically distinguishes scenes where Foxy
is performing the aptly named “Misty Cotton,” a racist and sexist
stereotype she has constructed to seduce her opponents (usually wearing a
wig and a sexy dress or gown) from scenes where she is herself (wearing
more casual clothes with her hair done in a afro or wrapped in a
turban). On the surface, Foxy Brown further develops the racial
politics when the heroine allies herself with a local group of Black
Panthers; in the scenes where she visits their headquarters, Foxy is
even framed with portraits of Angela Davis in the background to
underline the physical likeness [73:31-74:10]. Yet I would argue that
this only serves to reinforce the divide between black and white in a
manner typical of blaxploitation. Indeed, the representation of the
criminal world in Coffy is more complex as a site of
intersectionality between gender, race and class: Coffy’s journey takes
her from a black pimp to the Italian mafia to a black politician,
confirming what her friend Cater, a black policeman, had told her from
the outset [11:56]. On this level, at least, Foxy Brown’s increased coherence diminishes the film’s political potential.
*
**
**
- 11 These are nonetheless based on homophobic stereotypes. In Blacula (AIP, William Crain, 1972), for i (...)
18We
have already noted that a few exploitation films have been acknowledged
as promising works or even masterpieces through auteur theory, even
when the movie happens to be by far a director’s crowning achievement
(this is clearly the case of Tobe Hooper and even, to some, of Wes
Craven). But it is, no doubt, the ambivalent politics of the
exploitation films of the 1960s and 1970s, combined with the ironic tone
noted by Schaeffer, that explains, at least in part, why many still
enjoy cult standing today. If these movies often targeted young
heterosexual rural white males, the audiences for these films have
diversified. As Anne Crémieux explains in this issue in
“Exploitation Cinema and the Lesbian Imagination,” some of these films,
in spite of their predominantly sexist and homophobic attitudes, have
been recuperated by contemporary LGBT audiences for whom negative
representations are less problematic than they were in the 1960s and
1970s. Members of these communities single out specific moments for
celebration. At festivals notably, audiences can negotiate images of
strong women, lesbian and (albeit less frequent) gay characters from a
camp perspective.11
This is especially true of lesbian communities who can tap into an
abundance of fantasies initially tailored for young heterosexual
males—Michelle Johnson’s Triple X Selects: The Best of Lezsploitation (2007) even tries to salvage the Canadian nazisploitation Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS
(Don Edmonds, 1975)! Thus, one of the pleasures provided by
exploitation cinema is akin to that provided by genre films: audiences
often seek in them “an increasingly intense counter-cultural genre
pleasure” which then “create[s] an invisible bond among fans of the same
genre” (Altman, 155, 165).
- 12 See Richard Dyer (1992).
19Some
of these fans went on to make films. The tradition of low budget
exploitation continued well into the 1980s, as Kristina Pia Hofer’s
piece on Blood Orgy of the Leather Girls (Michael Lucas, 1988) shows. TV shows like Charlie’s Angels (ABC, 1976-1981), Crémieux points out, bear the influence of the strong female characters of exploitation cinema. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
(Twentieth Century-Fox, Jim Sharman, 1975) taps into both the
transgressive potential of exploitation horror and the utopian potential
of the musical12
to propose a world free from oppressive heteronormalcy. An early
example of a fan of exploitation cinema exploiting his influences in a
very personal way is, no doubt, John Waters. Elise Pereira-Nunes’s “Sex,
Gore and Provocation: the Influence of Exploitation in John Waters’s
Early Films” shows how he appropriated imagery from the nudies pics of
Russ Meyer, the gore movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis and the Mondo Film
tradition from Italy in his films of the 1960s and 1970s. Each
influence operates on a specific level in terms of politics: the
subversion of gender and sexual identity, by modeling the persona of
Divine on Meyer’s bombshells, and the implication that Americans are
essentially primal animals like any other. More generally, celebrating
these lower forms is, of course, a provocative act in itself and largely
participates in the assault on propriety that is at the basis of
Waters’s aesthetics, an aesthetics which appealed to student and gay
audiences of the 1970s and contributed to the emergence of a camp
sensitivity.
