B for BAD Cinema - Abstracts
Jason Bainbridge (Swinburne University)
When Big Budgets Go Bad: Fraternizing with Flash Gordon and Going down The Black Hole or Why don’t more people write papers on Inseminoid (1981) anyway?
The big-budget studio movie is designed to be a blockbuster, a film that enjoys widespread popularity and makes substantial money at the box office. In this sense, the blockbuster appears to be a purely commercial film genre, one that can be measured solely by economics (increasingly, the opening weekend gross). But what happens when a big-budget movie goes bad? When those films clearly designed to be blockbusters actually “fail” to connect with audiences? In this paper I want to explore the concept of badfilm through two “lapsed” blockbusters, Disney’s The Black Hole (1979) and Universal’s Flash Gordon (1980), two films clearly designed to both be blockbusters in the same mould as Star Wars (1977) - in that they share the same genre (science-fiction) and similarly draw on B-Movie source material – but which were both perceived as underperforming on their initial releases. Through comparative analysis with a third film, the British low-budget Alien-clone and cult movie Inseminoid (1981), I want to explore the cultural value that attaches to the bad blockbuster - how audiences judge them to be “bad”, how they struggle (and often fail) to make the generic transition from underperforming blockbuster to cult film, how audiences renegotiate their relationship with such movies and how appreciation of badfilm, like these, might assist us in better understanding the blockbuster as a genre.
Dr Jason Bainbridge is Senior Lecturer in Media, Journalism and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology. He has published widely on media representation, chequebook journalism, the function of newsreading and the postmodernity of comic-books and is the co-author of Media and Journalism: New Approaches to Theory and Practice (OUP, 2008).
David Baker (Griffith University)
Sam Katzman produces Elvis Presley. Some lessons from the exploitation cinema.
Legendary exploitation film producer Sam Katzman produced two Elvis Presley vehicles: Kissin’ Cousins (1964) and Harum Scarum (1965), often regarded as the two worst Elvis movies made. Katzman was an obvious choice of producer of Elvis movies because of his experience in an exploitation approach to cinema production and distribution: ie keeping budgets down, producing films very fast and on time, and almost always making small but tidy profits.
Katzman’s exploitation approach often involved taking up issues that were flavour of the month and writing, producing distributing and exhibiting films in an extremely short time-frame (3 to 4 months between original conception and screening). Rock Around the Clock (1956) is exemplary here – Katzman made the film very quickly in order to cash in on the rock n roll craze of 1956, believing it was a fad and would die within a year. Indeed Katzman produced Calypso Heat Wave in 1957 believing the rock n roll craze was over and was about to be replaced by Calypso.
What makes Katzman’s two Elvis films interesting is that the heavily mythologised figure of Elvis Presley himself becomes the topic. In this paper I will consider the way Kissin’ Cousins explores and “resolves” aspects of the split and contradictory image of Elvis himself – Elvis as “cracker/hillbilly” on the one hand and Elvis as dutiful patriotic member of the military establishment on the other. Harem Scarum, by contrast, considers the figure of Elvis as an internationally famous American entertainer working primarily for the State department.
David Baker is a lecturer in the School of Arts at Griffith University. His current research interest is the relationship between popular music and film, focussing particularly on the 1950s and 60s. He has recently published on issues such as the figure of the rebel in 1950s cinema, 1960s cinema verite representations of rock n roll, and 1950s juke-box musicals.
Phil Betts (Macquarie University)
The Gentrification of Bad Cinema
Zombies? Check. Gore? Check. Murderous rampages? Check. Oscar nominated filmmaker…? Permission to shut down London streets…?
With US$8 million dollar funding from the British Film Council, Danny Boyle’s 2003 film 28 Days Later is a zombie thriller with prestige. It’s fitting then that its US distribution was handled by Fox Searchlight Pictures, the ‘prestige’, ‘specialty’, or ‘independent’ film division of Fox Film Corporation. Historically, bad cinema has fallen under auspices of ‘independent cinema’. Through the sixties and seventies, the schlock horror films of Corman and Romero sat alongside the New Hollywood auteurism of Scorsese and Coppola, loosely bound through the label independent. The rise through the nineties of the specialty subdivisions like Fox Searchlight Sony Pictures Classics and Miramax saw these studios market a wide range of films that fell under the independent umbrella.
However, teen slasher flicks target significantly different demographics than gritty emotional dramas, so these specialty subdivisions in turn created separate divisions to handle genre films, maintaining the integrity of the prestige studio. Thus while Miramax was releasing Oscar contenders like Shakespeare in Love, its sister studio Dimension released The Faculty. Sony Pictures Classics released Capote following Screen Gem’s Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Fox followed up their acclaimed zombie thriller with a more commercial 28 Weeks Later, distributed through their newly established wing, Fox Atomic. In ‘The Gentrification of Bad Cinema’, I examine how the conglomerates approach independent cinema through their specialty studio labels, and in doing so, pull bad cinema out of paracinema and into the mainstream.
Phil Betts is writing his PhD in Media and Communications at Macquarie University, Sydney. His thesis, Independent Like a Fox: Fox Searchlight and Hollywood’s Independents examines the industrial positioning of the specialty studios against their Hollywood counterparts, and how they negotiate with traditional discourses on independent cinema.
Lisa Bode (University of Queensland)
Tainted love: “creepy adult women” and the reception of Twilight
This paper examines Twilight (2008), Catherine Hardwicke’s film adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s juvenile vampire romance novel, focusing particularly on fault-lines in the film’s reception between its younger intended audience and its “inappropriate” older female fans. As Ernest Mathijs points out, “reception is rarely unitary. More often it consists of many competing and opposite discourses competing for dominance.” (2005: 451) Twilight is no exception, having split opinion on its aesthetic and cultural worth. On the one hand it has been derided for its laughable wirework, character makeup, dialogue and dubious gender politics, and on the other celebrated as distilling the raw, heightened feelings of first love. The different formations of value (O’Regan, 1996: 111) used to disparage or legitimate the film are of interest here, but so too is the discursive conflict over who should be allowed pleasure from teen romance films like Twilight, and on what terms. The pleasures of adult women in the books, the film and (perhaps most pertinently) its young male stars, have been met with hostility and revulsion from members of the film’s teen audience as well as bemusement and derision in the wider online world. In response, an unrepentant group of older female fans calling themselves the “Twi-Moms” have self-consciously constructed a separate online communal identity with a website and merchandise range. Along with a study of the defiant “badness” of the Twi-Mom identity, this paper will look at the film itself, some of its promotional facets, and, drawing on work by Pierre Bourdieu and Matt Hills, examine the fractures in its online fan communities in order to understand something of the relevance of age and gender to the policing of taste and pleasure.
Lisa Bode is Associate Lecturer in Film and Television Studies in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland. She has written articles on the comedy of Chris Lilley, its promotion and reception, the cultural reception of digital actors, and discourses around screen performance and CGI.
Jan Bryant (AUT)
Part of the Margins of B panel.
In Takashi Miike’s films there are constant clashes between the seductive nature of beauty and the horror of the abject, often coupled with consciously inserted ‘glitches’ in the filmmaking process. This allows Miike to be suggestive concomitantly of (so called) b-movies and art-house, but without being reduced to the limitations of categorisation.
Dr Jan Bryant is Head of Research at the School of Art and Design, AUT University. She publishes and teaches in contemporary art and film and is currently preparing a text on Claire Denis.
Jodi Brooks (UNSW)
The discipline, the syllabus, and the university: teaching film studies today
Part of the Teaching Bad Objects panel.
“Bad cinema” has generally been understood as something that sits outside a “proper” film studies canon. When deemed an unworthy or improper object of study (too disposable, too shabby, too excessive, too mass-produced, too amateur, too technically deficient, too much), “bad” cinema’s entry into a film studies syllabus is also regarded as something that can—or should—shake up the discipline. Today, however, it seems that it is not so much (or not only) “bad cinema” — at least in some of its most recognized forms of porn, kitsch, cult and trash cinemas—that operates as an unruly or improper object in the academy but rather film studies itself. For over a decade now, film studies has been regarded as facing an uncertain future. Film studies has increasingly been understood as a discipline that is losing its objects as celluloid and the theatrical viewing experience, often (though certainly problematically) regarded as the discipline’s prime concerns, have been displaced by the digital image and by other viewing contexts and screens. When the “proper” object of film studies is seen as celluloid and theatrical cinema going, film theorists find themselves having to argue for the relevance of their discipline today. Countering assumptions that film studies is the study of cultural “relics” (when film is understood as a disappearing medium), film theorists have argued for the relevance of their discipline both for understanding the history of cinema and for understanding various screen cultures and moving image forms. But while the discipline argues for the value of its concepts for understanding a broad range of moving image forms and practices, course timetabling and modes of course delivery (along with film availability and copyright issues) often impact on the kinds of texts being examined in a course—after all, it is considerably easier to timetable the study of a feature film than it is a long running television series. In this paper I will look at how attempts to argue for the value of the discipline’s concepts and debates can nevertheless find themselves constrained by the ways that we structure and deliver our courses. To what extent is a “bad” teaching object in film studies one that is difficult to timetable, whether this be because it raises the “wrong” affects in the classroom, or because it is too long, short, or simply “disorderly” in its structure. What kinds of innovations in our teaching methods and our forms of “course delivery” might be of value for the future of film studies?
Jodi Brooks is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at The University of New South Wales.
Dean Brandum (RMIT University) and Rolando Caputo (LaTrobe University)
Erotomania: A Sleazy History of the Film Still
Dean Brandum is a PhD candidate at RMIT. Rolando Caputo is with the Cinema Studies Program at La Trobe University and Co-editor of Senses of Cinema.
Allan Cameron (AFTRS)
Zombie Media: Resolution, Reproduction and the Digital Dead
The modern zombie is a media zombie. With insistent frequency, zombie films have drawn attention to the role of news media (and their inability to communicate the threat in time) as well as the materiality of the recording medium itself: from the rough high-contrast 16mm of Night of the Living Dead (1968) to the digital ‘documentary’ footage of Diary of the Dead (2007). The practical immediacy of these recording formats associates the zombie with a sense of the contingent. According to Mary Ann Doane, contingency is inherent in film and video technologies, which allow the irruption of chance and the ephemeral within the frame. Contingency is also, she argues, associated with the nostalgic gaze of cinephilia.
Using an example from Lucio Fulci’s 1979 ‘masterpiece’ Zombi 2 (aka Zombie Flesh Eaters), this paper will trace the movement of the notorious ‘Zombie vs. Shark’ scene across different digital formats, and will argue that it presents an exemplary instance of the contingent in horror cinephilia. The pleasures of this cinephilia are concentrated in the technical and physical embodiment of the undead: from the limitations of low-budget special effects to the choppiness of lo-res video. Here, the disintegration of meaning, the image and the human body suggests both the horror and the joyous possibilities of the contingent.
Allan Cameron is a researcher and lecturer at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and an honorary fellow in screen studies at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). His work has also appeared in The Velvet Light Trap and Jump Cut.
Matthew Campora (University of Queensland)
Incomprehensible Hollywood: Multiform Narrative in Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain
This paper will explore questions raised by the use of complex narratives in contemporary Hollywood cinema using Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain – a challenging and critically-reviled film produced by Warner Brothers in 2006. Foremost among these questions is how to classify films such as The Fountain, which was made by a star-director and financed by one of the most well-established studios in Hollywood, yet, tells its story using a complex narrative that has proven incomprehensible to all but the most resourceful of film critics. The paper will argue that The Fountain’s apparent incomprehensibility results, in part, from its use of a narrative style developed in the art cinema as an explicit rejection of the realist style of Hollywood cinema. The use of such a narrative in a mainstream production such as The Fountain assists in explaining its negative critical reception. However, it also raises the problem of how to classify films such as The Fountain. Is it an art film or a Hollywood film? Is it both? Can it be both, or, are these styles of filmmaking mutually exclusive? The contradictions embodied in The Fountain are echoed in a recent cycle of complex films and this paper will argue that Janet Murray’s notion of multiform narrative can assist, not simply in the classification of such films, but also in their comprehension.
Matthew Campora is finishing a Ph.D. in film studies at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. His research is centered on a cycle of multiform films emerging from the contemporary American independent cinema context.
Megan Carrigy (University of New South Wales)
Couldn’t the Original Movie Do? Gus Van Sant’s Obsolete New Remake
In the late 1990s, Gus Van Sant decided to re-do Hitchcock’s Psycho. His highly atypical remake attempted Psycho again, shot-for-shot, even repeating the continuity mistakes Van Sant and his team had spotted in the original. Upon the release of the film, this approach induced much banal nitpicking from critics who used the remake to demonstrate their mastery of the original, swiftly declaring the remake a seriously poor imitation. Vant Sant’s Psycho was a dud. Not only was it panned by critics, it was also a box office flop. It did not produce the new generation of fans for _Psycho _that Van Sant had hoped for.
Van Sant achieved quite a feat in producing a new film, up-to-date with contemporary mores and using all the most up-to-date digital techniques, that was at the same time already obsolete, already superseded. The attempt itself was seen as foolhardy, a remake that set itself up for failure. Why did he do it? As Constantine Santas puts it in an article published Senses of Cinema, couldn’t the original movie do? This paper considers how Van Sant’s redundant remake responds to this question in a manner that contributes significantly to current debates in film theory about the future of cinema and its digital remediation.
Megan Carrigy is a PhD Candidate in the School of English, Media and the Performing Arts at the University of NSW. Her research investigates the uneven and unsightly history of reenactment in the cinema.
Nina Cartier (Northwestern University)
Beyond Baaad Bitches: Blaxploitation, Women, and the Ethnographic Trace
Blaxploitation films have a tumultuous history, as they have been alternately derided as glorifications of hypersexuality and criminality, and hailed as unique cultural artifacts depicting a facet of black masculinity and subjectivity counter to contemporary representations in American film. Yet, until recently, with the publications of books such as Dunn’s “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films or Sims ’Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture, academia’s assessment of the women’s roles in these films was reduced to “shaking their behinds,” as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. so intensely asserted.
While acknowledging these current studies’ aims to interrogate and critically reposition the women blaxploitation films, and the recuperative project that others can subsequently extrapolate, this paper charts a different course. Stemming from an entirely different set of questions and concerns, I consider whether or not blaxploitation films offer useful insights into black culture circa 1970s America, particularly black urban woman culture, by virtue of being “ethnographic documents” of their time. As I grapple with the debates surrounding the films’ production contexts, as well as with the epistemological complexities concomitant in considering what constitutes the limits of ethnography, I hope to elucidate what I call the “ethnographic trace,” or residues of “authentic” black life that erupt from and reside within blaxploitation films despite their construction as fictions. Ultimately, I aim to theorize new ways of critically engaging blaxploitation films, wholly resisting the dialectical polemics of re-valuing or re-trashing the entire genre.
Nina Cartier is a Doctoral Student at Northwestern University. She studies the representations of black women in film, particularly in blaxploitation, early cinema, and race films. Her most recent research projects include “Reel Niggas?: Examining White Constructions of Urban Blackness in Blaxploitation Films,” “Somethin’ Just Ain’t Right: ‘Quaring’ the Race Films of Spencer Williams,” and “Do the Robot?: Black Modernity, the Spectacle of Dancing, and Early Cinema.”She is also a professional photographer who enjoys shooting musicians and nudes. Her work is currently featured on newcomer Liz Toussaint’s cd, Country Soul.
Alan Cholodenko (University of Sydney)
‘B for BAuDrillard (Hyper)cinema’
This paper proposes that the conference statement’s descriptors of paracinema are forms of that cinema that Jean Baudrillard described as hyperreal cinema, cinema of the order of hyperreality.
The statement gives as the logic of paracinema ‘good-because-bad or bad-because-good’. But I propose that that logic of simple reversal is not adequate to paracinema. Rather, the logic of paracinema as hypercinema is: at once bad more and less good than good and at the same time good more and less bad than bad. This logic means that good is everywhere except in the good and bad is everywhere except in the bad, what would be the pure and empty, hyperreal, virtual forms of good and bad. In such a light, badfilm is not simply badfilm. Rather, I would nominate it hyperbad film. Hyperbad film lies beyond ‘cultural value’, for it lies beyond both culture and value, as it does aesthetics (hence aesthetic(s) (as) value), art (hence bad art), morals and politics.
Its order is third order reality as Baudrillard has articulated it, order of the extreme, the hypertelic, the mass, the hypermedia, the global, transpolitics, transaesthetics, the obese, the obscene, the transdevaluation of all values, the viral, the fractal, the clone, the quantum, which is why the term B-movie applies to every movie. My paper would elaborate the fatal implications of hyperreal cinema, hyperbad cinema, as form of what I call hyperanimation, for the markers of second order cinema that the conference statement foregrounds, including especially for film theory and criticism.
Alan Cholodenko is former Senior Lecturer in Film and Animation Studies in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the University of Sydney, where he is now Honorary Associate. He has lectured and published widely on film theory and animation theory as they intersect with French ‘poststructuralist’ and ‘postmodernist’ theory. He edited Jean Baudrillard’s The Evil Demon of Images (1987), Samuel Weber’s Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (1996), and the anthologies The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (1991) — the world’s first book of scholarly essays theorising animation—and The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation (2007).
John Chrisstoffels (Canterbury University, New Zealand)
“Never mind the Bolex!”: Making low budget Music Videos in New Zealand in the early 1980s.
I will talk about my experience learning how to shoot band videos with absolutely no training and the smallest of budgets ($50.00 to $100.00). An insight into the opportunities and obstacles at that time sheds light onto an important transitional period in NZ film & television history (“state owned” to “independent”).
The direction of the contemporary Music Industry at that time was led by small Christchurch label, “Flying Nun” records. Making short run pressings, the label and the bands created a cottage industry ethic beloved around the world. Most of these bands recorded their music onto portable 4 channel reel-to-reel recorders on a budget of $30.00 (the price of the reel). The pressing plant in Wellington charged roughly $300.00 for a pressing of 300 records and the hand screen-printed covers might have cost another $50.00 for cardboard and ink. The idea that you might then spend $400.00 on making a band video was unconscionable (you could make another record for that!). With “bad” exposures, unsyncable vocals, unintentional jump-cuts, flash frames and awkward compositions, some of the best NZ music has been captured perfectly.
John Chrisstoffels has been making films for well over 20 years, working freelance as a director and cinematographer with a number of critically acclaimed short films, documentaries, advertisements and music videos. In 2002 he started teaching film-making at the School of Fine Arts at Canterbury.
Ted Colless (University of Melbourne)
Bad Infinity
Rebecca, the eponymous dead wife in Daphne du Maurier’s novel, never appears but only re-appears. In one sense she is the trace on the mystic writing pad of Freud’s famous analogy: erased from the scene of writing, from the surface stratum of the new wife’s narration, from the present; and in the way the dead influence the living through the obligations of debt and duty passed on, the way the living must listen to the dead as living memories, Rebecca’s marks—the marks of her name (like graffiti, like carving into a school desk, figuratively “Rebecca was here”) that are left in the substrata of the present interfere with and direct the writing of the manifest family romance […]
To fail at the cure, to be addicted to the remedy, is the catastrophic unending of possession, hearing voices that don’t obey the rules of good identity: by this we might invoke the “bad” recurrence of the living dead who don’t stay within their memorials, or the “bad” persistence of an importunate property beyond its body, indecently lingering like the Cheshire cat’s smile. The exquisite irresolution of the unanchored “I” that speaks without resembling itself is an excruciating beauty—the aesthetic effrontery of the hallucination of self that haunts, terrifies, irritates, offends, entices, satisfies but never fulfils; this painful pleasure that renders affection and hostility indistinct (not complementary, not one hiding within the other, and not even alike by degree, but expressly indistinguishable). Du Maurier’s novel, for all its haunted atmosphere, doesn’t capture the extent of this ruthless beauty; turn instead to a work itself so unsettled that it is treated critically with as much contempt as adoration: Dario Argento’s bizarrely metafictional movie Opera, in which a giallo-horror movie auteur, Marco (evidently Argento’s alter-ego), is producing an avant-garde Gothicized version of Verdi’s MacBeth, notorious in theatrical tradition for its “curse”, at La Scala in Milan; a production that unleashes—behind the scenes—precisely the sort of psychotic violence and supernatural, daemonic force characteristic of this opera director’s movies.
The indefinite repetition—the utterance of desire going on and on, as in the laborious accounting by Leporello of Don Juan’s catalogue—whether it blurs by receding into spatial or historical distance, or whether it diminishes exponentially as an echo (these being only mistaken losses of definition, only the translation of the Don’s intensive experience into Leporello’s servitude), is more pertinently the grip of an illogic of infinity in Hegel’s pejorative adjectival sense as unendlich: a Bad Infinity (schlecht Unendlichkeit) of unending labour; an unintelligible rather than misperceived labour—like Camus’s Sisyphean labour—because its infinite condition, in terms analytic and tautological, can bring about no end, thus no intention transcending (hence, governing) the work. Is the chorus of the libido a bad infinity? Is the bad infinity the dimension of possession, of the legion of demons?
Ted Colless is Head of Critical and Theoretical Studies in The Victorian College of the Arts’ School of Art.
John Conomos (University of Sydney)
Mr Kong, Bad Cinema and the Surrealists
In my paper I wish to focus on Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s classic monster fantasy film King Kong (1933) in the context of its profound impact on the French Surrealists as a seminal work exemplifying their ideas on what represents bad cinema in terms of popular American genre cinema , mass culture and modernism. The Surrealists were great poetic ‘archeologists’ in seeking out the potential aesthetic, cultural and erotic power of the cinema in everyday life. As a cinematic legend “King Kong” is pertinent to the American dream, corporate capitalism , the B movie, and exploitation/trash culture, but its significance as a seminal repetition text in American (and global) culture can’t be overestimated.
What I wish to specifically do is to show how this film’s representation of classical modernity as symbolised by the key iconic value of the Empire State Building as an early 1930s image of modernity, but just as significantly, its jerky animation “fakery” is also a key marker of bad cinema. What exactly do we mean by the expression “bad cinema” , what did it meant for the Surrealists, and what is “King Kong”s legacy in relation to the B movie, camp culture and “the damned film” (Jean Cocteau).
What did the film as a fever dream of primal passion, fear and sexual anxiety represent to someone like Jean Ferry , the Surrealist, Ray Bradbury, the fantasy/sci-fi author, and Maurice Sendrak, who as a Brooklyn-born kid in the 1930s and his contemporaries, regarded, thanks to Mr Kong, the Empire State building as the centre of Skull Island ? These are some of the issues I will like to discuss in the light of of my own ‘bi-cultural’ cinephilia as a Greek-Australian child in the 1950s and 1960s.
