Beyond the Darkness

With the Beyond the Darkness title stemming from a Joe D’Amato film and the subtitle cult, horror and extreme cinema, the typical reader of this blog can probably expect that Phil Russell’s book is going to be of interest to them, whether as a source of new films to track down and see or to simply see how another fan’s tastes diverge and converge with your own.

Rather than plunging straight into the alphabetised reviews of roughly 160 titles across 420 or so pages, Russell sets out his criteria in the introduction: No, this is not a comprehensive discussion of cult, horror and extreme cinema, nor could it ever be. No, this is not an “entry level” book, where no prior knowledge is expected.

At this point the prospective reader might wonder what “entry level” means and whether they are just going to get another discussion of, say, Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer or The Beyond. Well, yes, both these titles are present and correct.

Crucially, however, the wide geographical and temporal range in the films discussed, from North America, Europe, and East Asia, and from the late 1950s to the present, should mean there are titles you haven’t seen or may not even have heard of.

Another important factor here is the gamut of positions the films discussed occupy in relation to art, auteur, experimental and/or exploitation cinemas. This is sometimes seen within a single film (e.g. Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant or Nacho Cerda’s Aftermath) and sometimes within the broader career of a given auteur (e.g. David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future to Shivers to Dead Ringers).

Importantly, Russell also here establishes his limits, particularly around the inclusion of actual death footage. Accordingly those expecting a run through of interminable Faces/Traces of Death sequels may be disappointed.

The reviews themselves are informative and even-handed, avoiding fan-boy type hyperbole, whilst still often couched in Joe Bob-Briggs type language. There’s a levelling effect, where Jesus Franco’s “Bloody Moon is far from being a masterpiece but is entertaining from start to finish” whilst Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch is essentially a hit or miss affair”

In addition to the reviews there are also some longer pieces, such as a reprint of the Cinema of Transgression’s manifesto and an interview with Nick Zedd, or a discussion of horror and censorship in late Franco Spain.

Some apparent misspellings (“Marchians” for Martians in John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars) and awkwardness in the formatting (though no worse than other print-on-demand type titles I’ve seen) aside Beyond the Darkness can be recommended.

Musings on Virgins and Vampires

This 1997 book on Jean Rollin's films, written by Peter Blumenstock and published by Crippled Dick, occasionally shows up on Ebay.



Earlier today it sold for £77, more than I was willing to bid.

In relation to cult and culture I'm thus wondering if an interest in cult films thereby requires not just often considerable cultural and subcultural capital (e.g. the ability to justify a Rollin film as being worthy of study, perhaps through reference to Feuillade, Surrealism and so on) but also relatively high amounts of economic capital (owning a book like this, with Rollins own remarks about Feuillade, Surrealism etc.)

Upcoming cult screenings in Edinburgh

As some of you may recall, I'm involved in the running of my local film society, The Edinburgh Film Guild.

As part of our programme we show cult / exploitation / trash films on a Friday evening. This year our mini-seasons include gialli, US cult cinema of the 1970s and the Werewolf:

http://edinburghfilmguild.org.uk/season.php?id=30&season=The+Giallo
http://edinburghfilmguild.org.uk/season.php?id=32&season=American+Cult+Cinema+of+the+1970s
http://edinburghfilmguild.org.uk/season.php?id=29&season=The+Werewolf

Hello, again

I know I have not been posting much of late. Personal, family and other concerns have been taking precedence.

Nevertheless, I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the David Hess / John Morghen / Catriona MacColl event at the Jekyll and Hyde Pub here in Edinburgh yesterday.

It was great to see these people in the flesh and ask them questions / hear their answers to other people's questions. It was also great just to see people from the local cult / horror / trash film community and to talk. So, if you were there, please do get in touch, so that we can all be better informed about what's going on...

hennesseybrown@gmail.com

Edinburgh Zombie Club / The Edinburgh B Team

Just a shout to out /about The Edinburgh Zombie Club and Edinburgh B Team, whom I've just discovered:

http://www.myspace.com/edinburghzombieclub
http://www.myspace.com/theedinburghbteam

Hope to see some of you guys soon; you may also find the EFG's Friday night programme of interest ;-)

Edinburgh Film Guild - Freaky Friday screenings

This was something I posted about a while back, that the film society I'm involved with is doing some cult / exploitation / psychotronic / trash films on a Friday evening, starting in October.

