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B for Bad Cinema Plus General Articles COLLOQUY text theory critique issue 18, december 2009 B for Bad Cinema guest edited by Julia Vassilieva and Claire Perkins plus General Articles Editorial Committee: Editorial Board: Geoff Berry Bill Ashcroft David Blencowe Andrew Benjamin Timothy Chandler Andriana Cavarero Rachel Funari Joy Damousi David Lane Alex Düttmann Adam Lodders Jürgen Fohrmann Blair MacDonald Sneja Gunew Barbara Mattar Kevin Hart Diane Molloy Susan K. Martin Eleonora Morelli Steven Muecke Elyse Rider Paul Patton Catherine Ryan Georg Stanitzek Tanya Serisier Terry Threadgold Robert Stilwell Rachel Torbett Julia Vassilieva Advisory Board: Axel Fliethmann Brett Hutchins Alison Ross COLLOQUY text theory critique 18 (2009). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue18.pdf ISSN: 13259490 Issue 18, December 2009 Editorial 3 B FOR BAD CINEMA Introduction: B for Bad Cinema Julia Vassilieva and Claire Perkins 5 Excremental Ecstasy, Divine Defecation and Revolting Reception: Configuring a Scatological Gaze in Trash Filmmaking Zoe Gross 16 “They don’t call ’em exploitation movies for nothing!”: Joe Bob Briggs and the Critical Commentary on I Spit on Your Grave Tristan Fidler 38 Erasing the B out of Bad Cinema: Remaking Identity in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Craig Frost 61 “Fucking Americans”: Postmodern Nationalisms in the Contemporary Splatter Film Phoebe Fletcher 76 Their Time Has Come: Bad Cinema Nerds as Late-Capitalist Paradigm Mark Steven 99 Snakes on a Plane and the prefabricated cult film Kirsten Stevens 119 “Bad Form”: Contemporary Cinema’s Turn to the Perverse Hester Joyce and Scott Wilson 132 The Other Side of Indonesia: New Order’s Indonesian Exploitation Cinema as Cult Films Ekky Imanjaya 143 Doing It for the Kids: Rebels and Prom Queens in the Cold War Classroom Film Anika Ervin-Ward 160 Family Demons: The Ghost as Domestic Inheritance Donna McRae 182 B for Bad, B for Bogus and B for Bold: Rupert Kathner, The Glenrowan Affair and Ned Kelly Stephen Gaunson 193 Horror-Ritual: Horror Movie Villains as Collective Representations, COLLOQUY text theory critique 18 (2009). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue18/contents18.pdf 2 Contents ░ Uncanny Metaphors and Ritual Transgressors Mario Rodriguez 208 From Kracauer to Clover: Some Reflections on Genre and Gender in 70s/80s Slasher Films Tyson Namow 226 GENERAL ARTICLES Roland Barthes's Photobiographies: Towards an “Exemption from Meaning” Fabien Arribert-Narce 238 A Re-evaluation of Literature in Active and Critical Audience Studies John Budarick 254 Adding ‘Pull’ to ‘Push’ Education in the Context of Neomillennial E- learning: YouTube and the Case of “Diagnosis Wenckebach” Julie Willems 271 Arriving in the Future: The Utopia of Here and Now in the Work of Modern- Day Mystics From Eric Fromm to Eckhart Tolle Thomas Reuter 304 Ash’s Stasi File as a Script of Life Catherine Karen Roy 318 BOOK REVIEWS Geoff Page. 60 Classic Australian Poems. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009. Robert Savage 331 William Marderness. How to Read a Myth. New York: Humanity Books, 2009. Geoff Berry 334 Charles Bukowski. Hollywood. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007. Geoff Berry 339 David Damrosch, ed. Teaching World Literature. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009. Geoff Berry 342 Robert Savage. Hölderlin after the Catastrophe: Heidegger – Adorno – Brecht. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. David Blencowe 345 Editorial Issue 18 of Colloquy: text, theory, critique contains general articles as well as papers arising from the B for Bad Cinema conference held at Monash University in 2009. The Guest Editors of this section are to be congratulated on the excellent effort of turning around so many papers in such a short time and thereby presenting a very fresh perspective on this area of contemporary cinema studies. The general articles represent a wide array of approaches to literary and cultural studies today. Two of them respond to a call for papers requesting analyses of the International and In- tercultural Communications in the Age of Digital Media and discuss the lit- erature regarding audience studies and e-learning on the popular social- sharing multimedia site Youtube. Others discuss Roland Barthes’s photo- biographies, modern day mystics Erich Fromm and Eckhart Tolle, and the consequences of Secret Service files being released. As usual, then, an exciting mix with a broad variety of interests all concerned with the general Colloquy CFP request: for submission of articles related to literary or cul- tural theory (pure or applied), authored by those involved in research in English, communications, languages, performing or recorded arts. As always the editors want to thank the many referees who made this issue possible. The submission deadline for Issue 19 is January 15, 2009. Academic articles, review articles, book reviews, translations, opinion essays and creative writing will be considered. THE EDITORS COLLOQUY text theory critique 18 (2009). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue18/editorial18.pdf B f o r B A D C I N E M A A R T I C L E S Introduction: B for Bad Cinema Julia Vassilieva and Claire Perkins BAD Cinema in Context – Julia Vassilieva André Bazin, one of the major film theorists of the twentieth century, 1 famously entitled his opus magnum What is Cinema? Picking up where Bazin left off, Adrian Martin recently re-inscribed the question within the context of contemporary cinema in his monograph What is Modern Cin- 2 ema? The appropriate question for us to ask here would be “What is BAD Cinema?” However, by raising this question I seek not so much to intro- duce the BAD cinema discourse, but to interrogate it within the broader in- terdisciplinary framework that Colloquy has consistently advocated. The organisers of the conference “B for BAD Cinema: aesthetics, poli- tics and cultural value”, which took place at Monash in April 2009 and from which the contributions to the current issue have been drawn, traced BAD cinema’s pedigree to cult film, paracinema and its early predecessors in the form of B-movies of studio era. Terminologically, BAD cinema represents an expansion of the notion of ‘badfilm’ legitimised in film scholarship by Jeffrey Sconce in his influential essay “ ‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Ex- cess, and the Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style” published in Screen in 1995. Inspired to a large degree by Pierre Bourdieu’s study of the social construction of taste and fuelled by the rise of cultural studies, the essay COLLOQUY text theory critique 18 (2009). © Monash University. www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue18/vassilieva-perkins.pdf 6 Vassilieva & Perkins ░ drew attention to the phenomenon of paracinema as something that prob- lematises cinema itself and the status of cinema studies. Sconce opted for the notion of paracinema as “the most elastic textual category” that “would include entries from such seemingly disparate subgenres as ‘badfilm’, splatterpunk, ‘mondo’ films, sword and sandal epics, Elvis flicks, govern- ment hygiene films, Japanese monster movies, beach-party musicals, and just about every other historical manifestation of exploitation cinema from 3 juvenile delinquency documentaries to soft-core pornography.” Later on, Mathijs and Mendik positioned “Badness”, aesthetic or moral, alongside a hyperbolic exaggeration of genre, intertextuality and explicit violence as de- fining characteristics of the cult film, another sibling within the extended 4 (and perhaps dysfunctional) BAD cinema family. The Cult Film Reader that Mathijs and Mendik assembled in 2007 promised to “ gnaw, scratch 5 and infect you just like the cult films themselves” , and has provided a use- ful anthology in the theorisation of BAD cinema – from Walter Benjamin’s and Siegfried Kracauer’s to J. Hoberman’s and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s contributions. For Mathijs and Mendik, as for Sconce before them, the significance of BAD cinema as a textual, as well as a critical category, lies in its striving “to valorize all forms of cinematic ‘trash’, whether such films have been ex- 6 plicitly rejected or simply ignored by legitimate film culture.” Thus, we can say with Walter Benjamin, BAD cinema turns its gaze to the “historical trash heap” where, as Slavoj Zizek invited us in his recent expulsive cinematic performance beside a colossal deposit of rubbish, “we should start feeling 7 at home.” Leaving aside Zizek’s timely call for re-thinking ecology as a new philosophy of trash, what is important for the present discussion is that trash operates here as both metonym and metaphor, where its subject mat- ter reinforces the disturbing conjuncture between neglect, evacuation, abandonment and rescuing inherent in the trope. The specificity of the BAD cinema phenomenon and the polemics sur- rounding it encompass textual characteristics of cinematic material, condi- tions of distributions, circulation and reception, and the theorisation or val- orisation of ‘trash’ at work within the academy itself. One of the central is- sues within these debates is the vexed issue of taste, this two-headed Hy- dra, one head looking towards artistic quality, another – towards mass ap- peal. BAD cinema’s champions believe it promotes an alternative vision of cinematic ‘art’, “challenging the established canon of quality cinema and 8 questioning the legitimacy of reigning aesthete discourses on movie art.” As such, BAD cinema debates provide a re-incarnation of high culture ver- sus low culture polemics, once again raising the issues of criteria, legitimis- ing bodies and access to cultural capital, thus
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