Jeffrey Sconce (ed.),
Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-3964-9
US$23.95 (pb)
352pp
(Review copy supplied by Duke University Press)
Jeffrey Sconce is a terrific smart arse. It’s what makes him such a pleasure to read, and what ensures his ‘Trashing the Academy’ is one of the few tutorial readings wholly and happily consumed by undergraduates. He is especially amusing if, like Sconce, you revel in the inevitable absurdity of the evaluation and appreciation of an ‘art form’ forever besmirched by its origins in, and ongoing affair with, the cheap and nasty thrills of popular spectacle. This edited anthology is familiar territory for Sconce, traversing the slippery slide between taste and politics in trash cinema, between the ironies and incongruities of what audiences (and academics) love, what they hate, and what they love to hate.
Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics collects twelve broad ranging essays united by a shared interest in movies of disrepute and infamy. The title, as Sconce wryly notes, does not refer to “the effortless sleaze of a Hollywood studio making a film about a husband worried that a psycho cop will break in to the house and rape his wife, and then titling the film Unlawful Entry (1992)” (p. 5). Instead Sleaze Artists looks to a host of cinematic nasties from the fringes of acceptability – films from the sexploitation and grindhouse circuits, hardcore pornography, slashers, perverse Italian bloody mayhem, cannibal holocausts and so on.
While there isn’t time here to discuss all twelve essays in detail, I will try to give a sense of the scope of discussions presented by Sleaze Artists. The essays in the first half of the anthology take a loosely historical approach, focusing entirely on 1960s and 1970s cinema, and sexploitation cinema in particular. Eric Schaefer examines the advertising for sexploitation films and hardcore pornography from the 60s and 70s, charting their wilful perpetuation of the stereotypes of sexploitation audiences as unsavoury perverts. For Schaefer, it was an approach that wholly misrepresented the reality of sexploitation audiences and had dire consequences for the sexploitation and porno industries, which faced increasingly strict censorship codes and exclusion from the mainstream press. Likewise looking to sexploitation films, and the emerging hardcore pornography industry, Chuck Kleinhans provides a typology of narration in ‘mondo porn’: exploitation documentaries that made the most of United States obscenity laws that permitted nudity on the grounds of social, scientific or educational value. Harry M. Benshoff considers the representation of homosexual desire in the military in a string of films from the 1960s, arguing that despite their sleazy tendencies they were in fact more complex and progressively queer than previously realised, and often more so than films produced after the Stonewall riots.
Perhaps the most interesting essay from this first collection is Tania Modleski’s analysis of Doris Wishman; New York housewife turned director of sexploitation ‘roughies’. At the heart of the essay is a reference to lesbian writer Joan Nestle’s description of her mother, whose sexual adventures often resulted in beatings and abuse but “who kept alive her right to sexuality when sex was killing her” (quoted in p. 48). Modleski wonders whether there might be moments in Wishman’s films that protest sexual violence and defend women’s right to sexuality, and more implicitly, whether feminists can criticise Wishman’s films and defend her right to work in an aggressively male genre. Gesturing to Pam Cook and Claire Johnston’s call for a feminist ‘counter cinema’, Modleski posits that films which so relentlessly traffic in the battery of women by men offer a potentially ‘counterphobic’ mode of filmmaking and film-going wherein women can confront and survive their worst nightmares.
Wishman is such a compellingly ambiguous figure that Modleski has to confront a series of debates regarding cinematic politics and taste, the least of which are the shifting attitudes towards Wishman and her work, progressing from failed sexploitation goon to trash auteur and renegade feminist subversive. Just as interesting are fluctuating attitudes within diverse feminisms and Modleski’s attempts to reconcile them, and her own shifting personal tastes (and distastes) regarding Wishman’s work. This essay was written in the 1990s but has been unpublished until now because of Modleski’s ongoing uneasiness with her subject.