John Conomos is a media artist, critic, and theorist who extensively exhibits both locally and internationally. His art practice cuts across a variety of art forms - video, new media, installation, performance and radiophonic art - and deals with autobiography, identity, memory, post-colonialism, and the “in- between” links between cinema, literature, and the visual arts.
Elliot Cooper (University of Canberra)
“I like Hotdogs!” M. Night Shyamalan’s sublime dialogic senility in The Happening.
After a largely unnoticed start with Wide Awake, M. Night Shyamalan exploded onto the scene with his critically acclaimed film The Sixth Sense. _His third film, _Unbreakable was also well received. Since then things have gone down hill for the director. The Village _and _Lady in the Water, while they were marketed well, were largely rejected by audiences who had wised up to Shyamalan’s now tired twist gimmick. The most recent effort by this director is something that is called The Happening. Here Shyamalan is confirmed as a writer and director of bad cinema. He achieves this through a growing inability to write dialogue that is pithy, interesting or, even, at times, relevant. The effect of this is to create a film poetics of sublime nonsense. I cannot think of a film from 2008 that I have enjoyed more than this. My paper will discuss Shyamalan’s dialog as both a symptom and a representation of senility and apply the Kantian notion of the sublime in a reading of his film, The Happening.
Elliot Cooper has been teaching at the University of Canberra since 2006. He is currently undertaking his PhD in Communications on the semiotics of Jacques Lacan. He has published creative prose, poetry and academic articles on semiotics and photography. He also writes for twenty600 magazine.
Allison Craven (James Cook University)
Decorously Dubbed: Period, Region and Voice in_ The Irishman_
The Irishman (1978, directed by Donald Crombie) was among the crop of Australian period films produced in the late 1970s, the so-called ‘AFC sub-genre’ that formed the second stage of the New Wave of Australian cinema. While visually impressive, the period dramas were criticised for inconclusive endings and lack of historical depth, and for presenting an uncritical view of Australian history that, in Graeme Turner’s words, was “too decorous,” given the brutality of some events in the national past. In the case of The Irishman, this seems to have contributed to its status as a B film (not to mention ‘ham’ performances and an overly melodramatic musical score). Furthermore, the AFC sub-genre did not succeed financially, including The Irishman, and this, Susan Dermody and Liz Jacka have argued, led to “gloom” and a sense that Australian cinema was “completely out of touch with audience desires”. Embarrassment is still in evidence today in the director’s commentary released on the DVD, where it is also revealed that The Irishman exhibits the dubbing of an aboriginal actor, a practice not seen in Australian films since Jedda. This paper revisits The Irishman, the cultural status of period (or heritage) films in Australia, and the regional context of production of The Irishman in North Queensland, in considering the markers of aesthetic merit that have been interpreted as overly decorous. The spectacle of DVD packaging with commentary is also discussed as a para-cinematic device that works – through a similar mechanism to dubbing - to influence audience responses to the feature film.
Dr Allison Craven lectures in film, communication and children’s literature at James Cook University, in Townsville. She has published on Disney film, gender and globalization, children’s literature and education, and is currently working on a suite of papers concerning Australian films set in Queensland.
Leonie Cooper (University of Melbourne / Monash University)
The [Astronaut]: The Bad Work of a Contaminated Tool
I don’t like astronauts: the blank-faced bio-engineered figures once considered cyborg actually activate (bad) feelings for me. Yet, it was only by (re)turning to the astronaut that I was able to figure out the ethical aims and moral intentions that had implicitly framed the research project that was my PhD thesis. I had hoped that the figure through which I would think through a period characterized by transitions and convergences between film, screens and worlds would incite the love, and even passion, that has fuelled my (good) feelings for the cinema. Instead, I was burdened with dislike, boredom, and even a strange sense of loss. This paper offers a critical reflection on the process of selecting and heuristic tools that activate, in turn, a form of critical ambivalence. Donna Haraway has spoken of the figures she has excavated from the terrain of technoscience as “knots” that are not meant to be unwoven but inhabited. What happens then when you “inhabit” a (bad) object, employ a tool already contaminated with political, ideology, psychological and symbolic pollutants, conjugate a figure that cannot be returned to a state of “goodness” for that then would only perpetuate its rights for fulfillment?. Focusing upon instances of an astronaut’s death on the screen in films such as Mission to Mars (Brian de Palma 2000) and Space Cowboys (Clint Eastwood, 2000), this paper considers whether the inhabitation of the “hollow thing” that is the astronaut can critically speak to the shifting relations between self, screen and world and how such relations might be ethically imagined.
Slayers, cylons and the other strange life forms that emerge from the borders between screens: these are the things that fascinate (and sometimes trouble) Leonie Cooper. In pursuit of these figures, she has undertaken teaching and research in the Screen Studies program, University of Melbourne; and the Department of Theory of Art and Design and Film and Television, Monash University with a focus upon developing productive relations between screen theories and practices.
James Curnow (Monash University)
Something Weird: How Herschell Gordon Lewis Made Crap and Influenced People
It is no coincidence that Herschell Gordon Lewis, the godfather of gore, later went on to become a self-described major force in the world of advertising and marketing. Film titles like Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs and Blast-Off Girls!, all of which thoroughly exceed the standards of their respective films, possess the same obnoxious insistence on attention that would later define his marketing philosophy of Force-Communication. On top of this, the posters produced for the majority of these films frequently seem to have been a greater target of creative energy than the films themselves. This is not to say that his films are not equally as aggressive. They may provide an unremitting barrage of the banal, but it ironically serves to further emphasize the brief moments of sex and carnage littered throughout. When a film is as tedious as Blood Feast, the only moments left in memory a month later tend to involve amputation and total lobotomy. Later marketing book titles like Open Me Now, Marketing Mayhem and Catalog Copy That Sizzles suffice to demonstrate the articulation of this insistence on insistence into a set of intellectualized marketing principles. The purpose of this paper is a retrospective examination of Lewis’ work contextualized by these later principles – outlined and espoused in countless articles and more than twenty books – and the way in which they have had lead him to an unparalleled influence on film culture.
James Curnow is currently in his the second year of his Masters of Arts at Monash University. His thesis, currently entitled Imagining the Next Disaster, is focused on the science fiction disaster film and the way in which it seems to obtain popularity under specific social and cultural conditions. James has recently delivered a paper in Chicago at the Film & Science: Fictions, Documentaries & Beyond conference run by the University of Wisconsin, as well as for last year’s Monash seminar series Under Construction series. He has also written book reviews for the online journal, Screening the Past.
Adrian Danks (RMIT University)
Being in Two Places at the Same Time: The Forgotten Geography of Back Projection
Back or rear projection is routinely regarded as an inauthentic and outdated technical device that has garnered very little critical attention. It is often ridiculed as a necessary but inferior or “bad” technique that belongs in the “dustbin” of history. This paper will examine back projection as both a technical and aesthetic device that creates its own peculiar and often bifurcated sense of space (both enclosed and open), form (both documentary and fiction), place (both here and there), time (both now and then) and mobility (both stationary and moving), examining how its often potent inauthenticity creates a challenge to the regimes of cinematic realism and continuity, as well as the tastes associated with them. It will trace the history of back projection from the late 1920s, partly through its expressive and far from “invisible” use in the films of such directors as Alfred Hitchcock (Marnie, for which the director was widely criticised, and Topaz), Fritz Lang (Fury), Max Ophuls (Letter from an Unknown Woman), Howard Hawks (The Big Sleep, Red River), and Ken G. Hall, as well as examine its problematic reappearance as a marker of period, overt homage or self-consciousness in such works as Zentropa, The Good German and Pulp Fiction, and the more recent work of Mark Rappaport. A key focus of this paper will be too examine the kinds of “worlds” and discordant viewing experiences facilitated by this once ubiquitous device, particularly its use of stock and found footage within specific films (such as the outtakes from King Kong glimpsed in the background of one scene from Citizen Kane), and its capacity for “inventing” striking representations of existing places (such as South America and Australia).
Adrian Danks is Senior Lecturer and Head of Cinema Studies and the Media Program in the School of Applied Communication, RMIT University. He is co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque and editor of Senses of Cinema’s Cteq: Annotations on Film. He has published widely in a range of books and journals including: Senses of Cinema, Metro, Screening the Past, Real-Time, Screen Education, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, Traditions in World Cinema, Melbourne in the 60s, 24 Frames: Australia and New Zealand, Cultural Seeds and Twin Peeks: Australian and New Zealand Feature Films. He is currently writing a book on the history and practice of Australian home moviemaking.
Antonio Marcio da Silva (Birkbeck University of London)
Brazilian Women prison films: a gendered reading
Films portraying women in prison predate the boom in soft-core or “sexploitation” filmmaking of the 1960s/1970s. However, it is in the 1960s and 1970s, precisely at the time when feminist movements were beginning to impact on cultural production throughout the world, that a veritable boom in films focussing on imprisoned women takes place. Therefore, this paper will explore the relationship between gender and the increase of sexploitation films in 1970s and early 1980s in Brazil, namely pornochanchada. More specifically it will explore a selection of Women in Prison films (WIP) and discuss the extent to which these films are gendered. With the exception of the recent work of Dennison (forthcoming, 2009), no real attempt has been made to consider Brazilian sexploitation production within an international cinema context. Thus, by carrying out a close reading of a representative selection of WIP films, it aims at contextualising them within a reading of international WIP film production of the same period.
Antonio Marcio da Silva is the Brazilian Lector at Birkbeck University of London. He is a third year PhD candidate in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol and also an MRes candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Leeds (2008-09). His PhD research deals with the representation of the femme fatale in Brazilian cinema and his MRes deals with Brazilian WIP films. His main research interests include the representation of constructions of gender, sexuality and race in Brazilian cinema and literature and national/world cinemas and popular culture in the 1970s.
Therese Davis (Monash University)
Good/Should/Bad Films: Teaching Indigenous Film and Indigenising the Canon
Part of the Teaching Bad Objects panel.
In this paper I want to look at the procedure whereby a film gets constructed as socially “good” thus becoming something “worthy” and how this worthiness then in turn becomes something “bad” for cinema-goers, in the sense that such films are often those that we feel we should see rather than something we want to see. I will show how this procedure routinely occurs in the popular reception of Indigenous film in Australia. But I also want to look at how this procedure carries over into non-Indigenous student pre-conceptions of Indigenous film, making them some of the most difficult films to teach, that is, the films students often think of as a “bad” (i.e. boring or uninteresting) topic. As I’ll argue, there is a number of ways of thinking about this procedure. We could, like Australian writer Louis Nowra, see such disinterest as a historical mode of non-Indigenous indifference to Indigenous people and culture, an insidious form of “casual racism” that is part and parcel of the Australian national character. I certainly don’t discount this theory. But I also think it’s has something to do with the ways in which these films are taught at both secondary and tertiary levels. I want to propose that we consider how a certain non-Indigenous student disinterest in Indigenous films might stem from educational over-exposure, for the fact is many Indigenous films are widely used in secondary level education and across the humanities disciplines (Anthropology but also History, Sociology, Education, English and Law) as a technology for inscribing Indigenous peoples and their cultures into Western forms of knowledge as objects of study. The challenge for Film Studies is thus to not only “include” Indigenous film in the canon but to find ways of de-colonizing the canon and the current critical frameworks for viewing and understanding Indigenous film.
Therese Davis is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Monash University.
Andrew Denton (AUT)
Part of the Margins of B panel.
The films of Carlos Reygadas are distinctly art house, and yet he often applies/presents what is a raw if not pornographic freak show in contrast to mainstream cinema. By totally unpeeling the scab, slowly and surely we are actually allowed in to formulate our own interpretation.
Andrew Denton is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Design at AUT University. He teaches on digital cinema, in theory and practise. His current research is concentrated on motion capture performance, and contemporary Mexican cinema.
Greg Dolgopolov (UNSW)
Bad Attempts at Badness: New Russian Horror Films
While there were plenty of horrible things in the Soviet Union, there was very little exploration of cinematic horror. The patriotic confidence of the Putin era (2000-09) has delivered a stream of populist horror films that have altered expectations of cultural values in attempting to establish a mainstream visceral cinematic experience. The box office triumph of Night Watch (Bekmambetov 2004) with its blood sucking vampires and stunning visual effects paved the way for the mainstreaming of local fantasy-horror genre production. Vedma (Fesenko 2006) was a contemporary CGI heavy remake of Gogol’s classic supernatural thriller, Vyi, that attracted a sizeable audience for its $2.5m budget but bombed with horror aficionados. This was a poor attempt at making a genre film that was scary. S.S.D. (Shmelev 2008) is an attempt at a Russian slasher variation of _Friday the 13th. _It gets the look right but fails to deliver either worthy social commentary or the requisite quota of gore despite the huge body count.
This presentation examines the struggle over cultural values that occurred with the attempts at establishing a genre of horror cinema during the Putin era. The emergence of a new wave of Russian horror and slasher films highlight Russia popular culture’s embrace of the West’s trash aesthetic and debauched cultural values. However Russian horror films fail to be scary undermined by the ambivalence posed by traditional high brow Russian culture and the foibles of translation and misappropriation of imported genres. This paper questions how bad Russian ‘Bad Cinema’ is and the transforming cultural values of the mainstreaming of domesticated B-grade visions.
Greg Dolgopolov is a lecturer in Film at the University of New South Wales, Australia having previously taught at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, Murdoch, Melbourne and Curtin Universities. He completed his PhD on the transformations of post-Soviet television culture at Murdoch University in 2003. He has worked as an actor, director and a ‘spin doctor’. His primary areas of interest are: Australian Cinema, Russian cinema, screen theory video production, short films, mobile devices and documentary. Greg now runs a small production entity called ‘BadDad’ which is focused on hybrid documentary and cinema theory put into practice.
Glenn Donnar (RMIT University)
Why is this happening to us?: Understanding and responding to ‘the threat’ of Godzilla and Cloverfield.
This paper will focus on the significance and consequences of a shift in character focus in recent Hollywood disaster movies, focusing on the ‘bad’ studio monster flicks Godzilla (Roland Emmerich, 1998) and Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008). While Godzilla is representative of 1990s disaster movies, I argue that the shift in focus from professional-heroes (scientists, military personnel, journalists) in Godzilla to (doomed) ‘emergent’-heroes in Cloverfield is symptomatic of cultural, cinematic and political developments in post-9/11 America. This is particularly apparent in the way both films represent distinctions between public and personal experiences of disaster. Thus, although this shift in protagonist focus is noteworthy in Cloverfield’s representation of the (in)capacity of authorities to understand and effectively respond to ‘the threat’, it is most significant in the consequent necessity, yet inevitable inability, of citizen-characters – and the audience – to understand and respond to their situation – characters unwittingly caught up in a ‘threat’ or attack which is unexpected and of an unknown, and unexamined, cause. This inability is further evident in each film’s aesthetics, with Cloverfield filmed ‘badly’ by its characters, unable to fully ‘capture’ the monster on camera.
Glen Donnar is undertaking a PhD on the potential for individual agency in post-9/11 British and American narrative cinema at RMIT University, Melbourne. He also teaches into cinema and literary studies, communication studies, and international communication and culture in the School of Applied Communication. He has previously published in Senses of Cinema and Media International Australia.
Victoria Duckett (University of Melbourne)
A Bad Beginning: Early Film and the Liberty Style
‘Bad cinema’ valorizes popular culture and presumes an avant-garde edginess: it is a boundless object which celebrates the very mediums and models that the cinema traditionally shunned. We seem a long way from early film, particularly from those early European films which seem to celebrate film as a high art or which marketed film through actors drawn from the legitimate theatrical stage. As most film histories remind us, these films were not properly cinematic and are interesting only insofar as they provide documentary evidence of the actions and gestures of once-famous people.
Taking the French film d’Art as my case study, I want to explore an alternative reading of these ‘bad’ early films. Rather than presume their historical irrelevance to the development of the cinema, I want to suggest that they instead offer a nascent model of ‘Bad cinema’: they point outside of themselves to the crafts, to the low and popular arts, to all that paracinematic ‘stuff’ which was newly redefining how one could think of and engage with art. Rather than defining disciplinary limits, these films drew from an array of visual cultures and were popular precisely because they allowed a range of people to engage with them. We therefore have an early cinema which in critical and theoretical terms has long (and literally) illustrated bad film. On the other hand, we have this same early cinema incarnating the Liberty style and defining what ‘bad cinema’ might once actually have been.
Victoria Duckett has recently returned to Melbourne after an 18 year absence and is currently an honorary Fellow in the University of Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communication. She received her Ph. D. from UCLA in 1999 and has held academic posts in the Centre d’Etudes Critiques, Paris, the Department of Drama, University of Manchester, and the Department of Media and Performing Arts, Università Cattolica, Milan. A specialist in early cinema, she has completed a book entitled A Little Too Much is Just Enough For Me: Mediating Sarah Bernhardt (UC Press, forthcoming).
Tessa Dwyer (University of Melbourne)
B-Grade Subtitles & Error Theory
What are bad subtitles? The comically incomprehensible subtitles of Hong Kong action cinema, the brutishly censored yet professionally rendered subtitles of communist-era Romania, or those resulting from translations of translations – the norm within global clearing houses?
In the 1960s, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther argued that all subtitles were bad – that they were elitist, distracting and unforgivingly reductive. More recently, some experts have labelled fluent, unobtrusive subtitling ‘corrupt’, arguing that although such practices represent the industry standard they effectively domesticate the foreign, favouring the language and syntax of the target audience over that of the foreign original.
This lack of consensus is only amplified by contemporary subtitling experiments that reinstate typically bad, kitschy aesthetics. Timur Bekmambetov’s Nochnoi Dozor / Night Watch (2006) and Dnevnoy Dozor / Day Watch (2006) employed in-your-face subtitles that moved all over the screen and echoed graphically the drama unfolding. Words dripped red with blood and grew in size to match their volume. Similar techniques were employed in the 2008 Melbourne Festival production by Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes in which the Mexican silent film El Automovil Gris / The Grey Automobile (Enrique Rosas, 1919) was accompanied by live interpretation and subtitles clashing across multiple languages.
This valorisation of the B-grade adds complexity to the quality debates that have long dogged film translation discussions. When does bad translation become good? How are judgments affected by high/low culture distinctions? Ultimately, can ‘bad’ subtitling practices provide the basis for a new, dynamic ‘error theory’ able to move beyond ideals of quality alone?
Researching issues surrounding film and translation, Tessa Dwyer is a doctoral candidate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her film articles have appeared in journals such as The South Atlantic Quarterly, Polygraph and Linguistica Antverpiensia, and in the anthology A Deleuzian Century? (1995). Currently co-editing a special issue of the online journal Refractory on split screens, she is the former director of the Centre for Contemporary Photography and a member of the World Picture e-journal advisory board. Her ‘Slashings and Subtitles: Romanian Media Piracy, Censorship and Translation’ is forthcoming in The Velvet Light Trap.
John Edmond (University of Queensland)
Zombie Fans, Zombie Walks, and Everyday Life
This presentation examines the cultural productions of zombie fans, focussing on the social significance of the “zombie walk” in which fans, dressed as zombies, parade through a city. Traditional fan culture is defined by the text/s that form the focus of fandom. Ordinarily this provides an agreed upon universe from which the fans can draw source material such as characters, settings, scenarios, etc, in order create their own personal cultural productions. However, this is not a practice that is particularly available to zombie fans. Zombie fans lack a coherent universe to draw from; more importantly a zombie’s mindless, speechless, and above all visual nature causes problems when creating typical fan texts. This presentation argues the zombie fan’s desire for cultural output finds its outlet through visual performance, that the defining cultural production of zombie fan culture is fans mimicking zombies. The presentation outlines the particular qualities embedded in zombie texts that make zombies subversively appealing to their fans. The fan practices are then examined using Henry Jenkins’ theory of textual poaching, in which fans’ cultural productions act as evidence for how they read a text. The presentation then draws on Jenkins’ key influence, everyday cultural theorist Michel de Certeau and his concept of location to examine how the fans’ zombie walk transfigures the familiar spaces and practices of the city. Examining the zombie walk will demonstrate how role-playing as zombies offers fans the opportunity to subvert the fans’ mainstream identities and in doing so critique aspects of everyday life.
John Edmond is an honours student in Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. He has recently completed his honours thesis “Narrative and the Defended Border”, an investigation of narrative location films or films in which location is foregrounded through a film’s characters and their plot-related activity. Exemplar narrative location films include such “bad taste” films such as George A. Romero’s zombie films, Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1979). He hopes to continue exploring the presentation of location in narrative films, in particular the utilisation of a film location’s ludic potential.
Maura Edmond (University of Melbourne)
Puff Daddy explodes through the roof of a New York sky scraper and dissolves into hundreds of peace doves before descending to earth as an Armani clad angel to lead a hundred piece orchestra in Times Square: Some Notes on the Logic of Vulgarity and Spectacle in Music Videos
Music videos are a prime site from which to discuss the relationship between aesthetics and cultural value. The relationship between what music videos look like and how audiences make meaning from them, enjoy them and evaluate them, can offer many insights into the construction of contemporary taste cultures. However, within discourses of taste politics, music videos have been desperately under-theorised. We often respond to them as if they defied interpretation: too visceral and spectacular, too arbitrary and illogical, so very, very silly. Furthermore, they don’t have the kind of productive and articulate fan cultures that so many categories of bad cinema do, making it even more difficult understand the pleasures music videos offer and how audiences distinguish between them.
This paper attempts to negotiate the terrain between theories of cinematic attraction, spectacle and excess, and theories relating to the formation of taste and cultural value. It examines a selection of contemporary mainstream music videos that exemplify the format’s fixation with surfaces and style, visual and special effects, spectacle and pageantry. I argue that the internal logic of music videos shares important characteristics with the logics of exhibitionism, and affective and emotional intensification, described by writers like Tom Gunning, Linda Williams and Henry Jenkins, but that it differs in important ways too. The internal logic of most music videos can be described as “the look as the hook”; a kind of visual code that relies on powerful, meaningful, affective and almost immediately recognisable signification. This paper argues that music videos offer an opportunity to reconsider the oft-denigrated pleasures of cliché, hyperbole, instant gratification, repetition and recognition.
