The Style of Sleaze

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Calum Waddell
Keyword(s):  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Film History ◽  
American Film ◽  
Complex Motion ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Thematic Approach ◽  
Exploitation Film ◽  
The Aesthetic

What is an exploitation film? The Style of Sleaze reasons that the aesthetic and thematic approach of the key texts within three distinct exploitation demarcations - blaxploitation, horror and sexploitation - indicate a concurrent evolution of filmmaking that could be seen as an identifiable cinematic movement. Offering a fresh perspective on studies of marginal cinema, The Style of Sleaze maintains that defining exploitation cinema as a vaguely attributed 'excess' is unhelpful, and instead concludes that this period in American film history produced a number of the most transgressive, and yet morally complex, motion pictures ever made.

Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in American Film

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Carr
Keyword(s):  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Film History ◽  
Future Research ◽  
American Film ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Film Texts

The rise of the American motion picture corresponds to the influx of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Just as many of these immigrants initially settled in East Coast and Midwest cities, both movies and movie audiences emerged there as an urban phenomenon. Rather than view this phenomenon only in terms of the images that films of this era offered, this chapter proposes to move beyond a “reflection paradigm” of film history. Of course, film texts reflected immigrant, ethnic, and racial identities. But these identities also existed beyond the text, across movies and movie-going, and embedded within diffuse, multiple, and overlapping networks of imagined relationships. Using Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, this chapter recounts some preliminary case studies involving race, ethnicity, and immigration to explore how future research in this area might probe the cultural practices of movie-going among diverse audiences during the first half of the twentieth century.

Not Quite Hollywood

2018 ◽  
pp. 12-31
Author(s):  
Calum Waddell
Keyword(s):  
Exploitation Film ◽  
The Aesthetic

How to define an exploitation film – and what separates the exploitation cinema produced in America during the timeline of this book from that of the B-movie. The chapter also explores the aesthetic and thematic approaches of exploitation cinema in the post-classical era. The chapter concludes upon what makes American exploitation cinema unique.

Between Copyright and Creativity

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-121
Author(s):  
Amanda Egbe
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Film History ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
New Materials ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Primary Form ◽  
Archaeological Approach

Focusing on Edison’s early cinematic apparatus and the optical printer, this chapter explores how copyright law intersects with creativity, providing an alternative to teleological accounts of moving-image technologies. Thomas Edison attempted to control the film industry through patents and copyright. Edison’s first film experiments were registered as a series of photographs on card by his assistant, W. L. Dickson. In protecting these contact copies as paper prints with copyright, the new medium of motion pictures was being formalized. The necessity to duplicate film to support the development of exhibition and distribution was also necessary for copyright purposes. An archaeological approach is utilized to explore how paper prints enabled innovation in the area of the optical printer, a primary form of duplication in cinema. In developing approaches that could bring to life the remaining examples of early cinema, novel solutions in the form of innovations were required. The overlapping concerns of the copyright clerk, the film entrepreneur, and the film historian thus provide a basis for new materials and new innovations in moving-image technology and film history.

The Hundred-Year-Old Question: Can American Cinema Be Saved?

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 37-47
Author(s):  
James Schamus
Keyword(s):  
American Film ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Theatrical Film ◽  
Streaming Services ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Ticket Prices ◽  
Film Experience ◽  
Viewing Experience

The Art House Convergence conference annually brings together hundreds of independent theater owners and supporters of arthouse cinema during the days preceding the Sundance Film Festival. When the organizers invited James Schamus to deliver the keynote address at their 2016 gathering, it was a commission he did not relish. The expected argument of such speeches is pretty much set in stone these days: cinema, understood primarily as feature films meant initially for theatrical exhibition, is under attack, and the keynote speaker's task is to rally the troops in its defense, soliciting applause for recent victories on the battlefield, and railing against the encroachments of the enemies of film, in particular the digital streaming services whose assaults on the sanctity of the theatrical viewing experience, and thus on the aesthetic object known as the theatrical film, grow ever more ferocious with each passing year. Schamus took on the task of delivering that speech, and then transforming it into this article for FQ. He concludes with a rousing plea to all regarding what he terms, “This vicious spiral of longer movies, higher costs and higher ticket prices,” that can only spell disaster for the supporter of truly independent American cinema. Schamus urges readers to stand with him (and all who love the genuine American film experience), to advocate for vibrant, varied, open-ended, hybrid, serial and ongoing open storytelling and entertainment.

American Women Screenwriters in the 1920s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuliana Muscio
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Film History ◽  
World Market ◽  
Narrative Construction ◽  
American Film ◽  
Social Force ◽  
American Women ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
American Film Industry ◽  
Classical Hollywood

This chapter contextualizes the work of American women scriptwriters within the gendered liberalization of an emerging consumer capitalism during the 1920s. More specifically, it examines the major role played by women writers in the American film industry of the period to the development of “classical Hollywood narrative,” both as a social force and a form of storytelling. It suggests that women screenwriters contributed to the maturation of narrative construction—from its origins to the introduction of sound, when Hollywood completed the conquest of the world market. In addition to significantly contributing to film history, American women screenwriters played a crucial role in modernizing society, not only through the stories they wrote but also through their very presence in Hollywood.

Brown Studies Now and in Transition

2019 ◽  
pp. 555-570
Author(s):  
Hannah Lauren Murray
Keyword(s):  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Early National ◽  
Thematic Approach ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
State Of The Field

This chapter examines the state of the field of Charles Brockden Brown studies since 2000. Taking a thematic approach, I discuss four dominant strands in twenty-first-century criticism: geographies, medical humanities, economies, and aesthetics. These sections cover the scholarly debate over a transnational, imperial, or postcolonial Brown; consider the new ways in which early national medicine intersects with his fiction; chart the rise of market and class-based criticism; and discuss a return to formal concerns in light of the aesthetic or postcritique turn. The final section of this chapter looks ahead to emergent trends in future Brown scholarship in response to the previous decade’s work.

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