20Exploitation
films of the 1950s-1970s have also had a direct influence on the films
of contemporary American filmmakers, including two of the most famous:
Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino. The imagery we often describe as
Burtonian is a mix of Disney animation, the classic monster movies of
the 1930s, and exploitation horror and scifi of the 1950s-1970s. The
presence of Vincent Price in the short film Vincent (1982) and Edward Scissorhands
(1990) pays tribute to the films of Roger Corman, while specific
shots—the low-angle establishing shots of the Inventor’s castle [4:30,
8:55] or the high-angle shot of artificial hands [81:30] in Edward Scissorhands
(1990), the medium closeup of the Corpse Bride unveiling her face in
the 2005 film [16:30]—cite, as Sarah Hameau (2015) has noted, The Curse of Frankenstein
(Hammer Films, Terrence Fisher, 1957). I would argue that Burton’s
integrating exploitation imagery and material in mainstream films is, in
effect, an aesthetic project with political implications: it celebrates
the “lower” form by evincing its poetry. This project is notably
carried out across three films made back to back: Ed Wood (1994) is a celebration of the creative energy of the man who is said to have made the worst movie of all time, Mars Attacks! (1996), a parody of 1950s scifi like Invasion of the Saucer Men (AIP, Edward L. Cahn, 1957) and a political satire of the 1990s U.S.; Sleepy Hollow (1999), both a remake of Disney’s 1949 adaptation and Burton’s “love letter to Hammer, Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum (1961), and Mario Bava’s neo-baroque La maschera del demonio (The Mask of Satan, 1960)” (Carver, 121).
21Tarantino’s
project is similar to Burton’s but more radical insofar as his films
celebrate lower forms that have yet to be redeemed. Like Burton, he
refers to exploitation cinema by casting actors associated with it (Pam
Grier, David Carradine), recycling specific characters (Pai Mei in Kill Bill Vol. 2, 2004), citing specific motifs (in Kill Bill, Elle Driver wears an eye patch like Frigga, the heroine of the Swedish rape-revenge film Thriller,
Bo Arne Vibenius, 1973), and using music from Italian exploitation
films (often composed by Ennio Morricone). In his article for this issue
entitled “Quentin Tarantino : du cinéma d’exploitation au cinéma” Philippe Ortoli
argues that Tarantino’s exploitation of exploitation cinema is not just
fannish; it is grounded in a view of art as repetition with difference,
which, in Django Unchained (2012), is incarnated in the
exchange between Django and the character of Franco Nero, the original
Django of 1966 who spawned a host of others: exploitation cinema, a form
founded on the recycling of spectacular images, would thus epitomize
this view. Tarantino’s approach is more comprehensive not only because
he taps into exploitation cinema on an international level and across
various genres (Italian Westerns, martial arts movies), but also because
it explores the political ambiguities of exploitation cinema Burton
tends to ignore. This is most obvious in Jackie Brown (1997) and Death Proof
(2007). The first is a critical homage to blaxploitation that
simultaneously invokes blaxploitation (via Grier, Ordell Robbie’s look
and the music Roy Ayers composed for Coffy) and
counters the ambiguous politics of these films by making Jackie a strong
woman who achieves her goals without resorting to sex and
self-fetishization; by portraying an interracial romance, Tarantino’s
film also rejects what Crémieux calls “the schism between blacks vs.
whites” blaxploitation films antagonized. As the second part of Grindhouse, Death Proof
invokes one of the modes of exhibition of exploitation cinema, but the
film proposes to revisit various exploitation genres (the slasher,
rape-revenge, the car movie) through the prism of feminist film theory:
in so doing, it reveals that generic conventions are gendered, and thus
that subverting these conventions can potentially deconstruct binaries
like “male”/“female” and “masculine”/“feminine,” revealing them to be
constructs (Roche, 2010); the scene where Stuntman Mike takes pictures
of the girls in the airport parking lot, in particular, undermines the
Mulveyan equation of male gaze by opposing image and sound, as the
music, “Unexpected Violence” (Morricone), is borrowed from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, Dario Argento, 1970), a movie in which the stalker is a woman [65:33-66:31].