While the dates and times are still to be finalised, along with the membership packages, we have the seasons and the films in them sorted now:

http://edinburghfilmguild.org.uk/season.php?season=Mario+Bava
http://edinburghfilmguild.org.uk/season.php?season=Spaghetti+westerns
http://edinburghfilmguild.org.uk/season.php?season=Extreme+Cinema
http://edinburghfilmguild.org.uk/season.php?season=Post+Apocalypse

Maybe the world doesn't need another Mario Bava retrospective, but bear in mind that many of our current members have probably never heard of him - nor seen a spaghetti western not directed by Sergio Leone...

Nuits rouges / Shadowman

Georges Franju's last film needs to be understood in relation to the trying circumstances in which it was made, as outlined by writer and actor Jacques Champreux in the interview included as an extra on the Eureka 'Masters of Cinema' series DVD, where the film is double billed with Judex.

The original plan was for a contemporary remake of Louis Feuillade's Fantômas, one which would be as shocking to 1970s audiences as the original had been to their counterparts in the 1910s and which would thereby serve as antidote / antithesis to the more familiar and comfortable 1960s series starring Jean Marias as the eponymous anti-hero.

A French television station liked the idea and gave Franju a relatively big budget to work with. He then found that securing the rights to the Fantômas character would cost around half this budget. Parallel to this Champreux had been working on a script for a pulp villain inspired by silent era star Lon Chaney Sr, “the man of a thousand faces.” He suggested to Franju that they might use this, with the director agreeing.

The production was then shot in both 16mm and 35mm versions, for television and cinema respectively, in Belgrade. When the footage was sent back to the laboratory in Paris for processing – suggesting that Franju was working without rushes, giving an indicator of his talent but perhaps also why his approach might lead him to encounter problems a routine journeyman would not have – it was discovered that someone had stolen the 35mm material en route.


The Shadowman

If the salvage job nature of Shadowman / Nuits Rouges has the serendipitous effect of bringing it that bit closer to the surreal strangeness of its model in certain ways – Feuillade famously writing characters into or out of his stories from episode to episode depending on the actors' availability and other chance factors – the downside is that it weakens the extent to which it presents an actual serial-like narrative with a regular roller-coaster ride rhythm.


The 1000 Eyes of the Shadowman?

It starts off well, with the introduction of Baron de Borrego and his secret treasure, the wobbliness of the secret panel hiding a wall safe and the rather prop-like nature of the mask endearingly low-tech and providing further hints as to the pastiche / parody nature of the piece.


The Templars

Unfortunately for the Baron his servant is completely untrustworthy and in desperate need of money to pay off his gambling debts and thus sells this information on to the initially sceptical Shadowman.




The mad scientist and his auto(n)matons

His secret base and army of minions, including zombie like slaves produced by a mad scientist, are also a delight. Indeed, the latter subplot was my favourite, both for its imagery of the hitherto mannequin-like zombies advancing implacably and inexorably on their targets and the typically Franju-ian politics. After all, the mad scientist only follows capitalist logic to its (il)logical conclusion when he suggests that replacing of the workers with his automata would allow for great cost savings since they don't need paid and can be kept in storage when not needed.


A mechanical auto-pilot

Nor is there any problem with the masked villain's visit to and murder of the Baron, against warnings of dire consequences that he cannot begin to understand.

It's when the Baron's nephew and heir Paul arrives in Paris that things start to go awry. Because we don't know what the master of disguise Shadowman – AKA “the man without a face” – actually looks like we are in no position to know that this Paul is an impostor and while certainly experiencing a shock when this deception is revealed are not placed in a state of suspense beforehand.