Maura Edmond is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communication. She has worked as an assistant film curator and researcher at the Queensland Art Gallery and as a media curator at Federation Square. She was the founding editor of Machine, a Queensland-based magazine for emerging visual artists and writers. She also writes regularly on the visual arts herself and has published articles in Art and Australia, Artlink, Eyeline and The Australian. Her research explores the apparent textual excesses and indulgences of music videos and how they function in relation to questions of taste, aesthetic preferences and cultural value.
Anika Ervin-Ward (University of Melbourne)
Doing it for the kids: rebels and prom queens in the Cold War moral hygiene film
The Cold War moral hygiene film has become a site of nostalgia and camp entertainment for those who have experienced its schoolroom screening first hand and those who find in it an image of lost or misguided, idealised America. More than simply laughable representations of one-dimensional, middle class existence, these films present an aspirational vision of Cold War America; one that presupposes an underlying, less than perfect experience of post war society. Made for an increasingly conspicuous adolescent audience these films range from droll instructional films on dating etiquette and appropriate table manners (Prom: It’s a Pleasure! (Handy, 1961) and A Date with Your Family (Simmel, 1950)), to the more exploitative ‘kids in peril’ films of Sid Davis (The Dangerous Stranger (1950) and Gang Boy, (1954) for example). Utilising differing aesthetic and educational approaches these films encourage their audience to become functioning, if not model young Americans. In doing so each film also contributes to an understanding of Cold War America that continues to circulate in contemporary culture. Through a negotiation or exchange of containment and excess the moral hygiene films of the 1940s, 50s and 60s articulate the ambivalence of American Cold War culture via the figure of the malleable teenager. This paper will therefore examine the various thematic and stylistic means by which these films create, encourage and disrupt the notions of the responsible young American, and his or her place within the American Cold War cultural and political discourse.
Anika is a sessional tutor in the Screen Studies program of the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne where she has taught courses on 1950s film, psychoanalysis and filmic love narratives and the cinema of Martin Scorsese. She is currently completing her doctoral dissertation on the intersection between Cold War culture and contemporary Hollywood film entitled ‘Duck and Cover’: Hysteria and the Cold War in the films of Tim Burton. Her research interests include post and Cold War film and television, teen film, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cult and contemporary Hollywood cinema.
Shirlita Espinosa
Filipino pito-pito Films and Digital Piracy: The Beginning of an End
This paper would like to probe into the relations between the infamous Filipino pito-pito films and how these dreadfully crafted movies possibly engendered the massive culture of digital piracy specifically of DVDs in the Philippines. Earning the name pito-pito signifies how flawed these popular 1990s films were: major studios required that pre-production, production, and post-production days of a film project must be seven days or less. This oppressive system not only gave birth to B(ad)-movies of a different kind but also led to the economic cruelty of those who work for the studios. Paradoxically, however, there has been contention that pito-pito films brought a glimmer of silver lining as this system produced a few internationally recognized independent films. The paper would like to argue that the ensuing digital piracy that heralded the death of Philippine filmmaking was compellingly a result of pito-pito filmmaking. The huge business of piracy in the country and the social networks it has created for the underclass is comfortably imbricated to the kind of cultural products that masses of people consume at the time digital piracy is at its infancy. In particular, the films produced by Regal, unquestionably the biggest studio that influenced mass cultural consumption through films, will be surveyed and studied. It is also the concern of the paper to distinguish how _pito-pito _aesthetics possibly differ from the accepted concept of Hollywood B-movies.
Shirlita Africa Espinosa is Assistant Professor in the University of the Philippines. She has been teaching literature, writing and criticism since 1999. Her academic interests include Southeast Asian colonial politics, Philippine literary history, postcolonial theory, and recently, film studies and criticism which led to a journal article “Use of Time and Wong Kar Wai”. She has published in Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia, Asian Journal of Latin American Studies, and other local journals. In March 2009, she will be starting her Ph D program in the University of Sydney. As a movie fan, she does not particularly like B-movies but a devotee of (pirated) art and cult films nonetheless.
Runa Fanany
rfanany@students.latrobe.edu.au
It’s Alive! Innovation and Creativity in a “B” Movie Score
It’s Alive! is an example of a classic B horror movie. Unlike many other films of this kind, It’s Alive! has an effective, innovative score composed by Bernard Herrmann, one of the most important and successful film composers of the 20th century. This paper will discuss the innovative aspects of the movie’s score, particularly the use of music to create sounds effects, and examine their effectiveness in the context of the movie and in relation to scoring techniques. In addition, the visual aspects of It’s Alive! are the source of many iconic images that have become cultural stereotypes frequently seen in other popular culture genres. The influence of the movie’s images, particularly in television, will also be discussed.
Runa Fanany is enrolled in postgraduate film studies at Latrobe University. Her research concerns the musical portrayal of the Devil in several Hollywood films. Her interests lie mostly in the use of music in popular culture, especially the aesthetics of film and television scores, and the use of music as a symbol in these areas. She has several publications in this area. She is a professional violinist, and holds a Bachelor of Music (Honors) from Monash University.
Tristan Fidler (University of Western Australia)
Defending Paracinema: Joe Bob Briggs, I Spit on Your Grave, and the Critic’s Commentary
A film critic with a cult following, Joe Bob Briggs is the foremost reviewer of paracinema since 1982 when the first Joe Bob Goes to the Drive In column appeared in American newspapers. A persona developed by writer John Bloom, Briggs is notorious for the tallies of blood and breasts that appear in his reviews of B-grade films. What my paper examines is the concept of Briggs as defender of paracinema, particularly Meir Zarchi’s 1980 rape/revenge film, I Spit On Your Grave. Mainstream film critic Roger Ebert decried that I Spit On Your Grave was “a film without a shred of artistic distinction.” In contrast, Briggs regards it as “the most feminist drive-in movie ever made.” The difference in opinion is incorporated into Briggs’ commentary for the film’s DVD release where his cowboy persona offers a double address that defends the film whilst providing Mystery Science Theater 3000 jibes at its flaws. Following on from ideas explored by Paul Watson, Joan Hawkins and Jeffrey Sconce in regards to the commercial properties of exploitation cinema, I want to deconstruct how Briggs uses the commentary track to destabilise the boundaries of film taste and foreclose a reading of the film’s gender politics through his own hyper-masculinity. In the end, the critic’s commentary track will also be shown, in Briggs’ case, to further promote the critic to their own audience.
Dr. Tristan Fidler is a graduate from the University of Western Australia. He completed his PhD in 2008, which was entitled ‘Music Video Auteurs: The Directors Labels DVDs and the Music Videos of Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze.’ He also had a chapter published in Music, Metamorphosis and Capitalism: Self, Poetics and Politics (ed. John Wall, Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle, 2007) that focused on two videos directed by Cunningham.
Phoebe Fletcher (University of Auckland)
Fucking Americans: Postmodern nationalisms in the contemporary splatter film
“You can’t rail a girl in a coma”, Paxton cautions his friend. “I think that’s illegal even in Amsterdam”. Lines like these enraged critics following the release of Eli Roth’s 2005 film _Hostel. _In what _New York Times _critic Nathan Lee calls “one of the most misogynist films ever made”, two American frat-boys are set loose on an archane and sexually licentious Europe. Their quest to hedonistically consume the Other, however, is catastrophically interrupted when they are lured with the prospect of beautiful women into a torture chamber for the rich.
Although Roth’s film is often read by critics at a literal level, Hostel was but one of a wave of ultraviolent splatter films which stormed American screens following the 2003 occupation of Iraq. Dubbed ‘torture porn’ by American critics, the sudden rise in popularity of films that featured graphic dismemberment, disembowelment and decapitation was seen as reflecting audiences’ unconscious fears of the United States’ Global War on Terror. Drawing from Fredric Jameson’s notion of the ‘geopolitical aesthetic’, I argue that the popularity of the American anti-hero in the post-9/11 splatter horror can only be read when contextualised into broader global discourses of anti-Americanism. Using examples from sex tourism splatter flicks Hostel and Turistas, I illustrate how sex and Orientalism are fused in the figure of the “fucking American” as dystopic allegory for a critique of America’s global dominance.
Phoebe Fletcher is completing her PhD in Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland. Her thesis examines political discourses in the post 9/11 splatter film and their ramifications for violence in postmodern cinema. She is a regular panelist on Alt TV’s The Sunday News Roast Club and divides her time between teaching media studies and working as Journal Coordinator for AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples.
Craig Frost (Monash University)
When Bad Cinema Goes bad
Renowned for continuing the cinematic aesthetic embedded within Bad cinema, horror films of the seventies and early eighties such as Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes not only sought to scare its audiences, but reflect a distinct social order in a post-Vietnam War America. Subtexts such as representations of the family unit, the distorting of boundaries between the civilized and the monstrous and the decline of economy within rural America all elevated these films above their initial ‘horror film’ status into pieces of celebrated cinematic iconography.
Released in 2003, the Michael Bay produced Texas remake sought to reintroduce the hulking figure of Leatherface to a contemporary audience. However, unlike Hooper’s claustrophobic nightmare into the dark heart of rural Texas, Marcus Nispel’s film strips away all the features that made the original such a Bad experience; instead producing a glossy, star based vehicle which ultimately proves soulless and just plain bad. It is this transference, from culturally celebrated Bad cinema to commercially viable (but ultimately dispensable) bad cinema which I will be discussing within my presentation, with specific focus on both the original and remade Texas Chainsaw Massacre films. _ _
Craig Frost is a PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. He is currently researching the horror sub-genre of ‘Torture Porn’ and its relation to notions of gender, the body, and images of torture in a post-911 cinematic landscape.
Stephen Gaunson (RMIT)
The Glenrowan Affair
The Glenrowan Affair (Rupert Kathner, 1950) is a bad film for many reasons. In addition to its bad acting, bad direction and bad editing it includes a number of historical facts and conspiracy theories, Kelly aficionados claim are complete fabrication. Because of these reasons and so many more, The Glenrowan Affair is often discussed as perhaps the country’s most pure example of bad cinema. Yet despite all of this, the celebration towards its badness often overlooks a number of valuable features of the film, especially concerning its wider contribution to the tradition of Ned Kelly. Not only is The Glenrowan Affair the only Kelly film shot in ‘Kelly country’, it supports the long standing myth that Dan Kelly escaped the Glenrowan siege and lived to tell his tale.
Stephen is currently writing his PhD thesis concerning the Ned Kelly tradition. He teaches within the School of Applied Communication at RMIT University.
Zoe Leah Gross (University of Melbourne)
Trash Filmmaking and Scatological Spectatorship: Configuring the Scatological Gaze
This paper investigates ways of conceptualising the highly corporeal and often deeply uncomfortable, even unpleasant spectatorial experience elicited by trash filmmaking. Trash cinema, as represented in this case by the early work of John Waters, with its particular emphasis on bodily excess, abjection and defilement, in which bad taste is elevated as a kind of perverse sublime, is a filmmaking process which mobilises and spectacularises the grotesque, visceral body, and launches an aesthetic and sensory assault upon its audience. Moreover, these texts which are critically centred around and of the body, also instate a form of viewing which is in itself highly corporeal – just as the onscreen body is seized by frenzied flailing, ejection, excretion and copulation, the spectator is compelled by convulsive laughter, nausea and shock. These films invoke a unique combination of horror and hysteria, and are often just as vile and outright disarming as they are amusing. The peculiar spectatorial experience they evoke, grounded in a kind of morbid ‘car-crash’ aesthetic, is thus a deeply ambivalent one, bound up in an ongoing tension of compulsion and repulsion, of passionately violent extremes. This paper thus aims to explore this perverse dichotomisation of (dis)pleasure, attempting to negotiate a dynamic spectatorship model which takes into account this ambivalence and these highly active and somatic ways of looking. If trash filmmaking can be perceived as a violent, oppositional, scatological and even destructive practice, does it in turn demand a more idiosyncratic mode of reception which allows for these tensions of the extreme and is equally defiant, dynamic and contrary?
Zoe Gross is a PhD candidate and sessional tutor in the Screen Studies program at the University of Melbourne. Her research is concerned with ideas of scatology, divinity, the body, and the sacred and profane in trash filmmaking and the subversive function of bad taste, particularly in the work of John Waters. She is interested in trash cinema aesthetics and spectatorship, the Bataillean notions of the informe and heterology, and the interplay between gender, masquerade and the uncanny.
Tim Groves (Victoria University of Wellington)
Bad Affects, A/sociality and St Elmo’s Fire
Group films such as Return of the Secaucus Seven (John Sayles, 1980) and The Big Chill (Lawrence Kasdan, 1983) seem to provide examples of positive social bonds. The group members are linked by friendship, common history, and/or nostalgia for a lost ideal or sense of community. These ties might be consistent with Freud’s argument that the origin of sociality is the identification between group members on the basis of their shared love of the leader or ideal.
St Elmo’s Fire (Joel Schumacher, 1985), however, is a bad group film. Its characters are less a community than an array of vain, shallow and self-indulgent individuals. The ultimate “brat pack” film is indeed full of brats. Ridiculous story lines, lousy music and woeful gender politics are combined with the full range of 80s fashion crimes: big hair, hideous clothes and pink décor. The result of this mess is so bad that it’s not even interesting, just mediocre.
It’s tempting to discard this most disposable of films since we don’t appear to re-cognize ourselves in it. However, I will use contemporary deconstructive writing on Freud’s work on sociality to explore the bad affects of the film and the mysterious, paradoxical nature of the rapport with others. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen argues that the primary social bond is also the foundation of individual subjectivity, and that this tie is affective. This rapport is also performative insofar as it is both a display of affects and something that transforms identity in the process of its creation. Moreover, Borch-Jacobsen claims that even bad affects such as panic, hatred, and narcissism can bind us to other people. Thus, I will ask: can we be sure that our attempts to dis-sociate ourselves from the bland object that is St Elmo’s Fire are successful?
Tim Groves teaches in the Film program at Victoria University of Wellington. His research interests include affective contagion, film theory, horror films, and the work of Michael Mann and Clint Eastwood.
Lisa Gye (Swinburne University of Technology)
How can you be found when no-one knows you’re missing
Try to imagine Wolf Creek with an Australia style marketing and tourism campaign. The John Jarratt action figure. Milk cartons proclaiming The Thrill Is In The Hunt. Such an imagining invites us to ponder the capacity of a ‘national cinema’ to reflect or refract ‘national identity’. It allows us to ask whether the idea of a ‘national cinema’ is relevant (or in fact ever was) in a world where the rapid and global circulation of images ensures that we are never able to control or distil them into any kind of meaningful semiotic assemblage for very long. In such a world, is national identity anything more than a marketing strategy?
Lisa Gye teaches Media and Communications at Swinburne University of Technology. Her most recent publication, Illogic of Sense: The Gregory L Ulmer Remix (edited with Darren Tofts), was published by Alt-X Press in 2007.
Lindsay Hallam (Curtin University of Technology)
Inside, Outside and The Beyond: The Sadean Transgressive Body in the Zombie Films of Lucio Fulci
Italian director Lucio Fulci is mostly known for his cycle of zombie films: Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), The City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981), The House by the Cemetery (1981) and Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (1988). Although light on plot and character development, these films are renowned instead for their extreme violence, being filled with graphic representations of the body being torn open by assorted weapons, as well as scenes of zombie cannibalism. In centring on the act of violence, rather than the plot that motivates it, these films lay bare the essential elements that define the genre. These films thus cater to a fascination with the limitations and possibilities of the body, and with how violence affects and destroys it.
Such an investigation of the body can be traced back to the novels and philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, which also explore the body’s reaction to pain and violence. Applying Sadean ideas to the analysis of Fulci’s zombie films* *helps to identify the sexual aspects of the graphic representations of violence inherent in the zombie film. Fulci’s fascination with the body and the many ways it can be destroyed can now be read as visual representations of the power and pleasure that emerges from the transgressive body.
Dr Lindsay Hallam recently completed her doctoral thesis entitled “Sinema: Sade and the Transgressive Body Onscreen”, and delivered a paper on ‘torture porn’ horror cinema at the Interrogating Trauma conference at Murdoch University. She is currently trying to turn her thesis into a book, and looks forward to further exploration of the horror genre and other forms of transgressive cinema.
Brady Hammond (Victoria University, New Zealand)
Haunted Girls, Bad Girls, and Mothra: Charting Feminism in Post-War Japanese B Movies
Giant she-monsters, delinquent girls, and vengeful femme spirits have all been prominent features of Japanese cinema at different points throughout the post-war years. A closer reading of B movies demonstrates a consistent concern with active females or strong female protagonists fighting against the traditional roles of ‘quiet’ wives and homemakers usually found in popular, mainstream Japanese cinema, roles that patriarchal society would regard as necessary to an acceptable status quo. My contention will be that these B movies offer viewers a glimpse at the evolution of often radical forms of feminism which present transgressive femininities and challenge dominant forms of gender identity.
By reading Mothra (1961), Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom (1973), and One Missed Call (2003) — a Japanese monster, pink violence, and modern horror B movie respectively—from a feminist perspective, I will construct a limited evolution of the representations of women in cult Japanese films, showing how they are often signifiers of transgression. Then, drawing on Douglas Kellner’s diagnostic critique, I will situate that evolution culturally to show how it relates to the larger narrative of feminism in post-war Japan.
Brady Hammond is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. He is currently researching the justifications of violence found in popular cinema and their relation to pre- and post-9/11 cultural tensions. His previous research has included interactive entertainment and linguistics.
David Hanan (Monash University)
The B Movies of Betawi Singer Benyamin S
The paper will explore some of the B Movies of the Betawi singer and comedian, Benyamin S, who in Jakarta in the 1970s made some 47 low budget films in a 9 year period (1970–1978) and whose songs and films celebrated the lives and culture of the Betawi poor. The Betawi are an ethic group regarded as the original people of Jakarta (Batavia under the Dutch), including families descended from people brought to Batavia as slaves of the Dutch trading in the region. Benyamin S is especially remembered in Indonesia for his development of an old Jakarta music genre, Gambang Kromong, into Gambang Moderene, creating original songs about the Betawi community. But he also rapidly became a top star of the Indonesian popular cinema. In addition to his comedies about local performance traditions of the Betawi ethnic group, for example Raja Lenong (‘The King of Lenong’), Benyamin made zany low budget comedy films that in effect mourned the loss of community and community reciprocity with the modernisation of Jakarta in the 1970s, or, from the point of view of Betawi values, spoofed Western genres, and simultaneously were vehicles for absurdist criticism of both the establishment, and of emerging developments in Indonesia, films such as Betty Bencong Slebors (‘Betty, the Drunken Transvestite’), Koboi Ngungsi (‘Refugee Cowboy’), Benyamin Spion 025 (‘Benyamin Spy 025’), Tarzan Pensiunan (‘A Retired Tarzan’). This paper will survey and provide examples of the main discursive features of Ben’s comedy films (with their multiple levels of signification) including some of the less well known of the B movies.
David Hanan teaches Film and Television Studies in the School of ECPS at Monash University. He has researched film in Indonesia, and in South East Asia generally, for about 25 years. He is the editor of Film in South East Asia: Views from the Region (Hanoi: Vietnam Film Institute and SEAPAVAA, 2001). He has subtitled more than a dozen Indonesian films, and is curator of a DVD distribution centre for SE Asian films, located in the Monash Asia Institute. He is currently completing a book on ‘Innovation, Cultural Difference and Political Resistance in the Indonesian Cinema 1950-2005’. _
Minette Hillyer (Victoria University, New Zealand)
B for Boring
If scholars, in celebrating the B-movie, have (re)validated trash, the counter-cultural feting of paracinema does not typically include its more genteel relation, which might also be described as “badfilm”: the home-movie. Trash, it hopes, it is not; nonetheless, the poor execution and questionable taste that characterize classic examples of this ersatz genre align it in perverse fashion with its raunchier, and more celebrated b-movie cousins. More obviously, pioneers in trash cinema, such as the Kuchar brothers, availed themselves of b-grade technology first intended for earnest amateurs. Home-movies have been rescued for cinema by placing them into the discourse of “art” (Jay Hoberman, for example, claims that 8mm “entered its heroic age” through the efforts of a pioneering avant-garde); art movies distinguished from cinema by virtue of their cheap and amateur origins. In this paper, I consider the virtues of the boring and the banal, the botched and the bungled, in light not of the trashy avant-garde, but of a selection of home-movies made in the mid-century United States, before the ironization of commonplaces was popularized in art and theory and boredom taken up as counter-cultural strategy. Looking at home-movies which range from the ideal to the archetypical, how can we reconcile the boredom and (dis)pleasure offered by this kind of film with that of the b-movie? Are there pleasures to be found in homemade bad films which at least parallel those offered to knowing readers of cinematic counter-cultures?
Minette Hillyer is Lecturer in Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. She received her Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley, with a study of the home-made mid-century movie. Her article about the bad porn / home-movie made by Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee – a new classic in each genre – appeared in Porn Studies (Duke UP).
Michael Honig (Monash University)
It was only then that I realized the film was a comedy: Takashi Miike and Style
Takashi Miike is a highly prolific and very versatile director who has spent much of his career working in the low budget field of Japan’s V-Cinema. The low budgets, pace of production, his use of genres, and glib, baroque application of violence and sex have garnered his films an exploitation label from many critics and a cult following in the west. The exaggeration of his films becomes problematic at the level of reception as critics have become polarized, not just over issues of value but even interpretation. Through his book Agitator: The cinema of Takashi Miike, Tom Mes has contributed the most comprehensive and thorough examination of Miike’s work as a whole and drawn out consistent themes. As significant a book as it is, Mes does not expand on the issue which seems to draw the most critical attention; style. Miike is a director who is very aware his medium, noted for his idiosyncrasy, and seems to buck analysis, and his films need to be contextualized and dealt with as a whole. If the work of Takashi Miike is to be studied further, then negotiating his story telling technique will be one of the central obstacles to any interpretation.
Michael Honig is a Masters candidate in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. His thesis is on Japanese and Korean horror cinema and the American remakes of those films. Research interests include national cinemas, cult film, American independent cinema and game studies.
Fincina Hopgood (University of Melbourne)
Ozploitation: Revisiting/Revising Australian film history
With the release of Mark Hartley’s documentary Not Quite Hollywood (2008) and Catharine Lumby’s study of Alvin Purple (Currency Press, 2008), there has been a resurgence of interest in Australian genre filmmaking of the 1970s and 1980s. Collectively (and affectionately), these films are referred as Ozploitation films. Panels at the 2008 Melbourne and Brisbane International Film Festivals, DVD releases, radio interviews and newspaper features are all testimony to a newfound fascination with a range of Australian action, comedy and horror films that were derided by critics upon their release and, until now, have largely been ignored or overlooked by film historians.