22Other filmmakers have basically followed Tarantino’s lead, especially in the horror genre. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Planet Terror, the first part of Grindhouse,
is a zombie movie in the Romero tradition: the ensuing chaos reveals
how dysfunctional existing institutions (the army, science, the family)
are and ultimately promises a brave new world with Cherry Darling at its
center; the limitation, however, is that the matriarch’s power stems
from the phallic machine gun the hero (Wray) has endowed her with. Eli
Roth’s recent Knock, Knock (2015) falls into similar trappings,
as this inverted rape-revenge fantasy—Keanu Reeves gets raped by two
beautiful young women—seems to prove the sexist point that all men are
essentially the same (at least so far, as one of his tormentors says).
In other words, roles are reversed, but underlying structures are
maintained. Roth’s earlier films, Hostel I and II (2005, 2007),
pursue the critique of capitalism of 1970s exploitation horror while
retaining one of its main ambiguities, since “the film can be read as
the critique of its main selling point” (Ortoli, 437, my translation). Hostel II
is, in my opinion, more intelligent than the first installment, not so
much because it counters the sexism of the first by focusing on female
characters, but because the Final Girl survives by inverting the
villain/victim binary through capital: the film’s ultimate statement on
the state of global capitalism is that the only reason she survives is
that she can lay out more money than her oppressor; in other words,
capital, not the torture devices, is the real weapon of choice. Thus, Hostel I and II, Pierre Jailloux
argues in his article for this issue entitled “Quentin Tarantino : du
cinéma d’exploitation au cinéma,” dramatize how actual bodies and their
virtual images have become indistinguishable in a hyperreal globalized
world where reality has dissolved into images. The films, I would
contend, not only represent unlikely examples of Gilles Deleuze’s
“crystal-image,” i.e., an image for which it is impossible to tell the
actual image and its virtual image apart (Deleuze, 93-94), but they suggest that our “reality” has become a “crystal-image.”
23The
films of Rob Zombie also pursue the critique of the family and
capitalism of independent horror of the 1970s, but also seek to
rehabilitate the figure of the redneck by emphasizing their status as
social victims in American society and by eliminating racial oppositions
between black and white—through the friendship between Captain
Spaulding and Charlie Altamont in The Devil’s Rejects (2005).
In this respect, Zombie pursues the exploration of social class effected
in the films of Romero. His remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween
(1978) is particularly illuminating as a critique of the politics of
the original film, endowing the character of Michael Myers with a
pathology and celebrating the assertive sexuality of all the female
characters (Roche, 2014, 112-13). Zombie’s animation feature, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto (2009), as Pierre Floquet demonstrates in this issue in “The Haunted World of El Superbeasto:
An Animated Exploitation of Exploitation Cinema,” is perhaps less
coherent both in terms of politics and aesthetics. On the one hand,
Zombie mixes genres like Tarantino in Death Proof (in this
case, the wrestling movie, the zombie movie, nazisploitation, the biker
movie) and depicts a female superheroine (Suzi X) like Cherry Darling in
Planet Terror, but on the other, Zombie shamelessly fetishizes
Suzi X who ultimately serves to reinstate order. In the end, Zombie
fails to tap into the animation medium’s potential for flexible bodies
to subvert essentialist conceptions of the body. Rodriguez, Roth and
Zombie have in common that they are somewhat aware of the ambiguities of
the exploitative material they themselves exploit, but they do not
always succeed in consistently resolving these ambiguities, perhaps
because they remain fascinated with the spectacle itself, or perhaps
because these ambiguities remain as unresolvable as the paradox of
creating a consumer product that criticizes consumer society.