Things get worse as we're then subjected to a long and rather tedious expository sequence outlining the backstory of the Templars and their treasures, in which we're also introduced to another unidentified character in the form of the hooded Templar who swears to avenge the Baron. But precisely because he isn't identified, it's hard for us to identify with him.


The rooftops of Paris, or a Belgrade studio at least.

Though Nuits Rouges picks up hereafter as it settles into a regular pattern of moves and countermoves by the good guys and the bad guys – again limited by the extent that we know which of these labels to apply any given individual, though the inherently perfunctory nature of the characterisation qua bumbling police inspector, femme fatale etc etc. certainly helps – and a more regular alternation of scenes of suspense and shock, story and spectacle, the momentum is never quite regained.

If it's difficult to recommend Nuits Rouges to the casual viewer who perhaps only knows Franju as the director of Eyes Without a Face, those already committed to his unique cinema will nevertheless find a lot of pleasure in the film.

For us it's very much a case of the more you bring to the film the more you will get out of it: it's about being on same fantastique / surrealist / art-trash wavelength, where one is not only able to identify Gerd Frobe as the titular villain of Goldfinger but also as the nemesis of Dr Mabuse in the 1960s series inaugurated by Franco Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse, before then going on to that repressed history of pop-modernist European cinema outwith the official canon; while I'll refrain from doing so, true obsessives will also want to seek out the 1919 Feuillade L'Homme sans visage and the 1974 French TV series of the same name, which features all Nuits rouges' leadings players, for comparison purposes.

Equally, however, Nuits Rouges is no lost masterpiece. The televisual origins of the material are apparent in its flat lighting, a far cry from the Eugen Schuftan's sublime cinematography on Eyes Without a Face, whilst the use of irising rather than straight cuts seems as much influenced by the presence of commercial breaks as Feuillade.

[DVD Times review of Judex and Nuits rouges]

New community / group for cult cinema

Here: http://cultmediastudies.ning.com/

Thanks to David there for bringing it to my attention :-)

Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics

[rant]

The cover and title are somewhat misleading, insofar as there is no detailed discussion of Satan's Cheerleaders and the tone of the pieces is academic rather tha sleazy. No doubt Sconce would contend that this is an ironic reflection of the kind of films featured within the volume, insofar as in his own essay he notes how our mental picture of a Nude for Satan was one that the films themselves could never hope to live up to.

Yet it also, to me, speaks of a certain lack of reflexivity about the academic game itself, that one wants to know about its conventions here in terms, fundamentally, of what sells best in its marketplaces and of a continuing gulf between the fan and academic discourses when, for instance, Kevin Heffernan's article on the changing status of Mario Bava's Lisa and the Devil and House of Exorcism arguably does little more than recast the work of a Tim Lucas in more theoretical guise or where Something Weird's Blue Book catalog has as much to tell us about the history of 60s and 70s sexploitation and porn as Eric Schaeffer's admittedly impressively researched essay.

Ranting aside, the essays are the usual mixed bag, with much of interest for fans and scholars of European horror cinema.

Schaeffer's essay 'Framing the Sexploitation Audience' indicates how the marketing of sexploitation films contributed to the discourse of the raincoat audience as deviant, thus ironically creating a situation in which the films could no longer be advertised in the mainstream media thereby further contributing to their ghettoisation – unanticipated consequences strike again.

Tania Modleski's 'Women's Cinema as Counterphobic cinema' takes Doris Wishman as her test case and performs the usual feminist detournements and deconstructions to end with the slogan “bad girls unite”; as such one eagerly awaits a follow-up piece defending Lizzie Borden's Cocktails. Unless, of course, not every sister is in fact a sister...

Harry Benshoff's 'Representing (Repressed) Homosexuality in the Pre-Stonewall Hollywood Homo-military' film is self-explanatory and does what it says on the tin.

A similar predictability limits Chuck Kleinhans 'Pornography and Documentary,' insofar as exposing the base material realities of mondo and white coater films is hardly the most challenging of tasks. Late capitalism, the cash nexus, blah blah blah. Tell us the same thing as it relates to academic publishing in late capitalism...