In this paper, I speculate on the possible reasons for this reclaiming of a lost history of Australian filmmaking and I examine the critical discourses surrounding these films and their directors (such as Richard Franklin, Brian Trenchard Smith, Tim Burstall and others). I do not analyse the films themselves; instead, I discuss the various counter-narratives to ‘official’ Australian film history offered by Hartley, Lumby, contemporary film critics and the filmmakers themselves. My paper is motivated by these questions: “Why this desire to rediscover and reclaim Ozploitation films? Why these films? Why now?”
Dr Fincina Hopgood teaches in the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Melbourne and is the Book Reviews Editor for online film journal Senses of Cinema. She is currently writing a book on the portrayal of mental illness in films from Australia and New Zealand.
Mashrur Hossain (Jahangirnagar University)
Baise ( toi, monstre: the violent women in B-films and the politics of power/pleasure
The enterprise of this paper is to understand how paracinema’s representation of femme fatale contests the power/pleasure schema. Divided into three talks, the paper draws chiefly from Gender Studies, Psychoanalysis, Semiotics, and Cultural Studies. The first talk, “Gun or dynamite?: the poetics of power/pleasure” enquires the pleasures offered by the films dealing with violence to/enacted by women. In order to conceptualize how pleasure becomes a means of renegotiation with power, the phrase “power/pleasure” is coined (referring to Foucault’s knowledge/power). What it connotes is: power and pleasure are imbricated in visual discourse; pleasure is itself a form of power/discourse and power renders pleasure a kind of gendered cultural capital, further privileging the male and marginalizing the female. The second talk, “Spitting on grave: the femme fatale in B-films” gives discourse and content analyses of select B-films having violent women as protagonists: for example, Baise-Moi, The Great Texas Dynamite Chase, and I Spit on Your Grave. The third talk, “‘Girls just want to end oppression’: contesting the power/pleasure schema,” shows how the B-films have advanced emancipatory, sometimes revolutionary, representation of women, sexuality, and violence. Despite having violent women stereotyping, for example eroticized Avenging Angels or Damsel in Distress graphically gangbanged, these B-films employ four strategies to question, destabilize and reverse gendered visual pleasure/discourse. These films seem to demonstrate that gender is performative and is, therefore, accessible to subversion. Attending the relation between violence and gender, the title of the present paper makes not only an aggressive reply to male pleasure but also envisions a humane world.
Mashrur Shahid Hossain, 34, is the Assistant Professor of English, Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. He teaches Communication Skills, Postcolonial Literature, American Literature, and Media among others. His areas of interest and expertise include postcolonialism, media, theatre, and gender. Recently he completed a paper on the politics of power and pleasure in the representation of women in films, and is presently working on the re-conceptualizing of masculinity in Bangladeshi haute couture. His essay “Hijra and Enforced (ab)Normalcy: Re-Appropriating Interpellated Identity Through Sex Work” is to be published in Sex Work Matters: Beyond Divides. He has shot his first short Howl based on a sexually confused boy’s predicament.
Maija Howe (University of New South Wales)
The Photographic ‘Hangover:’ Reframing Photographicity in the Mid-Century Home Movie
In The Simple Art of Making Films, a guide to amateur filmmaking published in 1957, Tony Rose issues a word of warning to the cine-beginner. “If you are, or have been, a still photographer you may think you have a head start in cine,” he writes. “Certainly you have less to learn than the complete photographic novice. You also have more to unlearn.”
Rose’s statement evidences a concern regarding the amateur’s transition from photography to filmmaking that surfaces repeatedly in mid-century publications on amateur film production. In an era in which millions of snapshooters were picking up a movie camera for the first time, advisory literature expressed considerable anxiety about what it saw as the widespread deployment of ‘photographic’ principles and techniques within amateur film practice.
This paper explores what Rose and others characterise as this photographic ‘hangover,’ examining the ways in which it was suggested to manifest in amateur films and, more specifically, in home movies. Arguing that the so-called ‘typical’ home movie comes to be identified – and disdainfully so – with both a photographic logic and mode within this literature, this paper explores how this notion of photographicity might be recuperated as a constructive framework for rethinking what are generally dismissed as the objectionable aesthetics of the mid-century home movie.
Maija Howe is a PhD candidate with the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales. She collects, screens and shoots on narrow gauge film, and is currently writing her PhD on temporality and the mid-century home movie.
Ekky Imanjaya (critic)
The Other Side of Indonesia: New Order’s Indonesian Exploitation Cinema as Cult films
Some 1980s exploitation Indonesian films, (few from late 1970s and early 1990s), had been distributed internationally (mostly by Mondomacabro DVD and Troma Entertainment) and praised as “holy grail of cult Asian cinema” with huge fans all around the world. Some of them are “The Queen of Black Magic” (Ratu Ilmu Hitam, Lilik Sudjio, 1981), “Lady Terminator” (Pembalasan Ratu Laut Selatan, Tjut Djalil, 1988], “ “The Devil’s Sword” (Golok Setan, Ratno Timoer, 1983), “Mystic in Bali” (Leak, Tjut Djalil, 1980), and “Dangerous Seductress” (Bercinta dengan Maut, Tjut Djalil, 1992). Those kinds of films are now neglected, abandoned, vanished, or some considered marginally as bad movies in Indonesia. Western distributors and spectators consider them as cult movies.
Why do Western spectators love and get fascinated with Indonesian exploitation cinema? And, how about Indonesian cult-boy fans? Another interesting fact is that those films were produced and distributed in 1980s, under the oppressive of New Order Regime (1966-1998) which was run by a dictator. The paper will contribute to Indonesian studies, especially to the production of cult cinema (the cinema—or, I can say, the culture—of the other) under a repressive state. I will take some samples of each subgenre of the cult Indonesian cinema, specifically genres that only exist in Indonesian film Industry (Kumpeni and Legenda Genre in Karl Heider’s terms), in relation with the anatomy, political economy, cultural status, and the consumption of those films.
Ekky Imanjaya is a film critic from Jakarta. He has master degrees of Film Studies (University of Amsterdam) and philosophy (University of Indonesia). He is co-founder/editor of Rumahfilm.org, an online film journal. He was nominated as best film critic at 2005 Indonesia Film Festival. He writes books, including A to Z about Indonesian Films. His scholarly articles were published in Journal of European Studies and Osian’s Cinemaya, The Asian Film Quarterly. His short film, Macet! (Traffic Jam, 2005) won first prize as best Documentary on urban transport trip in Asia video contest (GTZ Sustainable Urban Transport Project, Bangkok, 2006).
Mike Jones (International Film School Sydney / UNSW)
Bad Cinema’s Virtual Camera: Gaming, cinema aesthetics and the audacity of immaturity
Cinema in the 21st century has never struggled so profoundly with the breadth of its definition. With an umbrella as broad as the ‘art of the screen-based moving image’ the door is left wide open for all manner of media, and mediums, to invade the cinematic canon and turn good cinema, bad. Foremost among these is 3D gaming; the immaturity of gung-ho adolescence trouncing through the china cabinet of mature cinema and cinematography.
Is the aesthetic result of gaming as cinema simply bad-cinema stemming from immature and unsophisticated cinematography and screen language? Does the virtual camera of game aesthetics commit crimes against the mise en scene and relegate gaming to a second rate cinematic art in need of ‘growing up’?
Or is there artful genius in the bad cinema and bad cinematography of gaming that threatens to reshape our cinema language with its audacity? Is the bad cinematography of gaming the best thing too happen to cinema?
This presentation will examine the evolution of cinematography in 3D computer gaming and test these evolutions, and the technology-based aesthetics they deliver, against a range traditional and contemporary Mise en scene ideas. From Eisenstein and Bazin to the Virtual Camera and the infinite long-take. The impact of gaming as cinema proposes, for better or worse, profound implications for our understanding of cinema language and cinematic experience.
Mike Jones combines fifteen years professional experience in media production with a proactive academic interest in cinema aesthetics and cinema education pedagogy. With experience in film, TV, radio and online production Mike is the author of three books, more than 250 published essays, articles and reviews and a syndicated columnist on cinema technology. He is currently Head of Technological Arts at the International Film School Sydney and is undertaking a PhD at UNSW. His online home can be perused at http://www.mikejones.net.au and his professional blog for DigitalMediaNet can be read at http://www.digitalbaisn.net.
Hester Joyce (LaTrobe University) and Scott Wilson (Unitec School of Performing and Screen Arts)
Bad or Just Lost: Contemporary Cinema’s Turn to the Perverse. David Lynch: Lost Highway (1997); Lars Von Trier: Breaking the Waves (1996)
The paper is conceived as an adjunct to/exploration of Žižek’s exposition of Lacanian theory through popular culture and his analysis of Hitchcock’s films in particular. By using established formal techniques, a film ensures its audience understands that aesthetic decisions support and clarify the narrative to ensure maximum spectatorial satisfaction. However, some films exploit formal aesthetics in order to prevent clarification, thwarting spectatorial satisfaction in favour of viewing practices that can be considered perverse in that they withhold, suspend or obstruct immediate pleasure.
Formal analysis of Breaking the Waves (Lars Von Trier, 1996) and Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) leads us to theorise that each film is individually perverse, located somewhere between psychotic and neurotic. The prohibited features – desires, hallucinations, suspicions, obsessions, guilts – are brought forward and exist as aberrations, extraneous details that stand out from the skin of the film texts, formally and narratively. Rather than these features being a “repressed underside” the perversity is expressed through a flagging of formal features: through excessive editing/hyper exaggerated tracking, blackouts/ellipses in consciousness, hysterical tracking shots, concentric realities each denying the previous, miscegenation of fantasy through obsessive detail and psychotic narrative. Through such variations in the formal processes each auteur approaches “the creation of a new metaphoric continuity” (Žižek, 1992) through the construction of identifiable gazes that inscribe the spectator into the other.
A close examination of such perverse formal languages reveals the manner in which films allow their audiences a new kind of active spectatorship but also how mainstream cinematic language colonises this development.
Dr Hester Joyce is a lecturer in Cinema Studies at Latrobe University, Melbourne. She has professional credits in acting, writing and directing in theatre; in acting, script editing and consulting in film and television. Her research interests include national cinemas/indigenous cinema; scriptwriting theory, policy and practice; scriptwriting; screenplay narrative, aesthetics and formal analysis, creative project assessment.
Dr Scott Wilson is a lecturer in Cinema Studies at the Unitec School of Performing and Screen Arts, Auckland. His research interests include screen aesthetics, formal analysis, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, film sound, cognitive theories, Outsider Art and Music. A version of this paper was presented at the Screen Studies Conference in July 2007.
Sun Jung (Victoria University)
B for Bad Boys: Cheerful Trashy Fantasy of High-Teen Mak-Jang Drama, Boys over Flowers
On 5 January 2009, Boys over Flowers (Kkotboda Namja), a South Korean television drama series was first screened on KBS. The drama is based on a Japanese shojo manga (girls’ comic), Hana Yori Dango (花より男). Within only two weeks, the drama’s viewing rate reached 25%. After its first screening, “fanatic” audiences began to create numerous fan-blogs and fan-sites. In addition, they upload each episode on various video-sharing websites (e.g., youtube.com), where many non-South Korean (mainly female East Asian) audiences can follow the show, almost in real-time.
Boys over Flowers centers around four extraordinarily wealthy, beautiful, yet spoiled boys, the so-called “F4” (Flower 4), and an ordinary high-school girl, Jan-Di, with a focus on the themes of love and friendship. The drama explicitly signifies a childish fantasy of unrealistic (almost surrealistic) romance. Some local media have criticized the drama’s shameless portrayal of the Cinderella fantasy and vulgar materialism. Some even consider it as a “high-teen mak-jang (trash) drama” which, according to one local cultural critic, embodies “cheerful trashy fantasy.” Why, then, do audiences praise this “mak-jang drama” to such an extent? What is this “cheerful trashness” and what is its appeal to many female East Asian audiences?
The regional appeal of Boys over Flowers, I argue, demonstrates the fans’ desire towards both bishonen (pretty boy) masculinity and childish, immature pre-adolescent kawaii (cute) masculinity represented by F4. In other words, this regional F4 fandom is driven by the fans’ “shared imagination” of obnoxious, yet unrealistically pretty boys, which could have been constructed through consuming shojo manga. In this paper, I will thus explore how such “cheerful trashy fantasy,” shown in the regional F4 fandom, can be conceptualized through the disjunctive contextual paradigm of a shared imagination of bad, yet pretty boys, which is based on the transcultural influence of shojo manga in the region.
Sun Jung completed her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne in November 2008, and presently she is an honorary research fellow in the University. Her Ph.D. thesis examined globalization and transcultural consumption of representations of South Korean masculinities in visual productions. Currently, Jung is revising the final manuscript of the book, tentatively titled ‘Globalized Masculinities in South Korean Popular Culture’ which will be published by Hong Kong University Press as part of a series entitled “TransAsia: Screen Cultures.” Jung also has previous professional experience as a reporter/journalist in the field of journalism as well as a scriptwriter for South Korean film productions.
Alexia Kannas (Monash University)
All goodness is in jeopardy: Fire Walk With Me and the indecent burial of Laura Palmer.
In 1992, David Lynch released Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the long awaited, feature-length prequel to his hit television series, Twin Peaks. Chronicling the seven days leading to the beginning of series, the film – and its promotional tagline – promised audiences that they’d finally ‘meet Laura Palmer’. But when the film premiered at Cannes, the cigarette-smoking, cocaine snorting, fat drug-dealer-fucking Homecoming Queen failed to charm. The audience famously booed and the film became one of Lynch’s biggest critical and commercial failures – despite it being, at that point, his most experimental and rigorously stylised feature yet. _Fire Walk With Me _has managed to go unnoticed even in the current celebration and mass-canonisation of the ‘bad’ film.
This paper is interested in problematising Fire Walk With Me’s status as a ‘bad’ film through an analysis that holds the film up against the director’s other critically lauded work. It also wants to consider the critical response to Fire Walk With Me in light of the film’s status as a prequel – a genre that seems to have a particular relation to audience taste and expectation.
Alexia Kannas is currently completing her PhD thesis ‘The Italian Giallo Film’ in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. Her research interests include exploitation and cult cinema, genre theory and theories of national cinema. She is the author of Deep Red (London: Wallflower, forthcoming) and co-editor of The Cinema of Dario Argento (London, Wallflower, forthcoming).
Misha Kavka (University of Auckland)
Wrestling with the Particular: Another Day at the Muddy Office in Survivor
Part of the D for Dirt(y) TV panel.
Much has been written about the corporate subtext or ‘office politics’ of Survivor, but what these readings miss is that Survivor is the dirty version of the office, not only in a moral but in a material sense. The encroachment of dirt – and the desire to get clean again – are recurring themes of the programme, incorporating mud into challenges and the products for self-cleaning into rewards. In this show, bodies are bearers of dirt, willingly and unwillingly collecting dust and mud and grime as a marker of the ‘primitive’, which is figured as the flipside of office politics. In a moral sense, TV muddies the clean media image of corporate America by revealing its ‘dirty tactics’. In a material, visceral and affective sense, which I take to be the very condition of the moral, Reality TV itself works through dirt.
This paper will focus on the most plainly dirty game in Survivor, the mud-wrestling challenge, to investigate dirt as the playground of the real, and to argue that the dirt of TV has a particularising effect. Precisely there, where we might seek to abstract truths – about the ethnography of office politics, gender, race, age, class and sexuality in American culture – Survivor revels in the amoral, dirty materiality of interpersonal relations, in and out of the office. Making them so particular, and hence so resistant to abstraction, is what turns Survivor and by extension reality television into the dirty remainder of theory, whether television studies or anthropology.
Misha Kavka is a senior lecturer in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland. She is the author of Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy: Reality Matters (2008) and the co-editor of Feminist Consequences (2001) and Gothic NZ: The Darker Side of Kiwi Culture (2006). She has also published numerous articles on reality television, gothic film and feminist theory. Misha’s research interests cover feminism, film and television theory, Hollywood film history (both classic and contemporary) and issues of sexuality and the representation of reality.
Scott Knight (Bond University) and Alison Taylor (Bond University)
Sexploitation Paracinema & DVD: The Case of Retro-Seduction Cinema
This paper outlines the nature of soft-core sexploitation cinema designed for direct to DVD distribution. It investigates various issues surrounding specialist film DVD distribution including the producer/distributor as fan, low-fi aesthetics, and reception contexts by examining the output of Seduction Cinema.
Seduction Cinema and Retro-Seduction are labels run by US production / distribution company Pop Cinema. Under their Seduction label, Pop produces mainly soft-core parody films such as Lord of the G-Strings (2003) and SpiderBabe (2003), while they distribute sexploitation features from the 1960s and ‘70s by filmmakers such as Nick Philips and Joe Sarno under Retro-Seduction. These two strands intersect with the production of ultra-low-budget remakes of certain classic titles included as supplements on their Retro-Seduction DVD releases featuring actors such as the bona fide cult movie star Misty Mundae.
Connecting Seduction’s aesthetic and thematic approach with the films of Fred Olen Ray and Troma Entertainment while drawing on recent research by Linda Ruth Williams on the erotic thriller and David Andrews on soft-core cinema this study attempts to locate Seduction Cinema’s contribution and position within the trajectory of soft-core sexploitation filmmaking.
Scott Knight is Assistant Professor of film, television and media and Head of Computer Games at Bond University. He is also a senior programmer of the Brisbane International Film Festival. Scott has authored papers on fan cultures, censorship issues, and videogame history. He is currently engaged in research on game form and aesthetics. Alison Taylor is an Adjunct Teaching Fellow in film at Bond University and PhD candidate in film and television studies at the University of Queensland where her dissertation examines the spectatorship of disturbing cinema. The authors currently co-teach a course on sex and the cinema at Bond University.
Adrian Lee, Yuen Beng (University of Melbourne)
Remp-It: An examination of the Malaysian Mat Rempit as representations of masculinity, desire and rebellion.
The motorcycle is frequently used in films as an object of masculinity, desire and rebellion. Portrayals of characters riding such machines are often synonymous with films such as Hells Angels on Wheels (1967), Easy Rider (1969) and the more recent The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and Ghostrider (2007). Very often, the screen portrays a motorcyclist riding alone or in gangs terrorising the streets, a free-willed and free-spirited human being performing roles as self-proclaimed vigilantes. A more negative portrayal would see the motorcyclists as anarchic outlaws and criminals. In Malaysia, a motorcycle subculture infamously known as the ‘Mat Rempit’ are often associated with deviant acts of illegal road racing, dangerous stunt-acts, gangsterism and vandalism. This paper examines the film Remp-It and how its images of anarchy exemplify the representations of masculinity, desire and rebellion. My argument is that while this phenomenon remains a social, cultural and political problem, the acts of the ‘Mat Rempit’ are instead glorified in this film. In addition, the representations of such images implicitly stereotypes Malay youths as subversive. By closely examining the film, I will also argue how this deviant subculture group imagines itself as an ‘imagined community’, which rebels towards the changing conditions of modernity in society.
I am currently pursuing my studies as a first year PhD candidate the University of Melbourne. I am attached to the School of Culture and Communication under the Faculty of Arts. My area of research delves into the issues of ethnicity, national identity, and transnationalism in postcolonial Malaysian cinema. Prior to joining Universiti Sains Malaysia as a fellow under the Academic Staff and Training Scheme, I was teaching at a local community college in Penang, Malaysia while being involved in non-industry video production works.
Dominic Lennard (University of Tasmania)
“Somehow the Identities, they get all Mixed Up”: Fatherhood, Science and Semen in Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive (1974)
This paper discusses Larry Cohen’s 1974 low-budget horror film It’s Alive, in which an ambiguous combination of pollution and modern medical science transform a child in utero into a ravenous mutant, in connection with patriarchal attitudes to reproduction. In light of It’s Alive’s narrative focus on the baby’s father particularly, this paper explores how understandings of reproduction that label the father the main contributor mean the film’s monstrous birth highlights the signifying capacity of male reproductive biology, contextualising the child as a slur on its father’s male self-worth. The idea that men almost solely author their children is reinforced in the film through the role of scientific and medical authorities, which intrude in reproduction and recreate it as a male technological process. However, this paper argues that the corrupt view of medical authority given by It’s Alive, combined the intense insecurity of the baby’s father about his genetic calibre, emphasises the irrationality of the discourses used to understand the our relationship to children and the agenda-driven aspects of reproduction in the public sphere.
Dominic Lennard is a PhD student in the School of English, Journalism and European Languages at the University of Tasmania. His thesis is entitled “Little Terrors: The Child Antagonist in the Horror Film” and focuses on the demonisation of children in the popular horror and thriller film since 1950.
Tania Lewis (Latrobe University)
White bread for the masses: bad aesthetics and bad lifestyle TV
Once relegated to beauty and fashion segments on women’s daytime TV, over the past decade the lifestyle makeover show has colonised primetime TV screens around the world. On today’s primetime makeover shows everything from homes (Extreme Makeover Home Edition) and gardens (Backyard Blitz) to pets (It’s Me or the Dog), parental skills (Supernanny), personal etiquette (From Ladette to Lady), cars (Pimp my Ride) and bodies (The Biggest Loser) are put under the spotlight and transformed—with the guidance of various life experts—under the gaze of the watching public.
Although occasionally dealing with wayward celebrities, these shows—like reality TV more broadly—are centrally about the lives of ordinary people and as such have been seen as part of a broader democratization of TV culture. Following in a tradition of social observational documentaries, lifestyle TV enables audiences to enter the lives of a diverse range of people often not seen on mainstream TV and to empathise with them as they embark on their personal journeys of transformation. The flip side of this process of democratization however is that the transformational ethos of makeover TV is often driven by class dynamics (hence it is often referred to as ‘aspirational’ TV within the industry). On shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, working and lower middle-class men are taught to ‘get ahead’ by acquiring the markers of middle class cultural capital and habitus. Similarly, on ‘educational’ lifestyle shows like It’s Me or the Dog and Honey We’re Killing the Kids, the unruly behaviours of the dogs and overweight children to be ‘made over’ by the shows’ middle class lifestyle experts are implicitly framed as indicators of the deficient life competencies of the overwhelmingly working class and lower middle class owners and parents on display.
In this paper I explore questions of cultural value and aesthetics as they are played out on lifestyle TV, a format marked by its own internal tensions around genre and aesthetics—associated as it is both with a tradition of observational documentary TV and with a feminised tradition of trash TV—talk shows, melodrama and advice programming. Through foregrounding the complex relations between gendered, classed and televisual aesthetics and values on lifestyle TV, the paper speaks to a number of broader shifts around the nature of normative selfhood and citizenship in contemporary culture.