Essays in the second half of the collection, ‘Sleazy Afterlives’, are less historically rooted and more diverse in their approaches. Kay Dickinson’s ‘Troubling Synthesis’ considers the use of synthesisers in the soundtracks for video nasties such as Dario Argento’s Inferno (Italy 1980) and Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (Italy 1979). Dickinson suggests that the uncomfortable paring of bloody dismemberments and brutality with the cold hedonism of synth music played a large part in their eventual banning in Britain under the 1984 Video Recordings Act. Violence, coupled with such a dogged reluctance to offer any moral reproof (at least aurally), is what makes these films so interesting to Dickinson. They call into question our standard engagement with horrific cinema, and in particular the privileged relationship between “specific realist codes, humanist sympathy, and morality” (p. 181). Surely, however, any ill-fitting sound track (jangling folk or sugary pop – or even the absence of a soundtrack as Dickinson herself notes) would have elicited a similar sense of moral ambiguity? Dickinson doesn’t really interrogate precisely what about synth music was so troubling, relying instead on the too-neat generalisation that synthesisers were seen as ‘cold’, ‘flat’ and ‘futuristic’ (especially when analogue synths from that period such as the Moog are usually described as immensely warm).
Joan Hawkins and Matt Hills both look at the difficult and contested territory between art and trash, the legitimate and the maligned, and the fringe and the centre, with regards to very different films. Hawkins describes the ‘sleazy pedigree’ of director Todd Haynes, a highly articulate filmmaker well aware of the debates and strategies surrounding the hybridisation of camp and trash with high art concepts that characterise his filmmaking. Building on observations made in her book Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (2000) Hawkins argues that trash cinema cultures valorise their interests by aligning them with high art, collapsing conventional high/low hierarchies, and in Haynes’ case, producing a genuine synthesis of taste cultures.
This is a point Hills picks up on in his essay ‘Para-Paracinema’ which considers the Friday the 13th series (1980-2003) as an example of films which are neither sufficiently trash nor quality to belong to either film culture. He argues that trash cinemas fans, or in Sconce’s original term fans of ‘paracinema’, legitimise their interests by adopting the evaluative criteria of the legitimate. The overall affect is not, as paracinephiles would believe, the triumphant dismemberment of bourgeois cultural morality, but just a remake of it. “Cultural hierarchies are not escaped; instead the lines of cultural demarcation around film as art are stretched as avant-garde legitimacy is discursively borrowed” (p. 222). Paracinephiles have their own set of exclusionary taste hierarchies which, much like legitimate film cultures, work to de-value the Friday the 13th film series and its audiences.
Closing the book is Sconce’s essay ‘Movies: A Century of Failure’ which looks at the growing number and visibility of “cinephiles who love movies yet hate the cinema” (p. 275). He describes how cinema, inherently compromised by its relationship to industry and capital, has always struggled to be recognised as an art form in its own right, with cinephiles and academics looking instead to its social and historical contexts for valorisation. Subversive content, artistic visions and bold experiments were disguised and snuck out from under the noses of Hollywood moneymen in the form of genre movies, hidden subtexts and out and out failures. The rise of ‘cine-cynicism’ suggests the general public now realise “the cinema is not really an art at all, but an industrial and cultural circus masquerading behind obsolescent discourses and impossible expectations about art” (p. 304). For Sconce, the salvation of cinema, if we should so wish for it, can be found somewhere in this cine-cynicism and derision, in its politicised engagement with cinema not as an art form, but as a ‘practice’, or rather “an occupied cultural field that must be continually attacked, resisted, and mocked in guerrilla skirmishes of wit, snark, and sarcasm” (p. 302).
This last line hints at what might be at the heart of this taste/politics merry-go-round. The greatest pleasure for cinephiles and academics is, and possibly always has been, the constant negotiation and tussle over cinematic turf. Films are fun, but fighting about films is even more fun. Coming at a time when the paracinephiles of Sconce’s original essay are not ‘trashing the academy’ so much as comfortably ensconced in it, Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics provides a useful overview of the historical and sociological meta-narratives and theoretical debates associated with the 1960s and 1970s exploitation films central to so much trash cinema culture. Importantly, it also points to some new avenues through which to research ongoing and future cinematic taste wars.
Maura Edmond,
Melbourne University, Australia.
Created on: Thursday, 31 July 2008