24In
any case, each article in this issue attempts to pinpoint and address
those very ambiguities and how they can be “used.” As I have attempted
to show in this introduction, these ambiguities can be viewed as
limitations imposed by the imperatives of exploitation cinema, but they
also have the potential to be appropriated by filmmakers and audiences
who, by recycling transgressive images, sounds and, more generally,
exploitation conventions, can make them resignify through irony, parody,
a camp sensitivity, sometimes all three, and can, in the process,
invent an aesthetic, personal or group identity founded on the practice
of recreation. It is this practice that can, in effect, be subversive
and contribute to changing the normative discourses and practices.
Exploiting exploitation cinema is not just about making money, learning
one’s craft or launching one’s career. It is a recognition that the
potentials within the constraints are endless because the industry and
form are founded on the very process of recycling. This, no doubt,
explains why the ambiguities of exploitation cinema remain even when
filmmakers and audiences strive to work through them. It also entails
that exploitation cinema, as Tarantino’s films suggest, is, by its very
excesses, the quintessence of cinema: both an industry and a medium
founded on recycling forms and images with variation.
Bibliographie
Des DOI (Digital Object Identifier) sont
automatiquement ajoutés aux références par Bilbo, l'outil d'annotation
bibliographique d'OpenEdition.
Les utilisateurs des institutions abonnées à l'un des programmes freemium d'OpenEdition peuvent télécharger les références bibliographiques pour lesquelles Bilbo a trouvé un DOI.
Les utilisateurs des institutions abonnées à l'un des programmes freemium d'OpenEdition peuvent télécharger les références bibliographiques pour lesquelles Bilbo a trouvé un DOI.
ALTMAN, Rick, Film/Genre, London, BFI, 1999.
BECKER, Matt, “A Point of Little Hope: Hippie Horror Films and the Politics of Ambivalence,” The Velvet Light Trap, vol. 57, Spring 2006, 42-59.
DOI : 10.1353/vlt.2006.0011
DOI : 10.1353/vlt.2006.0011
The Big Doll House. Dir. Jack Hill.
Written by Don Spencer. With Judith Brown (Collier), Roberta Colins
(Alcott), Pam Grier (Grear), Kathryn Loder (Lucian), Christiane
Schmidtmer (Miss Dietrich) and Pat Woodell (Bodine), New World Pictures,
1971, DVD, Bach Films, 2011.
BOURGET, Jean-Loup, Hollywood, la norme et la marge, Paris, Armand Colin, 2005 [1998].
CARVER, Stephen, “‘He wants to be just like
Vincent Price’: Influence and Intertext in the Gothic Films of Tim
Burton,” in WEINSTOCK, Jeffrey Andrew, ed., The Works of Tim Burton: Margins to Mainstream, New York and Basingstoke, UK, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 117-32.
Coffy, Written and directed by Jack
Hill, with Pam Grier (Coffy), Allan Arbus (Arturo Vitroni), Booker
Bradshaw (Howard Brunswick) and Robert DoQui (King George), American
International Pictures, 1973, DVD, MGM / United Artists, 2004.
COOK, Pam, “The Pleasures and Perils of Exploitation Films,” in Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema, London and New York, Routledge, 2005, 52-64.
Corpse Bride, dir. Tim
Burton, written by John August, Caroline Thompson, and Pamela Pettler,
with Johnny Depp (Victor Van Dort) and Helena Bonham Carter (Emily),
Warner Bros Pictures, 2005, DVD, Warner Home Video, 2006.
The Crazies, directed by George A
Romero, written by Paul McCollough and George A. Romero, with Lane
Carroll (Judy), Will MacMillan (David) and Harold Wayne Jones (Clank),
Pittsburgh Films, 1973, DVD, Wild Side Video, 2006.
Death Proof, written and directed by
Quentin Tarantino, with Kurt Russell (Stuntman Mike), Vanessa Ferlito
(Arlene), Jordan Ladd (Shanna), Rose McGowan (Pam), Sydney Tamiia
Poitier (Jungle Julia), Zoë Bell (Zoë), Rosario Dawson (Abernathy),
Tracy Thoms (Kim) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Lee), Dimension Films /
Troublemaker Studios / Rodriguez International Pictures / The Weinstein
Company, 2007, DVD, TF1 Vidéo, 2007.