Tania Lewis is a Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at La Trobe University. She is the author of Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise (Peter Lang, New York: 2008) and editor of TV Transformations: Revealing the Makeover Show (Routledge, London: 2008). She is currently editing a collection (with Emily Potter) called Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction for Routledge and is also conducting research on lifestyle TV in Asia.
Ramon Lobato (University of Melbourne)
The Straight-to-Video Imaginary
Through an examination of the economics and aesthetics of straight-to-video releasing, this paper explores the relationship between media distribution structures, textual value and (sub)cultural practice. The straight-to-video/straight-to-DVD sector of the global film industry represents a relatively small but nonetheless significant proportion of overall expenditure. Despite their low profile, many STV texts have a high degree of transnational mobility and are seen by very large numbers of people. STV releasing has also given rise to new textual forms, and staple genres like action and horror B-films constitute an important part of the market. However, the STV feature, like the telemovie, rarely figures within film studies as anything other than a guilty pleasure. This paper offers a preliminary mapping of the STV field and proposes some theoretical co-ordinates for its analysis. I argue that the dispersed nature of STV distribution, especially in its 1980s boom period, is a form of “cockroach capitalism” which represents an interesting departure from the bottlenecks and oligopolies which plague theatrical distribution. The affective dimensions of STV reception are also discussed. I argue that STV reception inevitably raises questions about the blindspots in film studies’ model of the text, questions which can in part be answered through the analysis of what I describe as STV’s “low-voltage” form of spectatorship.
Ramon Lobato is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His doctoral research examines the relationship between film distribution and globalization, and his work has appeared in Camera Obscura, Media International Australia, Limina, Continuum, Studies in Australasian Cinema (forthcoming) and the edited collection The Business of Entertainment (forthcoming, Praeger).
Adrian Martin (Monash University)
My Bad (Part One) – The Risible, or: On With the Adventure!
Critics, theorists, reviewers and moviegoers are always dismissing certain films as silly, implausible, risible… sometimes, these days, with the twist that risible is no longer bad, but fun (and therefore good). In my time as a writer on film, I have often rebelled – compelled as much by a sensibility that reaches far into my film-watching childhood, as of a present-day, rationalised, intellectual conviction – against the very bad assumption that underlies all damnation or celebration of the risible: that there is a norm (implicit or explicit) which defines good cinema, the well-made film, the solidly crafted script, plausible narrative, three-dimensional characterisation, subtle acting, an appropriate musical score, telling dialogue, etc, etc. In particular, such a norm (usually recycled without any argument or reflection whatsoever) shortchanges the entire international history of B cinema, from the best-known names like Samuel Fuller, José Mojica Marins and Edgar G. Ulmer all the way through to the least-known gems. And, intriguingly, it leaves us just as unable to appreciate many works of experimental and/or art cinema. In this presentation (part of a larger project titled My Bad), I want to tackle some aspects of what is deemed risible in contemporary cinema, with particular reference (illustrated with clips) to some explosive films by the French writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau.
Ernest Mathijs (University of British Columbia)
Discontinuity and Lack of Progress: Time in Bad Cinema
“And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future” (Plan Nine From Outer Space)
An exploration of how inabilities or refusals to adhere to the logical progression of time accidentally equip bad cinema with the revolutionary potential of challenging one of the key ways of organizing representations of reality. The paper will juxtapose analyses of the essence of time as an organizing principle in modern society with observations that one needs to look for the gaps, breaks and lapses in representations in order to find their essential rhetorical make-up, and argues that ‘bad cinema’ provokes a ‘different’ experience of time.
Ernest Mathijs is Professor in Theatre and Film at University of British Columbia.
He has most recently edited The Cult Film Reader (with Xavier Mendik), and three books on The Lord of the Rings: The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context, From Hobbits to Hollywood (with Murray Pomerance), and Watching the Lord of the Rings (with Martin Barker). He has also edited books on European exploitation cinema, Big Brother, and Belgian and Dutch cinema, and recently completed a monograph on David Cronenberg. He is editor, with Jamie Sexton, of Wallflower’s Cultographies series.
Karen Mauri (Victoria University)
B for Bro’ Town: “Im goin 2 da pub i may be some time”
The paper revisits a central problematic in media studies, cultural studies and television studies: evaluating minorities’ representation through the use of stereotypes, satire and parody. It focus on the publicly funded ‘cult’ TV series, Bro’ Town (TV3, 2004/present), a situation comedy that has attracted international attention over the past few years. It is unusual for such attention to focus on product of such a ‘minor’ TV industry, and this interest is probably due to the cultural caché of the series, along with its innovative mix of astute social commentary, pertinent social messages, and irreverent sexually explicit humor. Written and voiced by the critically acclaimed New Zealand comedy group Naked Samoans, the show ‘winks’ at its audience, playing with stereotypes and the politics of mockery. In a familiar tactic of oppressed groups, the stereotyped play with their own representation generating a challenging, cheeky, uncomfortable viewer pleasure.
The paper explores Bro’ Town’s simultaneous address to a national, regional (Pacific) and international cult audience. It situates Bro’ Town as part of a global practice in the “public” television industry that utilises irony and mocking for social purposes, but mixes these with more overtly ‘commercial’ elements in order to engage with broader audiences (non-elite, cultural aware responsive young audience). The argument opens up questions of the possibilities, the legitimacy and the functionality of deploying such a television aesthetic - a ‘dirty realism’ - for social utility.
Karen Mauri is an international PhD student at Victoria University in Melbourne. She has a Degree in Philosophy, with Honours in Cinema Studies from the Catholic University of Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy.
Joanna McIntyre (University of Queensland)
How Bad Can It Be?: The Problematic Politics of Temporary Transvestite Film
This paper explores the gender and sexual politics at play within temporary transvestite films, taking the most notable Australian example of this genre, All Men Are Liars (1995), as its primary case study. All Men are Liars is a relatively well-made, mainstream Australian film, yet it is difficult to separate its aesthetic value from the narrative and thematic techniques that might render it, politically and ideologically, a ‘bad film’: a reliance on gender and sexual stereotypes, confusions of sexuality designed to evoke ‘cheap thrills’, and humour derived from sex/gender misrecognition. Following in the tradition of prominent cross-dressing comedies such as Some Like It Hot (1959), Tootsie (1982) and Mrs Doubtfire (1993), All Men are Liars centres around a male protagonist who is, to comical effect, ‘forced’ because of economic concerns to temporarily disguise himself as a female before his deceit is revealed and its consequences resolved. Cinematic portrayals of this narrative formula have been analysed by a number of film and gender theorists, and such criticism provides astute insights into the ways these films offer both transgressive and conservative representations of gender and/or sexuality. However, little if any of this criticism considers All Men are Liars. Utilising existing work on the subject, this paper examines the structures of temporary transvestite film generally and All Men are Liars specifically to investigate the tensions and intersections between temporary transvestite films’ aesthetic achievements and the problematics of their cultural meanings and motives. Additionally, the paper compares All Men are Liars to its big-budget Hollywood counterparts to contemplate how it can be considered B-grade within the bounds of its own genre, but also how, as a uniquely ‘Aussie’ addition to the popular genre, certain Australian audiences might deem it ‘bad’ in some very endearing ways.
Joanna McIntyre is a PhD candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. Her thesis project examines historical and contemporary Australian screen media representations of male-to-female transgender. Joanna has also written and presented on the representation of transphobic violence in Australian film, and the psychoanalytic and carnivalesque themes in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
Donna McRae (Monash University)
Family Demons: The ghost as domestic inheritance
In Adelaide, South Australia, no one can hear you scream. Or can they? Adelaide is the site of many bizarre murders and strange occurrences; ghosts of ghastly crimes that have populated and mythologized its history loom large and will not leave. This is the site where Family Demons, a new independent low budget horror feature by the Canadian born, Adelaide filmmaker Ursula Dabrowsky is set. Family Demons is a work exploring how women can be both the victim and the perpetrator of domestic violence. This duality is artfully depicted in Dabrowsky’s film, subtly wrapped within a seemingly familiar genre, but working on many levels. The film deftly integrates the thrills of the horror genre with a meditation on the determinist nature of domestic violence. In this paper I will discuss the cyclic nature of her film, both real and imagined. While it is tempting to think of cinema ghosts as simulacra, the manifestations in this film offer a credibility that is disturbingly familiar.
Donna McRae is a filmmaker whose practice is based in Melbourne and Adelaide. Her short films have been shown at festivals around the world as well as in artist run gallery spaces. She is currently completing a PhD – “Projecting Fantasy - The Ghost in Cinema” at Monash University and is developing a longer film.
Sharon Jane Mee (UNSW)
The buzzing fly: the tell-tale heart of film (broaching the banal) in Jörg Buttgereit’s NekRomantik (1987)
In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) the beating of the heart acts as an index of, not the representational forms of horror, but the figure of horror. Far from representation, the pulsatile movement of diastole-systole is an operation of decomposition. The pulse, in other words, is irrepressible. Like the buzzing fly that annoys the corpse, the beating heart is a figure of horror that won’t be stopped.
The fly takes the respect from the corpse, just as some would argue the horror film takes the respect from cinema. We go to cinema in abandon, abandoning the self to the convulsive affects of cinema. For cinema to abandon the rituals of death in exchange for the corpse’s material value is only another way of disrupting the autonomy of the sign and relaunching it as a thing for the play of convulsive affect and the frenzy of decomposition. This paper engages with Georges Bataille’s fascination with the fly and his embrace of the heterogeneous, as well as Jörg Buttgereit’s film NekRomantik (1987). NekRomantik pairs the frenzy of the erotic with the operation of decomposition: two ways in which Bataille describes the abandonment of the self. In both its erotic and decompositional forms the abandonment of the self, for Bataille, is a convulsive projection as well as a rapturous escape from the self (c1985: 132-3), and it is in this way that the figure of horror in cinema might be understood. This is a figure of horror that is continuous with cinema spectatorship.
Sharon Jane Mee is a PhD Research student at University of New South Wales in the School of English, Media, and Performing Arts. She is currently completing her dissertation, titled The Pulse: An Aesthetics of the Cinematic Apparatus, which examines recent conceptions of the pulse in the work of Rosalind E. Krauss, Jean-François Lyotard, Georges Bataille, and Gilles Deleuze, and develops them in order to understand an aesthetics of the cinematic apparatus. It examines a selection of horror and horror-erotica, including William Castle’s The Tingler (1959), George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond/L’aldilà (1981), Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981), Jesús Franco Manera’s Vampyros Lesbos (1970) and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Jörg Buttgereit’s NekRomantik (1987).
Naomi Merritt (University of Melbourne)
A vile little piece of sick crap: Bataillean Transgressions and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
‘… a vile little piece of sick crap … a film with literally nothing to recommend it … but a hysterically paced, slapdash, imbecilic concoction of cannibalism … and unrelenting sadistic violence as extreme and hideous as a complete lack of imagination can possibly make it’.
‘This abattoir of a movie … [is] about as subtle as having your leg sawed off without anaesthetic …’
(From film reviews for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre)
Tobe Hooper’s infamous horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) has been variously banned, reviled, and dismissed as exploitative trash. Yet this provocative low budget film has proved enduringly popular, spawning several sequels and remakes, attaining cult status amongst horror film buffs and is now regarded as one of the great modern horror films by film scholars. Indeed, Chain Saw has entered the mythology of pop culture. Clearly, there is something about this film which taps into fundamental social anxieties and generates perverse fascination. This paper examines the ambivalence produced by horror and ‘bad’ cinema, such as Chain Saw, in relation to taboos and transgression. The theorist Georges Bataille, who has courted his own share of condemnation and moral outrage for the violent and pornographic content of his work, offers an intriguing perspective on what he terms the ‘seductive boundary of horror’, and the role of taboos and their transgression, in respect to social bonds. While Bataille asserts that the ‘main function of all taboos is to combat violence’, he also suggests that the taboo paradoxically begets its own violent transgression. This paper explores this seeming contradiction in relation to the representation of cannibalistic capitalism in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, linking this issue to the film’s controversial legacy.
Naomi Merritt is undertaking a PhD on the ‘cinematographic’ photography of Jeff Wall at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include the relationship between the still and moving image, contemporary staged and cinematic photography, digital imaging, nineteenth-century visual culture, film theory, psychoanalytic theory, the work of Julia Kristeva, surrealism, horror, pop culture and the visual arts. Naomi is also a practising artist with a special interest in photograms and other experimental photographic processes.
Jane Mills (Charles Sturt University)
Hollywood’s ‘bad other’
‘Bad cinema’ is widely perceived in terms of its opposition to both art and mainstream cinema, making it ‘Hollywood’s ‘bad other’. Underlying this perception are the binaries of a Hollywoodcentric approach to Film Studies: the globally dominant cinema sets the standard by which all other cinemas are judged – and often found lacking. Paradoxically, cinemas thought to oppose Hollywood are also valorised at the expense of the globally dominant cinema which is denigrated. Thus good is bad and bad is good.
Hollywood, however, is bad in more ways than one. Not only is it accused of ‘ruining all the cinemas in Europe’ (Godard: 1989-1998), it is the significant bad Other, from which all other cinemas need to be protected (Elsaesser: 2005).
In this scenario, cinemas are imagined to possess rigid and impermeable borders. These supposedly keep Hollywood conservative and immune from the ideas, images and sounds of Bad cinema. Similarly, the borders often erected around Bad cinema are thought to keep Hollywood out and protect its essential ‘otherness’.
This paper challenges the common perception of Hollywood’s relationship to its ‘bad other’. It addresses issues of cultural value and aesthetics to propose replacing the notion of fixed cinematic borders with that of a chaotic, fluid screenscape in which global cultural flows carry ‘badness’ between cinemas within the transnational imaginary. It asks if films commonly perceived to abhor the excess, low production values and sleaze of bad cinema, are also widely imagined to be bad, just how bad is bad, what value can we place on badness, and do two bads make a good?
Jane Mills is Associate Professor in the School of Communication, Charles Sturt University, honorary Research Associate at AFTRS, and Series Editor of Australian Screen Classics (Currency Press/NFSA). A former documentary filmmaker, she has written on cinema, censorship, feminism, linguistics and human rights. She is a “Film Fanatic” for ABC Radio’s Sydney 702 station, and designs and delivers cineliteracy programs for the NSW Department of Education. Her last book was The Money Shot: Cinema, Sin and Censorship (Pluto Press, 2001); her next book is Loving and Hating Hollywood: Reframing Global and Local Cinemas (Allen & Unwin, May 2009).
Richard Misek (University of Bristol)
Boredom, Boringness, and Badness
When a film provokes boredom, this is typically perceived as a failing: ‘boring’ becomes a signifier of badness, and boredom its affect. But to use boredom as an evaluative category is to overlook its richness as an experience, and the often subtle explorations of temporality that provoke it. In this paper, I attempt to break the link between boredom and badness. I do so by tracing cinematic boredom back to its source, viz. the narrative and visual characteristics that provoke it. Notable among these are slowness, repetition, and scarcity of information and events. Using examples from films including Werkmeister harmóniák (Béla Tarr, 2000) and _The Brown Bunny _(Vincent Gallo, 2003), I explore some of the formal and conceptual complexities associated with ‘boringness’, and investigate how ‘boring’ films can help us engage with duration and mortality. I conclude by suggesting that, though boredom is a powerful (and often frightening) force, ‘boringness’ must not be feared – not least, because it does not exist.
Richard Misek is a Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Bristol. He has published articles in journals including Rouge, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film-Philosophy, and the International Journal of Žižek Studies. He is also a screen practitioner, and has had short films shown at festivals including Cannes, Raindance, and Clermont-Ferrand, and broadcast on BBC2, Channel 4, and MTV Europe.
Anna Mostovaia (Monash University)
Russian early cinema through the prism of words: cinema stars, vedettes and vamps in the viewers’ discourse
When first silent and later talking films were made, it triggered the emergence of new words and culturally important images.
Russian lacked the term for ‘cinema star’ at first, and the critics and viewers hesitated between a few competing terms. Vera Kholodnaia was, in all likelihood, the first actress to be called ‘kinozvezda’ [movie star]. She was also called, perhaps, even more often, ‘koroleva ekrana’ [queen of screen]. At this time (1910 decade) the term ‘kinozvezda’ was not used by everybody; for example, the émigré writer Irina Odoevtseva, when she writes of the early cinema, uses the full form kinematograficheskaia zvezda [cinematic star] instead of abbreviated kinozvezda [movie star] which has come into common use later.
The image of a movie star was not necessarily a good one; at the beginning of the century there was another competing term, (kino)vedetta [vedette], borrowed from French, which now completely disappeared. Yuri Annenkov uses the now strangely sounding term kinovedetty [cinema vedettes]; the image of ‘vedetta’, as Annenkov draws it, is similar to how ‘vamp’ is understood in the modern usage. The word vedetta [vedette], which sounds similar to ‘vendetta’, although it was rarely used, may had been a predecessor of the cinema jargon word ‘vamp’ which appeared in Russian only later (in the forties). Another possible source of the word ‘vamp’ in Russian was the opera called ‘Vampuka’, written by V. Erenberg in 1908, before the English ‘vamp’ appeared, probably in 1915. The full form of the word, ‘vampir’ was used to refer to a woman type by Vladimir Nabokov in Camera Obscura.
Biography:
- 1985 – graduated from Moscow State Univ. with Honours (Linguistics)
- 1989 - 1992 – research associate at the Institute of the Russian Language, Academy of Science
- 1992 – 1996 – was awarded an overseas PhD scholarship and later AGRA and completed a PhD (linguistics); topic: Metaphor in Grammar
- 2004 – teaching English to adult learners, Moscow
- 2008 – Honorary Research Fellow, Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University
Brendan Murphy (Central Queensland University)
B Grade 2.0: Gondry, “Sweding” and B movie tropes in emerging social media culture
In contemporary popular culture, online community and digital video production and consumption have come together in a way that is resituating what has traditionally constituted aesthetic and cultural value in cinematic discourse. For example, director Michel Gondry’s work encompasses both the traditional studio release and the short, playful online video making so typical of the social networking scenes of Web 2.0. In particualr, Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind exemplifies the blurring of production and consumption in the Web 2.0-saturated contemporary popular culture. Be Kind Rewind champions ludic amateur production through its central device of “Sweding”, or extremely lo-fi fan recreations of iconic movies. Video sharing sites such as Youtube abound with Sweded movies, and an analysis of this process of Sweding illustrates how the emerging culture of social media is revaluing B movie tropes. As well as discussing how this plays out in the work of and inspired by Michel Gondry, this paper will also examine how the iconic features of popular cinema are used constructively in other web 2.0 media forms, such as the “Sweded” B movie homage game levels in the community based Playstation 3 game LittleBigPlanet.
Brendan Murphy lectures at CQ University where he teaches in areas relating to digital media and contemporary communcation. His research interests include digital design in contemporary media, contemporary commnication and games and related media in education.
Tamao Nakahara (University of California at Berkeley)
Family plots: The Bad Boys of Italian Sex Comedy Incest Narratives
By the mid-1970s, Italian sex comedies had evolved from portraying the bawdy affairs between wives, husbands, and lovers to depicting a wider range of sexual narratives, including those that exploited the “bad” behavior of incestuous family members. It is not by happenstance that the films toyed with perhaps the most taboo of societal transgressions in the late 1970s; it was a result of both the Italian film industry’s changes in modes of production to exhibition and the shift in the demographics of the Italian family and film spectatorship. This paper explores how the privatization of Italian television in 1975, the subsequent breakdown of film industry funding, and the cultural, artistic, and financial pressures of both high and low works to represent sexually transgressive material all contributed to a frequent depiction of the Italian family’s loss of morality and proper boundaries. Furthermore, the exploitative explorations of the family had repercussions on the reception end as 1960s to 1980s families in Italy experienced a new generation of older sons who remained in the home until a later age, endured prolonged years of university education, married at a later age, and were more economically constrained to remain as “children” at home. In this historical and cultural context, the representation of close family quarters, tensions, and sexual temptations and transgressions had a particular resonance among the adult sons who were also often the consumers not only of sex comedies, but also of other “bad” cinema such as horror and erotic art films.
Tamao Nakahara received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, from the Italian Studies Department with a Designated Emphasis in the Film Studies Program under the tutelage of Barbara Spackman, Linda Williams, and Eric Schaefer. Her publications include “Barred Nuns: Italian Nunsploitation Films” in Alternative Europe (Wallflower Press / Columbia University Press, 2004), “Online Digital Film and TV” in Battlegrounds: The Media (Greenwood Publishing, 2008) and “Making Up Monsters: Set and Costume Design in Horror Films” in Horror Zone (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming).
Tyson Namow (LaTrobe University)
With Kracauer Watching Slasher Movies
I propose to apply Siegfried Kracauer’s phenomenological and socio-ideological model of cinematic spectatorship, as expressed in various essays and articles published collectively in The Mass Ornament, to key literature on the spectatorship of low brow slasher films made in the 1970s and 80s. Kracauer’s general argument is that it is precisely because cinema is a technologically-based art form which has its origins in capitalist and rational, scientific production, it is an art form that is more closely bound up with the existing conditions of society than other art forms. Moreover, for him it is popular, low-brow genres of cinematic entertainment that more intimately capture the conditions of modernity than those cinematic genres and styles that have been worked over by the bourgeois ideology of art.
I will argue that strands of Kracauer’s thought are illuminating in the context of key literature on the spectatorship of 70s/80s slasher films, such as the work of Carol J Clover (1992) and Matt Hills (2007). I am keen to draw out from such literature the different, shifting ways that such slasher films have been valorised or de-valued by academic critics and fans of paracinema. I am particularly interested in the different reasons given for dismissing either the genre as a whole, or individual films that make-up this genre, since these reasons tend to be about the fact the films are seen as nothing but commercially exploitative, formulaic fanfare. But as Clover for one says, speaking of the genre as a whole, it is precisely because of their ‘crudity and compulsive repetitiveness’ (23) that such films are insightful regarding the gender politics of the audiences that watch them. I hope to show how Kracauer’s view of the ambivalent nature of low-brow cinematic images sheds light on this potential for, if not all, at least certain slasher films to mirror the conditions of social reality.
