A Cinema of Confrontation

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A Cinema of Confrontation: Using a Material-Semiotic Approach to Better Account for the History and Theorization of 1970s Independent American Horror Court Montgomery Dr. Nancy West, Advisor ABSTRACT In The Films in My Life, François Truffaut describes how “cinematic success” results from a fragile, temporary confluence of elements: the director, the film itself, and its audience, but also critical reception, marketing, competition, and the zeitgeist in which the film is released. “When a film achieves a certain amount of success,” Truffaut observes, “it becomes a sociological event.” Accounting for such a sociological event seemingly warrants a sociological approach. Material-semiotic methods have been used in sociology to map relations between people, materials and concepts, and given the similar confluence of elements involved in filmmaking , such methods seem ideal for critical interventions in cinema studies. This thesis offers an example of such a material-semiotic approach to film history and theorization, illustrated through close readings of three films: George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). While each of these films has received renewed critical and scholarly attention since 2000, its success and continued significance too often has been attributed to its director alone. By accounting also for the role of the audience and other collaborators (e.g. producers, actors, art directors) in meaning-making, the mode of exhibition, the specific sociohistorical context, intertextual and paratextual elements, and indeed the texts, themselves, one can recognize a remarkable similarity in the confluence of elements between these films. Together they became a kind of agitprop horror, a cinema of confrontation, which envisioned the screen not as a “mise-en-scène of desire,” but rather a mise-en-scène of angst, implicating the spectator in the violence onscreen and tying that violence to the real life horrors outside the theater. By tracing the points of contact and the shared qualities of films, one can posit such larger speculations. The material-semiotic approach employed here arguably offers a richer account of these films, and promises to be a productive approach to film history and theory. .

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Common Horror Elements 2.Pages
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A Cinema of Confrontation
A CINEMA OF CONFRONTATION: USING A MATERIAL-SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO BETTER ACCOUNT FOR THE HISTORY AND THEORIZATION OF 1970S INDEPENDENT AMERICAN HORROR _______________________________________ A Thesis presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia _______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts _____________________________________________________ by COURT MONTGOMERY Dr. Nancy West, Thesis Supervisor DECEMBER 2015 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of the Graduate School, have examined the thesis entitled A CINEMA OF CONFRONTATION: USING A MATERIAL-SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO BETTER ACCOUNT FOR THE HISTORY AND THEORIZATION OF 1970S INDEPENDENT AMERICAN HORROR presented by Court Montgomery, a candidate for the degree of master of English, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. _________________________________ Professor Nancy West _________________________________ Professor Joanna Hearne _________________________________ Professor Roger F. Cook ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my committee chair, Dr. Nancy West, for her endless enthusiasm, continued encouragement, and excellent feedback throughout the drafting process and beyond. The final version of this thesis and my defense of it were made possible by Dr. West’s critique. I would like to thank my committee members, Dr. Joanna Hearne and Dr. Roger F. Cook, for their insights and thought-provoking questions and comments during my thesis defense. That experience renewed my appreciation for the ongoing conversations between scholars and how such conversations can lead to novel insights and new directions in research. In addition, I would like to thank Victoria Thorp, the Graduate Studies Secretary for the Department of English, for her invaluable assistance with navigating the administrative process of my thesis writing and defense, as well as Dr.
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