Sleaze Mania, Euro-trash, and High Art (1999) - Joan Hawkins
Parents: sleaze - Euro trash - art horror - film
Related: paracinema - Joan Hawkins - 1999
On the place of European art films in American low culture. [Aug 2006]
The War Game (1965) - Peter Watkins [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
"A terrifying, fabricated documentary records the horrors of a future atomic war in the most painstaking, sickening detail. Photographed in London, it shows the flash bums and firestorms, the impossibility of defence, the destruction of all life. Produced by the BBC, the film was promptly banned and became world-famous and rarely seen." --Amos Vogel, 1974
Description
Sleaze Mania, Euro-trash, and High Art is a 1999 essay by Joan Hawkins which appeared in Film Quarterly of Winter 1999. In the essay she examines American mail order horror film catalogues and is surprised to find art films in them. She cites as examples Peter Watkins's The War Game (1965), Godard's Weekend (1968) and Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1972).Hawkins concludes that in American cult film mail order catalogues, high mingles with low and that European art and avant-garde/experimental films and popular culture meet in nobrow land. While this may be very well the case, there is still the question of authorial intentionality.
Art filmmakers make films with the intention of making art, they seek artistic merit, while exploitation filmmakers make films to make money. [Aug 2006]
Horror fanzines
Open the pages of any U.S. horror fanzine--Outre, Fangoria, Cinefantastique--and you will find listings for mail order video companies which cater to afficionados of what Jeffrey Sconce has called "paracinema" and trash aesthetics. Not only do these mail order companies represent one of the fastest-growing segments of the video market, their catalogues challenge many of our continuing assumptions about the binary opposition of prestige cinema (European art and avant-garde/experimental films) and popular culture. Certainly, they highlight an aspect of art cinema which is generally overlooked or repressed in cultural analysis, namely, the degree to which high culture trades on the same images, tropes, and themes which characterize low culture. --Sleaze Mania, Euro-trash, and High Art, Film Quarterly, Winter, 1999 by Joan Hawkins [Mar 2005]
High mingles with low
In the world of horror and cult film fanzines and mail order catalogues, what Carol J. Clover calls "the high end" of the horror genre mingles indiscriminately with the "low end." Here, Murnau's Nosferatu (1921) and Dreyer's Vampyr (1931) appear alongside such drive-in favorites as Tower of Screaming Virgins (1971) and Jail Bait (1955). Even more interesting, European art films which have little to do with horror--Antonioni's L'avventura (1960), for example--are listed alongside movies which Video Vamp labels "Eurocinetrash." European art films are not easily located through separate catalogue subheadings or listings. Many catalogues simply list film titles alphabetically, making no attempt to differentiate among genres or subgenres, high or low art. In Luminous Film and Video Wurks Catalogue 2.0, for example, Jean-Luc Godard's edgy Weekend (1968) is sandwiched between The Washing Machine (1993) and The Werewolf and the Yeti (1975). Sinister Cinema's 1996-97 catalogue, which organizes titles chronologically, lists Godard's Alphaville (1965) between Lightning Bolt (1965) and Zontar, the Thing from Venus (1966). --Sleaze Mania, Euro-trash, and High Art, Film Quarterly, Winter, 1999 by Joan Hawkins [Mar 2005]
The War Game (1965) and The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1972)
While Williams' assessment of the way body genres work--particularly the way they work in "specifically gendered ways" (144)--is excellent, the distinction between high and low, properly distanced and improperly involved audience response is not as neat as Williams suggests. Consider, for example, Amos Vogel's description of The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1965), a British art film which is frequently listed in paracinema catalogues. "A terrifying, fabricated documentary records the horrors of a future atomic war in the most painstaking, sickening detail. Photographed in London, it shows the flash bums and firestorms, the impossibility of defence [sic], the destruction of all life. Produced by the BBC, the film was promptly banned and became world-famous and rarely seen." Similarly, Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1972), which is hard to find outside experimental and avant-garde film venues, encourages an uncomfortably visceral reaction in the spectator. The chronicle of a real autopsy, the film is, Amos Vogel writes, "an appalling, haunting work of great purity and truth. It dispassionately records whatever transpires in front of the lens: bodies sliced length-wise, organs removed, skulls and scalp cut open with electric tools" (267). While such descriptive terms as "haunting work of great purity and truth" are seldom found in paracinema catalogues, The War Game and The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes do address the spectator in ways that paracinema fans would appreciate. Clearly designed to break the audience's aesthetic distance, the films encourage the kind of excessive physical response which we would generally attribute to horror. Furthermore, their excessive visual force and what paracinema catalogues like to term "powerful subject matter" mark them as subversive. Banned, marginalized through being screened exclusively in museums and classrooms, these are films which most mainstream film patrons never see. --Sleaze Mania, Euro-trash, and High Art, Film Quarterly, Winter, 1999 by Joan Hawkins [Mar 2005]
Marquis de Sade
Consider the works of the Marquis de Sade, whose books are sold in mainstream bookstores and adult bookstores, and housed in university libraries. De Sade's works, which the intellectual elite views as masterful analyses of the mechanisms of power and economics, are also--at least if we are to take their presence in adult bookstores and magazines seriously--still regarded as sexually arousing, as masturbatory aids. Furthermore, as Jane Gallop's powerful admission that she masturbated while reading de Sade demonstrates, one set of cultural uses--one kind of audience pleasure--doesn't necessarily preclude the other.(15) It is possible for someone to be simultaneously intellectually challenged and physically titillated; and it is possible for someone to simultaneously enjoy both the intellectual and the physical stimulation. --Sleaze Mania, Euro-trash, and High Art, Film Quarterly, Winter, 1999 by Joan Hawkins http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1070/is_2_53/ai_59210751/pg_1 [Mar 2005]