Tyson Namow is currently a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne. His thesis topic is the aesthetic depiction of landscapes in the documentary films of Werner Herzog. He gave a paper at the recent Film and History Conference in New Zealand entitled: Nosferatu, Herzog, and Images of History. He is also scheduled to be writing a Chapter on Herzog’s film: Even Dwarfs Started Small for an upcoming book provisionally entitled: Outside The Frame: Cinema and Representations of Difference, which is being developed by Associate Professor Geraldine Bloustein at The University of South Australia.
Angela Ndalianis (University of Melbourne)
Corpse Contagion and Aesthetics of Disgust
The living dead as originally conceived by George Romero in his film Night of the Living Dead (1968) went on to influence a spate of imitators. The film medium witnessed Romero’s own Dawn and Day sequels and the recent remakes and retellings; European and Latin American variations directed by Lamberto Bava, Lucio Fulci, Jorge Olguin, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and Yorgos Noussias; and parodies such as Return of the Living Dead (1985) and Shaun of the Dead (2004). Living dead hijinx also extended into comic book series like Living with the Dead (2007), Escape of the Living Dead (2006) and Marvel Zombies (2006), and the hugely popular Resident Evil computer games. In these migrations and reimaginings the narrative rationale given the emergence of the ‘zombies’, the means to their destruction, the hero-types who hunt and destroy them, and the social context that provides the backdrop to their adventures and misdoings may undergo transformations. One thing, however, remains stable: the consumption of human flesh by animated corpses. This paper explores the nature of this consumption — the bite that punctures fragile skin, the hands that tear open an abdomen to reveal slippery internal organs, the same hands that rip limbs from pulsating bodies — and asks the question: How do we begin to articulate the aesthetics of disgust that washes over our senses when confronted by these images?
Angela Ndalianis is Associate Professor in Cinema and Cultural Studies at Melbourne University. Her publications include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2004), The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (editor, 2009), Stars in Our Eyes: The Star Phenomenon in the Contemporary Era (editor, 2002) and essays in the anthologies Screen Consciousness: Technology, Cinema, Mind and World (2006), Hop on Pop: the Politics and Pleasures of Popular Cultures (2003), and Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics Of Transition (2003). She is currently completing the book Spectopolis: Theme Park Cultures.
Tim O’Farrell (Latrobe University)
Shockumentary: Addio Zio Tom, The Killing of America and the Geneaology of Mondo
The DVD release of The Mondo Cane Collection, showcasing the work of Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, has lead to a re-appraisal of the ‘Mondo’ tradition pioneered by these unique filmmakers. In this context it is instructive to consider the significance of this tradition, its relationship to history and the genealogy of documentary.
Addio Zio Tom, a.k.a. Farewell Uncle Tom (1971, Jacopetti and Prosperi) and The Killing of America (1982, Renan and Schrader) at first sight represent two poles of the movement, straddling styles (docudrama, mockumentary and compilation documentary), reception sites (grindhouse and home video) and national provenance (Italy and Japan/US). Yet each has provoked heated debates about historical representation and film. This paper will examine how the distinct paths to production and distribution of both films are linked to their interrogation of history, as a prelude to discussing their affective dimension and locating them within the family tree of Mondo films and documentary more generally.
Tim O’Farrell has recently completed his PhD focusing on the direct cinema celebrity portrait documentary within the Cinema Studies Department of La Trobe University, where he also taught throughout his candidature.
Radha O’Meara (University of Melbourne)
B for Bad Guys: The Disposable Villains of Television Crime Series
This paper shines the spotlight on disposable villains, the bad guys who appear and disappear in each episode of television crime series. Studies of character in television usually focus on the ongoing, regular characters. However, the ephemeral has always been an important part of television aesthetics. Disposable villains are significant for the narrative strategies and systems they employ, the meanings they produce, the themes they explore, and the pleasures they provide. These areas will be explored here through the example of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise (USA 1990-).
Law and Order episodes conform to a tightly formulaic narrative structure, initiated and driven strongly by villains. These bad guys are usually more deeply psychologised than the good guys seen regularly in the series. A villain’s confession of guilt or revelation of motive is often the most melodramatic scene in an episode, inspiring pronounced reactions from other characters and shock, scorn or sympathy from the viewing audience. The good guys of Law and Order tend to be represented as highly stable characters, whereas the villains are notably volatile. Themes of unstable identity are expressed through a strong narrative focus on identifying the “perp,” and recurrent emphasis on related issues, including disguise, questionable paternity, double lives, unreliable memories, and mental illness. The importance of bad guys in the Law and Order franchise is reinforced by the frequent use of guest stars, whose performances are often a key pleasure for fan audiences. Disposable villains demonstrate the tension between structural repetition and episodic variation inherent in serial narrative form.
This paper addresses the conference themes aesthetic value and bad art, and cultural value and theory.
Radha O’Meara is currently completing her PhD in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she also teaches. Her research focuses on narrative and aesthetics in contemporary film and television. Radha’s recent publications include articles on soap opera in Metro and on superheroes in Refractory, and forthcoming essays in anthologies on global soap opera and Gilmore Girls.
Murray Pomerance (Ryerson University)
The Villain We Love: Notes on the Dramaturgy of Screen Evil
The trope of the cinematic hero terminating and dispensing with the nefarious villain in an apotheosis of passion, technique, and moral purpose is examined dramaturgically with reference to such screen types as Hannibal Lecter and Darth Vader and with a view to illuminating some interesting problems of staging for camera. The engrossment of the audience in a narrative, for example, and the audience’s capacity to identify and condemn negative characters—a paramount concern of filmmakers—requires the simultaneous production of potentially (extremely) offensive displays and the villain’s survival; if he caught and punished too early, the story must end, yet if he is not thoroughly reprehensible, audiences do not come to agreement that he should be caught. Particularly interesting are certain limiting cases, where the representation of screen evil is based on historical records the darkness of which cannot be matched in film; and also the relationship between cinematic “punishment” as a ceremony designed for vastly amplified audiences, and public executions. The paper will reflect, among other theoretical positions, Harold Garfinkel’s analysis of degradation ceremonies.
Murray Pomerance is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University.
Author of The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory (2008), Johnny Depp Starts Here (2005), An Eye for Hitchcock (2004), Savage Time (2005), and Magia D’Amore (1999), he has edited or co-edited numerous volumes, including A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home (2008), City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination _(2007), _Cinema and Modernity (2006), From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (2006), American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations (2005), Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth (2005), BAD: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen (2004), and Enfant Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film (2002). He is at work on a book about the color films of Michelangelo Antonioni. He is editor of the Horizons of Cinema series at State University of New York Press and, with Lester D. Friedman and Adrienne L. McLean respectively, co-editor of both the Screen Decades and Star Decades series at Rutgers University Press.
Manish Priyadarshi (Indian Institute of Public Administration)
Modernism and why bad cinema should be called bad: an analysis of bad cinema, Indian film industry and the poor people
Cinema is the mode of visualization, where the creativity meets the reality. It’s an art or medium of expression of themes of human lives, emotions, sexuality, passion, history and assimilation of good and bad things of the society. Due to sudden and fast exposure to west, in its endeavour to copy western lifestyle, our younger generation have gone much ahead of west without understanding it properly, we should have taken good things of west, instead we are taking all bad things first and one direct impact is that vulgarity in India cinema have gone up considerably, which is directly effective minds of not only kids but adults also.
This paper analyses the impact of bad cinema into the heart and soul of the Indian society, the impact of the bad cinema into the cultural traits of Indian society and the position of spiritual knowledge transformed into the sexual incarnation of the society. The paper tries to identify the meaning of the bad cinema, sexuality and showing hot sexual foreplay scenes and gestures and movements in the movies, the need of showing very vulgar movements of men and women and also abusive language. Over exposure of bodies, increase in nudity and vulgar gestures have increased a lot in the name of freedom. Because of this our present generation have become just confused and is no where, neither they are fully western and nor they are left Indian.
If this trend is not checked then our next generation shall be weak and perverted. It not only effect young children and kids but also adults and teenagers, there is already alarming increase in the rate of rapes and sexual crime in India, including New Delhi, which is now not safe for women of any age. Every day on media we see rape and sexual abuse reports of female of all ages, right from 15 days old to 60 year old and these crimes are committed mostly by young boys, don’t we think that it is direct result of this improper overexposure of sex and vulgarity in mass media and cinema or any other factor is responsible for the paradigm shift of Indian society.
Mario Rodriguez (University of Pennsylvania)
Horror-Ritual: Horror Movie Villains as Re-Presentational Sacrifice
In their description of Culture Industry, Horkheimer and Adorno (1944) noted that, “[i]n the first-class production the villain is dressed up as the hysteric who, in a study of ostensibly clinical exactitude, seeks to trick her more realistic rival out of her life’s happiness and who herself suffers a quite untheatrical death.” For Horkheimer and Adorno, the Culture Industry churns out tragedy as routine, and villains as staples. This paper illustrates precisely that dimension of horror movie villains which is a ritual construct. First, horror movie villains are hybrid ‘collective representations’ (Durkheim, 1912) and ‘uncanny metaphors’ (Schneider, 1999) mobilized through media. Second, Neo-functionalist ritual frameworks define the reinforcement of binary categories (child/adult, action here/effect there, human/divine, war/peace, etc.) as a fundamental aspect of rituals (Rappaport, 1999; Bell, 1997). (This implies a sanctioned role for transgression in ritual, as we shall see.) Furthermore, it is the job of media to perform ritual ‘re-presentation’ of original blood sacrifice (Marvin & Ingle, 1999). Third, horror movie villains transgress social binaries (England, 2006; Trecansky, 2001). Thus, the function of horror villains as transgressors gives them a critical, ritual role in media re-presentations: to reconstitute binaries. This paper concludes with a brief comparison of the fates of anti-heros in two Academy Award-winning films (There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men) and two films from the new ultraviolent genre of horror (Saw, Hostel), to expose the villain as ritual construction for re-presentational punishment.
Mario Rodriguez received his BA from New College of Florida in 2001 and an MA in Journalism from the University of Florida in 2006. He is currently a PhD. Candidate (2011) in the area of Culture at the Annenberg School for Communication in Philadelphia. His dissertation will examine the construction of villainy in contemporary American film. He enjoys horror cinema, science fiction, and occasionally karaoke.
Monique Rooney (Australian National University)
Melodramatic Crossings in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977)
The New Yorker critic Pauline Kael described Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977) as “preposterous” and “a throwback to B-grade films of the 30s and 40s”. This paper considers the aesthetic and political value of The Last Wave as a film that is influenced by classic—or melodramatic—Hollywood forms. My reading is of the film as an Australian melodrama that can be understood in terms of its director’s successful crossing from cinematic margin (Australia) to centre (Hollywood). Peter Weir’s career trajectory enacts an interesting reversal of the cultural crossings that occur in many of his other film plots. A trademark characteristic of Weir’s films is the plotting of a character (often from the global centre) who makes inroads into a more marginal, self-enclosed community or ecology. From Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) to Witness (1985) and Master and Commander (2003) Weir’s films depict his persistent fascination with cultural crossings as occurring across both imaginary (cinematic) and lived (city, suburb, regional, global) space. In The Last Wave, Weir casts American actor Richard Chamberlain as an Australian lawyer who defends four Aboriginal men charged with murder. The film’s metaphorical exposure of the inadequacy of Anglo-Australian law and its failure to account for Indigenous Australian culture is in tension with Weir’s casting of Chamberlain for the Australian role which seems to uphold the normative cultural hierarchy of Hollywood over local talent. My reading of the film as a melodrama—as well as my discussion of the screening of Aboriginal actors within this form—raises questions about cultural recognition and troubles the idea that the film upholds “bad” or imperialist values.
Monique Rooney lectures in film and literature in the English Program at the Australian National University. She is currently developing a research project on melodrama, race and late 20th century Australian film.
Mark Ryan (Queensland University of Technology)
Bad cinema, good business: the boom in Australian horror film production
After experimental beginnings in the 1970s, a commercial push in the 1980s, and an underground existence in the 1990s, throughout the 2000s contemporary Australian horror production has experienced a period of growth and relative worldwide commercial success unequalled throughout the past three decades of Australian film history. Australian horror films, however, are highly marginalised within a national cinema funded by public subsidy to foster a sense of national identity. Valuing ‘quality’ and ‘cultural content’ over ‘entertainment’ and ‘commercialism’, Australian films have tended to be art-house vis-à-vis genre-based films. Commercial, generic, non-culturally specific (in some cases) and international in their appeal, horror films – not to mention their low-culture status – have been antithetical to these aspirations. Yet as the broader Australian film industry experiences stagnating production rates, declining audiences and earnings at the local box-office, horror is one of the few areas of production experiencing growth. Moreover, while horror films are regarded as ‘bad cinema’ a vibrant local horror sector has multiple positive flow-on effects for the broader industry: horror acts as a world-class training ground for emerging filmmakers; horror has been a growth strategy for production companies and a magnet for international investment; and local horror product supplements local audience’s horror fare, until recently a niche almost totally dominated by international products. This paper outlines the horror genre within Australian cinema; the dual mainstream and underground structure of the sector; and the market, industrial and technological forces driving production.
Mark David Ryan is a research associate and a completing PhD candidate at the Queensland University of Technology. His PhD titled, “A dark new world: anatomy of Australian horror films”, explores the industry of contemporary Australian horror film production. Mark is the co-author of several reports, articles and book chapters on creative industries and new media policy. He was a parliamentary intern for the then Shadow Minister for Communications, Lindsay Tanner MP, in 2002. Outside of research, Mark produces short films and writes creatively.
Dave Sagehorn (Northwestern University)
Bad Cover Version: The Imitative Amateur and Be Kind Rewind
A recent DVD, I Was a Teenage Movie Maker: Don Glut’s Amateur Movies, compiles one man’s childhood attempts at making his own science-fiction and horror movies, short 16mm films which Glut acknowledges were extensively modeled after Hollywood productions. These films demonstrate surprising ingenuity but also rely heavily on Hollywood as a referent; in other words, they are primarily intelligible due to their closeness to more standardized modes of filmmaking. This same contrast is present in Michel Gondry’s 2008 movie Be Kind Rewind, which tells the story of two men who begin filming reenactments of popular movies in order to replace some erased tapes at a local video store. Be Kind argues for the subversive potential of amateur filmmaking, and the films created within its narrative are presented as an alternate mode of signification that is tied to localized meaning. However, this is complicated by the idea that these films are so closely linked to the mainstream – they began as failed reenactments, and as such may serve as a humorous reinforcement of the way cinema ordinarily functions rather than representing a true alternative. In this paper I will use Glut’s and Gondry’s films to explore the conflicting meanings that get attached to this type of imitative amateur filmmaking. Such films may be impressive in their mimicry or appear laughably bad, but Gondry and Glut seem to suggest that the inability to exactly replicate Hollywood style can be both compelling and empowering.
Dave Sagehorn is a PhD student in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University. His research interests include nostalgia and cultural memory, television history, and popular music in film.
Diana Susan Sandars (University of Melbourne)
Australian Musicals: Excessively Bad
A global cinema model that defines Hollywood as the first cinema and national cinemas as second cinemas effectively defines all products of Australian cinema as “B Movies.” Australian films are the comparatively low budget, often poorly executed, excessive and quirky foil to both mainstream and independent Hollywood cinema. Focusing on Starstruck, as an example of an Australian bad film, this paper will argue that second cinema musicals mark the liberations and boundaries of the ongoing dialogic relationship between Hollywood and second cinemas.
The musicals produced by national cinemas and in post-classical and contemporary Hollywood are denied the cultural and generic legitimacy ascribed to classical Hollywood musicals. These musicals often share a contested status as to their right to even belong to the musical genre. This situates them as bad cinema in relation to the film musical canon, a status invested with a power of ideological and cultural critique. This is exemplified by John Waters’ contemporary musicals, Hairspray (1988) and Starstruck, whose low budget challenge to the aesthetics and ideologies of the classical Hollywood musical aligns it with Hairspray.
Both Starstruck and Hairspray operate as a queer and feminist based cultural critique that challenges Hollywood cinema’s governing ideologies. Both films focus on working class, quirky characters, challenge to the nuclear family model, and celebrate a self-centred, fame-obsessed central female protagonist. Unlike Hairspray, Starstruck extends its use of queer excess and exaggeration to refocuses attention on the anti-heterosexual courtship mythologies that are an often-overlooked dark subtext in Busby Berkeley’s musicals. In comparison to the power of cultural critique inherent in John Waters’ Bad films, second cinema’s Bad impact is still to be fully explored.
Dr. Diana Sandars teaches in the Screen Studies program in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia where she is currently co-ordinating a course on Australian cinema. Diana also lectures at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Diana has published chapters on Ally McBeal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and has contributed to the academic journals: Australian Screen Education, Idiom, Metro The Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media, Screening the Past and Sensesofcinema.
John Scannell (Macquarie University)
Why “Bad” Cinema is Often Rather “Good”
Why is it that “bad” cinema - a description often attributed to those cult B-movies, exploitation and blaxploitation flicks, slasher films et al - play almost exclusively to the “educated” filmgoer? This paper will argue that “bad” cinema and/or cult cinema is attractive to cinephiles if only because its subversion of the apparent conventions of good cinema, such as plausable narrative, creditable acting and coherent editing, are irrelevant to the qualitative assessment of a cinematic text. To this end, this paper will argue that the best way to critique such ongoing (and false) qualitative presuppositions is to, instead, turn our attention to the role of the cliche. Whilst the cliche is a feature of good and bad cinema alike, in “bad” cinema, it provides a “covered”, rather than a “bare” repetition. As Gilles Deleuze might contend, this “covered” repetition is at the heart of “bad” cinema’s transformative power; its apparent cliches, are, in fact, a “chaosmos”, a productive chaos, a repetition of difference, rather than a repetition designed to maintain narrative preconceptions. This is perhaps the reason why bad cinema continues maintain a currency denied of many “good” films and why “bad” cinema is often actually rather “good”.
John Scannell is a lecturer in the Department of Media and the Department of Contemporary Music Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His PhD thesis, “James Brown: Apprehending a Minor Temporality” foregrounds relationship between musical expression and existential temporality. His work is currently being developed into a book which is due for publication in late 2009.
Rikke Schubart (University of Southern Denmark)
From Final Girl to Horror Heroine: The Emergence of the Super Bitch in Low-Budget Horror
In the last decade, horror has witnessed a growing number of female protagonists in low budget and exploitation productions: AVP: Alien vs. Predator (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2004), The Descent (Neil Marshall, 2005), Hostel: Part II (Eli Roth, 2007), Doomsday (Neil Marshall, 2008). These can be traced back to Ripley in Alien (1979) and Barbara in Night of the Living Dead (1990).
Feminism has rejected these female protagonists as perverse and negative (Bundtzen 1987; Creed 1993; Greer 2000) or as men in disguise (Clover 1992). This paper examines the positive role of violence in the transformation of female identity taking place in AVP, The Descent, and Hostel: Part II. Drawing on recent post-feminist theory, the paper discusses the horror heroine as a post-feminist example of a new female subjectivity (McCaughey & King 2001; Early & Kennedy 2003; Inness 2004). It argues that the “bad” genre of low-budget horror allows for more radical representations of female independence than mainstream productions like Kill Bill. The horror heroine is composed out of female archetypes such as the dominatrix, the rape-avenger, and the daughter (Schubart 2007), she embodies sado-masochistic fantasies, and she has traits such as strength, intelligence, rationality, desire. The paper argues that the horror heroine unites repressive and subversive elements, making perversion the site for a female identity in opposition to what Silverman has called “the dominant fiction” (Silverman 1992; Morgan 1987). The horror heroine, rejected by feminists but available to post-feminists, is an example of the progressive gender politics of bad cinema.
Rikke Schubart is associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark where she teaches film. Her present research is on the American war cinema after 1991 and she is currently co-editing the anthology_ War Isn’t Hell, It’s Entertainment: War in Modern Culture and Visual Media (Spring 2009, McFarland). She is the author of _Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970-2006 (2007, McFarland), co-editor of Femme Fatalities: Representations of Strong Women in the Media (2004, Nordicom) with Anne Gjelsvik, and has written books in Danish about horror film and action cinema. She also writes vampire fiction.
Jeffrey Sconce (Northwestern University)
Explosive Boredom
One of the most prominent signs of the Hollywood cinema’s ongoing decay is its hypertrophic obsession with the explosion. Once a narrative potentiality that might structure or punctuate an entire film, the explosion is now the premiere emblem of a cinema seeking ascension to a logic of pure obscenity, fascination, and awesomeness. This paper considers the stock conventions that have emerged for staging the multiple CGI explosions now propelling blockbuster cinema. Particular attention is devoted to the industrial, cultural, and spectacular implications of what I term “explosive boredom:” the now ubiquitous convention of a protagonist calmly walking toward the camera, wholly unconcerned and disinterested as a massive explosion ignites in the background.
Jeffrey Sconce is Professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. His publications include Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics (editor, 2007) and Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (2000). His essay “’Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style” (first published in a 1995 issue of Screen) is an ongoing point of reference for discussions of paracinema and questions of taste and cultural value in film studies.
Simon Sellars (Monash University)
Flesh dissolved in acid of light: the B-movie as second sight
Using Slavoj Žižek’s writing on popular cinema as a frame, this paper analyses Roger Corman’s X (1963) and John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) to trace the rehabilitation of the B-movie aesthetic. Both films celebrate autonomy and guerrilla filmmaking, encoded within remarkably similar conceptual and formal frameworks. In X, a maverick scientist develops x-ray vision, using it for cheap thrills, but then seeing into the fourth dimension – and something so shocking he rips his eyes out. This act is analogous with Corman’s career as purveyor of trash cinema: refraining from pushing badfilm’s power to the absolute limit; foregoing the gift of ‘second sight’; content to exist instead on a marginalised, second-tier, parallel reality to the Hollywood mainstream.
In They Live, Carpenter re-empowers the thesis: the hero stumbles on a secret society that has developed sunglasses to see through the real to the alien-generated subliminal messages in advertising and politics. Rather than withdrawal, Carpenter’s hero declares: ‘I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass – and I’m all out of bubblegum’. Unabashed, glorying in his outsider status, Carpenter reappropriates Hollywood values in a cheap ‘bubblegum’ universe that invades, reinvigorates and repopulates the ‘desert of the real’. Trash culture is the smart bomb, with the aim of prising apart not only cinematic convention but also reality itself.
Ultimately, both films, in very different historical specificities, offer up the B-movie as a response to the gathering global and economic forces of late capitalism, signified by the ‘ideological state apparatus’ of Žižek’s present-day Hollywood.
Dr Simon Sellars is a freelance writer and editor, and a tutor in Monash University's School of English, Communications and Performance Studies.