DELEUZE, Gilles, Cinéma 2 : L’Image-temps, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985.
DOHERTY, Thomas, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, Philadelphia, Temple UP, 2002.
DYER, Richard, “Entertainment and Utopia,” in DYER, Richard, ed., Only Entertainment, London, New York, Routledge, 1992, 17-34.
Edward Scissorhands, dir Tim Burton,
written by Caroline Thompson, with Johnny Depp (Edward), Winona Rider
(Kim), Dianne Wiest (Peg), Anthony Michael Hall (Jim), Vincent Price
(The old inventor), 20th Century Fox, 1990, DVD, 20th Century Fox, 2002.
FEASTER, Felicia and Bret WOOD, Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film, Parkville, MD, Midnight Marquee Press, 1999.
Female Trouble, written and directed
by John Waters, with Divine (Dawn Davenport / Earl Peterson), David
Lochary (Donald Dasher) and Mary Vivian Pearce (Donna Dasher),
Dreamland, 1974, DVD, Metropolitan Vidéo, 2006.
Foxy Brown, written and directed by
Jack Hill, with Pam Grier (Foxy Brown), Antonio Fargas (Link Brown),
Peter Brown (Steve Elias) and Karthyn Loder (Katherine Wall), American
International Pictures, 1974, DVD, MGM / United Artists, 2004.
GUNNING, Tom, “Now, You See It, Now You Don’t:
The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions,” in GRIEVESON, Lee et
Peter KRÄMER, eds., The Silent Cinema Reader, London and New York, Routledge, 2004, 41-50.
HAMEAU, Sarah, “The Frankenstein Motif in Tim
Burton’s Film: (Recreation and Metafiction),” Mémoire de M2R, Université
Toulouse Jean Jaurès, 2015.
HIGASHI, Sumiko, “Night of the Living Dead: A
Horror Film about the Horrors of the Vietnam Era,” in DITTMAR, Linda
Dittmar and Gene MICHAUD, eds., From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers UP, 1990, 175-88.
KNIGHT, Ken, The Midnight Grind: A Tribute to “Exploitation” Films of the 70s, 80s, and Beyond, Bloomington, IN, AuthorHouse, 2012.
MEYERS, Richard, For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films, Piscataway, NJ, New Century Publishers, 1983.
MUIR, John Kenneth, Eaten Alive at a Chainsaw Massacre: The Films of Tobe Hooper, Jefferson, NC and London, McFarland, 2002.
MULVEY, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in MULVEY, Laura, Visual Pleasure and Other Pleasures, Bloomington, Indianapolis, Indiana UP, 1989, 14-26.
DOI : 10.1093/screen/16.3.6
DOI : 10.1093/screen/16.3.6
NOVOTNY, Lawrence, “A Cinema of Contradictions:
Gay and Lesbian Representation in 1970s Blaxploitation Films,” in
ELLEDGE, Jim, ed., Queers in American Popular Culture, Volume 2, Santa Barbara, CA, Denver, CO, Oxford, UK, Praeger, 2010, 103-22.
Night of the Living Dead, written and
directed by George A. Romero, with Duane Jones (Ben), Judith O’Dea
(Barbra) and Karl Hardman (Harry), 1968, DVD, AML, 2006.
ORTOLI, Philippe, Le Musée imaginaire de Quentin Tarantino, Paris, Cerf-Corlet, 2012.
QUARLES, Mike, Down and Dirty: Hollywood’s Exploitation Filmmakerrs and Their Movies, Jefferson, NC, and London, McFarland, 1993.
RAYNER, Jonathan, “‘Terror Australis’: Areas of
Horror in the Australian Cinema,” in SCHNEIDER, Steven Jay Schneider
and Tony WILLIAMS, eds, Horror International, Detroit, MI, Wayne State UP, 2005, 98-113.
ROBB, Brian J., Screams & Nightmares: The Films of Wes Craven, Woodstock, NY, Overlook Press, 1998.
