Mark Jancovich
Profile
Mark Jancovich is Reader and Director of the Institute of Film Studies at the University of Nottingham. His publications include: Horror (Batsford, 1992); Approaches to Popular Film (co-edited with Joanne Hollows, MUP, 1995); Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (MUP, 1996); and The Film Studies Reader (co-edited with Joanne Hollows and Peter Hutchings, Arnold/OUP, 2000). He is currently working on a manuscipt for Minnesota University Press, Sexual Tastes: A Cultural History of Playboy Magazine (forthcoming). He is a founder member of Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies; and series editor (with Eric Schaefer) of the MUP book series, Inside Popular Film.Defining cult movies
As Mark Jancovich has pointed out, about the politics of cult fan formations in general:…cult movie audiences are less an internally coherent “taste culture” than a series of frequently opposed and contradictory reading strategies that are defined through a sense of their difference to an equally incoherently imagined “normality”, a loose conglomeration of corporate power, lower middle class conformity and prudishness, academic elitism and political conspiracy (Jancovich, 2002: 315).--Kate Egan
Naked Ambitions: Pornography, Taste and the Problem of the Middlebrow
By Mark Jancovich, University of Nottingham, UK.
Excerpt:
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, pornography was generally positioned as an object of criticism by feminism. A great deal of feminist work was devoted to analysing it as an almost pure expression of patriarchal ideology and power. Although these assumptions were never fully accepted, even within feminism, they did none the less have an almost taken-for-granted status, which meant that those who called for a more complex understanding of this area were largely marginalised. Whether drawing on classic works of popular feminism (see, for example, Dworkin, 1979; Lederer, 1980; Griffin, 1981) or on the more theoretical critiques of "woman as image" (see for example, Mulvey 1975; Pollock, 1977; Kappeler, 1986), this work assumed that pornography addressed male sexuality and was generally based on a violent subjugation of female sexuality and subjectivity. --Mark Jancovich via http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/film/journal/articles/naked-ambition.htm
Defining Cult Movies : The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Tastes
- Defining Cult Movies : The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Tastes
by Andrew Willis (Editor), Julian Stringer (Editor), Antonio Lazaro Reboli (Editor), Mark Jancovich (Editor)
[Amazon US]
About the Author: Mark Jancovich is Reader and Director of the Institute of Film Studies, Antonio Lazaro Reboll is Lector in Hispanic Studies, and Julian Stringer is Lecturer in Film Studies, all at the University of Nottingham. Andrew Willis is Senior Lecturer in Media and Performance at the University of Salford.This collection concentrates on the analysis of cult movies, how they are defined, who defines them and the cultural politics of these definitions. The definition of the cult movie relies on a sense of its distinction from the "mainstream" or "ordinary." This also raises issues about the perception of it as an oppositional form of cinema, and of its strained relationships to processes of institutionalization and classification. In other words, cult movie fandom has often presented itself as being in opposition to the academy, commercial film industries and the media more generally, but has been far more dependent on these forms than it has usually been willing to admit. The international roster of essayists range over the full and entertaining gamut of cult films from Dario Argento, Spanish horror and Peter Jackson's New Zealand gorefests to sexploitation, kung fu and sci-fi flicks.
The question is not whether pornography, but the quality of the pornography
For Sontag, it is specific modes of consumption that are the problem, not pornography itself. To those with a pure gaze, pornography can be rewarding and significant, and to these people, she argues, "the question is not whether pornography, but the quality of the pornography." (Paul Goodman, quoted in Sontag, 1969: 72) --Mark Jancovich, 01/06/01 via Naked Ambitions: Pornography, Taste and the Problem of the Middlebrow via http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/film/journal/articles/naked-ambition.htm [Aug 2005]
See also: Susan Sontag - 2001 - pornography - Mark Jancovich - UK
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