Rape and revenge film genre
Related: exploitation film - rape - representation of rape in fiction - revenge - vigilantism
Titles: The Virgin Spring (1960) - Last House on the Left (1972) - Death Wish (1974) - Thriller (1974) - I Spit on Your Grave (1978) - Ms. 45 (1981) - Bad Lieutenant (1992) - Irréversible (2002)
American poster for Thriller - A Cruel Picture (1974)
Thriller - A Cruel Picture (1974) - Bo Arne Vibenius [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Definition
For better or worse, Boarne’s Vibenius’ 1974 film THRILLER-EN GRYM FILM ushered in the "rape and revenge" genre to the grindhouse circuit (albeit in a cut drive-in release under the title THRILLER-A CRUEL PICTURE). Regardless of one’s personal reservations on the subject matter, it is impossible to deny this quaintly produced film’s influence on the genre’s prototype. Although director Vibenius openly admits he constructed his film with an exploitative rigor (and the film does function best as pure spectacle), the resultant film is an unlikely prophetic one, certainly to the surprise (and dismay) of Vibenius himself.[T]his shortcut of audience manipulation proved so successful that it would again be used in two subsequent pictures in the genre: Abel Ferrara’s MS. 45 (1981) and Meir Zarchi’s I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978). Ferrara’s film sports a remarkably similar protagonist, the mute Thana (played by the late Zoe Tamerlis), used for largely the same effect. Zarchi’s features a beautiful, naïve young woman (Camille Keaton). Although she has no malady similar to Ferrara’s or Vibenius’ leads, her naïve disposition performs the same task: building the audience’s sympathy, only to tear it down in the rape sequences. --Stephen Gladwin via http://pages.cthome.net/puppylove/thriller.html [Dec 2004]
The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle (2000) - Jacinda Read
The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity and the Rape-Revenge Cycle (2000) - Jacinda Read [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
About the Book
In this, the first full-length study of the rape-revenge film, Jacinda Read suggests that the rape-revenge cycle can be read as one of the primary ways in which Hollywood has attempted to make sense of feminism and the changing shape of heterosexual femininity in the post-1970 period. Arguing that rape-revenge is better understood not as a genre, but as a narrative structure, the author analyses the ways in which various deployments of this structure rework the 'mass cultural fictions of femininity' inscribed in the genres over which they have been mapped. From the 'frontier femmes' of rape-revenge westerns such as Hannie Caulder, through the 'erotic avengers' of neo-noirs such as Batman Returns, to the 'maternal avengers' of rape-revenge melodramas such as Eye for an Eye, The New Avengers explores the popular understandings of feminism that circulate around these generic manifestations of the female avenger. Applying ideas from feminist cultural studies to the analysis of film, and combining detailed textual analysis with contextual analysis, The New Avengers challenges many of the received orthodoxies of feminist theory and takes feminist film criticism and indeed, feminism itself, into the next generation. Interdisciplinary in its approach, The New Avengers will be of interest to second and third year undergraduates, postgraduates and lecturers across several academic fields including film studies, gender studies, and media and cultural studies.
About the Author(s)
Jacinda Read is Lecturer in Media Studies at De Montfort University.
Synopsis
A study of the rape-revenge film, in which Jacinda Read suggests that the rape-revenge cycle can be read as one of the primary ways in which Hollywood has attempted to make sense of feminism and the changing shape of heterosexual femininity in the post-1970 period. Arguing that rape-revenge is better understood not as a genre, but as a narrative structure, the author analyzes the ways in which various deployments of this structure rework the "mass cultural fictions of femininity" inscribed in the genres over which they have been mapped. From the "frontier femmes" of rape-revenge westerns such as "Hannie Caulder", through the "erotic avengers" of neo-noirs such as "Batman Returns", to the "maternal avengers" of rape-revenge melodrama such as "An Eye for an Eye", this work explores the popular understandings of feminism that circulate around these generic manifestations of the female avenger. Applying ideas from feminist cultural studies to the analysis of film, and combining detailed textual analysis with contextual analysis, the book challenges many of the received orthodoxies of feminist theory. --via Amazon.co.uk
your Amazon recommendations