Colin Gunckel's 'Origins and Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film' brings out what he terms “additional, even provocative explanations for the existence of this curious subgenre,” in the form of the way it engaged with the historical and cultural specificities of Mexican identity in a way that Hollywood product could not. It makes sense but there's the rub: wouldn't it in many respects be more surprising to find a national popular cinema cycle that did not connect with a national population? But while I didn't get too much out of this essay, perhaps this is because of having read Doyle Green and David Wilt's work on much the same subject...

Kay Dickinson's Troubling Synthesis looks at the place of music in five Italian video nasties – Cannibals Holocaust and Ferox, Inferno, Tenebrae and The Beyond, arguing that the detached nature of the music, in its lack of obvious engagement with the on-screen action and use of the synthesiser, could have contributed to the negative readings afforded these films in the early 1980s. It's a piece that I think has the right ideas, in countering the dominant vision-centred approach to the film experience that stems from psychoanalytic theory in particular, but whose reading of the semiotics of the synthesiser as “cold” and “inhuman” seems somewhat essentialising. As I understand it, analog synthesisers of the sort used in these films are now commonly referred to as having “warm” sounds in comparison with the later digital synthesisers, while she also fails to discuss Frizzi's use of the Mellotron, which I've seen described as an instrument with a very distinctive personality to it (Robert Fripp: “Tuning a mellotron doesn't”) in The Beyond's score. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but pedantry is what being a cult fan is all about...

Joan Hawkins's 'The Sleazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes' does a Cutting-Edge type reading on the director's work, seeking to bring out its low culture aspects (i.e. Meyer rather than Sirk and Fassbinder) and made me wonder when / if someone will ever do straight readings of queer films that bring out their repressed heterosexuality...

Matt Hills's 'Para-Paracinema' is, for me, the most useful and challenging essay in the collection. Looking at the characterisation of the Friday the 13th films amongst both the academic and cult film audiences, he identifies them as an object which both groups can unite in their hostility towards as lacking in subversive potential for the former and too mainstream for the latter, with this failure to engage being seen in frequent factual errors in the discussion of them. While I can't say that I particularly want to look at the films again – perhaps because there's no cultural or subcultural capital to really be gained thereby now that Hills has made the point – it does suggest that a more honest way for the enterprise to proceed could, in effect, be for films to be assigned to us whose value and interest we then have to make a case for, rather than choosing the films that we like in part on the basis of our pre-existing theories about them. (Yes, I'm currently in a what if Argento has been all played out and I'm just a johnny come lately; should I have made my investment in, say, Italian cop films instead and pushed them as the next big thing. Or more broadly, when territorialisation and careerism come in, where does the fun go?)

Chris Fujiwara's 'Bordedom, Spasmo and the Italian System' is one of those challenging intellectual exercises that brings Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Lenzi together. Those who have read Michael Grant's essay on T. S Eliot's The Wasteland and Lucio Fulci's The Beyond will find it right up their street, while others might consider it intellectual masturbation of the worst sort. (On the subject of Spasmo, am I alone in thinking that it would make for an interesting comparison piece to David Fincher's The Game?)

Greg Taylor's 'Pure Quidditas or Geek Chic?' examines US television show Beat the Geeks and the discoures around geekdom it explores. I haven't seen the show, but imagine it would make for an interesting comparison to the likes of Mastermind or a Radio 4 quiz programme here in the UK, insofar as they're each dealing with trivia, albeit of different sorts – i.e. my trivia is pointless shit, whereas yours is culturally validated as valuable knowledge. Of course, once civilisation breaks down we'll both be equally fucked compared to the aborigine who couldn't care less about Deodato or Derrida...

Jeffrey Sconce's Movies: A Century of Failure diagnoses the current crisis but has a predictably more difficult time finding any solutions. For my part, I was more interested to discover that the Rape of Frankenstein story Andrea narrates in Four Flies on Grey Velvet would seem to have been a borrowing from a 1971 novel by Jacques Sternberg, Toi, Ma Nuit / Sexualis '95...

Sometimes it is that chance encounter that makes it all worthwhile...

[/rant]