The Law Is Crazy!

This chapter examines the intersection of colorblindness and antistatism in New Hollywood exploitation films of the early 1970s. Focusing on Dirty Harry (1971) and Coffy (1973), the chapter explores how the success of New Hollywood relied in part on its ability to function as a laboratory for the development of colorblind ideology. Together, these films, similar in genre but marketed to vastly different audiences, reveal the disparate ends colorblind rhetoric served in the first half of the 1970s. Both appealed to emerging colorblind sentiments and helped shape the antistatist ethos of the early decade while reinforcing popular and dehumanizing notions of blackness. That ethos provided the necessary foundation on which colorblindness would gain traction in the ensuing years.

Od trawelogu do King Konga. Misja badawcza jako motyw kina lat dwudziestych i trzydziestych w świetle imaginarium społecznego epoki

From the travelogue to King Kong: Science expeditions as a cinematic motif of the 1920s and 1930s in light of the social imaginaries of the eraScience expeditions are a staple of cinematic fiction. The theme has been utilized in dozens of permutations in different media and film genres ranging from adventure flicks to family comedies and horrors. Indiana Jones, undoubtedly the best-known “field researcher” in the world, is one of popular culture’s most recognizable figures. In this article, however, I am interested in an era predating his cinematic debut by at least a half century. Its main focus is the 1920s/1930s threshold in which science expeditions began constituting themselves as a motif of cinema and the reasons why such a seemingly august, scholarly enterprise transformed into a popcultural phenomenon. My analysis will focus on two often overlooked but massively popular genres of the era: expeditionary films and exotic exploitation films, both of which, I argue, can be traced back to the ethnographic travelogue. I begin my inquiries — and end them — with Merian C. Cooper’s and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong 1993, which provides me with a framework for describing the ever-fickle relationship between documentary, fiction, truth and fabrication, which defined the cinematic representations of science expeditions from the very beginning.

Roger Corman

“The King of the B Movies.” “The Pope of Pop Cinema.” “The Spiritual Godfather of the New Hollywood.” “The King of Cult.” Celebrated and reviled, the many-nicknamed Roger Corman is a remarkable filmmaker for many reasons. By all accounts a quiet, unassuming man with left-wing politics who is nevertheless known as a cutthroat businessman and unapologetic capitalist, Corman is enshrined in Hollywood legend for his thrift and innovation. His 1950s and 1960s output as a director, mainly for American International Pictures (AIP), is varied and colorful: science fiction films, gangster films, motor racing films, biker films, sex comedies, Westerns. And yet it is surely for his horror films he is best remembered, especially the mid-budget series adapting Edgar Allan Poe stories, mostly starring Vincent Price. He is also well known as a nurturer of new talent, providing numerous actors and directors with early opportunities; his successful disciples have rewarded him with cameos in films such as The Godfather Part II (1974) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Corman was an innovator on the business side as well. In 1959, he and his brother Gene Corman founded a distribution company called Filmgroup; it folded within a few years but was a prelude to the founding of Corman’s much more successful New World Pictures in 1970. New World was oriented toward inexpensive exploitation films but also responsible for the American distribution of many international art films by directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Akira Kurosawa. Academic attention to Corman came slowly. There was a swell of interest in the late 1960s and thereafter, identifying him as a low-budget auteur who maintained a distinctive set of themes unifying a diverse body of work, but it happened just as he retreated from directing, only sporadically returning to the director’s chair. Though Corman directed around fifty films, that count is vastly outstripped by his films as a producer, a role he regularly occupies to this day. General public appreciation for Corman peaked with his 2009 Honorary Academy Award and the celebratory documentary Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011).

Early 21st-century Serbian exploitation cinema

Exploitation films are one of the main trends of the Serbian cinema of the beginning of the 21st century, when Serbia enters the second phase of systemic transformation, striving to neutralize the effects of the crisis in the first phase of transformation – towards the end of the 20th century – due to the authoritarian policy of Slobodan Milošević and Yugoslav wars. This non-film context allows better understanding of the phenomenon of these films, which in many respects are a continuation of the cinema of self-balkanization cultivated in the 1990s, and at the same time differ from it, because they do not offer a compromise with difficult transformational reality, but express the need to release the social trauma born of experience of political violence in the Milošević era.

Mondo Macabro as Trashy/Cult Film Archive: The Case of Classic Indonesian Exploitation Cinema

Film archiving and local exploitation films, let alone the trashy film archive, are marginal in the discourses of film journalism, scholarship, policies, and criticism in Indonesia (Imanjaya, 2009c; Imanjaya, 2012a; Imanjaya, 2014). However, this paper will demonstrate the importance of Indonesian exploitation cinema, alternative film archives, and exploitation film preservation. It will focus on the output of Mondo Macabro, a transnational DVD label that consistently preserves world trashy films, including Indonesian films produced from the 1970s to the 1990s. By focusing on its DVD paratexts, that is, its DVD covers, special features, and online promotional materials, and applying the Chaperone archiving model also applied by Criterion Collection, this paper will also argue that Mondo Macabro gives trashy or cult films a new lease on life, and more importantly, treats them as collector’s items.

Mondo-ing Urban Girl Tribes: The Boom of 1960s–70s Erotic Cinema and the Policing of Young Female Subjects in Japanese sukeban Films

The purpose of this article is to analyse the ambivalent politics of looking and discourses of gender, class and sexuality in a variety of 1960s–70s Japanese studio-made exploitation films, known as sukeban films. It first contextualises their production within a transnational and domestic shift emphasising sex and violence in film and popular culture. The article then highlights instances where the visual, narrative and discursive articulation of non-conforming femininities flips the gendered power balance, as in the sketches that satirise men’s sexual fetishes for girls. In conclusion, it suggests to understand the filmic construction of young women’s agency, and their bodily and sexual performance, in terms of a recurring modus operandi of Japanese media that ambivalently panders to and co-constitutes youth phenomena.

Adaptation XXX

Pornographic adaptations—erotic parodies of mainstream films—have long been dismissed from critical notice as much because of their allegedly slapdash adaptation strategies as because of their demotic cultural associations. Focusing mostly on commercially produced US films, Chapter 24 traces the history of pornographic adaptations from the softcore exploitation films of the 1960s through “Golden Age” hardcore films such as The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976) to contemporary DVD and online “XXX versions” and looks in detail at porn versions of Fanny Hill and Psycho (1960). The essay explores how far such film adaptations uncover disavowed erotic subtexts in their sources and considers what the process of porn adaptation can reveal about the more general processes of producing and consuming adaptations.

Italian Horror Cinema and Italian Film Journals of the 1970s

This chapter will focus on the domestic reception of Italian horror cinema in journals and magazines during the 1970s in order to begin a process of understanding the ways in which the genre was valued, discussed and (less commonly) analysed by Italian critics of the period. Although Italian horror in general has been subject to a considerable amount of scholarship, in fact, little has been written (in English, but also in Italian) about the criticism it aroused, and the way it was used by Italian critics to deal with genres and popular cinema. Given the entire history of Italian horror, the decision to focus on the 1970s is not casual and merits some preliminary contextualisation. Compared with the previous decade, which witnessed the blossoming of Bava, Ferroni, Freda and Margheriti’s gothic genre, and the subsequent one, which accompanied the work of Dario Argento as a director and a producer of both his and others’ films, the brief but intense season of the cannibal movie and the exploitation films of directors like Fulci, Massaccesi and Lenzi, the 1970s were relatively ‘empty’.