ROCHE, David, “David Cronenberg : une mission utopique,” in DUPERRAY, Max, Gilles MENEGALDO and Dominique Sipière, eds., Éclats du noir : gothique, fantastique et détection dans le livre et le film, Aix-en-Provence, Publications de Provence, 2006, 163-84.
---, “Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (2007): Subverting Gender through Genre or Vice Versa?” in DEL MAR AZCONA, María and Celestino DELEYTO, eds., in Generic Attractions: New Essays on Film Genre, Paris, Michel Houdiard, 2010, 337-53.
---. Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don’t They Do It Like They Used To?, Jackson, MS, UP of Mississippi, 2014.
SAPER, Craig, “Artificial Auteurism and the
Political Economy of the Allen Smithee Case,” in BRADDOCK, Jeremey and
Stephen HOCK, eds., Directed by Allen Smithee, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press, 2001, 29-49.
SCHAEFER, Eric, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!” A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959, Durham, NC, Duke UP, 1999.
She-Devils on Wheels, dir. Herschell
Gordon Lewis, written by Allison Louise Downe, with Betty Connell
(Queen), Nancy Lee Noble (Honey Pot), Christie Wagner (Karen) and Rodney
Bedell (Ted), Mayflower Pictures, 1968, DVD, Image Entertainment, 2000.
The Student Nurses, dir. Stephanie
Rothman, written by Don Spencer, based on a story by Stephanie Rothman
and Charles S. Swartz. With Elain Giftos (Sharon), Karen Carlson
(Phred), Brioni Farrell (Lynn) and Barbara Leigh (Priscilla), New World
Pictures, 1970, DVD, New Concorde, 2003.
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,
written and directed by Melvin Van Peebles, with Melvyn Van Peebles
(Sweetback), Simon Chuckster (Beetle), Hubert Scales (Mu-Mu) and John
Dullaghan (Commissioner), Yeah, 1971, DVD, Arte Editions, 2003.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, dir.
Tobe Hooper, screenwriters: Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper. With Marilyn
Burns (Sally Hardesty), Allen Danziger (Jerry), Gunnar Hansen
(Leatherface), Teri McMinn (Pam), Edwin Neal (Hitchhiker), Paul A.
Partain (Franklin Hardesty), Jim Siedow (Old Man or Cook) and William
Vail (Kirk), Vortex, 1974, DVD, Universal Pictures, 2003.
THOMPSON, Kristin and David BORDWELL, Film History: An Introduction, 3rd Edition, New York, McGraw Hill International Edition, 2010 [1994].
THORET, Jean-Baptiste, Une Expérience américaine du chaos : Massacre à la tronçonneuse de Tobe Hooper, Paris, Dreamland, 1999.
VEREVIS, Constantine, Film Remakes, Edinburgh, Edinburgh UP, 2006.
DOI : 10.1007/978-1-137-08168-1
DOI : 10.1007/978-1-137-08168-1
WALLER, Gregory A., ed, American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, Urbana and Chicago, U of Illinois P, 1987.
WILLIAMS, Tony, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film, Jackson, MS, UP of Mississippi, 2014 [1996].
---, Knight of the Living Dead: The Cinema of George A. Romero, London and New York, Wallflower Press, 2015 [2003].
WOOD, Robin. Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond, Expanded and revised edition, New York, Columbia UP, 2003 [1986].
WORLAND, Rick, The Horror Film: An Introduction, Malden, MA, and Oxford, UK, Blackwell, 2007.
Notes
1
For instance, one fan’s blog speaks of “[t]he exploitation genre” (See
<http://popcornhorror.com/exploitation-film> accessed on
2/25/2016). Another describes exploitation film as “[t]his film genre”
(See
<http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/10-noteworthy-exploitation-films.htm>
accessed on 2/25/2016). The wikipedia page speaks of “this genre” (see
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_film> accessed on
2/25/2016).
2
The semantic refers to “linguistic meaning, i.e., the meaning in the
dictionary, the syntactic to “textual meaning,” i.e., meaning derived
from the structure. Semantic elements might be common topics, shared
plots, key scenes, character types, familiar objects or recognizable
shots and sounds,” while syntactic analysis focuses on “deeper
structures,” such as “plot structure, character relationships or image
and sound montage” (Altman, 79). Pragmatic analysis addresses the “use
factor” and “must constantly attend to the competition among multiple
users that characterizes genres” (Altman, 210).
