Search results
Regarded by fans and critics alike as the Queen of Horror, Barbara Steele stands as one of the few bona fide cult icons of the genre, whose ability to project an uncanny blend of deathliness and eroticism imbues her characters with a kind of necrophiliac appeal. Horror film scholars have tended to read Steele‘s films in feminist terms, as texts that play to our fascination with the monstrous-feminine. This article approaches them from a different standpoint – that of cinephilia studies. Steele‘s cult horror films are at their most basic level horror movies about cinephilia, presenting her as the very embodiment of the ghostly medium that cinephiles cherish. In so doing, they convert Steele into a necrophiliac fetish-object, an intoxicating fusion of death and desire. Considering Steele‘s work from this perspective reveals the fluidity of the boundary between horror and cinephilia, demonstrating that horror has something important to teach us about cinephilia and cinephilia has something important to teach us about horror.
Alejandro Amenábar has made only five main features over a 15-year period from
1995 to 2009. In 1995 he abandoned his Film Studies degree at Madrid's
Complutense University in order to shoot
streamlining process and stock stories with hints of contingency feels in equal part intuitively logical and deeply troubling. One aspect that Epstein never guarded against (as Pudovkin and others may have sensed) is photogénie’s potential for pre-emption, and worse yet, for devolving into sheer glamour or advertising slickness. Epstein’s fascination with CUs, details, and unforeseen aspects of filmic images has undoubtedly influenced the very idea of cinephilia. In an essay rethinking film theory in the wake of Bazin, Mary Ann Doane writes, Whether the moment chosen by the
sincerity’ (1993: 242–63). In Collins’s schema, the first of these terms emphasises the collapse of generic boundaries, playful excess and ‘ironic hybridisation’, (e.g. the Back to the Future franchise), while the second eschews playfulness, irony, parody, overt cinephilia and self-conscious spoofery in favour of seriousness, narrative coherence, generic unity, ‘good taste’ and a broadly realist aesthetic
qu’on appelle le cinéma. (Assayas 1983 : 23). 13 However, he remains distrustful of the politique des auteurs , and in particular of the canon of classical Hollywood directors that it championed – he has criticised academic film studies for setting in stone classical Hollywood as the only period worthy of study, the result of an ‘historic cinephilia’, which has mummified
culture since the filmmaker’s premature disappearance in 1934. We shall show that, within a decade or so of his death, this virtually unknown artist, whose modest corpus had at the time of its production scarcely made a mark in the spirit of the film-going public, was already on his way to becoming a vital legend of French cinephilia, as well as an inspirational hero for the younger generation of filmmakers and critics emerging
Amenábar ( Los otros/The Others , 2001). Among these examples, Coixet’s case is most significant in her consistent adoption of English and the imagined landscapes of American cinema not merely as a strategic career choice, but out of a self-conscious gesture of cinephilia – a love of cinema embedded in practices of intertextual allusion and appropriation. In terms of industrial make-up, themes and style, the
industry and place him in opposition to it is to do a disservice both to Fisher and to the industry that helped form him as a film director. Having said all this, there are certain qualities of auteurism which perhaps merit further consideration and which militate against its outright rejection, with these stemming largely from its reliance on cinephilia. At the risk of oversimplification, cinephilia refers to a
audiences, the ever-expanding globalised film festival circuit proves that cinephilia is alive and well and living in the international marketplace. As news media reports habitually demonstrate, festivals can make or break new films. Certainly, many of the larger events act as launching pads for foreign (i.e. non-US), marginal or ‘difficult’ movies, and as such constitute an alternative
accompany any technological breakthrough, digitisation’s progressiveness cannot be assumed in advance. If this is a technology that facilitates such things as nimbler, sassier documentaries, it is also one liable to appropriation by commercial film industries for the production of ever more lavish and overpowering spectacle. Selected reading Balcerzak, Scott and Jason Sperb (2009, 2012), Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Revolution: Film, Pleasure and Digital Culture (New York: Columbia University Press). Two timely volumes, tracking