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relevance. The boys’ games are polyvalent: they are playing at gangsters or at soldiers or at cowboys and Indians. The allusion to genre films, the gangster/thriller, the war film, the western and thus Hollywood and American cinema, is unambiguous. The homage sequence juxtaposed with the games sequence is instantly identifiable to those familiar with the origins of (French) cinema: it is a remake of the Lumière Brothers short film
The introductory chapter is written to help position the reader regarding the academic climate that saw the first edition of Hammer and Beyond materialise, to consider some of the book’s omissions, and to assess the state of British horror in the years immediately leading up to, and following, its publication.
Filmax group of companies, with the explicit aim of making genre films that would have an appeal beyond the Spanish market. The last Fantastic Factory products, The Nun (Luis de la Madrid) and Beneath Still Waters (Brian Yuzna), were released in 2005, after which Yuzna, an American producer and director who had helped establish the label, left the organisation. Filmax continued its commitment to
This book has sought to argue for Kassovitz’s importance in contemporary French cinema as a filmmaker whose work has engaged with (and, in some cases, helped shaped the direction of) key shifts in French cinema since the early 1990s, such as: new realism, the banlieue film and the ‘post-look’ spectacular genre film. In so doing, one of the central concerns in these
figures to an extent which obscures beguiling work being done in less obviously prestigious areas of the field. Unlike, say, the Gainsborough or the Hammer oeuvres, Comfort’s work has not yet been the subject of reappraisal. Second, his work exhibits strengths in categories that have been habitually undervalued in the discourse on British cinema: melodrama, genre film-making and the ‘B’ film have only very recently been given
technically brilliant craftsman, a skilled manipulator of audiences, who produced a series of arresting genre films? If he was as much an entertainer as an artist, why in that case did he direct so few films? And finally, were his films influenced in any way by the rise of the New Wave of French directors and critics from the late 1950s, or did they remain rooted in what some hostile commentators saw as a conventional and stultifying classicism? Although Clouzot’s output as a director spanned a period of twenty-six years, in this time he released only ten full-length feature
year later.12 There is, however, little indication that these countries, rather than Italy, were the film’s intended primary markets. Because in the 1950s most Italians (and certainly the growing urban working and middle class) tended to prefer (dubbed) THE EXCLUSION OF GIALLO FILMS FROM HISTORY 37 American films to Italian productions, it was common for Italian directors of genre films to adopt American-sounding names – a practice that also facilitated the films’ circulation in the United States and other foreign markets. But, as I discuss later in this chapter
Since its release in 1997 critics have interpreted Michael Haneke’s Funny Games in terms of European counter-cinema’s deconstruction of Hollywood genre film. Such accounts have drawn on a range of provocative statements by the Austrian director, who has gone on record to state that his intention in making the film was to ‘rape the viewer into independence’ and thus
Calparsoro turns to the war and horror genres the critique of violence is more muted. By the time the director immerses himself into genre film he has to some extent already been pigeonholed as the violent enfant terrible of Spanish cinema and critics are able to pigeonhole the violence of the films in exactly the same way: they make use of an auteurist conceptualisation to dismiss more detailed consideration of the representation of violence in Spanish cinema. Calparsoro’s vision thus remains fairly unified across his work in terms of theme and narrative structure. In
incorporated into popular genre films. This has led to debates about whether it is possible any longer to talk of an ‘avant-garde’ cinema at all (Lapsley and Westlake 1988 : 181–213). Also, by its very nature, the notion of ‘genre film’ or ‘genre cinema’ is tautologous in the sense that all cinema is genre cinema. As noted above, all films feed off, rework