Jamie Sexton (University of Aberystwyth, Wales)
Cult Film: From Bad to Good and Back to ‘Bad’ Again?
The notion of ‘cult’ has undergone several evaluative changes when applied to film culture. From sporadic use in the first half of the twentieth century as a largely negative term applied to ‘herd-like’ groups (a bad category), to an increasingly employed, often positively-tinged, concept referring to a particular type of film (a good or, at least, ‘bad’ category). In this paper, I would like to begin a process of _tracking _the shifts of ‘cult’ as a conceptual tool within film culture, a kind of archaeological investigation of its shifting uses. This would neatly mirror the processes in which cult films are often identified as such: through the ways that they travel, and gain meanings, within particular cultural contexts. I do not envisage at this stage a thorough investigation of cult film; rather, I would like to place this pursuit on the film studies agenda so that it can be investigated further with more rigour. With the proliferation of ‘cult’ as a sometimes slippery term used within communicative discourse in the digital age, this pursuit is timely. It will not only contribute to a broader understanding of the historical/contextual variations of generic terms (following on from Altman’s important work, for example), but will also enrich understanding of a concept that is unique. ‘Cult’, for example, while often functioning as a generic term, is nevertheless unlike a number of other generic categories, chiefly through its primarily reception-based identity.
I would like to begin this pursuit, then, by outlining some broad semantic shifts that the concept of cult has undergone within film culture, and attempt to provide some explanations for some of these semantic transformations. This will entail, amongst other things, a consideration of the broader ways in which film has been valued within particular cultural contexts; the relation of ‘cult’ to other terms and their shifting statuses (such as fans and subcultures), and the impact of technologies upon leisure habits and communications.
Jamie Sexton is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at University of Aberystwyth, Wales. He is author of Alternative Film Culture in Inter-War Britain (Exeter UP, 2008), and editor (with Laura Mulvey) of Experimental British Television (Manchester UP, 2007) and Music, Sound and Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual (Edinburgh UP, 2007). His forthcoming publications include (with Ernest Mathijs) Cult Cinema: an Introduction (Blackwell) and Stranger than Paradise (Wallflower). He is also co-editor (with Ernest Mathijs) of the Wallflower book series, Cultographies.
Catherine Simpson (Macquarie University)
Ozploitation and Gaia’s Revenge
“If it moves shoot it, if it doesn’t chop it down”. Such was the prevailing mantra towards nature in Australia throughout the twentieth century. But alongside this colonising imperative of utter domination lies a land that so often refuses to succumb. In many Australian film texts, nature seems to be resilient and at times even vengeful towards those who don’t treat it with respect. Tara Brabazon claims that, the land “exhibits agency: its irregularities roll cars and its hidden crevices engulf picnicking schoolgirls” (Brabazon 2001: 154). This paper is going to look at the ways in which a few exploitation horror films have dealt with environmental issues. Most of which were released long before climate change emerged as a global issue. The focus will be on nature’s agency, more specifically the role of animals in these Ozploitation films.
We hear so much about extinction in debates around climate change but what about those animals that do the opposite? Who go feral and then return - bigger, hungrier and angrier - to wreak revenge on humans who may have done them injustice? Apart from Deb Verhoeven’s notable Sheep and the Australian Cinema (2006), little work has been done on the role of animals in Australian cinema. In particular, this paper examines animals gone feral - crocs, pigs and marsupial werewolves - and focuses on horror films, Long Weekend (Colin Eggleston, 1978) Razorback (Russell Mulcahy, 1984) Howling III: the Marsupials (Phillipe More, 1987) and Rogue (Greg McLean, 2007). What do these films have to teach us, and why might animals be, as Levi-Strauss once said, “good to think with”?
Catherine Simpson is a lecturer in media at Macquarie University, Sydney. She has organised film festivals in Turkey and Australia and writes on the cinema of both countries.
Matt Sini (University of Queensland)
“I Eat Green Berets For Breakfast”: Schwarzenegger, Cheesy Lines and the 80s Action Film
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s performances are often examined with recourse to his body, or “musculinity” as Yvonne Tasker calls it, wherein his muscular frame denotes a hyper-manliness that appeals to the action film’s largely male audience. Very little work, however, has looked at other aspects of Schwarzenegger’s performance. My intention is to focus on how his accent, inflection and awkward line delivery contribute to the pleasure of his films both as representative of the big-budget action genre, but also as examples of “so-bad-it’s-good” films. This paper will briefly examine three films from the 80s: Commando (Mark Lester 1985), The Running Man (Paul Michael Glaser 1987) and Predator (John McTiernan 1987). These were big-budget Hollywood action films, and gained considerable box-office success. I will investigate why Schwarzenegger’s bad acting and line delivery do not seem to hamper the reception of the films. My thesis is that Schwarzenegger’s poor acting ability and his heavy Austrian accent grants the audience the pleasure of recognising and revelling in the artificiality of the genre. The three films listed contain a vast amount of cheesy lines and puns, which was a common trope of American action films in the 80s. However, in most other instances of the action film the hero is usually an “All-American” male and he sounds like one. This paper will compare Schwarzenegger’s performance to other action film stars around the same time, as well as how the bad acting and cheesy lines from the films are still appreciated on Internet sites such as Youtube.
Matt Sini is currently undertaking his Master of Philosophy in Film Studies at the University of Queensland. His academic work focuses on genre and its intersections with queer cinema, but he has wide-ranging interests in both film studies and literature. He also writes short fiction, plays and the occasional book review.
Belinda Smaill (Monash University)
Attachments to and Teaching with Bad Texts
Part of the Teaching Bad Objects panel.
In a teaching context “bad” film or television is not the same as bad cinema in a disciplinary sense. What is deemed bad cinema in terms of the canon, or marginal cinema that troubles the boundaries of the discipline, is figured differently when films are considered as bad teaching and learning objects. “Badness” is located not in the scholarliness of the texts but in student perception of the texts. Without an understanding of disciplinarity or even the canon, students locate “badness” in a way that aligns with their own regimes of taste. Moreover, the teacher’s attachments to a good object that is disciplinary or ideological integrity can easily prefigure a bad learning object. The student who is easiest to teach is frequently the one who matches the teacher’s own taste formations and/or is open to grappling with new and challenging material. As the discussions that have appeared in prominent film journals around teaching “difficult films” (pornography, racist films or even experimental film) have demonstrated, difficult films are those that activate modes of affect, especially aversion, frustration or confusion. Yet, these films can also produce the most dramatic and successful learning outcomes. This paper argues that bad teaching objects are actually those that are met with indifference or boredom, not aversion. One of the most difficult teaching objects in this regard is the overtly political text, especially in the realm of non-fiction. Focusing on undergraduate television studies, this paper raises questions around the relationship between student subjectivity and the teacher’s attachment to particular television texts in the syllabus and in the classroom.
Belinda Smaill is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Monash University.
Richard Smith (University of Sydney)
Actions and Their Vicissitudes
This paper explores the ‘nervous activity’ of contemporary action film in relation to that of another period of nervousness, the 1980’s, when much of the action film now regarded in popular parlance and in common usage as The Action Film was made. How has the action body changed in the period from Conan the Barbarian and Big Wednesday to Contact, Speed and Sudden Death to Fight Club, Ironman and United 93, and is the Freudian theory of the body adequate to contemporary action?
In Camera Politica (1988) Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner argue that the rise of political conservatism in society and cinema in the 1980’s is marked by a set of anxieties around sexuality and gender but also by a notion of human nature that coincides with certain ‘survivalist’ concepts of the market. In the 1990’s the end of the Soviet Union gave rise to a paradoxical fear of the redundant body of national labour and security within the market economy. With the demise of a ‘financialist’ concept of the market there is room for speculation as to the future of action and the body. If the 1980’s called for ‘muscles’ and the 1990’s called for ‘brains’ what do the 2010’s call for?
Richard Smith teaches film in the Department of Art History and Film Studies, University of Sydney. His research interests include film aesthetics, American film and new European film. He is also currently developing a software application for the analysis of moving images.
Susan Smith (American University of Sharjah)
The White Masai: Exploring Cinematic myths of racial hypersexuality found in ‘Romance Tourism’ among Elderly White women and Maasai Men
After centuries of sexual exploitation of African women by male travelers, sex tourism in Africa has taken a new twist. Currently retirement age mzungu (white) “mamas” are traveling to the Eastern coasts of Kenya and Tanzania to engage in what some refer to as “romance tourism” and others call “Mandingo - jungle love” with young Maasai men. “Mandingo” love is a reference to racial hypersexuality that is hinted at in early captivity novels, explicitly expressed in contemporary historical romance novels, exploited in 1970’s Blaxploitation (portmanteau of black and exploitation) films (Mandingo, 1975) and further idealized by contemporary romance films such as The White Masai (2008). These “romance traveling” films continue to perpetuate racial myths about native men. For example the books, Waiting to Exhale (1992) and How Stella Got her Groove Back (1998) have both been made into films that are so widely popular that today white women engaging in sex tourism in Jamaica are often affectionately called “Stellas” by the “native” beach boys. The Swiss film, The White Masai (2008), adapted from an autobiographical novel by Corrine Hofmann, continues this time-honored tradition by flaunting stereotypical images and myths of racial hypersexuality about Maasai men. This paper explores the connection between cinematic stereotypical images and racial hypersexuality in The White Masai and further uncovers “white gendered and economic power” in the “romancing” of the Maasai by elderly white women looking for love in Kenya.
Susan Smith is an Assistant Professor at the American University of Sharjah, UAE, in the Mass Communication Department and teaches media literacy, film and documentary theory, as well as video production and editing. As a documentary producer, Smith’s current focus is observing colliding cultures such as Indigenous groups while they negotiate traditions and globalization. Producing over thirty documentaries such as Hollywood Dreamin’, a 2007 Al Jazeera English broadcast, Smith’s documentaries include: Sweating Indian Style which toured with the 2007 Pan-American Unrest Traveling School to 30 cities in the Americas. Her current written publications include “Set jetting in Wadi Rum — Arabian Nights or Nostalgia for Imperialism?” in Words and Images by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
Penny Spirou (Macquarie University)
El Cantante (2006): Bad Aesthetic Leading to Poor Cultural Value in the Audio-Visual Representation of Hector Lavoe
Stemming from the long tradition of biographical writing, cinema has communicated history by means of re-enactments of the lives of significant public figures through time. The musical biopic in particular is a biographical film that focuses on individuals such as musicians, composers, singers and performer/entertainers and has had resurgence in contemporary cinema since 2000 with films such as Walk the Line (2005), Ray (2004), De-Lovely (2004), I’m Not There (2007) and Beyond the Sea (2004). Biopics, such as those previously mentioned, are released to pay homage or highlight the importance of the individual and his/her impact on music/culture.
El Cantante (2006) is a contemporary musical biopic that represents the life story of Puerto Rican singer Hector Lavoe from the 1960s through to his untimely death in 1993. The film is narrated from the perspective of Lavoe’s wife Puchi (Nilda Georgina Perez) which, according to the film, is based on an actual interview with Puchi after Lavoe’s death. This paper argues that El Cantante provides a bad aesthetic in representing the life of Hector Lavoe through the translation of his music on screen for an English speaking audience and also in the narration and visual representation of his life. Additionally, the film’s star appeal, through the casting of Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez in the lead roles also prevents the film viewer to entirely comprehend the impact that Lavoe had in shaping Latin American music and culture.
Penny Spirou is currently a PhD Candidate at Macquarie University, Sydney, in the Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies. Tutoring in film and music studies at Macquarie, research interests include the biographical film, popular film studies and music biography.
Anthony Springford (AUT)
Part of the Margins of B panel.
Guillermo del Toro weaves anti-fascist narratives into films with an aesthetic of fascism and cruelty (including a fascination with militaristic uniforms and attitudes), and an approach that combines ‘mainstream,’ ‘b-movie’ and ‘art-movie’ tropes. The irresolution of Del Toro’s political narratives is reflected in the stylistic ambiguity and humour of the B-movie.
Dr Anthony Springford is an artist and independent scholar. His practice combines painting and theoretical research with a particular interest in anti-idealist aesthetics and the legacies of realist and modernist painting
Jane Stadler (University of Queensland)
Visceral Cinema: Phenomenology and Affect in Kinaesthetic Martial Arts Movies
Cult film director Takashi Miike’s hybrid homage Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) and Quentin Tarantino’s kick-ass Kill Bill (Vol. 1, 2003 and Vol. 2, 2004) can be critiqued in terms of derivativeness, overstated affect, and a lack of psychological and thematic complexity – characteristics which are associated with the ‘bad cinema’ genres these filmmakers emulate and valorise. I aim to investigate how the celebration of what film theorists Linda Williams and David Bordwell term ‘body genres’ and ‘motion emotion’ gives rise to an eye-popping, gut-roiling affective cinematic experience. Indeed, the classification of texts as ‘bad film’ is often related to their exaggerated affective qualities and the cultural devaluation of emotion and bodily sensation by comparison with aesthetic and intellectual engagement. Cinematic viscerality is often theorised using a Deleuzian approach, as in Paul Gormley’s (2005) The New Brutality Film and Steven Shaviro’s (1993) The Cinematic Body. This paper analyses Sukiyaki Western Django and Kill Bill in terms of a phenomenology of affect, contending the films deploy a kinetic, visceral cinematic aesthetic that is central to their meaning and to the relationship between the audience and the screen. By developing and applying Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenological methodology, these films can be interpreted as generating an affective, embodied relationship with screen characters, thereby offering the kinaesthetic charge that is capable of making ‘bad cinema’ a great experience.
Jane Stadler is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies and Convenor of the Film and Television Studies Major at the University of Queensland. Her research uses a phenomenological approach to screen studies to investigate the relationship between media, identity and identification, and associated issues concerning the role of the media in social change. She is author of Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film and Ethics, and co-author of Media and Society and Screen Media.
Mark Steven (University of Sydney)
Their Time has Come: Bad Cinema Nerds as Late-Capitalist Paradigm
In the final scene of Jeff Kanew’s Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Gilbert delivers a rousing speech in which he proudly announces that he is a nerd. “All our lives we’ve been laughed at,” he cries. “Why? Because we’re smart? Because we look different? Well, we’re not.” However, the film itself belies such an assertion. Instead of likeness, this example of “bad cinema” depicts gawky though prodigiously intelligent nerds who triumph over their vacuous yet strapping aggressors, “the jocks”. Following Fredric Jameson’s argument that works of mass culture express the social anxieties, hopes, ideological antinomies, and fantasies held by their audiences, it is my contention that Nerds reflects the evolution of late capitalism with ample prescience. Epitomized by this hyperbolic depiction of nerds and jocks is a twenty and twenty-first century conflict between brains and brawn that has played out in U.S. politics and culture. Though Nerds invites an understanding of these ideologies as competing - especially in its use of stock characters typical of “bad cinema” - I consider the film itself as a marker of these two ideologies’ union. Why does this film favor nerds over jocks? How do the caricatures in this film relate to U.S. culture more broadly? What cultural lessons might be drawn from this film and how do these lessons relate to an idea of “bad cinema”? Taking these questions as points of departure, this paper combines textual analysis with cultural theory and presents a reading of Nerds that considers this bad film in the context of late-capitalism.
Mark Steven is a student at the University of Sydney where he completed joint-Honours in English and Cultural Studies and is about to commence a PhD in Cultural Studies. While his research is primarily located in the field of “critical theory” and focuses on the intersects of philosophy and the political and economic sciences, he has also delivered conference papers and has forthcoming publications on hypermedia, fictocriticism, apocalypticism, Firefly, and the relationship between cephalopoda and literature. Like Gilbert, he identifies as a nerd.
Kirsten Stevens (Monash University)
Snakes on a Plane: How Cyberspace Created a Monster
In September 2005, New Line Cinema wrapped principal photography for the PG-13 film they hoped to release as Pacific Air Flight 121. In August 2006 following a cyberspace phenomenon, five additional days of shooting and a new MPAA R rating, New Line released Snakes On A Plane.
While audience participation and internet fandom are far from uncommon phenomenons in regards to paracinema, cult or badfilm; the experience of exploitation horror film Snakes on a Plane can be understood as marking an interesting evolution in interactive film. Long before any plot points, spoilers or leaked footage made their way onto the internet; cyberspace had rallied behind the imagery of the film’s title. Based solely on the notion of poisonous snakes on an aircraft a mass of fan art, Fanfic, spoof tailors, short films, music tracks, blogs, and posters flooded forums, video sharing sites and personal web spaces, creating more than just an ironic interest in what was hoped to be the worst film of all time… in a good way.
In my paper I will investigate the role of the internet in both valorising paracinema and adding to its propagation and creation. I will examine through the experience of Snakes on a Plane how the authorised culture, namely Hollywood’s New Line Cinema, capitalised on the interest and fandom generated within the paracinematic and unofficial readings of the film, even before it received its final cut.
Kirsten Stevens is a PhD candidate with the Film and Television Studies at Monash University. Kirsten is currently completing work on her thesis focussing on the availability and exhibition practices for art film within local Australian exhibition environments. Within her research she will be paying particular attention to the roles of art house and specialty cinemas, film festivals, government bodies and independent organisations in providing Australian audiences with access to non-mainstream film.
Tom Steward (University of Warwick, UK)
B for Bruckheimer: The authorial value of “Jerry Bruckheimer Television”
This paper analyses American television drama series considered ‘bad’ for pursuing commercial success and promoting formulised package narratives from an authorial perspective, re-visiting these characteristics as evidence of aesthetic coherence over an expanding sets of texts and a distinctive approach to audio-visual style. I examine television made by producer Jerry Bruckheimer, namely the CSI franchise and Without a Trace. My contention is that Bruckheimer’s commercial strategies for greater domination of the television market motivate aesthetic choices and directorial techniques that intersect throughout his various series and franchises, marrying together the notion of the programme as an economic mechanism and part of an authorial brand. The duality of Bruckheimer’s televisual approach is evident in his use of repetition and uniformity to homogenise the product so that it serves as brand guarantee as well as increasing awareness of an authorial consciousness grouping his programming. I intend to show how paradigms of authorial style are not restricted to boutique television such as _The Wire _but also function in everyday generic procedural televisions which, although forsaking high art for more acquisitive motives, are by no means anonymous. I conclude arguing that we don’t have to elevate television to a level of art and cultural value in order to apply relevant authorship criteria. I attempt to free authorship theory from a habitualised correspondence with evaluation and social taste by demonstrating its role in conceptualising popular US television formats designed for mass-reproduction and its application to a producer whose work has been seen as essentially artless.
I am in the final year of a PHD in Television Studies at Warwick University (Thesis: ‘Authorship and Creativity in American Television Drama’) where I previously achieved an MA with Distinction in Film and Television Studies. I am the tutor for the Film/Television Department’s module ‘Television and Audio-Visual Cultures’. During my PHD, I taught several weeks of the department’s ‘Basic TV’ module and gave an inter-disciplinary lecture for the ‘Hollywood Cinema’ module. I have taught Warwick students from several disciplines including German Studies. I belong to the Midlands Television Research Group and assistant-edited articles they recently contributed to Cinema Journal.
Deborah Thomas (University of Queensland)
Tarantino’s Two-Thumbs up: ‘Ozploitation’ and the Reframing of the Aussie Genre film
In recent months interest has been reignited in a largely overlooked series of Australian genre films produced in the seventies and eighties, as the result of the release of a documentary entitled Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild Untold Story of Ozploitation (2007), written and directed by Mark Hartley. While encompassing a number of genre categories, their relatively low budgets, frequently lurid subject matter and sensational aesthetics have located these films in the rather sprawling, amorphous category of the exploitation cinema. This paper examines the various implications and manifestations that have accompanied this shift in the marketing and consumption of these films in and outside of Australia. My discussion will consider the way in which credibility for the documentary’s arguments are forged by the endorsement of their most high profile ‘fan’, that of celebrity auteur Quentin Tarantino. Additional possibilities for the marketing of these diverse set of films have also been opened up by their ‘rebranding’ under the catch-all of ‘Ozploitation’ which is emblematic of the way in which paracinematic discourse in cult /exploitation cinema is linked to the conceptual fetishism of the term itself. This is evidenced by Ozploitation’s ‘outing’ at a number of high profile film festivals, and the release of DVD box sets marketed under this label. I shall also consider the way Ozploitation renegotiates the patterns of cultural transfer in relation to Australian cinema by displacing concerns with identity and difference constituted by nationalist interests to an emphasis on Australia’s contribution to global forms of filmmaking.
Deborah J. Thomas lectures and tutors in Film, Television and Media Studies in the English, Media and Art History Department at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. She is currently in her final months of a PhD entitled “Youth, Irony and Cinematic Affect in Contemporary American Smart Cinema.”
Darren Tofts (Swinburne University of Technology)
“In my time of dying: the premature death of a film classic”
Why does virtually everyone from music critics to Thomastown bogans hate The Song Remains the Same? Conceived and designed to be the ultimate rock concert film, it has festered since its theatrical release in 1976 as the bete noir of the Zeppelin legend, pilloried for its inflated egotism, shoddy concert footage and laughable “fantasy sequences”. The film was virtually pronounced dead the minute it was premiered to the world in New York City in 1976.
But why? Is this film really so bad? This paper will critically explore the aura of negativity surrounding the film in the context of Led Zeppelin’s place and stature within contemporary culture; a stature notably reinforced by their “reunion” in London in 2007. It will also consider the recent remastering of the film by Jimmy Page in the context of the “director’s cut” genre of cinema. In this it will pursue the question: does everything have to be in surround sound?
Darren Tofts is Associate Professor in Media and Communications, Swinburne University of Technology.
Rachel Torbett (Monash University)
Desiring Circles, Being Cracked: Werner Herzog and a romantic exigency
Using Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s book as a starting point, this paper will examine Werner Herzog’s films in relation to “The Literary Absolute.” Herzog is obsessed with circles, but Herzog’s circles are not Hegelian circles. Never ‘circles of circles,’ never systematically closed, or complete: Herzog’s circles resist Idealism, or in other words – they always fail. They fail romantically, ironically, and almost always, gloriously. To be trite: his films are good because they’re bad. But perhaps there is something quite honourable at stake in this désœuvrement – a different kind of cinema, a French Herzog, and a dancing chicken, all throwing “the era of the Subject” into question.
Rachel Torbett is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University.