3 In Roy Frumkes’s documentary Document of the Dead (1985), producer Richard P. Rubinsten explains that he and Romero functioned in a European fashion and followed auteur theory.
4 Baadasssss Cinema. Dir. Isaac Julien. Independent Film Channel, 2002.
5 Thompson and Bordwell include companies like AIP and NWP and directors like Meyer and Romero in independent cinema (491).
6 Wes Craven was directly involved in the New York avant-garde (Becker, 44).
7
Van Peebles has always denied the influence although he lived in France
in the 1960.
<http://www.culturopoing.com/cinema/entretien-avec-melvin-van-peebles/20090212>
Accessed on February 16, 2016.
8
Critics like Sumiko Higashi (1990) and Tony Williams feel that the
“grainy black-and-white still images” at the end of the film recall
photos of World War II concentration camps or Vietnam [89:17-95:38]
(Williams, 2015, 30).
9 This is equally true of the Australian film The Cars That Ate Paris
(Peter Weir, 1974), which delivers a “comic but unflinching critique of
capitalism and consumerism as cannibalism and murder” (Rayner, 102).
Its opening credits, like those of Shivers, resemble a commercial.
10 Apparently, it was also Downe who “got real women bikers as actresses” (Quarles, 37).
11 These are nonetheless based on homophobic stereotypes. In Blacula
(AIP, William Crain, 1972), for instance, the gay couple, Billy and
Bobby, are coded gay, notably because they talk with a lisp and are
incapable of defending themselves, and their death eliminates “a threat
to heteronormative masculine identity” (Novotny, 112-13).
12 See Richard Dyer (1992).
Haut de pageTable des illustrations
 |
|
|---|---|
| Titre | Fig. 1 |
| Légende | Advertisement for The Band Wagon |
| Crédits | © Variety (July 1953) |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/7846/img-1.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 156k |
 |
|
| Titre | Fig. 2 |
| Légende | Advertisement from press book for The Desperate Women (1954) |
| Crédits | Public domain |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/7846/img-2.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 204k |
 |
|
| Titre | Fig. 3 |
| Légende | Poster of Glen or Glenda (1953) |
| Crédits | Public domain |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/7846/img-3.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 152k |
 |
|
| Titre | Fig. 4 |
| Légende | Advertisement for I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) |
| Crédits | Public domain |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/7846/img-4.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 132k |
 |
|
| Titre | Fig. 5 |
| Légende | DVD cover Dementia 13 (1963) |
| Crédits | © Ovation Home Video |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/7846/img-5.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 136k |
 |
|
| Titre | Fig. 6 |
| Légende | Screen grab from Night of the Living Dead (1968) |
| Crédits | Public domain |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/docannexe/image/7846/img-6.png |
| Fichier | image/png, 319k |
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
David Roche, « Exploiting Exploitation Cinema: an Introduction », Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2015, mis en ligne le 14 juillet 2016, consulté le 28 mai 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7846Haut de page
Auteur
David Roche
Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, CAS
Articles du même auteur
-
Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron and Arild Fetveit, eds., Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty [Texte intégral]Paru dans Transatlantica, 2 | 2017
-
Gilles Menegaldo et Lauric Guillaud, dirs, Le Western et les mythes de l’Ouest : Littérature et arts de l’image [Texte intégral]Paru dans Transatlantica, 2 | 2016
-
Paru dans Transatlantica, 1 | 2016
-
Traduit de l’américain par Stan Cuesta, Paris, Rivages Rouge, 2014 [2013]Paru dans Transatlantica, 1 | 2015
-
Philippe Ortoli. Le Musée imaginaire de Quentin Tarantino [Texte intégral]Paru dans Transatlantica, 1 | 2014
-
Pertuis, Rouge Profond, 2013Paru dans Transatlantica, 1 | 2013https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7846
Коментарі
Дописати коментар