Film, Media and Music
Pablo Corro‘s 2014 book Retóricas del cine chileno (Rhetorics of Chilean Cinema) is a wide-ranging examination of the style and concerns that have come to characterise Chilean film-making from the 1950s to the present day. Corro demonstrates how ideas of national cinema are always to some extent dependent on transnational currents of cinematic ideas and techniques, as well as on local political contexts. The chapter presented here, Weak Poetics, adapts Gianni Vattimo‘s notion of weak thought to discuss the growing attention paid by Chilean films to the mundane, the everyday and the intimate. Corro‘s dense, allusive writing skilfully mirrors the films he describes, in which meaning is fragmented and dispersed into glimpsed appearances and acousmatic sounds. Corros historicisation of this fracturing of meaning allows the cinema of the everyday to be understood not as a retreat from politics, but as a recasting of the grounds on which it might occur.
In contrast to the canonical history of cinema and film theory, often dominated by academic texts and Western and/or male voices, this article presents a casual conversation held in 1961 between four of the most influential women in the post-war Japanese film industry: Kawakita Kashiko,,Yamamoto Kyōko, Tanaka Kinuyo and Takamine Hideko. As they openly discuss their gendered experience in production, promotion, distribution and criticism, their thoughts shed light on the wide range of opportunities available to women in filmmaking, but also on the professional constraints,and concerns which they felt came along with their gender. Their conversation reveals how they measured themselves and their national industry in relation to the West; at times unaware of their pioneer role in world cinema. This piece of self-reflexive criticism contributes to existing research on both womens filmmaking and the industry of Japanese cinema, and invites us to reconsider non-hegemonic film thinking practices and voices.
Towards a Theory for African Cinema is an English translation of a talk given in French by the Tunisian filmmaker and critic Férid Boughedir (1944–) at a conference on international cinema, which took place in Montreal in 1974. In his presentation Boughedir discusses the vocation of the African filmmaker, who must avoid succumbing to the escapism and entertainment values of Western cinema and instead strive to reflect the contradictions and tensions of the colonised African identity, while promoting a revitalisation of African culture. Drawing on the example of the 1968 film Mandabi (The Money Order) by the Senegalese director Sembène Ousmane, Boughedir conceptualises a form of cinema which resists the influences of both Hollywood and auteur film and awakens viewers, instead of putting them to sleep. Boughedir‘s source text is preceded by a translator‘s introduction, which situates his talk within contemporary film studies.
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.
The body in the swimming pool as metonym for trouble in paradise is a recurrent motif bordering on cliché in Hollywood/West Coast sunshine noir. Through an intermedial survey of film, TV and literary fiction, photography, design and architectural history, crime and environmental, reportage, public health and safety documents this article examines the domestic swimming pools ambiguous status as a symbol of realised utopia within the Californian mythos from the boom years of the backyard oasis in the wake of the Second World War to the era of mass foreclosures, restricted water usage and ambient dread inaugurated by 9/11, the global recession and the severest drought in the states recorded rainfall history.
European horror films have often been characterised by a tendency towards co-production arrangements. Recent developments within regional European funding bodies and initiatives have led to a proliferation of films that combine traditional co-production agreements with the use of both regional and intra-regional funding sources. This article examines the extent to which the financial structuring of Creep(Christopher Smith, 2004), Salvage (Lawrence Gough), and Trollhunter (André Øvredal, 2010) informed the trajectory of their production dynamics, impacting upon their final form. Sometimes, such European horror films are part of complex co-production deals with multiple partners or are derived from one-off funding project. But they can also utilise funding schemes that are distinctly local.
Discussion of the horror film fanzine culture of the 1980s and early 1990s has been dominated by an emphasis on questions around the politics of taste, considerations of subcultural capital and cultism in fan writing, and processes of cultural distinction and the circulation of forms of capital. Sconce‘s concept of paracinema has come to shape the conceptual approach to fanzines. The aim of this article is to refocus attention on other areas of fanzine production, providing a more nuanced and richer historicisation of these publications and the ways they contributed to the circulation, reception and consumption of European horror film. Focusing on the fanzine European Trash Cinema (1988–98) I propose a return to the actual cultural object – the printed zine – examining the networks of producers converging around, and writing about, Eurohorror films and related European trash cinematic forms, as well as the contents within the publication itself.
British horror cinema is often excluded from critical work dealing with European horror cinema or, as it is frequently referred to, Eurohorror. This article argues that such exclusion is unwarranted. From the 1950s onwards there have been many exchanges between British and continental European-based horror production. These have involved not just international co-production deals but also creative per- sonnel moving from country to country. In addition, British horror films have exerted influence on European horror cinema and vice versa. At the same time, the exclusion of British horror from the Eurohorror category reveals limitations in that category, particularly its idealisation of continental European horror production.