Beth Toren (West Virginia University)
Jäger Shots: Quentin Tarantino Exploits B-Movies in Death Proof (2007)
This paper explores B-Movie references in Death Proof (2007) by investigating the influence of slasher films, particularly Texas Chainsaw Massacre parts one and two (1974 - 1986) and through an analysis of Abernathy as a final girl. It compares Abernathy to the archetypal final girl, Laurie Strode in Halloween (1978). This paper also compares acts one and two of the movies to unpack standard B-movie tropes. For example, in act one of Death Proof specific techniques make it look and feel like an early-Seventies release: the stunts, primitive special effects, film texture, abrupt editing and the traditional drinking and drugging, sexually promiscuous victims. In act two, the film quality improves, the edits are clean, and the would-be victims are all sober film industry professionals, two of them in the same profession as the killer. The paper compares and shows similarities between the two acts and Seventies-to-Eighties slashers. For example, in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, the final girl becomes the chainsaw wielding maniac. In Death Proof, Stuntman Mike’s chosen victims chase him down and finally, Abernathy, who only holds hands with her boyfriend, deals him the final deathblow. The film also exemplifies a few B-movie clichés of its own: its box office failure, poor critical reception, and the cult-like status of the DVD release.
Beth Toren is the Web Services Librarian and a Reference Librarian at West Virginia University. She has a BFA in Theatre, an MA in English, and an MS in Library Science. She is a lifelong film enthusiast who co-developed a successful online film course at WVU called Film and Media Literacy that emphasizes film criticism and genres. Modules she developed for the course include Slasher Films, Blaxploitation, the Films of Quentin Tarantino, and Film Adaptations of Graphic Novels. She writes and presents exciting assignments for her film course along with delivering dynamic presentations at professional library conferences. _
Charles R H Tutton (Monash University)
Incredulous and Dumb: The Manchild and his computer in fantasy cinema
The advent of computer imaging software has allowed for new opportunities and methods for the 21st century filmmaker, especially in terms of verisimilitude; but in the world of the unreal, verisimilitude can become paradoxical and confusing. Can computers really help the storyteller to appropriately convince the spectator when and how to believe in the unbelievable?
Charles Tutton is a PhD candidate in Film and Television Studies at Monash University.
Julia Vassilieva (Monash University)
Bad Resonance and Eternal Wonder of Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que viva México!
Sergei Eisenstein’s heritage is traditionally associated with the highest cinematic achievements of the twentieth century. Yet the fate of his unfinished project ¡Que viva México! belongs - paradoxically - to the problematics of bad cinema. Since Eisenstein became separated with his footage filmed in Mexico in 1932 never to see it again, speculations among the film scholars regarding how exactly the film would have looked , sounded and felt had Eisenstein had an opportunity to finish his work have never stopped, just as numerous attempts by various directors in different countries and continents to edit the footage . From exotic take under the title Thunder over Mexico (1933) by the Hollywood producer Sol Lesser, the maker of Tarzan films, to Grigorii Alexandrov’s arrangements in accordance with the aesthetics of socialist realism made in 1979, from Mary Seaton travelodge like version Time in the Sun (1939) to Oleg Kovalov’s postmodern Sergei Eisenstein: Mexican Fantasy released in 1998 each of the versions claimed to “get as close to Eisenstein’s vision as possible” and each of them was doomed to fail – almost from the inception inevitably falling short of Eisenstein’s genius vision. As such each of ¡Que viva México! versions was judged as yet another example of bad, unsuccessful , inaccurate reading and reconstruction of the unattainable but allegedly perfect vision of Eisenstein. By the same token none of them has ever been considered and acknowledged in its own right – in terms of what it reveals, rather than lacks. Reversing this historical trend I approach multiple versions of ¡Que viva México! as a unique methodological opportunity offering material testimonies of how values and readings shift and mutate through time, how judgments of taste and beauty are intertwined with changing ideologies and politics, how death of the author ushers in not the unlimited freedom to read and interpret his texts but historically specific and constrained ways of engaging with his vision, in other words how the powerful aura surrounding Eisenstein’s Mexican project generates both resonance and wonder throughout time.
Julia Vassilieva has a background in cultural studies, philosophy and psychology. She was educated in Russia and Australia. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Moscow State University and Professional Doctorate from Swinburne University. She is currently finishing her PhD at the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies and teaches at Film and Television Studies at Monash University. Her research interests include early and contemporary Russian cinema, Russian art criticism, and in particular – theory and practice of Sergei Eisenstein. She is an author of a number of articles in these areas and is currently working as an editor of Eisenstein’s volume in the Reading with Filmmakers series by Caboose Press.
Constantine Verevis (Monash University)
BADaptation
Based on the notorious, faux pornographic novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, Candy (Christian Marquand, USA/Italy/France, 1968) is an oddity from the counter-cultural past. Adopting the picaresque form of its namesake Candide, the film tells of the variously humorous and frightening sexual encounters of seventeen year-old ingénue, Candy (Ewa Aulin), while at the same time debunking the then current myths of celebrity authorship, religious dogma, aggressive militarism, scientific positivism, and counter-cultural mysticism. By no means a low-budget, exploitation film, Candy involved several production companies and a host of international talent, including a screenplay by Buck Henry, opening and closing sequences by Douglas Trumbull, title and other music by The Byrds and Steppenwolf, and cameos by Charles Aznavour, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, James Coburn, John Huston, Walter Matthau, and Ringo Starr. In the context of a brand of film (adaptation) studies that routinely employs a rhetoric of betrayal and degradation – of ‘infidelity’ to some idealized original – the promotional material (see Movie News, March 1970) for Marquand’s adaptation (fortuitously) inquires: ‘is Candy faithful?’ The quick retort: ‘only to the book!’ This paper looks to the film example of Candy to inquire into the quality and value of adaptations (and film adaptation studies), and to ask the question: are all adaptations (inherently) bad?
Constantine Verevis is Head of Film and Television Studies at Monash University. He is author of Film Remakes (Edinburgh UP, 2006) and co-editor of Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (SUNY P, 2009).
Roslyn Walker (VCA)
A Place for ‘Ozploitation’
When Mark Hartley invited Richard Franklin, Director of Psycho II (1983), Roadgames (1981) and Patrick (1978) to present a lecture in the 1980’s, he discovered little mention of Richard’s major contribution to Australian cinema in the texts of the day.
Twenty years later Mark sets the record straight, writing the feature documentary Not Quite Hollywood (2008) – celebrating Australian genre films of the 70’s and 80’s, and featuring the driven auteurs and actors who brought these films to explosive life.
Why has it taken so long to recognise the flip side to the cultural explosion that gave us Picnic at Hanging Rock _(1975) and _My Brilliant Career _(1979)? How did _Stork (1971), The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), Alvin Purple (1973), Patrick (1978), Mad Max (1979) and Stone (1974) help forge the re-emergence of the Australian Film Industry in the 70’s?
This paper examines Australian filmmakers who made their own rules. It explores the political and practical challenges faced by practitioners – making these films thirty years ago – and recovering that history today, by the Not Quite Hollywood team.
Roslyn Walker is Lecturer in Producing at VCA Film and Television, The University of Melbourne. Roslyn’s credits include Line-producer Not Quite Hollywood (2008), Co-producer Peaches (2004) and Producer Baby Bath Massacre (1994) and Portrait (2001). Roslyn was Manager of Film Victoria 1998-2002, is Victorian Chapter Head for SPAA and member of the Victorian Working Party.
Guest Speaker - Craig Griffin
Craig started in the industry as a runner on John Lamond’s Sky Pirates (1986) and then working on Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Jenny Kissed Me (1986). Craig is a Television Commercials Producer for The Director’s Group. He engineered the face off between ‘ozploitation’ experts Mark Hartley and Quentin Tarantino which kickstarted the production of Not Quite Hollywood (2008).
Gregory Wee Lik Hoo (Swinburne University of Technology)
The Iban VCD Movies: Bad but Necessary
The Ibans are the major indigenous group in Sarawak. Their race is one with a history that stretches back into the days of head hunting. Today, the many Iban communities still reside in their longhouses along the river banks which have become their main mode of transportation. Recent socio-economic development has seen the migration of the Ibans to the cities in search of work to earn a living.
In their free time, music, particularly Iban songs, form a big part of their leisure. This has created a small but economically viable music, karaoke and VCD movie enterprise which remains localised today. The VCD movies are largely internally produced by the recording companies, usually with stories adapted and translated from Malay scripts, and starring the recording artistes. Although shot economically with very basic shot direction, typical storylines & bad acting, these movies have been well received by the Iban community.
This paper takes a first look at this phenomenon to understand the nature of these movies. It will also analyse the narratives and the visual aesthetics and discuss them in relation to what can constitute an Iban movie and their identity in films within Malaysia.
Gregory Wee lectures at Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus. He has taught film for 11 years and was previously attached to Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. He is currently pursuing his PhD studies on Film Funding in the Context of National Cinema. His research interests include Malaysian cinema, national cinema, identity, the new independent Malaysian filmmakers, film funding, and film distribution and exhibition in Malaysia.
Walter Wells (California State University)
I Was a Very Strange Child: Michael Moore and the Aesthetics of Pseudo-Documentary
Can art and propaganda cohabit in cinema (in any narrative genre, for that matter)? Or does the latter necessarily nullify the former? While propaganda’s motives and its preoccupations are usually felt inimical to aesthetic achievement, satire may prove the one generic realm in which the right hands, a gifted eye, and a nuanced sensibility can make art and propaganda compatible.
Exploring the films of Michael Moore (with a time-efficient emphasis on the first of them, Roger and Me), the paper will provide both an analytic rubric for film propaganda and a brief theory of satire. It then examines the tensions between the satirical genre and Moore’s provocative (though mislabeled) “documentaries.” The paper aims to determine whether these films – notwithstanding either the entertainment or the controversies they engender - constitute bad cinema?
“I was a very strange child” are the first words spoken in the first of Moore’s theatrical releases. The question at hand regards the extent to which —and the ways in which— the films (and Moore’s several television series) now constitute a twenty-year procession of “strange children.”
Wells taught American literature, political fiction, interdisciplinary rhetoric, and film propaganda for 31 years at the California State University, Dominguez Hills; and was Rhodes Scholar advisor and American Studies chairman there. He has written Tycoons and Locusts: Hollywood Fiction of the 1930s, Mark Twain’s Guide to Backgrounds in American Literature, “Between Two Worlds: Waugh and Huxley in California,” and, most recently, Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper. He has also written frequently for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and is currently at work on a book called Telling It Slant, on bias and propaganda in film.
Amy West (University of Auckland)
How Clean is Your TV?: Reality Television and the Power of Dirt
Part of the D for Dirt(y) TV panel.
In 1983, John Hartley suggested that “if TV has a distinctive feature, it is that it is a ‘dirty’ category”. In this article, Hartley discusses ‘dirt’ as the ambiguation of an otherwise ‘clean’ binary pair. The more discordant this effect, the more preposterous the confusion of categories appears to be, and the more ‘power’ such ‘dirt’ will produce. For Hartley, television’s dirt, and the power it manifests, is thus an affect of its scandalous aggravation of properly defined categories of being.
In the same way, material dirt, long understood as “matter out of place”, is the result of an unauthorised border crossing: the encroachment of weeds in a garden, the expulsion or ejaculation of bodily waste, the inadvertent transfer of food from plate to floor. In this way, it is productive to consider the extent to which the relationship between televisual dirt as a metaphor and the material manifestation of dirt on screen may be far from arbitrary. Rather, the conceptual frameworks by which dirt is both understood and produced – both as a metaphor and as material detritus – are grounded in cultural anxieties as to the difficulty of fixing any one thing in its place, a problem which may speak to television itself.
With reference to the domestic management reality series How Clean is Your House?, this paper proposes an investigation of reality programming as a pre-eminent and productive example of television’s inherent dirtiness.
Amy West is currently employed as a lecturer in television and media studies in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at The University of Auckland. Her PhD thesis investigated strategies of intimacy and immediacy in New Zealand’s reality programming, and she has published from this thesis on televisual temporality, handy-cam aesthetics and historical re-enactment. Her ongoing research interests are centred upon popular television and media, settler theories, history and preservation, waste, ruins and dirt!
Deane Williams (Monash University)
Bad Boys: Figures of Loss and Displacement in the films of Sean Penn
With a particular focus on The Indian Runner (1991) and The Crossing Guard (1995), with some pointers to The Pledge (2001) and Into the Wild (2007), this paper will consider the ways Sean Penns’ directorial works construct “bad” men as vernacular, localised figures in relation to the forces of US national history. Both Frank Roberts (Viggo Mortensen) and Freddy Gale (Jack Nicholson) are characters who, as much as anything, are constructed in relation to and as a means of understanding the intersections between local stories and relations and the formidable forces of modernity, often understood as national history.
Deane Williams is Senior Lecturer, Film and Television Studies, Monash University. His books include Australian Post-War Documentary Film: An Arc of Mirrors (Intellect 2008) and, with Brian McFarlane, Michael Winterbottom (Manchester 2009).
Scott Wilson (University of Auckland)
Blowing Chunks, Punishing Spunks, Humiliating Hunks: Abjection as Discipline and Entertainment
Part of the D for Dirt(y) TV panel.
Whilst the hit NBC reality television show Fear Factor resembles other examples of the genre, combining a series of tasks (or ‘stunts’) within a game-show-oriented format, the extent to which it works to generate specific kinds of contestant and spectatorial responses as a result of these stunts offers a point of departure. The show’s most notorious stunts are those involving the consumption of a variety of, to Western stomachs, disgusting foodstuffs (mammal entrails and offal, dried insects, raw animal products and so forth), wherein contestants are rewarded for the ingestion of such material, and penalised for vomiting it up again. This paper considers the motivations for Fear Factor’s use of abjection and examines the ways in which the use of abject material functions both as a way of punishing or humiliating the contestants, and, crucially, of delighting the audience. This disciplinary activity would seem to offer another way to consider the role abjection plays in constituting the subject; a situation in which abjection, a place where “meaning collapses”, functions also as a disciplinary activity committed to the generation of knowledge. Thus, this paper considers the function of abjection in reality programming in relation to discipline, to spectatorial pleasure and therefore to broader hegemonic structures.
Scott Wilson is senior lecturer in critical theory and media studies at the Unitec School of Performing and Screen Arts, in Auckland. Scott recently completed a PhD on discipline and resistance within the work of David Cronenberg and has published on subjects as diverse as road safety advertising in New Zealand and the role of nostalgia in record sleeves. Scott’s current research explores the role and function of desire in the material cultural practices and hermeneutic activities of fans and collectors.
See also the paper co-presented by Scott Wilson and Hester Joyce.
Suzanne Woodward (University of Auckland)
“Moral Turpentine” - The Recuperation of Hairspray
Abstract to come.
Alan Wright (University of Canterbury)
Vigilante Fury: The Art and Politics of Ritchie Venus
Michael Braithwaite, aka Ritchie Venus, is an accountant and Elvis impersonator who has been making music and films in Christchurch New Zealand for over thirty years. His band, Richie Venus and the Blue Beetles, and his early films, such as Jaws of Death, Vigilante Fury and Off On a Comet, have acquired legendary status for an appreciative local audience. A feature film, The Ballad of Richie Venus, has been made in homage to his work.
Ritchie’s films draw their plot, style, and iconography from the heyday of American B Movies. He uses the generic conventions of film noir, 50’s sci-fi and the western as the aesthetic basis for the creation of his own imaginary cinematic universe. Rather than situate his work within the cultural confines of retro fashion, outsider art, or maverick underground filmmaking, I want to explore how Ritchie treats the form of the B movie as a prism for a transfigured vision of place and time: provincial Christchurch in the early 1980’s (the era of Muldoonism, punk rock and the Springbok tour). The footage of forsaken public parks at five in the afternoon, flat wide streets, skinny young men, and knife fights on New Brighton beach under the gaze of a blinding sun, possess a raw beauty and magical quality rarely attained in the history of New Zealand cinema! I want to claim, with some urgency, given that New Zealand has resoundingly elected a National Prime Minister who has no recollection of what he did or thought during the Springbok Tour, that, despite their right wing views, the films of Ritchie Venus are a timely reminder that History cannot be whitewashed so easily. In his case, the B aesthetic carries a moral and political charge.
Alan Wright is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. His essay “Of Fish and Film” appears in the most recent issue of Rouge. He has also published articles on Godard, Kluge, Tarkovsy, Andre Bazin and Annie Goldson. His film Scuppered is also available.
Can Yalcinkaya (Macquarie University)
Exorcising the Western Influence: Turkish Horror Cinema
Turkey’s film industry between the 1950s and 1980s depended mostly on films of a more commercial nature. Although melodrama was the mode of the majority of films produced in that era, studios also invested in hundreds of low budget action, historical, comic book, western, erotic, science fiction and fantasy films. Apart from a few disperse examples, horror remained a neglected genre in Turkish cinema. Most horror films made during that time were either adaptations of Western horror films, such as Dracula and Exorcist, or parodies, and they were not particularly well received when they were released. Film critics who wrote on the absence of horror films agreed that if a horror film made use of local elements, it would do well with audiences. The 2000s have witnessed a boom in the production of original horror films in Turkey. Mostly inspired by elements from Turkish/Islamic and Eastern culture, these films have been successful in drawing Turkish audiences to movie theatres; however, whether they have been successful in scaring them is another story. This paper aims to look at the history of (or lack thereof) horror films in Turkey and analyse the reasons behind the recent boom.
Can T. Yalcinkaya is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Macquarie University. His research is concerned with the changing facets of melancholy in the history of Turkish popular culture, particularly in film and music. He has an interest in cultural theory, cultural history, genres in cinema, humour and comics studies. He has published a number of refereed and non-refereed articles on humour, comics and cinema in Turkish language periodicals and books. _
Eric Yu (National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan)
Feel my Pain and Perish: The Aesthetics and Moral Challenges of the Grudge Cycle
The Grudge cycle directed by Takashi Shimizu began with 2 direct-to-video releases. Jay McRoy has noted a curious hybridity in the Grudge films: the appropriation of visual tropes from the US slasher sub-genre while presenting a deep sense of social disorientation rooted in Japanese society. To this one may add a fascinating mix of horrors related to modern technologies with those alluding to something archaic and bodily. What makes such a cycle originating from V-cinema, persistent in its “bad taste” in the macabre, “travel” so well into mainstream cinema? Akin to slasher films but lacking the hope of resistance embodied by the “final girl,” is the Grudge short of any positive cultural values?
This paper argues that Shimizu’s art, “minimalist” in its representation of violence and ambivalent about what it is that the ghost wants, does elevate him from the cruder kinds of gory horror. Drawing on Heidegger’s and Levinas’s analyses of death, I wish to show, despite its apparent pessimism, the Grudge cycle addresses the (im)possibilities afforded by the liminal state of being-toward-death. Most intriguingly, as the ghosts were all originally helpless victims of violence, they sometimes challenge their victims with the frightening demand of “feel my pain and perish,” which dramatically questions Levinas’s notion of our infinite responsibility for the Other. The greatest terror is thus not that of mere death but a profound moral dread of Dasein in its naked confrontation with a “Face” that demands much more than conventional sympathy, stretching moral sentiments to the extremes. Some fundamental ethical questions, if surprisingly, will be found in a rereading of this seemingly “trashy” horror cycle.
Dr. Eric K.W. Yu is an associate professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan. He was previously the director of the NCTU Film Studies Center and was also the founding editor of the e-journal Interstice. His research interests include Gothic fiction, travel writings, film, and urban spatial practices. He is currently working on a book on popular film genres.
Danni Zuvela (Griffith University)
Witness the Shitness: Australian Avant-Garde Film and Kitsch
Australian avant-garde film has one foot firmly planted in the rarified atmosphere of ‘fine art film’. However, there is another side to this sprawling, heterogenous field: a subversive, ‘low’, and kitsch impulse, which has manifested in film works and performances since the 1960s. I will argue that far from being opposed or contradictory forces, these two impulses, which have been present since the birth of avant-garde cinema, cooperate to produce not just some of the most important works of Australian avant-garde cinema, but also its audiences, informing and subtly - or not so subtly - framing the vibrant living culture of experimental film today.
Panel: Teaching Bad Objects
While our US colleagues continue to debate the ramifications of opening the Society for Cinema Studies to first television and then new media, here in Australia there is no professional association that embraces the discipline of film studies as a whole. As a result, there is no designated forum for discussing—and arguing for—the place and future of the discipline in the University and in the Humanities. In this panel we will look at some of the issues film studies programs are confronting in Australian universities today, focusing on some of the factors that are shaping the film studies syllabus—from the ways that the use of film in secondary education impacts on students’ relations to tertiary film studies, to ideas of what constitutes a “good” teaching text, to the impact of course delivery modes on the film studies syllabus.
This session will be divided into two parts. In the first section we will present 3 short papers that table issues around teaching “bad” or “unruly” objects in film studies today. The second part of the session will be devoted to an open floor—and recorded—discussion around some of the pedagogical and disciplinary issues in teaching film studies today. Taking advantage of this conference’s concern with the discipline and its margins and its assembling of film studies academics from across the country and abroad, this panel will provide a forum for discussing issues facing the teaching and shape of the film studies syllabus today.
Papers:
Panel: Margins of B: del Toro, Reydadas, Miike
In the context of the conference theme, “bad feelings and affects,” we are proposing a panel of three papers, each investigating the work of a different director — Guillermo del Toro, Carlos Reygadas, and Takeshi Miike. We will argue that these directors use tactics reminiscent of B-movie making, such as ‘disturbing’ humour, excessive violence and ‘pornographic’ sex to produce a distancing effect for the viewer. This distancing produces awareness of the breaks and gaps in editing and narrative, offering a space for conceptual reflection by the viewer.
Papers:
Panel: D for Dirt(y) TV
Given the prevalence of metaphors of dirt applied to television as a conduit for cultural trash, it may be construed that all TV is bad TV. If television itself is somehow tainted in this way, somehow dirty before it even begins, it seems useful to consider the manifestation of actual, material dirt as it appears in television programming.
Within a myriad of genres which could be defined as especially dirty (the scandal-mongering soap opera, the dirt-digging tabloid news format, the trash-talking talk show), it is reality television which realises the representation of dirt most fully, most literally and without apology. Here, dirt and waste are not only articulated, interrogated and rendered spectacular; they are relished for their actuality, and reified as markers of the real. Unwanted body fat, household grime, building detritus, garden waste and bodily emissions of all kinds are held up for scrutiny by the reality television camera as they show audiences that the homes and bodies under inspection are really real.
In succession, panel papers will focus on reality programmes about the dirty house, the abject body, and the muddy office, in order to situate these instances of dirt on TV within broader considerations of television as a dirty medium.
Papers: