DOI: https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v21.i0.2708

 

In her study on the folkloric figure of the pontianak in Malay animism and the history of her cinematic representations, Rosalind Galt’s Alluring Monsters adopts a multi-method, multi-scalar approach that contests Western film scholarship’s adherence to its own film-historical canon(s). “When we come up against the challenge of ‘adapting’ Western scholarship to think non-Western film histories,” Galt notes, “we fall prey to a colonialist mindset.”[1]Informed by “a methodology that takes in an expansive view of what might constitute the politics and aesthetics of postcoloniality,” Galt’s project “aim[s] to contribute to a decolonisation of the [horror] genre” rather than “situat[ing] horror genre studies as a neutral set of concepts to be applied to a new set of films.”[2] “To insist on Malay cinema ascinema itself,” Galt asserts, “we have to pay attention to how the category of world cinema is constituted and what it means to locate the worldly within the particular.”[3] Navigating alternative meanings of horror, and locating these meanings within a non-Western national context where the sectoral operations of cinema were always already transnational, Alluring Monsters demonstrates the ways in which a methodology of decolonisation in the study of world cinemas allows radically different entries into a genealogy of horror film: a genealogy that decolonises, in provincializing, the dominant film-historical canons associated with the horror genre. Galt’s genealogy troubles the normative geopolitics of canonisation in film studies.

Although the academic study of horror film has become increasingly established in recent years, the study of the transnationalism of horror cinema and its revival in non-Western national contexts is relatively limited. While the transnational approaches are discussed in key anthologies on international horror,[4] and a handful of later collections devoted to particular national horror traditions, including Asian and European national contexts,[5] there is still much to be said about the specifically transnational dynamics of horror filmmaking, its circulation, and its diverse trends or “waves.” Aligning with what Galt proposes as an “expansive” methodology (that attends to local and trans-local meanings of horror and its geopolitics of intelligibility and reception), the core objective of my project, entitled Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics,[6] is to explore the revival of folkloric representations through a critical approach that does not prioritise the Anglo-American and European legacies of horror film as the only point of entry into a genealogy of folk horror, but propose polycentric constellations of horror and its transnational development as genre and/or mode. The proliferation of these new folk horror narratives is a global phenomenon and the vast scale of its revival, and its histories, is relatively under-researched.

This article proposes an alternative methodology to the study of transnationalism and horror film, that attends to the curatorial affordances of film studies and its engagement with the canon (and the canonising practices). Following an analysis of existing curatorial approaches to frame the “folk horror revival”[7] in transnational settings, I will focus on the themed selection of film screenings, Mined Zone: Folk Horror, which I curated for the International Istanbul Film Festival (8-19 April 2022). The screening programme aimed to introduce Istanbul’s festival audiences to geographically diverse representations of folk horror in world cinema. Engaging with the recent revival of folk horror narratives featuring witches, shamans, trolls, djinns, demons, black magic and other folkloric-paranormal phenomena, the selection ranged from contemporary examples to historically significant examples of folk horror. In parallel to these screenings curated with the support of MUBI Türkiye and the festival programming team in Istanbul, I also edited a folk horror dossier published in Turkey’s leading film magazine Altyazı, which included the Turkish translations of the project participants’ original contributions to the dossier reviewing a selection of films programmed for the festival, and the films released and promoted by MUBI Türkiye as part of the festival’s Mined Zone programme. Critically reflecting on the curatorial possibilities and limitations of (i) de-westernising film criticism and horror spectatorship, and (ii) facilitating cross-cultural mobility of non-Anglophone horror cinema through an anti-canonising approach to horror-as-genre, this article will provide a critical account of transnationalism to understand the contemporary revival of folk horror narratives and its reception in international festival settings.

Aporetic Terms in the Humanities, and the Curatorial Affordances of Film Studies

Any field in arts and humanities, that is informed by contemporary critical theory, must engage with aporetic and ambivalent concepts. While the extent to which such concepts are productive in terms of their politics of ambivalence is debatable, they bear methodological – and curatorial – affordances to transform the disciplinary norms of knowledge production (e.g. “queer,” “decolonial,” “transnational,” “political,” “global/local,” “genre,” and “canon”). The aporia such concepts point to also “provokes a crisis in representation, but crucially we have some sense of it, we know there is something to be sought.”[8] Such ambivalences in concept-based methodologies of arts and humanities are not always critically and politically progressive. The “market forces” could also invest in the commercially productive ambivalences of such terms, which aspire to measure “success” through metrics investing in such ambivalences (e.g. equality, diversity, decolonisation, employability, etc). How individuals and institutions could interpret these aporetic, yet trendsetting, terms – creatively and innovatively – raise curatorial questions.

For this study, I will be focusing on the conceptual ambivalences of “horror” and “transnational”. While the former turns into a problematic genre category in recent re-interpretations of “folk horror,” the latter is an often-contested term in film studies – as a descriptive and prescriptive marker for filmmaking practices and their national affiliations. To be able to address the curatorial affordances of such key concepts in film studies, one needs to theorise “the curatorial.” While film studies have always been involved with curatorial frameworks that contest, critique, revise, or expand the (film-historical) canons, there is no established theoretical tradition (in the field) dedicated to “the curatorial” yet. I argue that the debates on curation in the field of contemporary visual arts bear significant potentials to inform the field of film studies, particularly its critical framings of the canonical.

In his response to Jean-Paul Martinon and Irit Rogoff’s conceptualisation of “the curatorial,”[9] Simon Sheikh notes that “the use of the curatorial is […] an analytical tool and a philosophical proposition, and by indication, a separate form of knowledge production that may actually not involve the curating of exhibitions, but rather the process of producing knowledge and making curatorial constellations that can be drawn from the historical forms and practices of curating.”[10] Treating the curatorial as “a specific mode of research that may or may not take on the spatial and temporal form of an exhibition,” Sheikh reflects on the paradoxes of the “inclusion/exclusion game” in practices of curation that invest in revising and/or expanding the (art-historical) canon:

Exhibitions as statements are (…) not dependent on individual subjects and their agency, but entangled in a web of statements, present as past, that both contradict and condition each other. And you are, principally, always allowed to disagree with the selection. Which is not to say that they do not deal in cultural hierarchies and hegemonies, but rather that these are not definite, but rather that they work with inclusion and exclusion, representation and de-presentation as constitutive of the field, and thus with an essential instability despite the perceived solidity of tradition, nation, and the walls of the institution, or what can be established as the canon. Now, in contemporary art and from art history we know that only very little is won by trying to include the excluded in the canon, since it works and maintains itself exactly through this inclusion/exclusion game. The inclusion of the excluded will again always be limited to only a select few individuals from whichever chosen excluded group, who will then have to suffer the indignity of representing this group forever. The canon only holds individuals, as works or subjects, and not contexts and histories. Instead of trying to expand the canon, it should be disposed of altogether.[11]

Here, Sheikh cites Stefan Nowotny’s proposition of “anti-canonisation” as a progressive response to the contemporary curatorial practices’ engagement with the canonical. Referring to the anti-canonising drive in Foucault’s conceptualisation of genealogy,[12] Nowotny asserts that “[w]hat could come into view through this kind of [anti-canonising] perspective is not so much – or at least not solely – the question of the respective critical assessment of art institutions, and certainly not of a canon, but rather an open field of a knowledge of action, a practical knowledge that rejects reintegration into the form of ends specific to art and in which the difference of institutional critique is actualized.”[13] The “anti-canonising knowledge,” Nowotny notes, is differential because it does not allow itself, being resistive, to be subjected to any authorized discursive field, to any authorization by a dominant discourse, but instead recognizes the power effects found in the separation of knowledge, yet without composing itself into a new totality of knowledge. Hence as plural knowledge it also does not “organize” itself under a unified form, but rather in an open, non-dialectical game of concurrence.[14]

Guided by these debates on “the curatorial” and its critical engagements with the canon, the next section will address the conceptual functions of folk horror (and horror, as genre) in the context(s) of its contemporary revival. The ambivalence embedded in the re-framings of “folk horror” bear the potential for horror studies to contest the normative film-historical canon, and to decolonise the field through an examination of alternative geographies – and genealogies – of genre film. Tracing the contemporary revival of folk horror through a lens of transnationalism, this study aims to incorporate Nowotny’s “anti-canonisation” (and Sheikh’s re-interpretation) into its curatorial framework.

Folk Horror within and beyond the Canon

Rather than pursuing an inclusive, global re-imagination of “folk horror” as a cohesive genre category, my project aims to explore how representations of folklore creep into different registers of filmmaking, with potentials to de-canonise national and international histories of horror cinema. This section addresses the ways in which contemporary debates and practices on folk horror question its affiliations with canons and genres. In his review of Valdimar Jóhansson’s film Lamb (2021), the film scholar Adrian Martin contests the critical reception of the film as “folk horror” in arguing that the film “resists folk horror tag” through its innovative style which does not sit harmoniously with the genre affiliations of horror (or “folk horror” specifically). Martin discusses his reservations over the contemporary hype around “folk horror” as follows:

 If the mythological figure of Dracula, for example, is to be taken under the umbrella of a nation’s folklore, then there seems precious little difference between virtually every well-established form of supernatural horror (taking in witchcraft, aliens, vampires, ghosts, spirits, zombies, demonic forces, etc., etc.) – thus covering the vast majority of horror films – and this new-fangled consumer tag of folk horror, already enthusiastically seized on for “curated marketing” purposes by, for example, the American “niche streaming” enterprise Shudder. What is the point, precisely, of separating folk horror out from the overall supernatural soup of the horror genre? I am yet to be convinced of the efficacy of this gesture.[15]

However, Lamb’s ambivalent involvement with the modes and tropes of folk horror demonstrates a more complex set of relations that are originally embedded within the Anglo-American and European legacies of folk horror. As I will discuss in detail, the revival of folk horror does not only augment the “curated marketing” purposes but also re-imagine the folk horror’s aporetic conceptuality in the (film-historical) canon.

In an interview featured in Kier-La Janisse’s documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), Adam Scovell reflects on his study Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017) which explores the British legacy of folk horror, and notes:

One of the big mistakes that I made – and that is still continuing to be made about it – is that [folk horror] is and does function as a genre. I think the best way to see it is as a mode … Folk horror works like [a mode] along with other modes such as psychogeography, hauntology, urban weird, English eerie… All these modes are interlinked but they don’t quite function as one cohesive genre. They’re interrelated in more complex ways.[16]

Scovell’s commentary above is located in Woodlands Dark’s final chapter (i.e. Chapter 6: “Folk Horror Revival”) which arrives after the penultimate Chapter 5: “All the Haunts Be Hours: Folk Horror Around the Word.” While internationalizing her documentary’s historical framework, Janisse’s expansion of the film-historical canon to “folk horror around the world” makes the operations of “folk horror”-as-genre more complex yet less cohesive. In other words, this expansion of folk horror’s British and American legacies compromises cohesion in favour of complexity, which Janisse’s inclusion of Scovell’s concluding remarks in the film’s final chapter (as cited above) corroborates.

How folk horror operates as a “consumer tag” in national and transnational settings, and how it obscures or elevates the political potentials of folklore, do indeed work as highly relevant questions that shape my project’s framework. Taking the geopolitics of canonisation in film studies scholarship as the key object of scrutiny, the project’s questions around the “folk horror revival” and “transnational horror” gain curatorial affordances as the ambivalences of “horror”s meanings and histories in transnational contexts of film criticism consolidate a polycentric vision of film history making any act of inclusion in (and exclusion from) a global canon ideologically shaped and (geopolitically) situated – thus curated.

I will start with three recent attempts to locate “folk horror” within curated histories of horror cinema. These histories are curatorial attempts to imagine, through particular modes of celebratory revisionism, a film-historical canon that re-categorises and re-conceptualises horror film. Part of the AMC Visionaries project, my first example is Eli Roth’s History of Horror (2018-2021), which is a three-season TV series that selects and categorises horror films to re-canonise a history of horror cinema. While its first season engages with the most familiar (i.e. “canonical”) themes in the history of American horror i.e. zombies, slashers, killer creatures, demonic possession, vampires, and ghost stories, the second season continues with haunted houses, monsters, body horror, witches, and “chilling children” – followed by the season’s final, sixth episode titled “Nine Nightmares.” The episode starts with Roth’s voiceover: “I want to introduce you to nine uncategorizable films that pushed the boundaries of horror”. Within the “uncategorisable,” Roth includes Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) and Get Out (2017), Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980), Juan Piquer Simon’s Pieces (1982), Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973). In his revisionist “curation” of an Anglo-American film-historical canon of horror cinema, Roth’s inclusion of The Wicker Man, a British folk horror classic, and Midsommar, one of the most known contemporary examples of the “folk horror revival,” under the rubric of the “uncategorisable,” demonstrates the categorical ambivalence that folk horror creates in such instances of celebratory historical accounts.

My second example is Severin Films’ Blu-ray box set, titled All The Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror(2021), which re-integrates folk horror into the film-historical canon in revising and expanding the normative curatorial frameworks that marginalise “folk horror” as “uncategorisable.” Proud of its inclusion of nineteen “best-known, least-known, rarely-seen and thought-lost classics of folk horror from around the world, all restored from the best available vault elements with Special Features that include short films, audio commentaries and exclusive featurettes,” the compendium’s curatorial framework moves beyond Eli Roth’s exclusive focus on American horror. However, the compendium’s “world” of “folk horror” seems to be defined by an Anglophone and Eurocentric film-historical canon. The selection of nineteen films includes key Australian productions of “indigenous horror” and “occult horror” (Mario Andreacchio’s The Dreaming [1988], James Bogle’s Kadaicha [1988], Ann Turner’s Celia [1989] and Ian Coughlan Alison’s Birthday [1981]), Konstantin Ershov & Georgiy Kropachyov’s Soviet classic Viy (1967), the Nordic productions Kåre Bergstrøm’s Lake of the Dead (1958) and Viðar Víkingsson’s Tilbury (1987), Đorđe Kadijević ’s Serbian film Leptirica (1973), and the Czech horror classic Otakar Vávra’s Witchhammer (1970). The selection features films from Poland (Marek Piestrak’s Wilczyca [1983] and Janusz Majewski’s Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach [1970]), Canada (Ryszard Bugajski’s Clearcut [1991]), and Italy (Brunello Rondi’s Il Demonio [1963]) – while also including the Russia-UK-Ukraine-Italy co-production Dark Waters (Baino 1993), and Avery Crounse’s Eyes of Fire (1983). Rather than including the British examples which were often regarded as “the unholy trinity of films that gave birth to folk horror,” namely Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973), the selection hosts a more eclectic mix of British films that attempt to reinvent folk horror: James MacTaggart’s Robin Redbreast (1970), Alan Clarke Penda’s Fen (1974), Chris Newby’s Anchoress (1993), and Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2012). Compendium’s framework gains further critical nuance with its inclusion of Kier-La Janisse’s documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021), which provides a comprehensive account of the ways in which “folk horror” became part of the film-historical canon world-wide. While the inclusion of Janisse’s film extendsCompendium’s imagination of the film-historical canon to other (i.e. non-Anglophone and non-European) cinematic legacies of folk horror, Janisse’s attempt to internationalise her documentary’s curated history also deserves critical examination.

Woodlands Dark combines expository, participatory, and poetic modes of documentary filmmaking.[17] While its poetic mode comes from the film’s essayistic method of compiling and mixing filmic images that share visual and thematic associations with various tropes of folklore, mythology, and horror, it is complemented by a participatory documentary mode that is shaped by the reflections and testimonials from practitioners and academics filmed in the “talking heads” format. The film opens with a rich array of definitions of folk horror: “based upon the juxtaposition between the prosaic and the uncanny,” “about being lost in ancient landscapes,” “ancients wisdoms that have been long repressed and forgotten rise up again – very often to the consternation of a complacent modern man,” “illegitimate culture …outside civilisation and modernity … sustained by the will of the people, the folk.”[18]

The film locates the first uses of “folk horror” within the history of European and British literature, particularly Gothic literature. This genealogical point of entry develops a historical account that is shaped by the industrial revolution and its effects on the British countryside, which lays the ground of Janisse’s identification of the British roots of folk horror informed by class antagonisms and a psychogeography of the countryside layered by “psychic imprints” of people. This British point of entry in the film leads the way to a chapter on “witchcraft and paganism” followed by a chapter on “American folk horror.” Janisse develops a framework that compares the British legacy of folk horror with the American horror’s ideological imprint: its colonial history of settlement – operating through the trope of the “Indian burial ground”. Janisse stretches the categorical boundaries of “folk horror” by including “hillbilly horror” or “backwoods horror” (with references to Toby Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974]) and horror films about urban myths/legends such as Candyman (1992). The “psycho-geographical pull [of the South in “hillbilly horror” and the Cabrini-Green housing projects in Candyman]” embedded in these films, Woodlands Dark suggests, is what makes them relevant to “American folk horror.”

Within its six-chapter narration over 193 minutes, Woodlands Dark dedicates its fifth chapter to “Folk Horror around the World.” The transition from the fourth chapter on American folk horror to the fifth chapter is accompanied by Janisse’s brief exposition: “Folk horror tends to have a lot of cultural and geographic specificity but when you start to look at it from a global perspective, those films are often speaking to each other in really interesting ways.”[19] While the chapter acknowledges a number of films included in Severin Films’ Compendium (i.e. examples of Australian “indigenous horror,” Eastern European productions, and Nordic horror films), it extends the compendium’s international framework to other non-Western national traditions of horror, e.g. the La Llorona films from Mexico (Ramón Peón’s La Llorona [1933], Miguel M. Delgado’s The Revenge of the Crying Woman [1974], and Rafael Baledón’s The Curse of the Crying Woman [1961]) and Guatemala (Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona [2019]), a selection of Brazilian horror films (Maurice Capovila’s Noites de Iemanjá  [1971], Carlos Hugo Christensen’s Leonora Dos Sete Mares [1955], Walter Hugo Khouri’s As Filhas Do Fogo [1978], José  Mojica Marins’s The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe [1974]), Japanese tradition of ghost horror films (Onibaba [1964], Kuroneko [1968], Black Cat Mansion [1958], Kobayashi’s Kwaidan [1964], Shunichi Nagasaki’s Shikoku [1999], Koji Shiraishi’s Noroi: The Curse [2005]), horror productions from the Soviet Union (Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors [1965], Aleksandr Rou’s May Nights [1952], Valeri Rubinchik’s Savage Hunt of King Stakh [1980]), and brief references to a limited number of Southeast Asian examples of folk horror (e.g. Mike de Leon’s The Rites of May [1977] from the Philippines, and Nonzee Nimibutr’s Nang Nak [1999] from Thailand).

Interestingly, the participatory mode dominating the first four chapters is replaced by a poetic mode of documentation that compiles images from “folk horror around the world” through visual associations and tropes of horror that Janisse’s “global perspective” grounds. The focus on “sacred indigenous sites” in Australian folk horror leads to the memory of genocide in the dybbuk movies (e.g. Marcyn Wrona’s Demon [2015] and Michał Waszyński’s The Dybbuk [1937]), which allows a transition to the themes of “national trauma” and “collective guilt” observed in Mexican La Llorona films. Using the maternal associations of water in the global horror canon, the film “surfs” from Mexican folk horror to Nordic and Japanese traditions of horror. The Australian “indigenous horror” frequently comes back as a comparative reference when the narrative compilation points to thematic connections with settler-colonialism as a horror theme. Overall, then, the nuance and rigour with which American and British traditions are compared to one another is replaced by a universalist (and transnational) mode of “worlding” folk horror – formally registered by a documentary mode of poetic essayism. What is meant by Janisse’s reference to “a global perspective” prioritises a comparative attention to transnational resonances of folk horror’s operations rather than an acknowledgement of the possibility of creating another “history of folk horror” with an entirely different geographic point of entry into an alternative genealogy. In his contribution to Altyazı’s special dossier (i.e. an output of the project, which I will discuss later), Iain Smith also expresses his reservations regarding Janisse’s acts of “worlding” folk horror: where the early sections of the documentary provide a concrete sense of the British historical and cultural context, this later section on folk horror titles from around the world becomes more digressive, highlighting the overlapping nature of folk horror across all these different national traditions but not always having the space to adequately address the specific sociohistorical context in each case. This relates to the broader challenge of applying a framework largely derived from British cinema to films from around the world – at once aiming to de-Westernise the concept by reframing it through a global selection of case studies, while also nevertheless reinforcing the centrality of Western frameworks for understanding these diverse traditions.[20]

What Woodlands Dark’s “global perspective” omits, then, are the rich traditions of horror in the cinemas of Egypt, Philippines, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Singapore, and South Korea, which are significantly informed by religion-folklore syncretisms. While some of the horror film traditions in some of these contexts (e.g. Bollywood, Nollywood, and the cinema of the Philippines) may be considered to operate under what Iain Smith conceptualises as “the Hollywood meme,”[21] the majority of these traditions combines horror with other modes or local genre conventions in such a way that the meanings of horror-as-category becomes situated knowledge. Recalling what Sheikh considers as “the inclusion/exclusion game” embedded in the curatorial aspirations to revise or expand the canons, I argue that the absences in Janisse’s documentary demonstrates the need for an anti-canonising curatorial approach to transnational horror. If one genuinely aspires to decolonise our understanding of folklore and horror in transnational settings of “world cinemas,” alternative genealogies should be pursued – rather than making “folk horror around the world” a comparative supplement to the hegemonic film-historical canon.

Another alternative method to resist hegemonic canons could take the form of what Alexander Jovčić-Sas’s study (on the Bauhaus centenary) conceptualises as “parallel canonisation,” which operates as a triangulation of the curatorial modes of revisionism, anti-canonisation, and “minor histories.”[22] For example, the HBO production Folklore (2018-2020) – a two-season thirteen-episode TV series with each episode dedicated to one horror story about an Asian folkloric spirit (e.g. wewe gombel [Indonesia], pontianak [Singapore], zashiki-warashi [Japan], toyol [Malaysia], pob[Thailand], mongdal [Korea], etc.) – is shaped by a pragmatically curated regionalism that brands “Asia” as an alternative “centre” for another lineage, a “parallel canon,” of folk horror. What my British Academy project was after, however, is not a “parallel canon” of regionally (and nationally) specific horror traditions but a more relational genealogy of folk horror that is informed by a curatorial mode of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation.

Critical Transnationalism as Anti-Canonisation

A critical framing of the “folk horror revival” requires a nuanced understanding of “the transnational”: Does it mark specific cultural practices or is it a mode of relations through which one could assess all cultural practices? In their critical account of the “proliferation of the term “transnational” as a potentially empty, floating signifier,” Higbee and Lim calls for a “critical transnationalism [that] might help us interpret more productively the interface between local and global, national and transnational, as well as moving away from a binary approach to national/transnational and from a Eurocentric tendency of how such films might be read.” [23] A “critical transnationalism,” Higbee and Lim assert, “does not ghettoise transnational film-making in interstitial and marginal spaces but rather interrogates how these film-making activities negotiate with the national on all levels – from cultural policy to financial sources, from the multiculturalism of difference to how it reconfigures the nation’s image of itself.”[24] “A critical transnationalism,” then, “must … be attendant to the dynamics of the specific historical, cultural and ideological contexts in the production and reception of each particular film.”[25]

To be able to put “critical transnationalism” into practice, we need a multi-scalar, multi-method framework to diversify the dominant analytical tools of studying genre and canon in “world cinemas.” By multi-scalar, I mean a dynamic methodology that moves between different geographic units. By multi-method, I mean combined methodological approaches that operate across categorial, textual, and generic distinctions, and pay more attention to the frictions of global mobility, differences in audience reception, and sectoral specificities. Therefore, critical transnationalism bears the potential to intervene into the dominant film-historical canons. Correspondingly, in his critique of horror scholarship (and genre studies more generally) and its adherence to “canon and consensus,” Mark Jancovich makes the following observations:

… a lot of writing on horror still continues to discuss the genre in terms that pay little or no attention to contemporary developments in genre theory and replicate what have become canonical accounts of the genre’s thematic or stylistic development or its formal or ideological identity. (…) Indeed, it is both surprising and depressing to see a genre, whose study is so often claimed to challenge existing hierarchies, being studied in terms of canons and consensus. Not only do most histories offer the same periodizations and landmark films, with little variety until the end of the book when the author brings the story up to date, but the theoretical studies often continue to suggest that there is something called the horror film that exists as a stable and consistent body of work, in which history is a process similar to the development of a biological organism: the organism remains constant, even if individual organisms mature, age and eventually die.[26]

Locating horror as a genre with inherently “anti-canonising” drives to “challenge existing hierarchies,” Jancovich asserts that studying horror “in terms of canons and consensus” is problematic and unproductive. In dialogue with Jancovich’s critique of horror scholarship, Lobato and Ryan propose “an alternative way of doing genre studies, based on an analysis of distributive circuits rather than film texts or generic categories,” which “provide[s] a conceptual framework that can account for the multiple ways in which distribution networks leave their traces on film texts and audience expectations, with specific reference to international horror networks.”[27] Exploring “distributor-driven attempts to reframe and re- canonize international horror,” Lobato and Ryan makes a convincing case of the “mutability of genre at the point of distribution.”[28]

Informed by these critical observations on the norms of genre studies scholarship, my project Transnational Horror, Folklore and Cultural Politics proposes critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation, a practice-based method that pays a particular attention to the curatorial components of the international distribution of horror film. The project’s key aims include: (i) to generate new conceptual and methodological tools that effectively engage with cross-cultural mobilities of folk horror; (ii) to integrate critical issues of scale, regionality, and geopolitics into the categorical complexities of national/transnational/world cinemas; and (iii) to investigate the ways in which the post-millennial revival of folk horror operates across different spatial units (i.e. local, sub-national, national, regional, continental, transnational, and global). Ultimately, the notion of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation aims to encourage scholars of transnational film to attend to the curatorial affordances of film studies by allowing practice-based research to deliver “rigour” in new platforms of knowledge production that works differently than the field’s default valorisation of and investment in close film analysis. The following two sections explore the curatorial approach I sought to implement in the project Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics.

Curating Mined Zone: Folk Horror for Istanbul International Film Festival (2022)

Informed by the critical reflections (discussed above) on the recent curatorial approaches that have framed the folk horror revival through canonical (or canonising) approaches, a significant number of outputs produced as part of the project Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics aimed to test an alternative practice-based method that prioritises the curatorial affordances of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation. The project’s approach to anti-canonisation is shaped by two areas of practice-based research: crossover festival programming and (non-Anglophone) film journalism. For the former, I curated a “folk horror” programme for the Mined Zone section of the International Istanbul Film Festival (8-19 April 2022). For the latter, in collaboration with Altyazı, I acted as guest editor for a themed magazine issue/dossier on “Folk Horror: Yerel Kâbuslar, Küresel Furyalar [Folk Horror: Local Nightmares, Global Trends]” published in April 2022 – with the scholarly contributions authored by the project participants and then translated into Turkish.

Curating folk horror for a film festival, whose programming practices significantly resonate with the Eurocentric canonisations of “world cinemas,” allowed me to question the currency of the horror genre in the art-house film festival circuit, including the frictions of crossover mobility in negotiating what gets to be shown and what not.[29] The festival team’s scepticism of horror-as-genre was predictable (due to the festival’s established networks with the art-house film festival circuit [e.g. Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, London, Toronto, etc.]); yet, the generic ambivalence of folk horror – as well as its historical connections with art film – facilitated a positive conversation with the festival director and the programming team.

Commissioned practices of curation involve a continuous process of negotiation that does not necessarily guarantee full curatorial autonomy. During my preliminary conversations with the festival director, we agreed on some protocols. Although folk horror (as genre/mode), in dominant and alternative film-historical canons, shows a striking mobility across art-house cinema, cult film, and the local/transnational forms of popular/mainstream filmmaking, a set of limits had to be agreed upon. For the programme to match the IIFF’s “brand” and its target audiences, we agreed that the selection should prioritise a contemporary focus on folk horror that accommodates recent examples of its revival, produced in contexts of art-house or middlebrow film. While the festival’s programmers allowed me to select a very limited number of “historical” examples that allow folk horror to be considered as global cult film heritage or as a mode constitutive of the work of some auteurs of world cinema, the team preferred the contemporary (and recently released) films to dominate the programme.

The festival team allocated this themed programme of screenings to their Mined Zone/Mayınlı Bölge section, which has been appearing in the festival programme over the last few decades. The section has never had a thematic focus, but it had a mission to capture a particular set of films, and feature “young,” paradigm-shifting voices of cinema. IIFF’s promotional text for the 2019 and 2020 installations of Mined Zone reads as follows:

These unusual, extraordinary, ground-breaking, edgy and “challenging” films outside the mainstream with their style, form, approach, technique or narrative will be attractive especially for cinephiles looking for some thrills. Restless cinematic spirits roam in the Mined Zone.[30]

Describing the section’s scope, the adjectives used above imply a curatorial drive to include recently produced films that would escape the art-house film festival circuit’s canonising framework. Previous Mined Zone entries included Magnus von Hom’s Sweat (2020), Isabella Eklöf’s Holiday (2018), Brendan Walters’ Spell (2018), Maud Alpi’s Still Life (2016), Julia Docournau’s Raw (2016), and Amat Escalante’s The Untamed (2016). The programme’s drive to capture “edgy” films that “challenge” with their “style, form, approach, technique or narrative” could also be taken as an ambition to show films with uneasy alignments with the canon(ical). The festival team’s enthusiasm for such “edginess” had proven productive for this project, which was seeking to implement a curatorial practice through critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation. The programming team agreed on a revised text for the 2022 programme of Mined Zone: Folk Horror:

This themed selection aims to introduce Istanbul’s festival audiences to geographically diverse representations of folk horror in world cinema. Curated by Cüneyt Çakırlar, the films in this section range from contemporary examples to historically significant masterpieces of horror film, engaging with the recent revival of the folk horror genre featuring witches, shamans, trolls, djinns, demons, black magic and other paranormal phenomena. Restless cinematic spirits still roam in the Mined Zone.[31]

The initial selection pitched to the programming team consisted of 31 films that range from contemporary to historical examples of folk horror from various national and industrial contexts. The festival programming team requested me to de-select the “folk horror”-affiliated films previously shown in the IIFF, e.g. Ali Abbasi’s Border, Valdimar Jóhannsson’s Lamb, Bustamante’s La Llorona, Scott Cooper’s Antlers (2021), Kleber Mendalcho Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau (2019), and Romola Garai’s Amulet (2020). The “non-Western” titles I proposed, which do not entail a strong affinity with global cult canon or with the dominant brands of art-house cinema got de-selected. These included Sisworo Gautama Putra’s Sundel Bolong (1981), Mari Selvaraj’s Karnan (2021), and Yuthlert Sippapart’s Krasue Valentine (2006). “Locally” produced Asian films whose distributors the festival team struggled reaching out and securing a mutually convenient agreement also got deselected, which included Japanese horror films Nobuo Nakagawa’s Black Cat Mansion (1958), Kaneto Shindo’s Kuroneko (1968), and the jiangshi films from the golden age of Hong Kong cinema such as Mr. Vampire (1985).

Despite these constraints and theory-practice tensions, the final selection the team agreed on managed to not only cover a geographic diversity but also accommodate diverse stylistic and thematic approaches to the filmic horror-folklore nexus. The discussion of the selected films, below, will make use of the reviews the project participants have authored for the special dossier I edited for the Turkish film magazine Altyazı, which worked as a crucial curatorial paratext for the festival team’s (and the sponsor MUBI’s) promotion of Mined Zone. This section, then, builds its analytical framework through a citational practice that reanimates the promotional intertextuality produced (and curated) collectively by the project’s academic participants’ film reviews. The next section will discuss the dossier in more detail.

Through the selection of films in Mined Zone: Folk Horror, I aimed to subvert Janisse’s treatment of the Anglo-American film-texts as the canonical centre. Instead of entirely excluding them from the programme, I positioned one example of contemporary British folk horror as a marginal film-text that is instrumentalised as a node of comparison with an example of horror filmmaking produced in the recently booming local film industry of the Republic of Sakha.[32] Thus, rather than including UK-produced contemporary films with obscure yet artful appropriations of British folk horror legacy, e.g. Ruth Paxton’s A Banquet (2021), Mark Jenkins’ Enys Men (2023), Alex Garland’s Men (2022) and Lynne Davison’s Mandrake (2022), I selected a Welsh-language film, Lee Haven Jones’s Gwledd/The Feast (2011): the film’s critique of extractive capitalism operates at the intersections of folk horror and eco-horror, which is comparable to Kostas Marsaan’s Ich-chi (2020) from the Republic of Sakha.

The Feast, according to Johnny Walker, is “a rural ‘revenge of nature’ film cut from the same cloth as cornerstone film like Long Weekend (1978), where ‘the environment’, embodied by the vengeful spirit’s corporeal vessel, resists modern, human, intervention.”[33] The film’s character Cadi, the maid possessed by a vengeful land-spirit, summons a force that antagonises the wealthy Welsh family’s business affairs with a mineral mining company with extractive interests in the Welsh land.  Similarly, Ich-chi uses Yakut shamanist cosmology (i.e. the spirit-master ich-chi) to locate the horrific within the folkloric – antagonising the forces of capitalism destroying tradition and (sacred) land. As Vlad Strukov also notes in his review commissioned by the project, “Ich-chi’s central conflict is about the loss of property—land—to colonial powers of the past and capitalist powers of the present (the main character Timir wants his parents to sell ancestral land to pay off his debt back in the city; credit economy is a new phenomenon in Russia, with many people suffering huge losses).”[34] Both films use folklore to produce horror through a family unit’s exposure to the forces of capitalistic extraction and ecological destruction. 

Mined Zone: Folk Horror programme is also used as an opportunity to respond to the absence of African cinemas in the recent debates on the “folk horror revival,” including Janisse’s Woodlands Dark. While the Nollywood productions of various juju stories (e.g. Living in Bondage [1992]) could be discussed with reference to folklore and horror (and be considered for inclusion), the IIFF’s affinities with alternative (and/or art-house) filmmaking had to shape my selection. Such an urge to include African films (despite the agreed limits of the festival’s programming discourse) runs the risk of what Nowotny regards as the paradoxes of the “inclusion/exclusion games” in revisionist frameworks. However, the two films I selected, namely Surreal 16’s Juju Stories (2021) as an example of Nigerian new wave filmmaking, and Jean Luc Herbulot’s Saloum (2021) from Senegal, served the project’s anti-canonising impulses in not only their contestation of national politics but also their formalist and anti-colonial engagement with folk horror as filmic mode rather than genre.

The collective Surreal 16’s mission “to create artistically minded films that move away from the reigning imperialism of Nollywood aesthetics and production practices” is starkly visible in Juju Stories.[35] Actively separating juju from Nollywood’s genre spectacles (e.g. Living in Bondage), the three short stories in the film (namely “Love Potion,” “Yam,” and “Suffer the Witch”) contest the mainstream uses of juju for “religious propaganda” and presents an alternative approach to folklore and supernatural horror, “where substance is prioritized over glamour”[36] and the legacy of pre-Nollywood anti-colonial Nigerian film is acknowledged.[37] In Juju Stories, the folkloric/folkloresque image – appearing as idioms of horror – seeks to mobilise an ideological critique of mainstream cinema.

Set during the 2003 coup d’état in Guinea-Bissau, the Senegalese production Saloum is a genre-bending western-action-horror hybrid that creates a “metaphysical … realm where the supernatural and the criminal coexist.”[38]Localising – in reinterpreting – “the tropes of the western,” Herbulot’s film authenticates its hybrid mode of “gangster horror” by using references to folklore and mysticism. Through different aesthetic responses to glocalisation, both Juju Stories and Saloum attempt to critically re-imagine the legacy of African cinemas in appropriating idioms of horror and folklore.

Resonating with Saloum in its hybridity, the Chilean stop-motion animation La Casa Lobo / The Wolf House (2018), also selected for Mined Zone, could be considered as another experimental film playing with genre conventions, whose affinities with folk horror are obscure yet productive. “Tak[ing] the folk tale of the Three Little Pigs and filter[ing] it through the warped mind of a profoundly traumatized little girl,” Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña constructs a grim fairy tale inspired Colonia Dignidad – “the cult-like Chilean enclave” founded by German fugitive Paul Schäfer, a sexual predator who “provided shelter to Nazi war criminals like Josef Mengele, and tortured Pinochet’s enemies in exchange for his support.”[39] León and Cociña’s “fascist parable”[40] blends the aesthetic of stop-motion animation with the narrative register of the folk tale, which contributes to The Wolf House’s “filmic folklore,” a term that Juwen Zhang defines as “an imagined folklore that exists only in films and a folklore or folklore-like performance that is represented, created or hybridized in fictional film.”[41]

The programme’s accommodation of the generic and stylistic hybridity, which the conceptual nexus of folklore-horror allows, was not limited to Saloum and The Wolf House. Vibeke Bryld’s essay film Thyland/Elsewhere (2021) was selected to respond to the “proto-ethnographic” drive in the pioneering examples of what Janisse’s canonising account frames as folk horror. Exploring the myths of the North-Western Danish region of Thy, Bryld creates a psychogeography that registers landscape through folklore. Bryld’s aesthetic of essayism, in a mode of haptic drift, seeks to match the regional folklore she cites: Beezlebub/The Invisible Dweller as the “eternal drifter”, merfolk who summon sand drifts and storm, Elder Women passing on “strangeness and insanity” through breastfeeding, Hill Folk abducting young women to bear Hill Men’s children.[42]

The IIFF’s urge to capture contemporary trends in art film has often been accompanied with revisions of the global cinematic canon by celebrating the work of the historically significant auteurs who had a considerable influence on the contemporary art film. In response to this, my selection included a film by Kim Ki-young, an auteur whose work was significantly informed by stylistic excess that subverts genre conventions from within, and inspired generations of Korean filmmakers such as Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook. Having worked in the context of state censorship and interference with the film industry during Korea’s military regime in the 1970s, Kim Ki-young was an independent, marginal and transgressive filmmaker whose practice, according to Chung-kang Kim, “far exceeded the cultural and generic norms of the period, a legacy which renders him as one of the most compelling directors in the history of South Korean cinema.”[43] Regarded as a “cinema of diabolical desire and death”[44] in the global film festival circuit, Kim’s work occasionally flirts with shamanism, horror, psychological thriller, and melodrama as narrative and stylistic modes.

Bechervaise notes that Kim’s filmmaking “construct[s] psychological dramas with an expressionistic style rare in Korean cinema.”[45] A powerful example of the director’s later, mid-career cinema, Io Island (1977) not only maintains this excessive engagement with horror and melodrama but also incorporates folklore (through shamanic rituals of exorcism – used as a precedent for its “eco-feminist” critique), gynaehorror (through its story of a matriarchal island community who abuse men for their reproductive interests), and psychogeography (in treating Ioedo as a – metaphorically and conceptually dense – island exploited by modern capitalist market interests, and haunted by spirits). Using folklore as a central narrative tool and a significant driver of horror, Io Island acts as a powerful example of folk horror. Such a reclamation of “deeply rooted belief systems like mugyo, a form of shamanism practiced mainly by women” overtly critiques Korea’s experience of modernity, capitalism, and imperialism.[46]

While the selection of a Kim Ki-young film resonated with the IIFF programming team’s auterist aspirations (using the national and the authorial as the festival’s key commercial paratexts), Mined Zone: Folk Horror’s practice of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation located Io Island within a contemporary context of the folk horror revival. Io Island, as folk horror, neither aligns with a canonising project of “global auteurs” nor fits entirely with the expansionist revisionism in Janisse’s curated history of “folk horror around the world.”  I would argue that Io Island’s inclusion here captures a possibility for auteur cinema to be used as a tool of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation that facilitates an alternative point of entry into a genealogy of particular cinematic modes such as folk horror.

In the long list of 31 films pitched to the festival team, I also proposed Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s Kandisha(2020) and Jérôme Cohen-Olivar’s Kandisha (2008). Both films sit harmoniously with the canonising accounts of folk horror, as well as the category of “postcolonial horror.” However, they differ in terms of what Rosalind Galt considers as their “modes of transnationalism” to evoke Aïcha Kandisha as a postcolonial spirit: “if the Moroccan film [2008] is transnational primarily in its address and its projection of Morocco to Euro-American audiences, the French Kandisha [2020] is transnational in its narrative of a colonial spirit that haunts postcolonial spaces [i.e. the French banlieue].”[47] As the mid-brow postcolonial aesthetic of Cohen-Olivar’s film came across too obscure to the programming team and their vision of “edginess” for the IIFF’s Mined Zone section, the authorial brand of Maury and Bustillo (as important figures of the New French Extremity known with their films Inside /À l’intérieur (2007) and Livid/Livide (2011)) made the French Kandisha a more palatable (thus “marketable”) option for the festival’s programming team.

Complying with the programming team’s preferences to minimise the presence of the global canon of cult horror in Mined Zone, I agreed on including the Indonesian film Mystics in Bali aka Leák (1981) as the only “cult” entry in the selection. In resonance with what Izharuddin defines as “transnational weird,”[48] Tjut Djalil’s film uses the female vampire leák/penanggalan/krasue from Southeast Asian folklore to subvert the aesthetic paradigms of horror in the Western film-historical canon. The selection of Leák also facilitated the inclusion of a mini programme of shorts from Amanda Nell Eu and Riar Rizaldi, which addresses contemporary responses to the uses of folklore in Southeast Asian cinemas.[49]

The British-Malaysian artist Amanda Nell Eu’s shorts Vinegar Baths (2018) and It’s Easier to Raise Cattle (2017) perform a critique of contemporary gender politics in Southeast Asia by appropriating the cinematic legacy of the folkloric creatures pontianak and penanggalan, and repurposing queer potentials of contemporary “aswang transmedia” in the wider Southeast Asia where folklore generates local camp sensibilities.[50] While Eu’s practice may be considered to fall into the category of feminist “art horror,” Riar Rizaldi’s essay film Ghost Like Us (2021) critically explores the importance of the folklore-horror nexus in Indonesian cinema by locating it in the post-Suharto national context of cultural politics. “As an attempt to examine the cultural and political implication of rural approach on horror cinema in Indonesia,” Rizaldi states, Ghost Like Us “offers an essayistic approach that investigates the rural-urban dynamic in horror cinema from the New Order regime to the dawn of deconstructed horror genre found in the kino-pravda style Misteri Bondowoso […] and demonstrates a poetic reflection of horror, ideology, the evolution of cinema, and cinematic-thinking in understanding the current landscape of media technology in Indonesia and Asia.”[51] The inclusion of Eu’s and Rizaldi’s shorts in the programme also works as a critical supplement to the Turkey-based audiences’ exposure to contemporary Southeast Asian horror via Netflix Türkiye, e.g. Sittisiri Mongkolsiri’s Inhuman Kiss (2019), Glen Goei and Gavin Yap’s Revenge of the Pontianak (2019), and Rizal Mantovani’s Kuntilanak (2018).

The selection’s engagement with art film was not limited to the works of Eu and Rizaldi. The programme included the Austrian production Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse (2017), a low-budget experimental “witch film” that creates an abstraction of witchcraft through the surrealist use of cinematography and the Alpine landscape. While the director Lukas Feigelfeld’s engagement with folklore and witchcraft is stylistically innovative, the film also demonstrates a transnational affinity with the “witch”-themed independent “art horror” movies such as Eggers’ The Witch (2015).

Finally, the most “straightforward” cases for selection – considering the festival team’s programming preferences shaped by the dominant regimes of palatability and marketability in the global art-house film festival circuit – were Arsalan Amiri’s Zalava (2021) and Anand Gandhi and Rahi Anil Barve’s Tumbbad (2018). Set in 1978, a year before the Islamic Revolution, Zalava “uses the Jinn figure to question [its characters’] sense of reality, but also to speak to the contextual politics of a post-war Iran.”[52] Anvari’s film seeks to continue the rising international popularity of Iranian horror (e.g. Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow [2016]) in its ambivalent engagement with horror and folklore. This new trend in “accented” Iranian horror is shaped by films that are “not conventional horror films” but rather taking various forms such as “a tongue-in-cheek horror-western-coming-of-age story … [or] a pseudo-realist war-horror and social film.”[53]  In Tumbbad, however, we encounter a transnational aesthetic of horror nuanced with local folklore. Considering Tumbbad as an example of “new Indian folk horror films,” Iain Smith argues that the film is “not particularly distinct from the conventions of the folk horror genre as a whole – indeed, on a formal level, Tumbbad is closer to other contemporary folk horror films like The Witch (2015) and The Wailing (2016) than the earlier Bollywood ‘masala’ horror from directors like the Ramsay Brothers.”[54] “Yet at the level of content,” Smith continues, “there is a deliberate emphasis upon explicitly local traditions and folklore, and it is precisely this cultural specificity at the level of content and not at the level of form that I argue helps explain the much overdue shift in the international perception of Indian horror cinema.”[55]

Informed by IIFF’s arthouse “brand” (and Mined Zone’s ambitious aim to programme experimental, innovative, “edgy” filmmaking practices from the global milieu of contemporary art-house cinema) and its curatorial protocols (of “cultural elevation” to meet IIFF’s arthouse programming) agreed at the start of this project, the final selection of films in Mined Zone: Folk Horror included a significant number of films that resonated with “art horror,” or what David Church conceptualises as “post-horror.”[56] Separating horror from its affiliations with genre cinema through its “lessened focus on the terror-inducing monster as clearly defined narrative locus, and its alternate focus on generating ambient states of dreadful unease,”[57] post-horror, Church argues, “merge[s] art-cinema style with decentered genre tropes, privileging lingering dread over audiovisual shocks and monstrous disgust.”[58] What Church presents in his study as the “provisional corpus of post-horror cinema”[59] is an attempt to produce a “parallel canon” (to use Jovčić-Sas’s terminology) that is predominantly shaped by contemporary independent productions from American, Australian, and British cinemas. While Church’s “parallel canon” of “post-horror” captures a significant number of “folk horror” films (e.g. The Witch, Midsommar, Hagazussa, and Relic [James 2020]), it also includes examples without any direct affiliations with folklore (e.g. Personal Shopper [Assayas 2016], mother! [Aronofsky 2017], Raw, and Us). What interest me here, however, is the productive intersections between the contemporary revival of “folk horror” as mode, and Church’s “post-horror” and its focus on “ambience,” both of which obscure horror’s associations with genre cinema.

Although a significant number of films included in Mined Zone: Folk Horror can be considered to resonate with “post-horror” as category, the selection – in its entirety – de-centres Church’s predominantly Anglo-American corpus. The Mined Zone: Folk Horror programme contains:

• non-Anglophone post-horror films experimenting with filmic medium, e.g. stop-motion animation (The Wolf House) and video art (Eu’s shorts Vinegar Baths and It’s Easier to Raise Cattle),
• post-horror films appropriating the globally palatable arthouse film aesthetics (Zalava, Hagazussa, Saloum, and The Feast), and
• non-Anglophone post-horror films claiming artistic and critical “elevation” of cinema, through minoritarian filmmaking practices, that de-centre the mainstream cultural production of their affiliated national film industries (Juju Stories Nollywood, Tumbbad vs. Bollywood, and Ich-chi vs. Moscow-centred Russian cinemas).

However, the anti-canonising curatorial framework of Mined Zone: Folk Horror also sought to interrupt Church’s “parallel canonisation” of “post-horror,” by including

• middlebrow horror crossovers (e.g. Kandisha (2020) and Post Mortem [Bergendy 2020]),
• transnational cult horror (e.g. Mystics in Bali),
• documentary-horror crossover-hybrids (e.g. Elsewhere, Ghost Like Us), and
• auteur-driven non-Anglophone horror that had escaped the global cinematic canons of both auteur cinema and horror cinema (e.g. Kim Ki-young’s Io Island).

Mined Zone was not curated in isolation from other sectoral and discursive forces, including those of festival sponsorship and film journalism. The next section will focus on the ways in which promotional texts and curatorial paratexts contributed to the project’s implementation of critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation.

Curatorial Paratexts, Commercial Intertextuality: Collaborating with MUBI Türkiye and Altyazı

My collaboration with MUBI and Altyazı facilitated a commercial intertextuality that enabled the project’s curatorial input to go beyond the film theatre and the festival apparatus. This section will discuss the ways in which the project navigated the curatorial paratexts (i.e. MUBI’s commercial discourse and Altyazı’s journalistic mode of film criticism) and managed to produce a transmedia convergence of academic practice through the curatorial.

Like many international film festivals, IIFF had to consider producing their 2020 and 2021 programme in collaboration with on-demand streaming platforms during the coronavirus pandemic. While IIFF’s 2022 programme celebrated the return to film theatres, the festival team also pursued the opportunities of sponsorship and collaboration with local and global streamers to hybridize the access to the programme. MUBI Türkiye acted as one of the festival’s primary sponsors; however, the MUBI team also proposed to act as a project partner of Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics by (i) collaborating with myself as Mined Zone: Folk Horror’s curator, and sponsoring the screenings, and (ii) extending the folk horror screenings to a multi-platform context.

As part of our collaboration, the MUBI Türkiye team released The Wolf House on their platform (following the end of the IIFF programme) while also promoting the “folk horror”-affiliated films already available for streaming in their own existing programme: Onibaba (1964), Kuroneko (1968), René Laloux’s counter-culture sci-fi classic Fantastic Planet (1973), Mohammad Reza Aslani’s recently restored pre-revolution Iranian film Chess of the Wind (1976), Nagisa Oshima’s kaidan film Empire of Passion (1978), the internationally acclaimed South Korean horror film The Wailing (2016), Brazilian werewolf film Good Manners (2017), Border (2018), Bacurau (2019), and Lamb (2021). In line with the project’s framing of folk horror through its critical transnationalism as anti-canonisation, these additional titles MUBI Türkiye promoted – under the marker of “folk horror” – did not only enhance Mined Zone’s reach to wider audiences but also further diversify Mined Zone’s curated selection by featuring relevant examples from various non-Anglophone contexts including Japan, Scandinavia, South America, and South Korea.

Released as an addition to the IIFF’s promo material in early April (Fig. 2), the promotional video MUBI Türkiye published on its official social media accounts (Fig. 3) attempted to highlight its curatorial effort to continue providing its audiences with additional “folk horror” titles. The text used in the promo’s mash-up video says: “Mayınlı Bölgeheyecanına MUBI’de yıl boyu devam [The thrill of Mined Zone continues on MUBI all year round]” (Fig. 3).[60]While the promo video uses images from the films Lamb, Good Manners, The Wailing, Empire of Passion, andFantastic Planet to relay the diverse range of films MUBI offered in support of Mined Zone, it also uses shots from other recent MUBI Türkiye releases that were not relevant to folk horror, i.e. Julia Ducournau’s 2021 Palme D’Or winner body-horror Titane (2021), Chris Marker’s La Jeteé (1962), and Edward D. Wood Jr.’s sci-fi horror Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

MUBI’s promo video quotes Plan 9’s character Chiswell (“you are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable… that is why you are here”) and decontextualises it to serve a commercial function in highlighting folk horror’s affinities with “the unknown,” “the mysterious,” and “the unexplainable.” While this can be seen as an example of how the “aporetic” genre-markers are manipulated for commercial interests, the promo’s references to Titane and La Jeteé are considerably far-fetched: although both film-texts may be considered to imply modes of experimentation with genre and canon, they do not engage with folklore-as-mode in any form or sense at all. This demonstrates how MUBI’s “curation model of video on-demand” locates the curatorial within its market-driven “efforts to curate an audience by building brand awareness, recommendation credibility and brand loyalty,” rather than attending to the nuances of the themed “indie” and/or “art-house” content it releases, promotes, and claims to “curate” through what Frey considers as a “rhetorical commitment to curation over algorithms.”[61]

“A critical transnationalism,” Higbee and Lim assert, “should also extend to our own critical practice as film scholars who enjoy the privilege of being located within an anglophone academia: one that wields its hegemonic language of English while pronouncing on transnational films that are often polyphonic in their linguistic use and that contain characters whose plight is precisely a result of the lack of capital of all forms (economic, cultural, symbolic).”[62] The scholars ask: “Can transnational film studies be truly transnational if it only speaks in English and engages with English-language scholarship?” Only through a critical mode of transnationalism can film studies “emerge as a vital field for a transnational, trans-lingual dialogue on cinema.”[63] Significantly informed by these questions, my collaboration with the Turkey-based film magazine Altyazı aimed to mobilise a “trans-lingual dialogue” on the folk horror revival. Acting as the guest editor for the magazine’s April 2022 issue, I have produced a themed, open-access dossier that included fifteen pieces authored by the project’s participants. Only two of these pieces were authored in Turkish, while thirteen of them were written in English and then translated into Turkish.

 Altyazı has been Turkey’s leading film magazine since 2001, participating in cinephile culture and promoting independent filmmaking. The magazine was evolved into a non-profit NGO (namely, Altyazı Cinema Association), advocating freedom of expression and democratic values in the field of cinema. Altyazı’s mission in the contemporary media landscape in Turkey is two-fold: (i) to offer original and critical content on national and international film culture, and, on a broader level, (ii) to actively cooperate with filmmakers, academics, festivals, and other civil society organisations to strengthen their critical voices for a more democratic cultural scene. The magazine’s operations across the intersections between academia, activism, journalism, and the national film sector provided a crucial input into the project. The dossier’s alignment with Altyazı’s journalistic register of scholarship (with academic affinities) does not only make the project (and its academic participants’ contributions) accessible to non-academic Turkish-speaking film enthusiasts but also propose film journalism as a crucial mode of what Higbee and Lee propose as “trans-lingual” transnationalism. As any browser’s in-built translation application could facilitate a considerably effective relay of the Turkish-language content of the dossier to non-Turkish-speaking readers, this “journalistic” output of the project aimed to produce a “trans-lingual” paratext for Mined Zone: Folk Horror, that encourages a two-way translation and exchange

The dossier does not only promote a significant number of the films selected for IIFF’s Mined Zone programme (Juju Stories, Tumbbad, Zalava, Io Island, Kandisha, The Wolf House, The Feast, Leák, Vinegar Baths, and It’s Easier to Raise Cattle), but also host reviews of a number of films included in MUBI Türkiye’s selection of folk horror (Kuroneko, Onibaba, Lamb, Border, Bacurau, and Chess of the Wind).[64] The dossier’s inclusion of Gary Needham’s review of the Japanese kaidan films (e.g. Kuroneko and Black Cat Mansion),[65] Bliss Cua Lim’s discussion of “cosmopolitan animism”[66] in the anime-influenced television series from the Philippines, Trese (BASE 2021), and Shakuntala Banaji’s comparative analysis of Bacurau and Karnan under the rubric of “postcolonial horror”[67]expanded the project’s framework to contexts that neither Mined Zone nor the MUBI programme were able to capture.

In conclusion, the project’s collaboration with MUBI and Altyazı facilitated a commercial intertextuality that enabled the project’s curatorial input to go beyond the film theatre and the festival apparatus. In dialogue with the curatorial paratexts (i.e. MUBI’s commercial discourse and Altyazı’s journalistic mode of film criticism), the project managed to produce a transmedia convergence of academic practice through the curatorial.

In Place of Conclusion

If the curatorial affordances of film studies get to be our core focus, the dominant paradigms of the field should be reimagined through practice-based (and/or practice-led) modes of knowledge production. As long as the forces of the higher education market continue to impose their own curatorial agendas upon teaching and research practices, these demands need to be reciprocated with our own curatorial propositions to decolonise the curriculum, to rethink the politics of academic citation practices, to de-centre hegemonic canons, to ensure methodological diversity in response to the sectoral demands/mandates of “impact” and “public engagement,” to imagine sustainable film policies, and to re-theorise analytical paradigms in the field. Seeking to identify curatorial affordances of practice-based research when collaborating with cultural and institutional “gatekeepers,” this study on the folk horror revival is intended to act as a point of entry into a wider debate I call for on the currency of curatorial paradigms in film studies. My proposition here should not be taken as an indictment of the field’s predominantly text-based investments in analytical rigour. It is, however, an intervention that proposes a relational curatorial paradigm to produce alternative territories of (practice-based) knowledge production and scholarly rigour in film studies.

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Notes

[1] Rosalind Galt, Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), p.25.

[2] Ibid., p.38.

[3] Ibid., p.25.

[4] Steven J. Schneider (ed.), Fear without Frontiers: Horror Cinema Across the Globe (London: FAB Press, 2002); Steven J. Schneider and Tony Williams (eds.), Horror International (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005).

[5] Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin (eds.), Korean Horror Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Gary Bettinson and Daniel Martin (eds.), Hong Kong Horror Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); Meheli Sen, Haunting Bollywood: Gender, Genre and the Supernatural in Hindi Commercial Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017); Colette Balmain, Introduction to Japanese Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Katinka van Heeren, “Return of the Kyai: Representations of horror, commerce, and censorship in post-Suharto Indonesian Film and Television,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, No. 2 (2007): 211-226.

[6] This project is sponsored by the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants scheme during 1/9/2021-30/11/2023.

[7] For the first, British/Anglophone, conceptualisation of “folk horror revival”, see Andy Paciorek, “Folk Horror: From the Forests, Fields and Furrows: An Introduction,” in Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, edited by Andy Paciorek (Durham: Wyrd Harvest Press / Lulu, 2018): pp. 12-19. This volume is connected to the Folk Horror Revival and Urban Wyrd Project. For the project’s official webpage, see https://folkhorrorrevival.com

 

[8] Sally Munt, Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 223-4. Inspired by Munt’s discussion here, which specifically focuses on the ways in which “queer” and “sodomitical sublime” operate through “aporia,” I argue that the aporetic has wider implications with regard to the discursive functions of critical concepts in arts and humanities.

[9] Jean-Paul, Martinon (ed.), The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

[10] Simon Sheikh, “Curating and Research: An Uneasy Alliance,” in Curatorial Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating, edited by M. V. Hansen, A. F. Henningsen and A. Gregersen (London: Routledge, 2019), p.90.

[11] Ibid., p. 105.

[12] Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 369–91.

[13] Stefan Nowotny, “Anti-Canonization,” in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, edited by Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (London: Mayfly, 2009), p.27.

[14] Ibid., pp. 26-7.

[15] Adrian Martin, “Folk Horror Türünün İçinde ve Dışında [Lamb: In and Out of Folk Horror],” in “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-folk-horror-turunun-icinde-ve-disinda  (cited from Martin’s original text written in English); see also Adrian Martin, “Film Review: Lamb is stunning and resists folk horror tag,” Screen Hub, online, 15 October (2021): https://www.screenhub.com.au/news/reviews/film-review-lamb-is-stunning-and-resists-folk-horror-tag-1475934/.

[16] See Scovell’s commentary in Kier-La Janisse, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, 2021, my emphasis.

[17] For the discussion of these documentary modes, see Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

[18] Kier-La Janisse, Woodlands Dark.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Iain R. Smith, “Hindistan Folk Horror Sineması ve Tumbbad [Indian Folk Horror and the Crossover Popularity of Tumbbad],” in “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-hindistan-folk-horror-sinemasi-ve-tumbbad

[21] Iain R. Smith, The Hollywood Meme: The Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

[22] Alexander Jovčić-Sas, Locating Grunow and Oram after celebrating the Bauhaus Centenary: Using parallel canonisation as a curatorial method to re-establish marginalised figures (Nottingham Trent University, UK: Unpublished PhD dissertation, 2024), forthcoming. Supported by AHRC/Midlands4Cities Doctoral Network’s Collaborative Doctoral Awards Scheme, Nottingham Contemporary, and PRS Music Foundation, Jovčić-Sas’s practice-based doctoral research explores, critically, the canonical narratives embedded in the Bauhaus Centenary. In response to the canonical framings of the Bauhaus, Jovčić-Sas reclaims the school’s marginalised figure Gertrud Grunow through his proposition of “parallel canonisation” as curatorial mode. Through Grunow’s work, Jovčić-Sas’s practice proposes an alternative legacy, a “parallel canon,” for electronic music, that extends from Grunow to Daphne Oram, and then to the contemporary electronic music artist/composer Afrodeutsche. This doctoral study made a significant contribution to my thinking of horror cinema, the canon, and the curatorial. Jovčić-Sas’s practice also takes Reilly’s “curatorial activism” as one of its key sources of inspiration. See Maura Reilly, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018.

[23] Will Higbee and S. Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Crucial Transnationalism in Film Studies,” Transnational Cinemas 1, No. 1 (2010): 10.

[24] Ibid., p.18

[25] Ibid., pp.12-13.

[26] Mark Jancovich, “Review of I. Conrich & D. Woods, K. Heffernan, M. Hills, P. Hutchings, R. Worland,” Screen48, No. 2 (2007): 261-2, my emphasis.

[27] Ramon Lobato and Mark David Ryan, “Rethinking genre studies through distribution analysis: issues in international horror movie circuits,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 9, No. 2 (2011): 188.

[28] Ibid., p.199.

[29] For critical overviews of Turkey’s privately funded arts institutions (and their historical affiliation with “Western”/Eurocentric institutions and practices), including Istanbul Foundation of Culture and Arts (IKSV), which IIFF is part of, see Esra Yıldız, “An Overview of Cultural Literacy in Turkey through Private Contemporary Art Institutions and Independent Arts and Cultural Spaces under the AKP Rule,” Critical Arts 34, No. 5 (2020): 121-138; Evinç Doğan, “City as Spectacle: Festivalization of Culture in Istanbul,” in Young Minds Rethinking the Mediterranean, edited by Mensur Akgün and Lenka Pet’ková (Istanbul: Istanbul Kültür University Press, 2011): pp. 69-93; and Sibel Yardımcı, “Festivalising Difference: Privatisation of Culture and Symbolic Inclusion in Istanbul,” EUI Working Paper 2007/35, in Mediterranean Programme Series Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies – RSCAS(Policy Papers PONZANO, 2007).

[30] To see IKSV’s electronic archive of IIFF catalogues (from 1982 until present), see their official webpage: https://film.iksv.org/en/archives/e-catalogues

[31] Ibid.

[32] Adelaide McGinity-Peebles, “Cinema, Ethnicity, and Nation-Building in the Sakha Republic (Russia) and Kazakhstan,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication (2022), online,  https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1326; Suyin Haynes and Madeline Roache, “Why the Film Industry is Thriving in the Russian Wilderness,” Times, online, 31 January (2020): https://time.com/longform/film-industry-russia-yakutia/

[33] Johnny Walker, “Doğanın İntikamı [Revenge of Nature: Notes on The Feast],” in “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-doganin-intikami

[34] Vlad Strukov, “Yaklaşan Felakete Dair [Sakha Horror and the Impending Destruction,” in “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-yaklasan-felakete-dair

[35] Tega Okiti, “Surreal 16: the filmmaking collective trying to forge a new identity for Nigerian cinema,” British Film Institute, online, 5 September (2018): https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/surreal16-collective-nigerian-arthouse-cinema-nollywood

[36] Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku, “Juju Stories Review: Surreal 16’s Bold and Artistic Exploration of Nigerian Urban Legends,” Afrocritic, online, 1 February (2022): https://www.afrocritik.com/juju-stories-review/

[37] Ebukah Emmanuel Nzeji, “Juju Stories: Nollywood and the Forgotten Art of Motifs in Storytelling,” AKOROKO, online, 26 February (2023): https://akoroko.com/juju-stories-nollywood-motifs/ In a piece commissioned by my British Academy project for the Turkish film magazine Altyazı, the film critic Onaran elaborates on the film’s use of folklore, e.g. the witch as a pre-Christian figure, to confront the corrupt establishment of Christianity in Nigerian society. See Gözde Onaran, “Jujuya Dönüş ve Muhalif Cinema [Return to Juju and Oppositional Cinema],” in Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-jujuya-donus-ve-muhalif-sinema

[38] Phuong Le, “Saloum Review – slick gangster horror in west Africa,” Guardian, online, 6 September (2022): https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/06/saloum-review-slick-gangster-horror-in-wild-west-africa

[39] Steven Scaife, “Review: The Wolf House Is a Trippy Evocation of the Mechanics of Fascism,” Slant, online, 11 May (2020): https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-wolf-house-review/

[40] Ibid.

[41] Juwen Zhang, “Filmic Folklore and Chinese Cultural Identity,” Western Folklore 64, No. 3-4 (2005): p. 267.

[42] Vibeke Bryld, “Elsewhere/Thyland (2021) Press Kit UK,” Final Cut, online, 2021: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5719f1128a65e2cccb5d1a04/t/607c9278413fdc79e8bb8fde/1618776710203/Elsewhere_EPK_CPHDOX_2021.pdf

[43] Chung-kang Kim, “Introduction: Kim Ki-young, The First Global South Korean Auteur,” in The Films of Kim Ki-young, edited by Chung-kang Kim (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 1-14.

[44] Jason Bechervaise, “Rediscovering Kim Ki-young: The Rise of the South Korean Auteur on the Film Festival Circuit,” in The Films of Kim Ki-young, edited by Chung-kang Kim (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 148-56.

[45] Ibid., pp. 146-161.

[46] Colin Marshall, “A Harrowing Journey to an Island of Women, and Into Korea’s Psychological Recesses: Kim Ki-young’s Iodo (1977),” BLARB: Blog Los Angeles Review of Books, 16 June (2019): https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/harrowing-journey-island-women-koreas-psychological-recesses-kim-ki-youngs-iodo-1977/

[47] Rosalind Galt, “Feminism with swords and hooves: Aïcha Kandisha, transnational cinema, and postcolonial horror,” in Transnational Horror: Folklore, Genre, and Cultural Politics, edited by Cüneyt Çakırlar (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), forthcoming.

[48] Alicia Izharuddin, “Batılı Bakışa Bir Uyarı [Mystics in Bali: a warning to the western gaze],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-batili-bakisa-bir-uyari; Alicia Izharuddin, “Folk culture and its global circuits: the transnational weird of Indonesian horror and the crisis of intelligibility,” in Transnational Horror: Folklore, Genre, and Cultural Politics, edited by Cüneyt Çakırlar (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024), forthcoming.

[49] Within the upper limit of 13 entries the IIFF programming team agreed on for Mined Zone: Folk Horror, I was allowed only one entry for a programme of shorts.

[50] For the queer uses of aswang folklore as camp in the Philippine context, see Bliss Cua Lim, “Queer Aswang Media: Folklore as Camp,” Kritika Kultura 24 (2015): 178-225. For the queer interpretations of the pontianak in contemporary contexts of Malaysian film, literature, and arts, see Rosalind Galt, Alluring Monsters, pp. 18, 23, 33-38, 80-83, 109-121.

[51] For Rizaldi’s film and accompanying statement, see http://rizaldiriar.com/ghostus.html

[52] Zahra Khosroshahi, “Kavanozdaki Cinin Görünmez Tehdidi [Zalava: The Invisible Threat of the Jinn in a Jar],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kavanozdaki-cinin-gorunmez-tehdidi

[53] Zahra Khosroshahi, “Vampires, Jinn and the Magical in Iranian Horror Films,” Frames Cinema Journal 16 (2019). https://framescinemajournal.com/article/vampires-jinn-and-the-magical-in-iranian-horror-films/

[54] Iain R. Smith, “Hindistan Folk Horror Sineması.”

[55] Ibid.

[56] David Church, Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

[57] Ibid., p. 17.

[58] Ibid., p.2.

[59] Ibid., p. 14.

[60] My translation.

[61] Mattias Frey, MUBI and the Curation Model of Video on Demand (Cham: Palgrave, 2021), p. 132, my emphasis.

[62] Will Higbee and S. Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema,” p.18

[63] Ibid., p.19

[64] Most of these pieces were cited in the earlier sections above. For the review on Border in the dossier, see Chris Holmlund, “Sınırlar Arasında [Border Checks and Cultural Crossings: Reception, Marketing, and Gräns],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-sinirlar-arasinda. For an extended version published in English, see Chris Holmlund, “Gräns (Border, dir. Ali Abbasi, 2018) and borders: transnational ties, Nordic roots, Swedish knowledge in critical reception,” Transnational Screens 12, No. 2 (2021): 150-168.

[65] Gary Needham, “Kedi Ruhlar ve İntikam Peşindeki Hayaletler [Feline Spirits and Vengeful Ghosts in the Japanese Horror],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kedi-ruhlar-ve-intikam-pesindeki-hayaletler

[66] Bliss Cua Lim, “Kozmopolit Animizm [Cosmopolitan Animism],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kozmopolit-animizm

[67] Shakuntala Banaji, “Postkolonyal Korku ve Çeperdeki Canavarlar  [Postcolonial horror – monsters and meaning at the margins],” “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-postkolonyal-korku-ve-ceperlerdeki-canavarlar

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Sheikh, Simon. “Curating and Research: An Uneasy Alliance,” in Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen and Anne Gregersen (eds.) Curatorial Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 97-107.

Smith, Iain R. “Hindistan Folk Horror Sineması ve Tumbbad [Indian Folk Horror and the Crossover Popularity of Tumbbad]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-hindistan-folk-horror-sinemasi-ve-tumbbad ISSN 1303-426X

Smith, Iain Robert. The Hollywood Meme: The Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

Strukov, Vlad. “Yaklaşan Felakete Dair [Sakha Horror and the Impending Destructionü” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), In Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-yaklasan-felakete-dair ISSN 1303-426X

Subero, Gustavo. “Kurt Evinde Aryan Kabus [La casa lobo: A stop-motion Chilean, Arian nightmare]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-kurt-evinde-aryan-kabus ISSN 1303-426X

Van Heeren, Katinka. “Return of the Kyai: Representations of horror, commerce, and censorship in post-Suharto Indonesian Film and Television,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, No. 2 (2007): 211-226. https://doi.org/10.1080/13583880701238688

Walker, Johnny. “Doğanın İntikamı [Revenge of Nature: Notes on The Feast]” (Zeynep Serinkaya Winter, trans.), in Cüneyt Çakırlar (ed.), “Folk Horror: Yerel Kabuslar, Küresel Furyalar [special dossier],” Altyazı 218 (2022): https://altyazi.net/dergi/sayi/218/218-doganin-intikami ISSN 1303-426X

Yardımcı, Sibel. “Festivalising Difference: Privatisation of Culture and Symbolic Inclusion in Istanbul,” EUI Working Paper 2007/35, in Mediterranean Programme Series Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies – RSCAS (Policy Papers PONZANO, 2007). ISSN 1028-3625.

Yıldız, Esra. “An Overview of Cultural Literacy in Turkey through Private Contemporary Art

Institutions and Independent Arts and Cultural Spaces under the AKP Rule,” Critical Arts 34, No. 5 (2020): pp. 121-138.

Zhang, Juwen. “Filmic Folklore and Chinese Cultural Identity,” Western Folklore 64, No. 3-4 (2005): pp. 263-80.

Biography

Cüneyt Çakırlar is Associate Professor of Film and Visual Culture at Nottingham Trent University, UK. His current research practice focuses on sexuality studies, global visual cultures, and transnational horror studies. Çakırlar has taught on queer arts and film theory at University College London (UK), Boğazici University (Turkey), Koç University (Turkey), and Istanbul Bilgi University (Turkey). His articles appeared in various international peer-reviewed journals including Critical Arts, Cineaction, [in]Transition, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Paragraph, and Screen. He co-edited a volume about cultures of sexual dissidence in contemporary Turkey, namely Cinsellik Muamması: Türkiye’de Queer Kültür ve Muhalefet (2012), co-authored Mustang: Translating Willful Youth (2022), and co-translated Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993) into Turkish (Pinhan, 2014). Çakırlar has also worked with various arts institutions and curatorial collectives based in Turkey, Germany, USA, and UK. He currently leads a British Academy project on “Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics” (2021-2023).

DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v21.i0.2703

 

There were no Godzilla films in either the critics’ or filmmakers’ Sight and Sound polls in 2022.[1] No giant monster movies made the top 250 critics’ choices, nor the top 100 filmmakers’ picks. Even Guillermo del Toro, who once described Gojira (Honda Ishirō, 1954) as ‘deep and affecting’,[2] and directed Pacific Rim (2013), his own take on the giant monster film, didn’t vote for a Godzilla film. The polls include classics of Japanese national cinema, with Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, Ozu Yasujirō, 1953) and Seven Samurai (Shichinin no Samurai, Kurosawa Akira, 1954) in the top 20 of both. Not counting co-productions,[3] there are six Japanese films in the top 100 directors’ choices, all directed by Ozu and Kurosawa, and none produced after 1957. The critics’ poll, unsurprisingly since it’s a longer list (250 as opposed to 100), features 13 Japanese films, again not counting co-productions,[4] 8 directed by Ozu and Kurosawa, 2 by Mizoguchi Kenji, and 3 produced by Studio Ghibli. This produces a very limited view of Japanese cinema, in specific national contexts and mostly aligned with conventional auteurist notions of art cinema traditions. Gojira remains perhaps the most impactful Japanese film ever made, spawning a host of imitations, and producing the kaijū eiga as a viable sub-genre at the intersection of horror and science fiction. In an ironic twist, since it was produced by the same studio, Gojira also features some of the same cast as Seven Samurai, iconic star Shimura Takashi, and Nakajima Haruo, a stunt player who was inside the monster suit for most of the Godzilla films in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

This article isn’t arguing for the inclusion of Gojira, or any Godzilla films, in lists such as these. What this paper is going to argue about is the narrow definitions created by such lists. Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi represent a common thread in the consideration of Japanese cinema. As Yomota Inuhiko has argued, the recurring focus on the trio as global representatives of Japanese cinema have been a consequence of the ‘readily fulfilled Orientalist desires’ that have been the subject of Japanese national cinema since the growth of auteurist criticsm in 1950s Europe.[5] Gojira is ‘an antinuclear film with an ecological perspective’ born of the nightmare of the end of the Second World War.[6] It fits comfortably with notions of national cinema, but fails to conform with the auteurist dimensions of the majority of the films on the Sight and Sound list. The critics’ inclusion of three Studio Ghbli films, My Neighbour Totoro (Tonari no Totoro, Miyazaki Hayao, 1988), Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka, Takahata Isao, 1988) and Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, Miyazaki Hayao, 2001), represents a widening of the established canon, to include animated films, and each shares superficial similarities with Gojira: the presence of strange creatures (kaijū translates literally as ‘strange beasts’ and shares the 怪 (kai) kanji with the kami-like spirits yōkai) or the direct engagement with post-atomic horror. Nevertheless, they still fit largely with exoticist tropes, especially the Miyazaki films, often posited as alternatives to Hollywood animation. This would place them within common oppositional taste hierarchies, world cinema still often revolving around a Hollywood centre. In addition to this, it’s worth noting that monsters do appear on both lists: Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) features on both critics’ and filmmakers’ lists, and Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) and The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982) are both on the critics’ lists. Genre cinema is therefore not excluded from such lists, but there is a preference for big budget Hollywood genre films.

            The Sight and Sound list represents a legitimate canon. The list of voters covers a diverse list of filmmakers, academics and critics from around the world. It is inclusive, and the critics’ list in particular was lauded for voting Chantal Ackerman’s avant-garde feminist epic Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) the greatest film of all time. Yet, the list maintains a preference for a particular kind of cinema, generally auteur-led art or arthouse cinema. As a self-proclaimed poll of ‘The Greatest Films of all Time’ it makes clear distinctions in terms of quality and represents a defined taste culture.[7] Some responses to the poll focused on what were seen as niche successes. An All the Anime blog celebrated the poll’s promotion of anime, and scraped the raw votes to construct a list of ‘the Best Anime Films of all Time’, highlighting filmmakers whose work was voted for, but not within the 250, including Kon Satoshi, Otomo Katsuhiro and Anno Hideaki. This piece celebrated ‘a world where we only valued the opinions of those with notable taste and distinction (i.e. the 8% of critics and 5% of directors who included an anime on their top 10)’.[8] The sub-Reddit r/Letterboxd conducted their own poll, and published a list that overlapped strongly with the Sight and Sound one, but arguably more conservative: 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) beat Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) to the top spot. But there were also more surprising inclusions: Obayashi Nobuhiko’s House (Hausu, 1977) was just outside the top 50, and Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Konsinski, 2022) was ranked higher (203) than Ozu’s Late Spring (Banshun, 1949) (215). Still, no Godzilla. Such lists speak to the curation and cultivation of canons by a range of gatekeepers, filmmakers, professional and validated critics and fans.

The development of alternative and oppositional lists is central to the discussion of cinema. But, what of the films deemed too alternative to fit into such validated canons? How do we account for how fans curate genres or forms through lists and collecting that share and promote such disreputable experiences? This article will explore how kaijūfan communities play a key role in defining the ‘disreputable’ kaijū film. Due to its fragmentation outside official distribution channels, fans play a key role in curating a kaijū canon. Adopting a conventional Fan Studies approach to netnography,[9] combined with a ‘platform studies approach’,[10] this article investigates the labour of kaijū fans on Letterboxd, along with several wikis. Letterboxd is a quasi-social media platform that allows users to build lists and communicate with other film fans, share recommendations and review films. It is an open platform that allows sharing, rating and commenting, and thus forms the bulk of the exploration here.

Letterboxd lists of kaijū films can cover anything from the ‘classics’, Tōhō’s Godzilla films and other Japanese kaijū eiga, to collections of over 2000 works featuring giant monsters of every kind, covering everything from major studio movies to fan films. Rumours circulate among fans of lost classics, such as Tokyo 1960 (Teodorico C. Santos, 1960), a Filipino version of Gojira, while digitised VHS rips of obscure Taiwanese films like War God (Zhànshén, Chan Hung-man, 1974) are shared online. They perform the labour of cultivating a global kaijū film. They fit with ways that Lucia Nagib discusses world cinema: it ‘is not a discipline, but a method, a way of cutting across film history according to waves of relevant films and movements, thus creating flexible geographies’.[11] Kaijū fans are highly attentive to geographies and politics, especially given the origins of the genre, but their collecting and curating can draw attention to complex dynamics of national and transnational boundaries.

The kaijū canon

Canon formation can be an ongoing process of collecting, sharing and validation that can completely disregard notions of quality. The kaijū eiga has long had a noted place in cult film canons. It is considered a quintessentially paracinematic experience,[12] and has a privileged place within bad film canons.[13] However, since kaijū films have often fallen outside conventional mainstream distribution, in exploitation and low-budget cycles, there is often a fragmented picture of this horror/sci-fi sub-genre. The films can often fall into the cracks between Ramon Lobato’s distinctions of formal and informal distribution, and ‘shadow film economies’.[14]  

Fans, therefore, play a key role in collecting and sharing the kaijū canon. The briefest online search can easily find sites in which kaijū films and examples of kaijū are shared by fans, as a means of genrifying.[15] Two wikis, ‘Gojipedia’ and ‘Wikizilla’, both help collect examples of the kaijū film from around the globe as a means of sharing and discussing giant monster movies. The industrial roots of the kaijū film range back to the 1920s and 1930s and the production of very early examples of dinosaur and giant ape films, principally Harry O. Hoyt’s The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper, 1933). Gojira emerges from producer Tanaka Tomoyuki’s need for an idea to replace a production that had collapsed. King Kong’s popular global release to mark its twentieth anniversary and the new American film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, 1953) provided the inspiration for new type of big monster movie, different from that of the atomic-era movies being produced by American studios at the time, rooted in the atomic nightmares of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.[16] By the late 1950s, Japanese critics were discussing the kaijū eiga alongside kaiki eiga (strange stories) as a form of the horror film, but they soon became passeas the films became more childish and horror more fashionable through foreign imports.[17] Kaijū wikis echo the transnational roots of the genre. On the surface, they are devoted to Japanese kaijū films, but collect and reference monsters from around the world. This ranges from the monsters from Japanese studios, Tōhō’s universe of monsters, and those from rival studio Daiei’s Gamera movies. But they sit comfortably alongside Kong and its sequels, the more recent Legendary series of Godzilla and Kong films, as well as del Toro’s Pacific Rim.

What’s immediately apparent in kaijū fans’ canonisation of their object of fandom is how flexible they appear in their approach toward national criteria. The term kaijū is applied to films from any country, from Japan, Taiwan, Denmark, Britain, as well as the US. This sits relatively comfortably with the ways in which Bâ & Higbee define de-westernization in their collection, De-Westernizing Film Studies. As they describe the concept, de-westernization: ‘is (and embraces) the reality of how economically and culturally, films, filmmakers and our analyses, function across national and/or cultural borders and boundaries in the current phase of globalization. This functioning takes place in a way that (paradoxically) challenges the hegemony of the West at the same time as it appears to reinforce it’.[18] The paradox of a form that adopts a Japanese term for its name but that is also a product of mid-twentieth century post-war occupation and globalisation sees fans engage with tropes of nation in their conceptualisation of the kaijū film. The canon does not subscribe to a particular frame of reference to national cinemas or cultural standards of filmmaking (the neocolonial reference to Hollywood as the aspirational pinnacle of standards). However, it paradoxically adopts terminology that periodises the kaijū film through Japanese imperial periods. ‘Gojipedia’ utilises a timeline of Japanese Emperors to define periods of production. Hirohito’s Shōwa reign from 1926 to 1989 is used to classify films up until around 1980, encompassing the monster boom of the 1960s up until around Gamera: Super Monster (Uchū Kaijū Gamera, Yuasa Noriaki, 1980). Heisei, the period of Akihito’s reign, covers all films between 1984 and 1999, despite the reign lasting till the emperor’s abdication in 2019. Millennium describes films made around the turn of the century when Tōhō took a break from producing Godzilla movies to allow for the 1998 Hollywood version directed by Ronald Emmerich. Naruhito’s reign is known as Reiwa, and this term covers kaijū films produced since 2016 – following Shin Gojira (Anno Hideaki & Higuchi Shinji) – unless they form part of the Legendary Monsterverse. The flexible periodisation of ‘Gojipedia’ means that Japanese terms are applied to a range of non-Japanese films, including British film Konga (John Lemont, 1961), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Zarkorr! The Invader (Michael Deak and Aaron Osborne, 1996), a low budget straight-to-video production.

This online fan canonisation represents a form of ‘narractivity’, Paul Booth’s term for the ways in which web commons models of collaborative fandom produce databases of knowledge.[19] Canon building is a form of databasing that produces an object, in this case a quasi-genre with a core set of terminology. That terminology is not solely a product of online narractivity, since the terms used to describe the kaijū film are well established pre-internet, in a range of publications and fanzines, such as G-FAN (1993-present), The Monster Times (1972-1976), Japanese Giants (1974-2004), as well as the long-running Famous Monsters of Filmland (1958-2019). But these canons now sit online in various forms, with ‘Wikizilla’ and ‘Gojipedia’ just two of those forms. While there is a primary focus on Japanese monsters and movies (this might be described as a purist approach, to which I’ll return later), the canon that develops is one that is largely transnational. It subscribes to Bâ & Higbee’s paradox, at once a product of a form of globalisation while simultaneously adopting a centre away from Hollywood. We can view fans canon building as de-Westernization,

an ongoing process that enables debate and negotiation […] defined more in terms of a shared attitude toward the need for a more diverse approach to [..] film history […] than a given geographical location[…] In this context, […] de-Westernizing also becomes the act (through theory and practice) of exposing, challenging, and thus repositioning the West’s dominance (real and imagined) as a conceptual “force,” representational norm, epistemological center, and ontological “fact”.[20]

This returns us to the initial focus of the article, most established greatest films canons retain a focus on the West as centre and fact. Kaijū fan processes of canonisation posit a centre away from Hollywood. While such a position does rely upon a colonial history and neocolonial relationship, the hierarchisation of nation is problematised by many kaijū fans.

The purist kaijū canon

Kevin Derendorf’s book Kaijū for Hipsters: 101 “Alternative” Giant Monster Movies is a self-published reference tome of kaijū movies, from major movies to X-rated examples such as Cleavagefield (Jim Wynorski, 2009), King Dong(Yancey Hendrieth, 1984) or Chinkozilla (Chin Kojira, Nakamura Rino, 2016). Derendorf acknowledges what we might refer to as a ‘cultural roots’[21]  argument about the origins of kaijū films. As he notes, there are fans who would see American films like Pacific Rim or Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2009) disqualified. Derendorf classifies kaijū films based on their proximity to the tradition established by Gojira and the special effects work of Tsuburaya Eiji. They ‘build on the Japanese tradition’ more than films that might have the word kaijū in their translated titles, but ultimately don’t reflect Tsuburaya’s influence, such as The Monster from Green Hell,[22] a 1957 B-picture released in Japan as Konchū kaijū no shūrai, literally Invasion of Insect Monsters.

In a post on his blog, Maser Patrol, Derendorf also reflects on the nature of the term kaijū and its national specificity. He suggests that foreign kaijū could be reclassified: ‘utilizing the kanji that already exists for foreignness (外), and shortening those “gaikoku kaiju” down to just “gai-jū”, like the slang term “gaijin” for foreign people’.[23]As we consider the constitution of such canons, Derendorf here is attempting, in two different fashions, to determine what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ through notions of national specificity. This is notable as Derendorf is a high profile kaijūfan, someone that Matt Hills would determine to be a subcultural celebrity: as ‘fan culture sustains its own specific network of subcultural celebrities’.[24] Such fans, Hills argues, are ‘working at the level of secondary textuality’.[25]Respected kaijū fans like Derendorf, along with SpaceHunterX, Steve Ryfle, August Ragone, JD Lees, play a different role in defining the kaijū canon to that of the mostly anonymous fans whose narractivity contributes to the curation of the kaijū film. This could be in collecting and showcasing different versions of films,[26] determining the parameters of what constitutes a kaijū in the first place,[27] or, importantly, denouncing appropriations of the kaijū film by Hollywood.[28] This final point, positioning texts outside the canon of the kaijū film, often because they whitewash the Japanese films’ origins,[29] ultimately shape what is ‘out’, not just determining what is ‘in’.

As Derek Kompare argues in his chapter, “Fan curators and the gateways into fandom”, such activity is at the heart of the activity of fans. Fans curate the objects of their fandom, creating unofficial canons in a variety of ways: ‘The most basic form of curation is suggested canon: simply suggesting, loaning, copying, or gifting additional material to interested fans. This canon is likely not “official,” but is based instead on the curator’s perceptions of fannish texts, and their relationship to their fandom.’[30] The examples above all revolve around aspects of suggested canon, via the kaijū fan’s ‘secondary textuality’. Ultimately, Kompare sees such curation as contributing to Encyclopedic media, which he describes as ‘the most common form of curated fan media, the perspectives that fans research, write, discuss, and argue about’.[31] Polls like the Sight & Sound list are also examples of encyclopedic media, where ‘elite fans’, as Matt Hills might refer to them,[32] the scholars or celebrity fans whose reputations ‘combine the symbolic and discursive power of subcultural celebrity status with industry power’, namely the filmmakers and critics whose fandom overlaps with their ‘media-professionalism’.[33] Such lists therefore represent ‘secondary textuality’ in relation to a fan’s curation of the genre, from whatever perspective that is manifest. As Philipp Dominick Keidl has argued in response to the growth of fan-run museums, such curation relies upon ‘subcultural networks and intermediaries that represent a crucial space for community building’.[34]

To explore how alternative lists can be defined in relation to the genre-building function of such lists and kaijūfandom, this study has looked at Letterboxd as way of determining how oppositional lists can be understood. Letterboxd features over 250 lists that match the tag kaijū.[35] Associated terms deliver variable numbers of lists: daikaijū (26), tokusatsu (特撮, “special filming”, the term used mostly to refer to Henshin [transforming series like Ultraman [1966-present]) (188), Godzilla (250+), Gamera (250+), Toho kaijū (64), Daiei kaijū (2), American kaijū (15), King Kong (250+), strange beasts (5), Japanese kaijū (14, including several that highlight the non-inclusion of Godzilla or that are just non-kaijū Japanese films). This spread of lists is not terribly revealing, although we might argue that as terms become more niche, such as daikaijū, or more refined in their relationship with national cinemas, such as identifying Japanese studios or specific national cinemas, the lists become less numerous. In terms of canon building impulses though, several lists seem to stand out. For this purpose, I want to look at several lists, all of which matched a search for the term kaijū and have more than 10 likes, and preferably comments, as they contribute to an ongoing discussion amongst viewers about the composition and understanding of the kaijū film. This represents 8 lists, each of which demonstrate flexible demonstrations of their understanding of what constitutes a kaijū and varying degrees of deference toward national origins. Such lists make little concession to notions of quality or, in some cases, media, shifting across various forms.

All the lists represent Kompare’s ideas of how fans manufacture suggested canon, some more flexibly than others. The first list I want to discuss is simply entitled ‘Kaiju’, by William Carpenter, and is described as ‘The chronology of the kaiju, starting with the true start of King Kong.’ The list is tagged ‘kaiju’, ‘king kong’, ‘godzilla’, and curiously, ‘foreign’ and ‘black and white’ (perhaps in reference to Gojira). This list collects 76 films, only 14 of which are not Japanese. It includes 31 of the 32 Tōhō Godzilla films (not including Shin Godzilla), alongside a handful of other Tōhō kaijū films, such as Mothra (Mosura, Honda Ishirō, 1961), Varan the Unbelievable (Daikaijū Baran, Honda Ishirō, 1958) and Frankenstein Conquers the Earth (Furankenshutain tai Chitei Kaijū Baragon, Honda Ishirō, 1965). It also features all 12 of Daiei/Kadokawa’s Gamera films and the mid-1960s Daimajin trilogy. The relatively small number of non-Japanese kaijū films include fairly predictable examples, such as The Lost World, King Kong, its sequels and 1976 remake, The Beast from 20,00 Fathoms and some of the Legendary series (the list was last updated in 2020, so this does not include Godzilla vs. Kong). North Korean film Pulgasari (Shin Sang-ok, 1985) and British Gorgo(Eugène Lourié, 1961) are also included. This list represents perhaps the best evocation of the tradition that Derendorf alluded to, with a lineage of special effects practitioners from Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen to Tsuburaya (who was heavily influenced by King Kong, to the point where the Go- in Gojira is adopted from gorilla). There is a clear continuity communicated through this list. What is perhaps most of interest is what is missing from the list: Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong (2005) and Emmerich’s reviled American version of Godzilla (1998). The latter is so detested by Godzilla fans that the monster design from the film is conventionally referred to as GINO (Godzilla-in-name-only). This therefore represents something of a ‘purist’ canon of kaijū movies, aligned with established narratives around the development of the form, its core influences and the main studios responsible for its key works. As many commentaries about the kaijū film have done,[36] this tends to essentialise the ‘Japaneseness’ of the kaijū movie, even if it alludes to the transnational background to its formation.[37]

Other kaijū Letterboxd lists also follow the pattern of highlighting the core Japaneseness of the giant monster film. ‘Kaiju!’, a list by MadCetologist, an active user with 75 lists, has just 45 films. Around half are Godzilla films, with a smattering of Tōhō films, including Rodan (Sora no Daikaijū Radon, Honda Ishirō, 1956) and Space Amoeba(Gezora Ganime Kamēba Kessen! Nankai no Daikaijū, Honda Ishirō, 1970), but also a few American films, including three Legendary MonsterVerse films, Colossal (Nacho Vigalondo, 2016), an independent film in which a kaijūattacking Seoul is controlled by a young woman experiencing mental illness exacerbated by the toxic masculinity around her, and The Amazing Colossal Man (Bert I. Gordon, 1957). Emmerich’s Godzilla is included, but receives the lowest rating of all from MadCetologist. The function of Letterboxd to sort lists by individual users’ and average ratings emphasises a further function of suggested canon, not simply the inclusion of films within a canon, but rankings and ordering that recommend and suggest orders in which films should be watched or the best pathways into that canon. Lists like this one and the ‘Kaiju’ list, while they are aligned with the conventional narratives around the origins and essentialism of the kaijū movie, are much less niche in the curation of obscure films. They are generally bound by films that are readily commercially available (especially in the US), whereas other lists, which take a less purist approach to narratives of nation or notions of ‘quality’ rely much more on fan labour for their objects.

Every kaijū film ever made

There are a few kaijū Letterboxd lists that promise an exhaustive curation of giant monster movies: the Raccoon Archives’ list ‘Kaijū: Every Kaijū Movie ever made’, includes 366 texts, collecting tokusatsu films and TV shows; ‘Strange Beasts: A Comprehensive List of Creature Features and Genre Films Starring Kaijū, Daikaijū, Dinosaurs, and Giant Monsters’, by Stephen Bush, is an ongoing list of 1421 texts dating back to 1905 with all sorts of giant monsters; while ‘The Complete Kaiju/Tokusatsu Guide 1921 – Present (Refined)’, a list of ‘kaiju/ kaiju adjacent films and tokusatsu films’, by Trey Sharp, features 2026, with dozens more listed that are not featured on Letterboxd. Such lists disregard more essentialist narratives around the national origins of the kaijū, collecting films from around the world, with little conscious focus on medium, quality or the popular availability of such films. They reflect the labour of fan sharing, collecting and suggestion. Since many of the films fall outside popular distribution channels, into the shadow economies of cinema, the very existence and discussion of some films is the product of fan discussion, rumour and myth. Since some films are lost, partially lost, or only available in poor quality VHS dubs, complete lists such as these reflect some of the fan mythology shared by sites like Letterboxd, ‘Wikizilla’, ‘Gojipedia’, and the many kaijūpodcasts, such as Kaijū Transmissions, Kaijū Curry House, Monster Island Commentaries, and Podzooky.[38]

            Many commentators have discussed distinctions of fan labour and the ways it contributes to knowledge production in a variety of fashions. Sandra Annett has argued that anime fans are ‘adding to’ conversations that are transcultural in nature.[39] There is no distinct general vision provided by a fandom (understanding fan communities is not a case of ‘adding up’ conversations), but fan work is plural by nature.  Similarly, Jamie Sexton has celebrated the ‘hard work’ of fans whose transnational activity collects and shares knowledge of national texts.[40] Booth’s conception of fandom relies upon socialised knowledge of etiquette, sharing, gifting and re-gifting. Such ‘digi-gratis’ work helps manufacture the ‘narrative database’ accessible to all fans, whether they contribute to that base of knowledge or not,[41] a process Tisha Turk has described as ‘fundamentally asymmetrical’ as not all gifts are reciprocated.[42]  Suzanne Scott has explored how the feminization of fan gift economies functions as ‘a defensive front to impede encroaching industrial factions.’ Producers’ attempts to appropriate those gifts into commercial networks are largely through male gatekeepers: ‘male audiences are more valued and courted… [U]sers […] consume and create in a fanboyish manner by acknowledging some genres of fan production and obscuring others.’[43] This is problematic in this regard, as most kaijū fans are male. Just 5 of the approximately 50 speakers at 2022’s G-FEST convention in Chicago were female, and the majority of elite kaijū fans are male. This appears to be mirrored in the lists under discussion here – the majority of gatekeepers here are male, but not exclusively so. Nevertheless, the type of fan labour being discussed here is of the kind defined by Scott, Turk and Booth, gratis and gifted. The more exhaustive lists mentioned here however do define those creators as elite in relation to the depth of their knowledge, and their labour is of the kind described by Meicheng Sun: they are ‘distinguishing themselves from ordinary audience members and the self-proclaimed fans who do not expend money, time, or energy on their idols’[44] by aiming to curate encyclopedic media that demonstrates engagement with deep knowledge of the kaijū film, far beyond that of the casual viewer, in significantly subcultural ways. Such lists also synthesise knowledge from the ‘narractivity’ of other fans, building on the dispersed communal archives available online.

            ‘The Complete Kaiju/Tokusatsu Guide 1921 – Present (Refined)’ highlights aspects of the ways in which fan curation can aim to develop a broadly inclusive canon of works that collect lost, unknown and diverse work that fall outside conventional distribution and emphasise the subcultural labour of such fan practices. This list is a mind-boggling collection of films, both features and shorts, and TV shows, both extant and rumoured. It features everything from exploitative mockbusters, like Monster vs. Ape (Daniel Lusko, 2021), The Asylum’s Godzilla vs. Kong knockoff, major Hollywood blockbusters (Emmerich’s film is included), anime (Anno Hideaki is very well represented), yōkaifilms, even effects-heavy horror films like House are featured. Several films however are representative of aspects of fan labour that reflect collecting and sharing and ways in which canon building relies on other fan practices, as well as how suggested canon can broaden the horizons of what is typically reflected in more essentialised lists.

 

Tokyo 1960 is one such film. The film appears in most of the most exhaustive lists of kaijū and in a total of 59 lists devoted to kaijū, Godzilla and Japanese horror films. It also appears on lists of lost Filipino films. The film is legend amongst fans after the existence of the Pinoy film was highlighted by a blog devoted to lost Philippine cinema.[45] But, it’s important to note, nobody appears to have seen this film since 1957, and it is ultimately an object of niche fan knowledge. The original post that referenced the film points to the existence of a series of Pinoy films in the 1950s that borrowed tropes from films made in the US and Japan. The poster shows Godzilla, devouring a train in its jaws, while the faces of the film’s stars, Tessie Quintana, Eddie Del Mar and Zaldy Zshornack, look on. Japanese names from the film seem to have been erased, replaced with the Filipino crew. Fan theories speculate that the film is a localisation in the vein of Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (Honda and Terry O. Morse, 1956), the American version of Gojira that inserted Raymond Burr into the action as an observer. SpaceHunterX’s video essay on the multiple versions of Gojiraalso ‘compares’ the film with the other alternate versions produced by German and French distributors, both of which remain in circulation due to fan sharing of VHS copies. Hence, the ‘hard work’ of fans here is ‘adding to’ discussions of suggested canon, highlighting subcultural knowledge of lost and mythic works that help define the completist canon of the kaijū film.

War God is another film referenced in similar tones, a little-seen mid-1970s film directed by Chen Hung-Min, who was best known for his martial arts films. This is a Trans-East Asian film, Taiwanese but set in Hong Kong, with special effects by Takano Koichi, a Japanese technician whose work include dozens of Ultraman episodes and the Monkey (Saiyûki) TV show. Koichi Iwabuchi’s notion of ‘Trans-East Asia as Method’ emphasises a vision of the region as a ‘dialogic communicative space in which people across borders strive to connect’.[46] Films like War God are the dialogic potentials of the kaijū film, speaking strongly to cross-border connectivity within these spaces. The story is very particularly Chinese. It centres on a family divided by modernity and tradition. The father is obsessed with carving statues, haunted by the loss of his wife. His son is a scientist, experimenting with bees. There is also a daughter who is a tearaway, riding motorbikes and hanging out with bad boys. The story maps traditional conservative values onto the giant monster action. The father is a representative of traditional cultural values. He is motivated by his obsession to produce the perfect statue of third century General Guan Yu, a deified god from the Three Kingdoms era. As his eyes fade, he tries to open those of the statue of the deity. Aliens then invade. They demand that humanity destroy its nuclear arsenal after an explosion in outer space has disrupted the atmosphere. The old man’s daughter is kidnapped to be their emissary, but she’s such a troublemaker nobody believes her, even when the weather superheats and then suddenly freezes. Eventually, the general returns in giant form, which leads to the monster action. The film seems to riff on ideas shared with two Daiei movies: Warning from Space (Uchūjin Tokyo ni arawaru, Shima Koji, 1956) and Daimajin(Yasuda Kimiyoshi, 1966). It lifts the literal warning from space from the former and a prayer to a statue that becomes a giant monster from the latter. The identification of the film as a kaijū movie (supplanting the language of Japan onto former colonised nations’ filmmaking in the process) relies on levels of knowledge, not just the derivative similarities between other movies, but also the role of Takano as a worker across borders. However, unlike Tokyo 1960, the film remains in circulation, but in a poor condition version shared widely online. The video quality is poor, since it is a dub of a VHS, with blurry images and difficult to read burned in subtitles (figure 1). The existence of the film echoes earlier sharing, the traces of VHS a reflection of the film’s marginal production, but also reminding of earlier forms of fan curation, when ‘curators functioned as “tape hubs”’ in the 1970s and 80s’.[47]

Conclusion: Discovering new canon

 

Like the Sight & Sound list, curated lists of suggested canon have the capacity to enable discovery of new films. They can validate previously unknown media and broaden the understanding of a genre. While the first lists considered in this article were more purist in their devotion to Japanese tokusatsu and kaijū media, the more exhaustive lists encompass wider sets of films, appeal to different taste cultures and suggest a more diverse audience for niche media than perhaps expected from other visions of kaijū fandoms. Alternative canons that aim at completeness, regardless of distinctions of taste, can both help fans discover new works and show off the elite fans’ superiority in curating ‘every kaijū film ever made’, even if that collection might reflect communal effort.

The inclusion of short and fan-produced films represents areas that more conventional lists of cinema tend to overlook. Some of those shorts have been in circulation for a long time and are well known by fans, such as Bambi Meets Godzilla (Marv Newland, 1969). This is a short, under two minutes, animated film. Most of the running time is credits. A young deer grazes happily in a peaceful field. Suddenly, a huge lizard’s foot stamps on it. The William Tell overture is replaced by a slowed discordance from The Beatles’ ‘A Day in a Life’ as the kaijū’s giant foot flattens the fawn. This is a well-known short to many kaijū fans, having played with the cinema and VHS releases of Godzilla 1985(R.J. Kizer, Koji Hashimoto, 1985), New World Cinema’s localised version of Gojira (Hashimoto, 1984). Other inclusions are less well known commercials, such as Minions x Godzilla x Toho Cinema Collaboration Movie (2015), a short sting for Tōhō Cinemas in which some Minions are scared off by Godzilla.

            Other films are less common in the kaijū canon, and reflect different appropriations. Alternative canon building can help share and spotlight films that would ordinarily fall outside other means of canonising media. Stop-motion artist Cressa Maeve Beer’s short Coming Out (2020) is one such film. It begins in media res with Godzilla fighting horned enemy Baragon.[48] Godzilla is distracted by a sad Godzilla Junior, who we see watching Sailor Moon and hear crying on the bed while their parent looks on. The young kaijū asks to speak to Godzilla, and, over tea, explains they don’t feel male but are female (this is captioned with gender symbols). They hug, and we see Godzilla wearing reading glasses and researching on their laptop. We subsequently see the giant monster knitting. It’s revealed to be a trans flag (figure 2). The monsters return to the fight with Baragon (who is patiently waiting with mug and book in hand), Godzilla Junior now with a pink bow in her hair. Beer explained that the story behind the film drew from her own experience of losing her father: ‘He was the one who introduced me to Godzilla when I was little, and then our last conversation ended up being my coming out to him as Transgender’.[49] While the film was shared at the time of its release by Tōhō and Legendary’s official social media accounts, the inclusion of films like Coming Out in fan curated lists helps to draw attention to works that would conventionally sit outside more mainstream interpretations of canon.

            Film lists like the ones that have been discussed throughout this article can perform multiple functions. Like the more widely reported Sight and Sound list, they enable discovery for more general audiences, and draw attention to lesser-known works. The elevation of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles to the position of ‘Greatest Film of All Time’ did just that, sparking a range of discussion, even if some of it descended into misogyny. However, the elite voters of that list continued to elevate particular kinds of cinema and taste to the forefront of cinephile culture. The focus remained largely on classic Hollywood and auteur-led art cinema from around the globe, mostly Europe. Distinctions of cultural capital and taste exclude different kinds of cinema experiences and types of media that alternative and fan curated lists draw attention to. Such lists rely upon different subcultural distinctions, drawing upon an archive of fan-curated knowledge and encyclopedic media. They reflect and draw upon the ‘hard work’ of fan labour, sharing and narrating myths of lost films and works that could only be seen on poor quality VHS dubs shared ad infinitum. Ultimately, they perform some of the work of de-Westernization, posting a cinematic centre away from Hollywood and Europe. While this does fit with tropes of Orientialism in some cases, the curation of the kaijū film by its fans creates a genuinely transnational and transcultural space that genrifies the kaijū film. 

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[1] British Film Institute, “The Greatest Films of All Time”, British Film Institute, 1 December 2022, accessed May 2023, https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/greatest-films-all-time.

[2] Criterion Collection, “Guillermo del Toro on Godzilla”, Criterion Collection, 11 July 2013, accessed May 2023, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/2830-guillermo-del-toro-on-godzilla.

[3] I’ve discounted two Japanese co-productions, Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (1999) and Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga (2001) since they sit in different national traditions.

[4] There are 6 Japanese co-productions on the list, included Yi Yi and La ciénaga, along with films in other national cinema traditions, such as Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) and Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993).

[5] Inuhiko Yomota, What Is Japanese Cinema? A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), p. 13.

[6] Ibid, p. 117.

[7] Some responses to the list were not especially surprising. The National Review bemoaned ‘the end of popular cinema’ via a ‘an inarguably political choice, made by radical Marxist feminists’ (Armond White, “Sight & Sound Poll Results: The End of Popular Cinema.” The National Review, 7 December 2022, Accessed May 2023, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/sight-sound-poll-results-the-end-of-popular-cinema/); filmmaker Paul Schrader complained the winner ‘undermined… the poll’s credibility’ and complained of ‘politically correct rejiggering’ and ‘a landmark of distorted woke reappraisal’ (Christian Zilko, “Paul Schrader Slams ‘Jeanne Dielman’ Topping Sight & Sound Poll as ‘Distorted Woke Reappraisal’.”, Indiewire, 3 December 2022, accessed May 2023, https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/paul-schrader-sight-and-sound-poll-too-woke-1234787868/).

[8] Mike Atherton, “Sight & Sound & Anime”, All the Anime, 12 March 2023, accessed May 2023, https://blog.alltheanime.com/sight-sound-anime/.

[9] Abby Waysdorf describes netnography, derived from Robert Kozinets’ work, as ‘one of the backbones of fandom research’. Abby Waysdorf, “Placing Fandom, Studying Fans: Modified Acafandom in Practice”, Transformative Works and Cultures 33 (2020), accessed July 2023, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2020.1739.

[10] Maria Alberto defines a platform studies approach as a form of netnography that investigates interactions between fans online, but accounting for ways in which the online platform operates, such as how Twitter differs from Tumblr in the form interactions take. Maria Alberto, ‘Exploring How Fans Use Platforms: A Platform Studies Approach to Fan Studies Project’, in A Fan Studies Primer: Method, Research, Ethics, eds. Paul Booth and Rebecca Williams (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2022), pp. 239-254.

[11] Lúcia Nagib, “Towards a positive definition of World Cinema”, in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, eds. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London and New York: Wallflower, 2016), p. 35.

[12] See Jeffrey Sconce, “’Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style”, Screen36 (4) (1995): 371-393; Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, Cult Cinema: An Introduction (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

[13] Harry Medved and Michael Medved, The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time (And How They Got That Way) (London: Angus & Robertson, 1979).

[14] Ramon Lobato, Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution (London: British Film Institute, 2012).

[15] Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999).

[16] Steven Rawle, Transnational Kaiju: Exploitation, Globalisation and Cult Monster Movies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022)

[17] Michael Crandol, “Godzilla vs. Dracula: Hammer Horror Films in Japan”, Cinephile 13 (1) (2019): 18-23.

[18] Saër Maty Bâ and Will Higbee, “Introduction: de-westernizing film studies”, in De-Westernizing Film Studies, eds. Saër Maty Bâ and Will Higbee (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 8.

[19] Paul Booth, Digital Fandom 2.0: New Media Studies, 2^nd Ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 2017).

[20] Saër Maty Bâ and Will Higbee, “Introduction: de-westernizing film studies”, p. 3.

[21] Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (London and New York: IB Tauris, 2006).

[22] Kevin Derendorf, Kaiju for Hipsters: 101 “Alternative” Giant Monster Movies (No Place: Maser Press, 2018), p. 11.

[23] Maser Patrol, “怪獣 or 外獣? (Kaiju or Gaiju?)”, 8 January 2017, accessed July 2020, https://maserpatrol.wordpress.com/2017/01/08/怪獣-or-外獣-kaiju-or-gaiju/.

[24] Matt Hills, “Not just another powerless elite?: when media fans become subcultural celebrities”, in Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture, eds. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 115.

[25] Ibid., p. 110.

[26] Wikizilla, “Five Versions of the First Godzilla Movie ｜ MONSTER PLANET.” YouTube. 5 March 2021, accessed August 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1yE5hlu2Dc.

[27] JD Lees, “What is a Kaiju?” G-Fan 78 (2006), 68-72.

[28] Steve Ryfle, “Whitewashing Godzilla”, In These Times, 14 May 2014, accessed September 2021, https://inthesetimes.com/article/whitewashing-godzilla.

[29] William Tsutsui, “For Godzilla and Country”, Foreign Affairs, 28 March 2014, accessed May 2023, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141472/william-m-tsutsui/for-godzilla-and-country.

[30] Derek Kompare, “Fan curators and the gateways into fandom .” In The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, eds. Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott (New York: Routledge, 2017), accessed May 2023, https://doi-org.yorksj.idm.oclc.org/10.4324/9781315637518

[31] Ibid.

[32] Matt Hills, Fan Cultures. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002).

[33] Matt Hills, “Not just another powerless elite?: when media fans become subcultural celebrities”, p. 108.

[34] Philipp Dominik Keidl, “The Labor of Curating: Fandom, Museums, and the Value of Fan Heritage”, Journal of Popular Culture 54 (2021): p. 414.

[35] This is the maximum number of search results possible in the platform’s engine.

[36] Mark Anderson, “Mobilizing Gojira: Mourning Modernity as Monstrosity”, in In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage, eds. by William M. Tsutsui and Michiko Ito (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), pp. 21-40; Michael J. Blouin, Japan and the Cosmopolitan Gothic: Specters of Modernity(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013); David Deamer, Deleuze, Japanese Cinema and the Atom Bomb (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Chon Noriega, “Godzilla and the Japanese Nightmare: When “Them!” Is U.S.”, Cinema Journal 27 (1) (1987): 63-77; Steve Ryfle, Steve, “Whitewashing Godzilla”; Kimmy Yam, “’Godzilla’ was a metaphor for Hiroshima, and Hollywood whitewashed it”, NBCNews, 7 August 2020, accessed August 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/godzilla-was-metaphor-hiroshima-hollywood-whitewashed-it-n1236165; Inuhiko Yomota, “The Menace from the South Seas: Honda Ishirō’s Godzilla (1954)”, in Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts, eds. Alastair Phillips and Julian Stringer (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 102-111.

[37] Such activity also fits with Hill’s notion of ‘techno-occidentalism’, ‘reading-for-cultural-difference’ in ways that create oppositions between Hollywood and an Orientalised Far East.  Matt Hills, “Ringing the Changes: Cult Distinctions and Cultural Differences in US Fans’ Readings of Japanese Horror Cinema”, in Japanese Horror Cinema, ed. Jay McRoy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 171.

[38] PlayerFM lists nearly 100 kaijū-related podcasts. PlayerFM, “Kaiju Podcasts”, 26 May 2023, accessed May 2023, https://player.fm/podcasts/Kaiju.

[39] Sandra Annett, Anime Fan Communities: Transcultural Flows and Frictions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 206.

[40] Jamie Sexton, “The allure of otherness: transnational cult film fandom and the exoticist assumption”, Transnational Cinemas 8 (1) (2016): p. 16

[41] Paul Booth, Digital Fandom 2.0: New Media Studies, pp. 85-7.

[42] Tisha Turk, “Fan Work: Labor, Worth, and Participation in Fandom’s Gift Economy,” Transformative Works and Cultures 15 (2014), accessed August 2022, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0518.

[43] Suzanne Scott, “Repackaging fan culture: The regifting economy of ancillary content models”, Transformative Works and Cultures 3 (2009), accessed August 2022, https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.0150.

[44] Meicheng Sun, “K-pop fan labor and an alternative creative industry: A case study of GOT7 Chinese fans”, Global Media and China 5 (4) (2020): p. 402.

[45]Simon Santos, “Pinoy Sci-Fi #4: Three ‘Atomic Monster’ Movies in the Fifties”, Video48, 24 May 2008, accessed August 2021, http://video48.blogspot.com/2008/05/pinoy-sci-fi-4-three-atomic-monster.html.

[46] Koichi Iwabuchi, “Trans–East Asia as method”, in Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture, eds. Koichi Iwabuchi, Eva Tsai and Chris Berry (London: Routldge, 2016), p. 281.

[47] Derek Kompare, “Fan curators and the gateways into fandom”.

[48] Beer’s social media handle is @beeragon.

[49] Christopher Stewardson, “Interview: Cressa Maeve Beer”, ourculture, 17 July 2020, accessed May 2023, https://ourculturemag.com/2020/07/17/interview-cressa-maeve-beer/.

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About the Author 

Steven Rawle is an associate professor in Media Production at York St John University. He’s the author of Transnational Kaijū: Exploitation, Globalisation and Cult Monster Movies (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), Transnational Cinema: An Introduction (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), and co-editor of Transnational Monsters: Reframing Monstrosity and Global Crisis (Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming). He has also regularly written about topics relating to the transnational circulation and production of cult cinema and has published in East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, Asian Cinema, The Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema and Film Criticism. He is also one of the investigators on the Screen Industries Growth Network-funded ‘Cinema and Social Justice Filmmaking’ project.

DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v21.i0.2704

 

As Len Cella’s Moron Movies (1983) reaches its 40th birthday, a place in any film canon—mainstream or alternative—still eludes it. Rehabilitating the film as a cinematic milestone has become implausible, complicated by the film’s surface similarities to today’s social media filmmaking practices. Reviewers evaluate Cella’s film as if it were a series of TikTok posts. They miss ample evidence that it should be considered as something more: an example of a parallel mode of cinema, exploring new territories pioneered by the video artists of the early 1980s.

A close study of the film, and its sibling More Moron Movies (1985), reveals that Cella’s work emerges from visual arts practice rather than moviemaking conventions. His art-informed approach, channelled through his one-person, do-it-yourself “amateur” filmmaking practice, is misunderstood by present-day viewers. A film that humbly made a huge cultural splash in its day is thus dismissed in our present moment, as if its only value is in its role as a precursor to social media videos. The result is a diminishment of Moron Movies, and of its importance as an artifact marking a moment in film history.

What happens if we grant Len Cella his due and take seriously his imperfect and beautifully strange collection of 18-second films? Is his work simply the product of technical advances in home moviemaking technology, or does it really explore new ways of thinking about media production and artmaking? What does the mixed, complex, and shifting public reception of his film tell us about generational changes in the limited audience that would seek out a film called Moron Movies? And where, if we are brave enough to make a prediction, will the film be on its 50th birthday?

Provenance

Just before midnight on December 11, 1984, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962) returned from a commercial break. Johnny Carson said: “Before Buddy Hackett comes out, this might be a good place to do the ‘Moron Movies’ because they’re a little off the wall also. They’re short, homemade, off-the-wall, bizarre little episodes.”[1]

I saw, on my parent’s television, Carson’s brief introduction and the nine films that followed: GETTING RID OF THE RAISINS, THE CHEAT, A COOK’S PUNISHMENT IN HELL, HOW TO STRIKE OUT, THE CHICKEN COMEDIAN, POOR MAN’S REMOTE CONTROL, HOW TO DISCOURAGE PICKPOCKETS, HOW TO KNOW IF YOU’RE UGLY, and RULES WERE MEANT TO BE BROKEN.

I was dumbstruck. No wonder Carson was at a loss as to what to call these films. They were funny enough to air on the steadfastly mainstream Tonight Show, but the laughter built slowly, and the studio audience was perplexed.

Moviemaking Conventions

If Cella’s film defies moviemaking conventions, which conventions are involved, and how, specifically, is this achieved? If rules are meant to be broken, what rules does Moron Movies break? To consider Cella’s practice in relationship to traditional cinematic editing, a brief review of two classic texts can help clarify conventional practices and where Cella’s editing diverges.

I teach editing at a university, helping students understand the use of conventional / “standard” film shots and how these can be cut together. To deliver an initial conceptual framework of these ideas to my students, I refer to Sergei Eisenstein’s essay “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,”[2] and I very carefully balance this material with concepts from André Bazin’s “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.”[3] For advanced students, these can be assigned readings. For beginning students, I present the key ideas through lectures and demonstrations.

Eisenstein posits montage as the central element of filmmaking, presenting its use as the filmmaker’s primary tool to control an audience’s attention. He also claims its use as a method for creating emotional effects. Eisenstein proposes that meaning emerges in “conflicts” that occur at the instant of change from one image to another—the actual edit point—and in the patterns that develop in an edited series of shots.

Eisenstein describes his debate on editing theory with Vsevolod Pudovkin, a discussion on the specific nature of montage-based meaning-creation: “A graduate of the Kuleshov school, he [Pudovkin] loudly defends an understanding of montage as a linkage of pieces. Into a chain. Again, ‘bricks.’ Bricks arranged in a series to expound an idea. I confronted him with my viewpoint on montage as a collision. A view that from the collision of two given factors arises a concept.”[4] Eisenstein calls the psychological effects arising from these collisions “sensations.”

In opposition to Eisenstein, André Bazin considers the use of montage to “force” the viewer’s gaze to be a crude, artificial approach. He suggests letting the viewer’s eye study a deep-focus shot. Bazin claims that “depth of focus brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality.”[5] The value of this, Bazin believes, is that “while analytical montage only calls for [a viewer] to follow his guide, to let his attention follow along smoothly with that of the director who will choose what he should see, [in a deep-focus shot] he is called upon to exercise at least a minimum of personal choice. It is from his attention and his will that the meaning of the image in part derives.”[6]

These two texts provide a theoretical framework clarifying traditional approaches to cinematic montage—conventional moviemaking theory. Cella is seemingly not familiar with, or not engaged with, these ideas. Whether that is from a lack of training (he is self-taught and did not go to film school or work with other filmmakers) or if it demonstrates a pragmatic set of choices emerging from his home-based, solo production of ultrashort films, the result is the same. Whether Cella is rejecting tradition, or simply disregarding the “cinematic” approach and replacing it with production techniques similar to those a teenager with a cell phone might use for a TikTok video, he films and cuts minimally and simplistically. He delivers the minimum information needed for his films. Eisenstein and Bazin give us a baseline to discuss the specifics of his filmmaking.

Visual Arts Practice

To examine the idea that Cella’s work emerges from visual arts practice rather than moviemaking conventions, Arthur C. Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace[7] and Remarks on Art and Philosophy[8] provide needed definitions and a conceptual framework regarding the nature of art. Specifically, Danto proposes a definition of art focused on meaning and embodiment, two characteristics useful for understanding the specifics of video art—circa 1980—as distinct from traditional filmmaking practice. If one wants to consider how Cella’s work is aligned with that of early 1980s video artists, rather than independent filmmakers from that period or earlier, Danto’s definition is useful. As well, Danto’s foregrounding of “embodiment” is helpful if we wish to comprehend the nature of Cella’s hybrid practice of combining home movie tools (his Super 8 camera) with home video / VHS finishing techniques.

Danto’s definitions, and the conceptual ideas around those definitions, were developed and refined in iterations from 1981’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace to the end of his life. “I knew that I was going to have to give a definition of art that would hold water,” Danto explained in an address about his writing on art philosophy and criticism. “I managed to come up with two necessary conditions. … The first one was that it’s got to be about something. It’s got to represent something. It’s got to have a meaning.”[9] While it might seem silly to ascribe the rather heavy word “meaning” to some of Len Cella’s ridiculous and extremely short jokes, the distinction here is between Cella’s work and our present-day use of the term “content.” Even Cella’s basest jokes can be seen to “mean” something, especially in contrast with our contemporary approval of posting “content” that marks the existence of the content creator but does little else.  

“And then I came up with this idea that there are many things that have meaning, but the interesting thing about artworks is that they embody their meanings,”[10] Danto continues. “So I came up with the thought that for X to be a work of art, X has to have meaning, and embody it. But different objects will embody their meaning in different kinds of ways, and the meaning picks out the properties of the physical object that consist in the embodiment of that meaning.”[11]

As we will see later, Cella’s Moron Movies does not present as “a film” despite having been initially screened in theatres. It is read as “a video” or “a videotape.” Depending on the audience, that embodiment has included a range of specific outlets—from nationwide broadcast on NBC to being discovered on a VHS tape found in the trash—but Moron Movies’ visual characteristics and format coincide with the “embodiment” associated with the videotapes of museum-based video artists presenting circa 1980.

Research Gaps

We can draw from the writings of Eisenstein, Bazin, and Danto, and thereby theorize the specific characteristics of Moron Movies and Len Cella’s practice, but there is a massive research gap beyond that baseline task. No academic writing seems to exist that addresses the film or the filmmaker. Casual writers (for example, bloggers) have made their thoughts available, but these documents mainly push the idea of Cella as somehow anticipating social media—despite significant evidence to the contrary.

As well, the ratings that exist for the film are primarily from the United States and Canada. The film does not seem to have been released, sold, or broadcast anywhere else. While opportunities to view the film expanded with YouTube and other online venues, there has never been any reason for significant interest about the film outside of North America.

The MTV, YouTube, and TikTok Generations

In April of 2023 I presented at the national conference of the Popular Culture Association in San Antonio, Texas. I discussed how the filmmaker Wim Wenders had made a social media commercial for the Salvatore Ferragamo fashion line, and I examined how Wenders and his editor had adapted their editing techniques to match the taste and attention span of the specific generation that was now Ferragamo’s expected clientele. As well, I discussed changes I saw in my younger university students and their comprehension of the ideas of continuity editing.

My presentation was placed under the rubric of “Generational Studies,” and I learned a great deal from other conference presenters. They addressed the current academic thinking in that field. I realized that while the accepted generational guidelines they used—based generally on technological change rather than world events—seemed correct, the fields of video production and media studies had slightly different relevant milestones to consider. I realized that my own bingeing of music videos in MTVs heyday was different than the media diet of someone whose teen years coincided with YouTube’s early expansion or with the growth of TikTok.

The term “Generational Studies” can refer to the generational theory of William Strauss and Neil Howe, but in recent years has been primarily associated with the writing of Dr. Jean M. Twenge. A C-SPAN hosted video and educational site[12] featuring Twenge places generational milestones in these groups: “Silents (1925-1945), Boomers (1946-1964), Gen. X (1965-1979), Millennials (1980-1994), Gen. Z (1995-2012), and the “Polars” (2013-today).” It is unproductive to simply expect everyone in a given generation to react the same way, but my students, who are from Gen. Z, turn out to be infinitely forgiving of Len Cella’s technical issues. As well, they are quite comfortable with Cella’s 18-second format.

A Changing Grammar of the Edit

Does Moron Movies reveal how frail our assumptions about cinematic language are? We have privileged the ideas of Eisenstein and Bazin to the point where their conception of editing provides the basic theory and starting point for much of our mainstream cinema production. University students watching the early “reels” of William Wegman[13]remark on the “lack” of editing, since the default assumption is that film and video should be shaped and refined in some way if the end product is something other than a social media clip.

As Deirdre Boyle explains in Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited,[14] the early use of portable video cameras, from 1965 to 1968, involved documenting artist-instigated “happenings,” a mode of production that did not focus on editing. Access to editing technology lagged behind, leaving community-based activists and documentarians waiting. Artists moved ahead. Boyle describes a key moment, again associated with art and artists and unedited videotape:

One version of the birth of portable video begins on an October day in 1965 when Korean-born artist Nam June Paik purchased one of the first portable video cameras and recorders at the Liberty Music Store in New York City. Hopping in a cab and pointing his half-inch,

black-and-white video camera out the window, as the story goes, he recorded the arrival of Pope Paul VI in New York on his way to address the United Nations. That evening Paik played his tape at the Cafe au Go Go in Greenwich Village and circulated a video manifesto declaring this new electronic medium would revolutionize art and information….[15]

It is notable, then, that Moron Movies does not feel like a documentation of performance art, but instead like an evolved continuation of the “actualities” of the Lumiere Brothers. In an alternate timeline where cinematic editing was never invented, Moron Movies makes perfect sense. Cella has little interest in using traditional establishing shots or working with the scale of shots in the way an independent filmmaker would. He points the camera at the next bit of information he needs for his joke, the same way a cellphone filmmaker might. Today Cella’s direct-to-camera presentation and disregard for continuity editing suits the aesthetic a new generation embraces.

Then again, if we look at Moron Movies with the same toolset we use for “serious” cinema, we discover a rigorous structure in it. With title cards at the beginning of each of the 189 segments that make up the film, Cella disrupts any possibility of cinematic immersion, breaking the conceits of traditional cinematic editing. The result is closer to a stand-up comedy routine than to a traditionally-edited comedy feature. There is a set up in each title card, and then the film segment itself is the punch line.

Cella’s purposeful rejection of mainstream filmmaking is easily missed. Public reactions to the film assume this is simply a clumsy effort, but that one might love or hate the film anyway, depending on one’s sense of humour. Cella has been lauded as the first YouTuber, a primordial TikToker, and an amateur filmmaking legend, yet his work is often dismissed as a collection of “dad jokes.” What happens if we treat his work in the same way that we would the museum-targeted videos of William Wegman or Ilene Segalove?

If Moron Movies—seen by millions through its The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962) broadcasts and its long run as a video rental—is to be considered as part of a 20th century film canon, we need to understand its evolving relationship with a public audience that is only now becoming brave enough to watch the film in an unironic way.

Collecting and decoding public reactions to Moron Movies allows us to look at what it contains at its heart—beyond our nervous laughter. With these reactions as background, we can consider the film’s production techniques as an alternative approach, rather than as a failed or naïve approach. If we accept the film in this way, it can be argued that Moron Movies is an unpretentious reminder that cinema is only a century old, shaped by quickly-changing technology, and built on a fragile set of assumptions about editing and human comprehension. Is there room for work that exists somewhere between cinema and art? 

Public Reaction, Then and Now

The mixed reaction experienced by Tonight Show viewers has been echoed over decades by reviewers on public forums from discussion boards to IMDb to Letterboxd. Accessing IMDb on May 16, 2023, we find that there are 21 IMDb user reviews available, posted from April 28, 2001, to December 1, 2018. There is an intriguing gap between that 2018 review and the previous review, dated October 20, 2010. For nearly eight years, Moron Movies seems to have been forgotten, at least by IMDb reviewers. Still, this collection of reviews spans almost 20 years, the traditional measurement for a “generation.”

These 21 reviews exist alongside a larger set of “user ratings” in a system that allows scoring from one to ten. With 180 user ratings, averaging 5.6 out of 10, we see a breakdown where the highest rating (10) has 21.7% of the vote (39 votes) and the lowest rating (1) has 26.7% of the vote (48 votes). The highest and lowest possible ratings dominate.

This notable split—which seems to indicate a “love it” or “hate it” reaction rather than an evaluative score—is demonstrated in another way if we break the scores down into three rating categories. We find an even split between high, medium, and low ratings.

If we consider a rating of 10, 9, or 8 as a “high” score, we see:

            10        39 votes

            9          13 votes

            8          8 votes

If we consider a rating of 7, 6, 5, or 4 as a “medium” score, we see:

            7          17 votes

            6          15 votes

            5          17 votes

            4          7

If we consider a rating of 3, 2, or 1 as a “low” score, we see:

            3          8 votes

            2          8 votes

            1          48 votes

An even division is evident:

            60 votes in the HIGH category

            56 votes in the MEDIUM category

            64 votes in the LOW category

There is no consensus on Moron Movies. The scores are split toward the voting extremes (the most common scores are 10s and 1s), indicating a polarity in audience reaction. No viewpoint wins out: we see an even division between high, medium, and low score categories indicating an overall divided response from the self-selecting audience that voted.

Note that IMDb shows no external reviews, and no Metacritic reviews, for Moron Movies. The film is abandoned by conventional reviewers. That makes sense, as it is not available on any streamers or networks. You must seek it out, and only a tiny audience does.

Letterboxd reveals a similar pattern, though more generous in scoring. The average is 3.3 stars out of 5, which could be considered a 6.6 out of 10 on IMDb.

If we consider a rating of 5, 4.5, or 4 as a “high” score, we see:

5          9 votes

4.5       5 votes

4          14 votes

If we consider a rating of 3.5, 3, 2.5 or 2 as a “medium” score, we see:

3.5       5 votes

3          14 votes

2.5       7 votes

2          9 votes

If we consider a rating of 1.5, 1 or .5 as a “low” score, we see:

1.5       4 votes

1          4 votes

.5         3 votes

These divisions seem to skew positive compared to the IMDb results:

28 votes in the HIGH category

35 votes in the MEDIUM category

11 votes in the LOW category

            The Letterboxd reviews begin November 27, 2014, but there is a gap to February 11, 2018. They then continue into May 10, 2023. These reviews are mostly recent, which reminds us that IMDb and Letterboxd offer a limited, imperfect sample of public reception.

With no pre-2001 online archive of viewer posts for comparison, any hope to consider audience reception to Moron Movies over time (especially from its release until 2001) must rely on additional personal statements. Interestingly, the anecdotes that do exist clarify the specific nature of the notably mixed reactions seen in online reviews and the “love it” or “hate it” reaction seemingly inherent in the Moron Movies viewing experience. For example, Philadelphia artist, musician, and collector Perry Shall describes discovering the film when he was ten, and then rediscovering it a decade later:

We would go to Blockbuster when they still would carry stuff that was a little bit out of the ordinary, which eventually they stopped doing.… And so I saw this thing on the shelf and it was called “Moron Movies.” … So we get it. I go home, I start playing it, and I go, “Huh?” I don’t know if it clicks with me. … Fast forward to high school. … I walked the street and there were boxes of VHS tapes in the trash at a neighbour’s house. … So I’m flipping through and I pull out this homemade VHS tape and it says on it “Scarface / Moron Movies” on one tape. I ran back to my friend’s house … I put it on and watched everybody’s reactions. … You could see without words: they go, “I don’t get it.” And I’m watching it, and I’m going, “Oh my God, I am so thankful to discover this at this moment in my life, or to rediscover it. This is the funniest, most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.”[16]

Generational Shifts in Reception?

In recent years, concepts from the field of “generational studies” have been used in hope of better understanding audience reception for film and video works. Real and measurable differences can be seen when we compare large groups of people born in different time periods. Each generation’s experience with technology (and the media ingested through that technology) shapes their expectations and reactions enough to matter. Individuals vary greatly, but my undergraduate students—who grew up watching YouTube in their formative years—have a different experience with the rules of cinematic continuity than someone my age.

I grew up watching Hollywood-made theatrical films. My students watched online videos that emphasized direct-to-camera address and de-emphasized continuity cutting. The millions in Johnny Carson’s audience on the nights where Moron Movies clips were shown came from four defined generations. In 1984, members of “The Greatest Generation” would have been between 57 and 83, “The Silent Generation” between 39 and 56, “The Baby Boom Generation” between 20 and 38, and “Generation X” between 4 and 19.[17]  The age groups that were too young to see those original Tonight Show broadcasts—specifically “The Millennial Generation,” “Generation Z,” and “Generation Alpha”—have experience with phone cameras and publishing homemade videos on social media outlets. It is likely they are less impressed by Cella’s work ethic, and less willing to credit him just for the act of making something. 

Moron Movies has migrated to YouTube.com and archive.org, so its audience is now primarily viewers familiar with social media. Consider this 2022 Letterboxd review, in which reviewer “Callisto” gives the film ½ star. Note how often the review addresses TikTok and a concept of “TikTok humour.”

Immediately from its first frame I burst out laughing, nearly in tears, and I had to pause because I couldn’t stop. It’s so stupid. Moron Movies is the perfect title. The jokes don’t start out as bad taste, but he eventually brings in more and more potty humor. Children could certainly come up with some of these stupid jokes, but they just wouldn’t hit as hard as Len Cella’s writing and line delivery. It truly is remarkable what moronic things the human mind can come up with. The jokes are so stupid that if he put these out during the TikTok era on TikTok, he would be the most famous and successful TikTok comedian among people who love this stupid humor. I have only seen a handful of TikToks from watching streams or videos, but this was like watching them for 83 minutes (for both movies without any credits) (how do people do this on a daily basis in real life?!), only much better thanks to the old 80s shot-on-video quality and deliver of this genius. It also helps they’re filmed in 4:3 rather than that awful portrait mode crap, whatever that aspect ratio is.

I admire this man’s dedication for producing this himself in the mid-80s, but over an hour of TikTok is not for me. That’s enough TikTok for my whole life and not only do I not use TikTok, but I have the sequel to watch after this. I laughed so much in the beginning, but now I can’t wait until it ends. It also doesn’t help that the jokes progressively get less and less funny (perhaps stupider?). If this were instead a short, it would be much more tolerable. The biggest lesson this film teaches you is that moronic (TikTok) humor has always existed, and this is 30 years before TikTok and before widespread use of the Internet, for that matter![18]

An April 2023 review is more generous, giving 4 and ½ stars, but again locking Cella’s work into the prison of TikTok. Reviewer “thecodyguy” writes:

They called Len Cella crazy. You’d call him crazy now. But look at all of you people today watching stupid skits and videos on YouTube and TikTok. This movie did that well before those existed and it’s a miracle. It’s a series of TikTok sketches for the generation raised on the funnies and Mad Magazine. It’s a singular exercise in absurdity.[19]

It is interesting to see the concept of “absurdity” appear in this review. For the reviewer, the point is Cella’s embrace of a certain kind of comedy. There is another association, however, more relevant to understanding Cella’s filmmaking.

Cella’s A COOK’S PUNISHMENT IN HELL appears at 44 minutes and 18 seconds into Moron Movies. (It was one of the nine selections I saw on Carson’s December 11, 1984 broadcast.) It begins, as all the segments do, with a shot of white plastic letters spelling out the title. Cella presents this text on the diagonal, slanting down on the left, leaning backwards away from the camera. This an amateur set up. One could use a copy stand, put the camera directly above the text, square it up … but this is good enough, as it was for many hobbyists making home movies. The background is azure blue, but unevenly lit, lighter at screen left and darker at screen right. This stays on the screen briefly, then cuts to a shot of a frying pan, centred with the handle extending out of the frame on screen right. The countertop, serving as a background to the frying pan, is a pinkish red.

The key visual element is that this pan has been modified. It has about eighty tacks glued onto it, point-side up. After a few seconds, two hands ease in at the top of the frame, cracking and spilling an egg into the pan. The hands recede, then appear again, spilling a second egg. We are left to imagine the impossible task of sliding anything under the eggs to flip them, scramble them or to take them out of the pan.

Cella’s pan is a visual relative to Man Ray’s sculpture Cadeau (Gift), an object demonstrating the Dada movement’s fascination with the absurd. Consider this description, presented with the object at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, conveniently located just eleven miles from Cella’s home:

On December 13, 1921, the day of his first solo exhibition in Paris, Man Ray purchased an ordinary flat iron, a box of tacks, and a tube of glue. He glued the tacks onto the iron, titled it Cadeau, and added it to the exhibition. This iconoclastic object exemplifies Man Ray’s emphasis on the juxtaposition of two completely unrelated elements in his assemblages, which he explained were “designed to amuse, annoy, bewilder, mystify, inspire reflection, but not to arouse admiration for any technical excellence usually sought or valued in objects classified as works of art.”[20] 

Certainly Cella could have seen the Man Ray sculpture and stolen the idea, or unconsciously reimagined it. He might simply have been inspired. The audacity of bringing a Dada worldview into his 1980s homemade video practice makes all forgivable, even laudable.

Is it wrong to credit Cella, the man behind ANIMALS SHOULD WEAR UNDERWEAR, with the subtle wit of our best Dada artists? Perhaps. It turns out A COOK’S PUNISHMENT IN HELL is not Cella’s first version of this joke. Earlier in Moron Movies, at 10 minutes and 56 seconds into the program, we have already seen CARPENTER’S PUNISHMENT IN HELL. In this, Cella also presents an absurd object—a hammer held by a string instead of a wooden handle—and its broken functionality becomes a diabolical punishment. And, at 34 minutes and 59 seconds, we have A CHEF’S PUNISHMENT IN HELL, another version of the concept where the pan was modified with a central bolt. We watch our tormented chef try to pry out what appears to be a pork chop. Cella’s repetition of ideas is rare in mainstream cinematic practice—where the goal is generally to make a single long-duration film—but in line with visual arts practice, where Claude Monet painted thirty evolving views of Rouen Cathedral. Perry Shall, a Moron Movies fan who would eventually become Cella’s friend, observed Cella implementing a similar strategy of making, testing, and selecting individual films as components of his master collection:

And so this guy was just creating endless content, hundreds, I would say, or at least over 100 videos that were only ending up to be 15 seconds. Probably spent a day each filming them, you know, and writing them and all that stuff. And he’s just so naturally hilarious. So what he did was he’d have people come over, they’d watch the movies. If he didn’t get a laugh, he would pull that movie out of the final product. And he continued, he would continue to do that for years, even after it got great reactions. If one joke stopped landing, he would remove it because he wanted this perfect piece of work….[21]

Cella’s path to filmmaking began after his exploration of other visual arts. Simon Mercer’s King Dongdocumentary reveals Len Cella’s painting, drawing, and process of refining the interior of his home. “Yeah, everything in my apartment was done by me,” Cella says. “I just feel more comfortable, you know, making things. I mean, to me, any work of art, it has to be pure. You have to do everything.”[22]

Categorization

How much of the work of early 1980s video artists have you watched and taken seriously? Is this work within our concept of “cinema,” or is it contained only in our notion of “art”? Is our categorization shaped by the tools of production, the function of the work, or something else?

Before one places Cella’s Moron Movies into any category, it is prudent to consider the work of artists Ilene Segalove and William Wegman. Like Cella, these artists presented works based on autobiographical material, embraced technologies less refined than Hollywood’s 35mm cinema cameras, and used quirky, sly humour. We put their production into the category of video art. We read their videos as aimed at museum exhibition, though we do this against evidence in the work itself, which hints at a goal of television broadcast. Segalove’s Why I Got Into TV and Other Stories (1983) and More TV Stories (1985) are certainly ready for broadcast.

Wegman screened Man Ray and Mic (1981)[23] on Saturday Night Live (1975) two years before Cella’s films made it to television. It is hard to ignore the visual and structural similarities to the Cella films. Wegman’s film opens with a title card (yellow on blue rather than white on blue, but similar enough), then reveals Wegman placing a microphone on the ground in front of his dog, moving offscreen, and then telling the dog to “drop it.” When Man Ray (Wegman’s dog, not the 1920s artist) obeys, we hear the startlingly clear sound of the object being dropped in front of the microphone. The film presents its tiny joke in 30 seconds, using a set up / punchline structure. Wegman has adapted his gallery-oriented 1970s video work for 1980s television, where brevity is essential. One wonders if Cella happened to catch this broadcast.

The problem with categorizing this type of work—and therefore the work of Cella—through its intended outlet is that we exacerbate the false narratives that relying on “the artist’s intent” can create. If we imagine three works filmed with identical equipment but distributed into three distinct silos—cinema, video art, television—then we are likely to resolve our categorization dilemma by seeking out or claiming to know the artist’s intention. This is an unreliable approach. If you have not considered the problem of “intentionality” before, begin with W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M. C. Beardsley’s critique of focusing on an artist’s claimed or imagined intent.

In “The Intentional Fallacy” they write: “The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public.”[24] If, instead, we primarily consider the work of art itself, leaving intention and function as secondary factors, less important and less trustworthy, we realize that “cinema,” “video art” and “television” are arbitrary categorizations. These categories can be useful, but lead to subdividing works based on styles, traditions, personal taste, or commercial trends.

Is Moron Movies some sort of hybrid work, triangulating art, cinema, and television? It is shot on film, so it is cinema. Yet it dismisses editing conventions, so it is not. It breaks up time into rigid informational chunks, so it is television. Its content, however, is personal, absurd, and dreamlike, so it is video art. Or, one wonders, is it simply naïve cinema? David Bordwell’s On the History of Film Style provides helpful context:

The history of cinema is most commonly understood as a narrative that traces the emergence of film as a distinct art. Call this the Basic Story. Stretches of the Basic Story are now questionable, but, tacitly or explicitly, it has been the point of departure for the historical study of film style. The Basic Story tells us that cinematic style developed by modifying the capacity of the motion picture camera to record an event. According to the Story, in the course of the 1910s and 1920s particular film techniques were elaborated that made cinema less a pure recording medium than a distinct means of artistic expression. The saga begins with cinema as a record of everyday incidents, as in the actualité films of Louis Lumiere.[25]

If we make the effort to consider Moron Movies as a 1983 actuality film, with Cella recording “everyday incidents” in 189 films, a comparison to the Lumiere actualities is not entirely ridiculous. At least, no more so than any other academic effort to comprehend JELLO MAKES A LOUSY DOORSTOP or THE PERVERTED CAMERAMAN.

Cella attempts only minimal editing in Moron Movies. More advanced techniques are applied in More Moron Movies, but Cella’s edits remain at the level university students achieve at the midpoint of their first editing class. Cella depends on putting something fascinating in front of the camera, usually himself or an art object created for use on camera.

Cella’s craft, beyond editing, is limited, parallel to that of the Lumieres circa 1895. There is no creative use of depth of field, no camera movement, no crafted lighting. Consider, as a comparison, The Lumieres’ L’Arroseur Arrosé (1895). It is very short, has no cuts, no closeups, and no camera movement.[26] An editor making it today would want to cut to a close up, hoping to increase the impact of the humour when we see the main character squirted by a hose.

Comparing Moron Movies to this Lumiere actuality seems fair. Is Moron Movies, then, not just old-school cinema, but an example of the oldest-school cinema? Has Cella taken the Lumieres’ approach, added sound and colour, and embraced a minimal practice to match his minimal jokes? Does Moron Movies embody its meaning?

Keep in mind that Cella is not choosing minimalism as an aesthetic. His craft and his tools are simply limited—and limiting. Cella’s equipment consists of a Super 8 film camera, a hobbyist text board for making his omnipresent title cards, and a minimal lighting kit with no evident diffusion modifiers. Ironically, this is a step above the 8mm gear young Sammy Fabelman starts with in Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical The Fabelmans (2022).

Yet Cella is not the prodigy Spielberg/Fabelman is. He uses his equipment in a way that exhibits a lack of technical skill, or a distaste for it, resulting in poor exposure, poor framing, poor focus, etc. Is this a punk aesthetic? An anti-cinema stance? Or simply a man who is a house painter by trade, self-taught and working alone, primarily focused on delivering a set of jokes in his own fashion? It is worth noting that no reviewers comment on these technical issues. The perceived lack of technical quality in the Moron Movies films only adds to the humour, or the audacity of delivering that humour.

Construction

One tool for understanding the construction of Moron Movies is to examine its title cards. There are 190 cards, beginning with “THE MORNING AFTER” at 26 seconds in and ending with “THANK YOU” at 57 minutes and 20 seconds. The 189 films in the program, from that first title card to the final card, last for 56 minutes and 54 seconds. If we include the opening graphic and dedication credit in our timing, the film is exactly fifty-seven minutes long. That is 3,420 seconds. If we divide that by our 190 title cards, we find an average duration of 18 seconds of content for each card.

Imagine this as a filmmaking task: from the instant where the title card appears until the next card appears on you have 18 seconds, and three seconds are taken up by the title card. Cella is therefore working with 15-second-long films, in 1983, decades before an army of TikTokers would explore this length.

Do not, however, credit Cella with precision timing. The rigorous timing seems accidental, a by-product of his process. The fine details of his craftwork, if you look closely, turn out to be ragged. For example, the title cards vary in duration in an arbitrary manner. “THE MORNING AFTER” is 2 seconds, 11 frames long, “HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF” is 3 seconds, 14 frames long, “HOW TO KNOW IF YOU’RE A NERD” is 4 seconds, 26 frames long. It is possible these durations are just how long Cella happened to run his Super 8 camera when filming title setups, rather than the more traditional approach of filming longer clips and editing them down to some chosen duration. Cella takes his roles of writer, actor, and set designer seriously, but is more relaxed about his role of editor. It is not his metier.

The seemingly elegant timing of the Moron Movies collection happens despite the inclusion of KING DONG, which runs 55 seconds. Next to last in the program, KING DONG, Cella’s earliest work included in the Moron Moviesset, is a troubling film. According to Cella:

Somewhere around 1968 or 1969, my brother came home with this … this bomb shell, the casing of a bomb. The thing was like six feet long, and I said, “Oh, Christ, I got to do something with that.” So I thought of the idea of chasing this maid with this big dong. And I called it “King Dong.” So I painted the thing pink. I painted this bombshell pink. But it was so heavy I had to, uh, I had to put a rope around it to hold as I’m going after the maid. In the film, in “King Dong,” I actually rest the dong on a trash can. And wipe my brow because the fucking thing is so heavy. But that was the origin of “King Dong.”

This explanation, presented in King Dong (2011), Simon Mercer’s documentary on Cella, is mystifying.[27]Most of Moron Movies demonstrates a wiseass, dad-joke vibe. It is a specific worldview, mocking the human tendency to take shortcuts or cheat, to practice laziness, stupidity, or cheapness. It is sometimes questionable, yet never reads as extreme. But Cella’s KING DONG has a different tone, harsher and genuinely offensive despite Cella playing both attacker and victim. Why include it? Why salvage it from 1969 and use it? KING DONG is literally an attempted rape scene. Perhaps Cella would say that comedy should not be overly self-censoring. I expect I am not alone, however, in feeling KING DONG’s humour misses the mark and crosses the line. My university students are in “Generation Z,” and call out what they find offensive. I cannot show them the full version of Cella’s Moron Movies because of the inclusion of KING DONG.

I like to imagine that if I did, they would suggest ways to rework it. Perhaps they would transform it into a spoof of the early Godzilla movies, with Cella using his six-foot pink appendage to knock down cardboard buildings on a set meant to look like Tokyo. I expect The Tonight Show would decline to broadcast that—they did not include KING DONG on the broadcasts—but it would be an improvement over the problematic current version.

Dissemination

How did Cella’s work get to The Tonight Show and its millions of viewers, anyway? The show was notoriously tough to book, especially for those not already in the public eye. Johnny Carson explained Cella’s inclusion to his audience:

We read an article about a man in Philadelphia who makes his own movies. Apparently, he would make these eight millimeter home movies and have them transferred to tape. Then I understand he hired a theater, or started to show them in a theater in Philadelphia. These are not normal movies, you understand?

Where does our appreciation of Cella and his “not normal” movies end up? Simon Mercer’s King Dong (2011) documentary reveals more about Cella’s determination to get his films shown. Cella says:

I’d read a book about El Cordobés. El Cordobés was a matador, kind of a renegade matador. And he was having trouble getting to go in the ring. They wouldn’t let him in the ring, to do his thing. So he built his own bull ring. I said, that’s it. I’ll get my own theater. Fuck ‘em. So I started shopping around for places to rent. And there was a second floor of a Lansdowne theater.[28]

Sophistication and its Discontents

Is Cella a genius, using visual arts strategies to amplify his homemade films? Is he an autodidact, learning from Man Ray and William Wegman (with his dog, Man Ray)? Is he a nightclub comedian? Do his jokes land?

There is growth between Moron Movies (1983) and More Moron Movies (1985). I have downplayed Cella as an editor, but in his second film his practice enters a more sophisticated phase. Cella learns to cut to reaction shots, and to use shots that reveal new information or a second character. He has developed a comedic language, and he is using it with gusto.

The most surprising development, however, is that he begins to build on ideas in the films he has already made. He explores the possibilities of the serial nature of his films. For example, in Moron Movies, at about 8 minutes and 17 seconds in, we see HOW TO KNOW IF YOU’RE COCKEYED. After the title card, we see a profile view of Mr. Cella looking at two small paintings on the wall. One is obviously crooked, its right side twisted upwards so that it is now diagonal rather than aligned with a level horizontal line. He looks over to the painting on the right, which looks level to us, reaches up and … twists up its right side. His fix for the problem makes the paintings match, but now both are diagonal. The joke has taken us in to a problem, given us an expectation, and then revealed an unexpected solution.

In More Moron Movies, Cella doubles down. At 43 minutes and 32 seconds into the program, we see HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE. After the title card, we have a squared up view of two paintings similar to the ones in HOW TO KNOW IF YOU’RE COCKEYED. This time they are vertical instead of horizontal, and they feature blue and green areas rather than just black and white lines. They are level, aligned with an imagined horizon line.

Instantly we see a problem: at the bottom right of the shot, a pair of hands holds a gun. The hands rig the gun on a small string attached to the painting. The hands now carefully lower the gun so it will hang below the frame, and then adjust the painting so that it tilts down to the right. The hands let go and move out of the shot. We realize someone will come along, adjust the painting, and thus pull the gun’s trigger. In seconds, someone does enter our shot. The “wife,” Mr. Cella in a blonde wig, walks in, looks at the paintings, and … adjusts the painting on the left so that it also tilts to the right. The plot is foiled. The wife leaves the frame, letting us fully appreciate the two slanted paintings.

If we only watch More Moron Movies, the joke is pretty good. If one is a loyal Cella fan, and has seen Moron Movies first, it is incredible. It is just a comedic “call back,” but it is a sophisticated one. The universe Cella’s characters live in is consistent, and the rules of that universe persist from film to film.

Cella as a Video Artist

Our conception of Cella as a video artist begins with the visual characteristics we observe in his work as it comes to us today. The look created by the cheap video transfer methods he used, and the fact that his work has been “preserved” through digitization of video tapes rather than from a scan of original film material, leads us to forget that he shot on Super 8 film and endeavoured to project his films in a theatre in front a live audience. He is not intentionally a video maker.

Yet even Johnny Carson mentioned Cella’s transfer to tape, so the technical characteristics and “VHS look” reviewers see in the work are inherent in it and present from its first television broadcast. Lacking cinematography skills, and unable to achieve a quality video transfer, Cella manages to get the worst of both worlds into each frame of his movie. Is that funnier, or hard to watch? Generation Z likes the VHS look, but they would rather just add a filter to achieve it.

In the end, for Cella’s practice video is a just a distribution tool, just as TikTok is a distribution tool for a segment of today’s filmmakers. His eventual distribution in video rental outlets relied on VHS tape. The version of his film that is preserved at archive.org has a significant video glitch or tape repair at about 46 minutes and 45 seconds, wiping out one of his short films. It is safe to assume this digitization was from a VHS cassette.

Cella was never one of the artists set free by video production techniques. He is not exploring the durational possibilities videotape offers. Conversely, he seems uninterested in the possibilities of traditional cinematic assembly, the act of building meaning from many carefully planned shots. Cella is simply doing everything in his own way. Cella is doing Cella.

Canons and Cult Status

Where will Len Cella’s Moron Movies be on its 50th birthday?

Reading David Bordwell’s account, in On the History of Film Style, of the establishment of early film canons, we gain an insight that practical matters and institutional choices play a major role in this process. Bordwell notes:

In 1939 MOMA opened in new quarters on 53rd Street, and as part of the occasion the Film Library launched a cycle of seventy films surveying “the main body of film-making from 1895 onwards.” The thirty programs presented an overview of the Basic Story, including “The Development of Narrative” (1895-1902), programs on early American masters, “The German Film: Legend and Fantasy,” “The Swedish Film,” and ending with a potpourri of sound-film genres. Now that MOMA had a theater of its own, Barry began daily screenings from the collection, thereby making the Film Library the first archive to offer regular public exhibition.[29]

Certain films were available for public screenings, others were not, and only a select set of films fit the narrative the Museum of Modern Art (and Iris Barry, head of its Film Library) intended to construct and promote.

Inevitably, vagaries of availability and notoriety slanted the MOMA canon. The Film Library had access to relatively few films from the major French silent directors, so Feuillade, Delluc, and their contemporaries were scantily represented. Whereas some archivists believed in seeing and collecting as much as possible, Barry was highly selective. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko formed MOMA’s great Soviet troika, while Dziga Vertov, Boris Barnet, Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Yutkevich, and the Fex collaborators Grigori

Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg were virtually ignored.[30]

To be included in any canon, a film must be available, and it must have strong champions that take up its cause. Are there champions for Moron Movies?

Perry Shall, who has a tattoo claiming “WE GET IT / THEY DON’T” across his wrists, provides us with a personal story that positions Moron Movies as something like a cult film rather than as a mainstream comedy. The dynamic described in Shall’s experience is not one where half the audience finds it funny and half does not. Shall is the only viewer in his group of friends to find the film minimally interesting. His positive reaction is intense. The film motivates him to find others with a Moron Movies mindset—and eventually he seeks out Cella himself. “From there on out, all I wanted to do was rewatch Moron Movies over and over again and study this and try to understand … how does this exist? What is the deal? Is Len still alive? Len Cella, the creator? And so that had kind of been my mission for a long time … until I became friends with him.”

Following Shall’s lead and engaging with Moron Movies as a cult film is a challenging task. There is no significant academic literature directly addressing the film in any way, let alone calling for canonization—not as cinema, not as television or pop culture, not as art. If we broaden our search to find similar films that function as cult films, the most relevant academic writing addresses the function of these films in the context of sociological study. This approach, defining and clarifying the characteristics of movies that persist under a “cult film” rubric, excludes many films called “cult films” in popular culture. In “Toward a Sociology of Cult Films: Reading ‘Rocky Horror,’” Patrick T. Kinkade and Michael A. Katovich differentiate “cult films” from “popular re-releases, fad films, films with cult qualities, and critical cult films.”

Cult films have persistent followings who treat them as cinematic experiences that inspire reverence (see Studlar 1989; Chute 1981, 1983). Devotees often champion the merits and values of these films independently of traditional sources of cinematic criticism and analysis. Audiences, moreover, construct ritual and belief systems through their viewing experience. Cult film attachments, therefore, become obsessions and enduring shared foci for habitues. Adherents claim that cult films transcend their entertainment, artistic, commercial status, and are significant regardless of advertisement, critical acclaim, or mainstream acceptance. Part of the cult film’s value to its following is that it is not for everyone and exists outside the category of both popular and elite taste cultures.[31]

Moron Movies is not necessarily excluded under these definitions, but even Shall’s viewing experience hardly demonstrates any sort of transcendent “reverence.” (Or even the fun of the irreverent sing-along central to Rocky Horror (1975) screenings once that film attained cult status.) The choppy, repetitive structure of Moron Movies clearly gets in the way of any extended emotional reaction. The film is not designed or edited with a cathartic release in mind. 

Still, Shall indicates an obsession with Moron Movies, and the film presents a number of the elements Kinkade and Katovich discuss as emblematic of cult films. Moron Movies posits Len Cella as a version of himself, a subversive yet relatable character in atypical situations, pushing against authority as he copes with the aggravation he finds in society. He invents strange—and funny—solutions to the problems he sees in society. This matches the structure Kinkade and Katovich claim for cult cinema: “Cult films contain themes that (1) place typical people into atypical situations, (2) allow for narcissistic and empathic audience identification with subversive characters, (3) question traditional authority structures, (4) reflect societal strains, and (5) offer interpretable and paradoxical resolutions to these social strains.”

Yet Shall’s obsession with the film, and with Cella, seems to be an outlier. Most of the positive reactions that can be documented as personal anecdotes are much milder. An advertisement for a 2015 “Moron Movies Retrospective” at the Cinedelphia Film Festival described a “cult following,” for the film, but sporadic retrospective screenings hardly make for a sustainable cult. No one is dressing as Len Cella and singing along. 

Preservation

While interested viewers in 2033 will probably be able to find an online version of Cella’s work, how will they know to look? What will motivate them to do so?

Cella’s position in 2023 is tenuous. He is a lone outsider, not part of any movement. There is no money to be made, it seems, from streaming or distributing his work. Most importantly, the reviews we have seen so far are all over the place. For each one that embraces the inherent “fun” in Moron Movies, we find something as harsh as this IMDb review that user “jmillhouse20,” posted in May 2002:

Worst Movie Ever

This is truly the worst movie I have ever seen. It is not even remotely funny. The skits are stupid, the premise is stupid. The only reason I laughed was because I could not believe I was sitting through this movie. Watching this movie is a complete waste of time. Anyone responsible for making or releasing this movie should be fired if not arrested.[32]

I have invoked generational studies in this discussion as a tool to predict what future viewers might think of Moron Movies. There is no age-related data in our sources of reviews and ratings, however, so is a fair study even possible? Future perceptions of Cella’s work are unlikely to be shaped by age. Perry Shall’s peers were disinterested in Moron Movies, despite his enthusiasm. Yet it is obvious to those of us who have taught long-term in fields like editing that the reception of time-based media has changed, and that it will continue changing.   

Generations are shaped by technology, and high levels of exposure to the seductive flows of media that technology allows will transform our viewing expectations. The endless flow of MTV music videos, when MTV had videos, was exciting to one generation but soon enough boring to the next. These second-generation viewers expected to choose the next video, following the flow of a personalized playlist. Later, viewers sought the more intensely personal connection they found in a flow of direct-to-camera YouTube videos and Twitch livestreams. These still resonate for some, but others seek the quick jolts of reward they find scrolling the overflowing content that newer, shorter social media formats offer.

Formats evolve. Now we are at an inflection point. We see, in real time, unexpected changes in our audience. In the May 23, 2023 article, “Social Media Can Be a ‘Profound Risk’ to Youth, Surgeon General Warns,” we discover concerning, measurable effects from media.  

The report noted that “frequent social media use may be associated with distinct changes in the developing brain in the amygdala (important for emotional learning and behavior) and the prefrontal cortex (important for impulse control, emotional regulation, and moderating social behavior), and could increase sensitivity to social rewards and punishments.” The report also cited research indicating that up to 95 percent of teens reported using at least one social media platform, while more than one-third said they used social media “almost constantly.” In addition, nearly 40 percent of children ages 8 to 12 use social media, even though the required minimum age for most sites is 13.[33]

In the same way popular snacks in the grocery store have changed, decade by decade, toward more intense bursts of salt, fat, sugar, and raw emotion, popular video evolves.

Can Moron Movies measure up? Despite its reputation as a series of TikToks, it is not really that. It drags, for many, unable to deliver huge shocks, tears, or a warm floating feeling. How can it survive?

Sentiment against Moron Movies has toned down over the last decade. Today’s young people, exposed to more YouTube than mainstream cinema, seem quite forgiving of Moron Movies’ technical and aesthetic flaws. Perhaps the film just needs a glowing, hyped-up introduction, positioning Cella as a revolutionary genius? Maybe its fifty-seven minutes should be broken up and delivered in tiny video groupings that stop before you get bored? Could an unexpected VHS glitch obliterate KING DONG, letting the film end on a gentler note?

I do not think Moron Movies will die from poor reviews. I worry it will die from disinterest. It seems unlikely to thrive in mainstream culture, or even in an alternative film canon.

My suggestion, if you decide you want to preserve this film, is to break the rules. Find the worst things about it: its offensive title, the terrible fifty-five seconds that KING DONG occupies. Play up Cella’s misogynistic plan to shoot his wife, and the film’s many cultural insensitivities. Make lists of these offenses, publish these lists on social media, and organize protests against the film. Propose laws banning it. At the end of your press release, include a link to where people can watch it for themselves, but only to see exactly how awful it is, of course. Something like this:

https://archive.org/details/moron-movies

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Bibliography

Bazin, André, Hugh Gray, Jean Renoir, and François Truffaut. What Is Cinema? Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2005.

Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Madison, Wisconsin: Irvington Way Press, 2018.

Boyle, Deidre. Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Cella, Len. Things to Worry About (in Case You Run out). Georgetown, CT: Spectacle Lane Press, 1987.

Cottrell, Sarah. “A Year-by-Year Guide to the Different Generations.” Parents, January 29, 2023. https://www.parents.com/parenting/better-parenting/style/generation-names-and-years-a-cheat-sheet-for-parents/.

Danto, Arthur C. Remarks on Art and Philosophy. Mount Desert Island, Maine: Acadia Summer Arts Program, 2014.

Danto, Arthur C. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge

Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Eisenstein, Sergei. “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram.” in Sergei Eisenstein Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, edited and translated by Jay Leyda, 28-44. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

“Johnny Carson Full Episode: Buddy Hackett, John Lithgow, Moron Movies, Tonight Show, 12/11/1984.” YouTube, December 13, 2013. https://youtu.be/7mlvQYZfJ58.

Kinkade, Patrick T. and Michael A. Katovich. “Toward a Sociology of Cult Films: Reading ‘Rocky Horror.’” The Sociological Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1992): 191–209. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4121141.

Mercer, Simon. King Dong. Vimeo, May 18, 2023. https://vimeo.com/23233796.

“Moron Movies (1985).” ‎Letterboxd. Accessed April 19, 2023. https://letterboxd.com/film/moron-movies/.

“Moron Movies (1983): Len Cella: Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive. Accessed April 19, 2023. https://archive.org/details/moron-movies.

Richtel, Matt, Catherine Pearson and Michael Levenson. “Surgeon General Warns That Social Media May Harm Children and Adolescents.” The New York Times, May 24, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/well/family/social-media-mental-health-surgeon-general.html.

Wimsatt, Jr., W. K. and M. C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Jul-Sept, 1946): 468-488.

Filmography

King Dong. 2011. Directed by Simon Mercer.

MAN RAY and MIC. 1981. Directed by William Wegman.

Moron Movies. 1983. Directed by Len Cella.

More Moron Movies. 1986. Directed by Len Cella.

More TV Stories. 1985. Directed by Ilene Segalove.

The Fabelmans. 2022. Directed by Steven Spielberg.

Why I Got Into TV and Other Stories. 1983. Directed by Ilene Segalove.

Biography:

Ted Fisher is an Assistant Professor at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, where he teaches film and video. He earned an M.F.A. in Photography from Claremont Graduate University, a Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies from The New School, and an M.F.A. in Film Directing from the University of Edinburgh. His documentaries have screened at fifty film festivals around the world and have been broadcast widely. His writing has been published in Frames Cinema Journal and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Filmography: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3299032/

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[1] “Johnny Carson Full Episode: Buddy Hackett, John Lithgow, Moron Movies, Tonight Show, 12/11/1984.” YouTube, December 13, 2013. https://youtu.be/7mlvQYZfJ58.

[2] Sergei Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” Sergei Eisenstein Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 28-44.

[3] André Bazin, Hugh Gray, Jean Renoir, and François Truffaut, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 23-40.

[4] Sergei Eisenstein, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” 37.

[5] André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” 35.

[6] Ibid., 36.

[7] Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981).

[8] Arthur C. Danto, Remarks on Art and Philosophy (Mount Desert Island, Maine: Acadia Summer Arts Program, 2014).

[9] Ibid., 113.

[10] Ibid., 114.

[11] Ibid., 114.

[12] “American Generations: C-SPAN Classroom.” C. Accessed July 25, 2023. https://www.c-span.org/classroom/document/?20840.

[13] “William Wegman.” Electronic Arts Intermix: William Wegman. Accessed July 25, 2023. https://www.eai.org/artists/william-wegman/titles.

[14] Dierdre Boyle, Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4.

[15] Ibid., 4.

[16] “Cinepunx Episode 127: Moron Movies with Perry Shall.” Cinepunx, February 2, 2021. https://cinepunx.com/cinepunx-episode-127-moron-movies-with-perry-shall/.

[17] Sarah Cottrell, “A Year-by-Year Guide to the Different Generations,” Parents, January 29, 2023. https://www.parents.com/parenting/better-parenting/style/generation-names-and-years-a-cheat-sheet-for-parents/.

[18] Callisto, “Moron Movies,” review of Moron Movies, by Len Cella (1985), Letterboxd. Accessed May 24, 2023. https://boxd.it/3bNqhD.

[19] thecodyguy, “Moron Movies,” review of Moron Movies, by Len Cella (1985), Letterboxd. Accessed May 24, 2023. https://boxd.it/49CHql.

[20] Man Ray, Cadeau (Gift), 1921. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, accessed May 24, 2023. https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/293203.

[21] “Cinepunx Episode 127: Moron Movies with Perry Shall.” Cinepunx, February 2, 2021. https://cinepunx.com/cinepunx-episode-127-moron-movies-with-perry-shall/.

[22] Len Cella quoted in Simon Mercer, King Dong, Vimeo, May 18, 2023. https://vimeo.com/23233796

[23] “Wegman Film – Saturday Night Live,” YouTube, October 9, 2013. https://youtu.be/tMCdzBzG8pk.

[24] W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M. C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Jul-Sept, 1946): 470.

[25] David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Madison, Wisconsin: Irvington Way Press, 2018), 13.

[26] It is worth noting that, like Len Cella’s reuse of ideas in several of his films, there is more than one Lumiere actuality film using the basic concept of L’Arroseur Arrosé.

[27] Simon Mercer, King Dong.

[28] Len Cella quoted in King Dong (2013).

[29] Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, 25.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Patrick T. Kinkade, and Michael A. Katovich. “Toward a Sociology of Cult Films: Reading ‘Rocky Horror,’” The Sociological Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1992): 191–209. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4121141.

[32] “User-Submitted Review of ‘Moron Movies.’” IMDb. Accessed May 24, 2023. https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0802388/.

[33] Matt Richtel, Catherine Pearson and Michael Levenson. “Surgeon General Warns That Social Media May Harm Children and Adolescents,” The New York Times, May 24, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/well/family/social-media-mental-health-surgeon-general.html.

DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v21.i0.2705

 

“But will they get it abroad?”

This question was posed to Argentine director Lucrecia Martel while pitching a film concept to her producers (2023). If the result of Sight and Sound [S&S]2022’s survey, which did not include a single Latin American film, is any evidence the answer is a resounding no.

In an online lecture titled “Images, Sound, Tourism and War “(2023), she answers that her one conviction is that one should make films for one’s neighbors, and secondly that, to her, it makes no sense to primarily cater to those who” will not suffer the floods, or energy cuts.” She likens the films prioritizing global audiences to tourism pamphlets, which oversimplify the full reality of the region. Forty years earlier, Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene (AfroSocialists, 2022[1983]) was posed the same question and took the opportunity to vigorously condemn the enforcement of a tropism, whereby all heads are supposed to turn in the European direction. Such tropism is acutely evident in a research short film by the University of Leeds’s Soft Power, Cinema, and the BRICS (2019), where Prof. Richard A. Sanders, explains BRICS as a Western nomenclature for countries “that are not us, but are trying to be like us,” effectively qualifying the ambition to be “like us” as the only imaginable aspiration. In a certain sense, belonging to the canon, legitimizes Sanders’ affirmation.

Given where transnational production and cinephilia stand today, can Latin American filmmakers afford not to issue pamphlets, in this sense? This question warrants its own essay, but mine will concern itself with what happens with when Latin America indulges in this stripe of illustrative cinema, as a condition to funnel through the transnational festival circuit and achieve global art house distribution. Occasionally, filmmakers from this region muster up the resources to produce non-pamphletarian cinema and instead promote discussions over aesthetics or even the human condition. In such cases, what are their chances of having their ideas being genuinely engaged with on a par with productions from the ideational center, mostly the Global North, and not just included for what I am calling representative capital?

These lines of questioning were catapulted by the glaring exclusion of the S&S 2022 poll which seems counter sensical in light of the region’s expressive festival inclusion and transnational production funding wins (Falicov, 2011; Ross, 2011; De Valck, 2016; Vallejo & Peirano, 2022) since the late nineties. S&S’s increased relevance is due to the fact that a lot of revenue, from streamers’ selections, for example, will be informed by it, supported by viral gestures of fandom, as illustrated below.

Consequently, an exclusion from the list can arguably result in hindered film visibility and filmmaker viability.

 Long before these films can stand the chance of being canonized, they must obtain production funding, secure a preferably A-list festival premiere, gather reviews that will generate a marketing context for them, and, finally, attain a distribution or licensing deal in order to circulate. Festival going audiences are a smaller, select group, while streamers and press readers largely outnumber them, which compounds the stakes of the S&S 100 exclusion.

Extending the range to the 250 films in the poll, the topmost five Latin American films attest to a female bias (Paiva, 2022) –three of them by Lucrecia Martel (Zama, 2017; La Cienaga, 2001 and La Mujer Sin Cabeza [The Headless Woman], 2008), and one by Sara Gomez (De Cierta Manera [One Way or Another], 1977). While there have been strong intentions to be more inclusive in 2022’s poll (Brody, 2022; Jacobsen, 2022; Petkovic, 2022), somehow Latin America did not quite make the 100 cut.

The gap separating festival and funding favor from canonical inclusion, merits a twofold debate: first, to inquire under what auspices this regional production is being embraced within the festival and art-house circuit, and second, to articulate how inclusion and representation of Latin American filmmakers does not equate with actively contributing to central artistic dialogs. Latin America remains in the ideational periphery, even as it occupies more global screens, perhaps precisely because of the terms in which it secures its entry and plays into “the trap of representation.[i]” (Bird 2022)

Similarly to Martel’s hypothetical tourist, Manuel Betancourt speaks of a “cartographic impetus” (2011:263) on the part of festivals, as ideational centers, seeking out new territories and accumulating representative capital for their own benefit. Reinstating autonomy for filmmakers from “the Rest,” is a first step towards improving the terms of global inclusion. In considering curatorial and poll exclusions, we might outline the pitfalls of a reformist, symbolic inclusion, that is to say, representative capital amassing. The antidote would be a promotion of ideational horizontality, an extension of Robert Stam and Ella Shohat’s (1994) polycentrism: an acknowledgement of multiple centers, instead of endowing some with parameters-setting privileges, while others are forced to adequate themselves.

A recent call for “provincializing” the hegemonic center (Chakrabarty, 2009) emphasizes the need to give the West some of its own medicine. Chakrabarty’s call, though well merited, stands in sharp contrast to where the film industry is headed, given the widening dominion of mainstream content producers (Leal, 2023), and their cultural insensitivity. Case in point, the 2023 summer release conflation of Barbenheimer (Dooley 2023), which minimized the real-life human toll suffered by Japan, in rolling up Oppenheimer (Nolan 2023) with the glibness of the Mattel intellectual property vehicle (Barbie, Gerwig 2023)—the latter, released days after the 78^th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. To give a better sense of scale of this hegemony, Claudio Leal (2023) laments that out of 3.401 Brazilian screens, Barbie alone occupied 2.056 in its opening weekend.  Aided by the rescinding of national quotas, such releases amount to “scandalous concentration” and a “colonization of the imagination.” (2023 translations my own [TMO]). Independent productions have no such power to overwhelm the distribution circuit in this scale, in Brazil and elsewhere, yet, they are also playing a part towards Leal’s global colonization of the aesthetic imagination, through means which I will continue to explore in this article.

While the desire to be inclusive is patent in the 2022’s poll, the exclusion of Latin America provides indications for needed decolonial work ahead. Before delving into this symptomatic exclusion, it seems pertinent to inquire into what gets projected onto lists, and what their shortcomings might be. Nicolas Prividera (2022) reminds us that every selection implies exclusions, and that the measuring stick used ought to be more transparent. Indulging in list-making seems like a harmless exercise, mostly serving fandom clamor. However, in addition to my earlier mention of streaming revenue and circulation, Elena Gorfinkel (2019), critiques lists by claiming they only perpetuate an uneven playing field. I highlight a few lines from Against Lists, which seem particularly relevant to this essay:

“Lists are attentional real estate for the fatigued, enervated, click-hungry.”

“Lists aggregate the already known and consolidate power.”

“But in this hyper-mediated moment, the recirculated compulsory form of the list – list as desiderata of consumption, a grocery receipt of your watching – has become an instrument of commodity fetishism, of algorithmic capture, of priapic, indulgent self-exposure. Look closely. Who exactly produces this flurry of lists? “

Gorfinkel frames such lists as another stage for hegemonic forces, which seizes global theaters and the ideational field, to play out. In addition to muting peripheric voices, lists set in motion the shallowest form of engagement: list comparisons. When S&S released the voter ballots, claiming the spirit of transparency, a furore of comments followed (Edelman 2022, Tobias 2022), making it clear that while some took this as an opportunity to push certain agendas, they are far outnumbered by those who listed to attest to a pedigree of sorts, to reassure themselves and others that they were drinking from the good sources.

 The omission of Latin American films not only fails to fetch more viewers, but suggests that their inclusion, beyond the 100 top films, might not necessarily merited, but a gesture of good will on the part of the center. In the captures below, researcher Sebastian Gonzalez Itier and film critic Carlos Aguiar, comment on the Eurocentrism inherent in this poll exclusion.  Itier employs an implicatory tone while Aguiar lets on a wistful affect. Both “provincialize” and problematize European incuriosity and point to the misguided benevolence.

“There’s lots to be discussed and thought about this, but the omission of Latino filmmakers and films speaks of an ignorance on the part of European cinephilia, which @SightSoundmag and @cahierscinema, among others, proudly promote.” (TMO)

            For context, the British Film Institute has indeed made efforts to amplify their voter base: in 2002, it consisted of 145 lists by critics, in 2012, 1000 lists by “critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles“(James 2021), and in 2022 it grew to 1600 lists, aired out by hired consultant Girish Shambu (Ruimy 2022) to be a more inclusive voting poll.

            Despite these efforts, a more radical problem emerges: the ballots of many Latin American critics and directors reveals that they seldom include regional contributions and seem poised to look North for filmmaking excellency. While it is unquestionable that Europe and the U.S.A. have meaningfully contributed to the canon, as this poll has historically attested, inquiring into the low count of Latin American films by nominated participants from the region might be read in three ways: as internalized Eurocentrism, as proof of weak intra-Latin American filmic circulation (Gutiérrez, 2017), and as a symptom of the transnational funding mechanisms. My inquiry probes the latter and will start by analyzing the film festival circuit, its associated funding schemes, and their criteria, as the primary instance of gatekeeping which leads to circulation in arthouses and beyond.

In addition to validating new productions and filmmakers, festivals also help solidify the canon by celebrating film classics and archives. The canon, as it finds expression in surveys like S&S’s, will compete for “attentional real estate” in an increasingly fragmented contemporaneity. From specialized streaming services like Mubi to tracking and notating apps like Letterboxd, tastemakers have the ample permeability of social media at their fingertips, giving the canon increased reach.

Canon Building: Festivals, Funds, and their Stakes

Festivals, as the point of ingress to the public, have been described as: “reducts of cinephilia” (Ikeda, 2021:188), “the exposure system of the film industry” (Campos 2015:106), a site for the writing of film history (Stringer 2001) while some go as far as to call it the “festival industrial complex” (Shellenberger 2022).  Another relevant aspect, which Brazilian researcher Marcelo Ikeda brings up, is that while festivals “compete among themselves for visibility, with the presence of films and personalities, and for financing of such events, they also have come to form a coherent network with its own implicit rules.” (2021: 187, TMO).

Miriam Ross affirms this network cannot be circumvented by Latin American filmmakers insofar as, even when they dispense with festival production funds, they simply cannot afford to sidestep the visibility and distribution contacts that festivals enable. Festival buzz is in a capacity to generate “indie blockbusters” (Elsaesser 2005) giving festivals the power to add value to a film, effectively creating an injunction to “enter into transcultural contracts that are determined by the power that festivals hold over the global film circuit.” (Ross 2010:14).

Federico Adorno’s opinionated editorial “Talk to Me About Colonialism! Notes from a Place of Resentment” (2022, TMO) provides one concrete example of how this unfolds for Latin American filmmakers, like himself. Paying multiple submission fees in euros, money hard earned in Paraguayan currency, is a hard endeavor that calls for resources (command of English included) and resolve. The eventual standardized letter of rejection arrives, stating they’d be happy to see his future work. Adorno quips that there won’t be a future film unless he can secure a decent international premiere for the current one.  Besides, he reports that the film’s link was not accessed on his Vimeoaccount, according to regional traffic data reports, which contributes the resentment in the title of his piece. This op-ed attests to how flawed the submission process is and what the hurdles before peripheric filmmakers are.  To succeed, they need significant funds, personal connections and to adhere to certain curatorial precepts, which I will address in my discussion of funding criteria, as the two seem closely matched.

It would be shallow to portray this costly, pro forma submission as the outcome of malicious intent on the part of festivals, most are currently underfunded and understaffed[ii]. Along with the consequences of labor precarity, currency disadvantages not being accounted for in the application process disproportionately affects filmmakers from the Global South and deepen the divide.

Having made themselves powerful and unavoidable, these networks keep expanding in directions that call for a thorough reevaluation of their methods and procedures, which have backfired in the form of scam festivals (de Valck, 2023; Kilkenny 2022)[iii], and abuses of curatorial power (Felizardo, 2020)[iv].

On a more positive note, festivals have also come to cater to niches audiences, and responded vigorously to world events such as the 2020 pandemic, providing a sense of community to many. The plasticity of festivals attests to their need to adapt to stay relevant. One such evolvement is their role with makers from the Global South on two fronts: funding schemes and professional formation mechanisms.  Both often require English fluency, come with several strings attached and require projects to pass through their selection criteria. Such criteria is inevitably traversed by power dynamics and undercurrents of the dominant acculturation agents, as is the case with film selection.

As a first instance of value attribution, film festivals are neither a neutral, nor transparent forum, much like canon drafting. Going back to the effort to make sense of the S&S 100 exclusion of Latin America, it’s important to highlight how this exclusion clashes against Marijke de Valck’s findings that upwards of 45% of the Hubert Bals fund (henceforth HBF) goes to Latin America (2013:52). Taken together, festival funding abundance and canonical irrelevance, arguably amount to a performative patronage: an inclusion of representations of the region that does not cohere with consideration as expressive aesthetic proponents. This inconsideration suggests that rhetorical decolonial gestures are made, but still leave peripheral players at the margin of ideational dialogs.

Out of a belief that the voters were genuine within, not so much their field of vision, but certainly their field of valorization I reject the term tokenism here. Instead, I favor Adam Phillips (2019) nesting concept that acculturation organizes our desire, and desire organizes our attention. Therefore, it behooves us to remain aware of how the dominant culture shapes global taste, and the desires and demands it generates.  Such strictures get reflected into our canons and festival accolades. I also risk the hypothesis that this circuit demands representation and inclusion, while desiring centrality and stake holding. This disconnect between representative politics and reinstatement of ideational centrality is the crux that the project of “provincializing” Europe should take on if it is to abet the situation for peripheric filmmakers, by affirming polycentrism.

Cornering Authenticity as Colonial Praxis

 Scholarship on film festivals has expanded considerably and one of its most consequential findings is that “the industry has replaced the filmmaker as the festival’s premiere stakeholder.” (de Valck: 2013:40) This industry, centered in the dominant acculturation agent of the Global North, dictates that to even stand the chance of securing domestic and theatrical distribution (Campos 2015) Latin American cinema must first land in this circuit. Many productions don’t and come to constitute a “festival film” which only recovers some of its costs through screening fees and awards gained in this circuit. To maximize festival participation, it is fundamental that these productions “comply with cosmopolitan standards” (Falicov 2010:5).

These standards have encroached upon this cinematic productions’ very incipience, in the form of production funds, script and directing labs. Spreading their manifold area of influence into how global art films are made (De Valck 2013:42), effectively forming a “parallel industry” (Oubiña 2009:18), they frequently demand the triptych of “authenticity,” “local roots” (de Valck 2014) and that these films be shot in the region, as if filming outside of the director’s native soil escaped the filmmaker’s mastery. The latter criterium going against global trends of migration and erasure of boundaries.

The Sundance Labs, the Berlinale Talents Program, the Locarno Industry Academy, and other training events, are heavily attended by Latin American filmmakers, and form a circuit of knowledge sharing and networking opportunities (Falicov 2010, Ostrowska 2010, Ross 2011). Participating increase chances of festival inclusion, besides, as an industrial art form, film necessitates resources that are currently mostly available through transnational co-productions, so sitting out this circuit is detrimental.

A less conducive outcome is that pre-production involvement in transnational films confines authorial voice, to appeal to global audiences, by making them more universally palatable and understandable to a large potential market (De Valck, 2013, Falicov 2010). Sembene dealt with the need to be understood abroad in reception, Adorno in securing festival entry and Martel in pre-production, as stated earlier.

The problematic assignation of “local roots,” by an Eurocentric gaze, is elusive, and not just for Latin America. Carina Bernasconi’s study (2023) reports how Iranian cinema was framed and propped up by the festival circuit. Ali Abassi, the Iranian director of Holy Spider (2022) and Danish resident, raised the majority of the funding for this production in Scandinavia, and nevertheless, his film ended up labelled of Iranian origin. When announcing it as a Cannes selection, the head of the festival Thierry Frémaux referred to Abassi as a “Swedish-Iranian” director, possibly harking back to the fact that Abassi’s prior film Border (2018), was shot in Sweden. “The implications of a decentered gaze are not discussed,” (2023:3) Bernasconi remarks. She makes a strong case for how the “Iranianess” of this film became a selling point towards festival inclusion and plaudit. Abassi distanced himself from Iranian cinema at the Cannes press conference thusly: “cinematically speaking I don’t feel at home in Iranian cinema and that’s because everything is so fucking(sic) metaphoric.” (Bernasconi, 2023:4) At the end of the screening, Abassi exclaimed “It’s a great day for Iranian Cinema!” (Bernasconi 2023:4).

Director and audience are aware of what is expected of him, and he chooses to perform the Iranian director, or not, taking on the burden of representation[v] to his advantage. Ostensible national discourses are hence produced at and for Cannes. After all, Bernasconi claims that Holy Spider is ultimately intended for the Western spectator (2023:5), and evokes Andrew Higson’s central question “What is a national cinema if it doesn’t have a national audience?” (1989:36) Unlike the Iranian situation where films, such as Holy Spider, featuring overt violence and sexuality wouldn’t be screened, what prevents Latin American films from being more widely seen at home is the market economy of hegemonic dominance. The astonishing fact that the Barbie release occupied approximately 80% of Brazilian screens, justifies Leal’s call for more quotas for national cinema. While he condemns such colonialist hegemonic imports, I’d like exploring how exports are equally vulnerable to a very resilient incuriosity and cunning colonialism. Mark Fisher (2009) and Ani Maitra (2020) use “cunning” when referring to a capitalism that thrives in co-opting counterculture (as independent productions were once considered) to remain firmly in place. Selection criteria, therefore, constitutes a vehicle for colonial reinstatement.

Without selling multiple territories these small films cannot break even, so they must reach wide as the film market is not exempt from the market logic of profit. Ariella Aisha Azulay (2019), however, defends a resistance to voracious imperialist expansionism. This defense supports the need for a divestment from ample distribution horizons as proof of relevance, for peripheric filmmakers. Martel’s encouragement to make films for one’s neighbors, not for a whole empire, aligns with such a directive. Together, streaming viewership tendencies, canonical recognition, festival, and funding schemes coincide in favoring a certain stripe of Latin American production, artifacts with ample spectatorial reach, which complicates how the periphery self-assigns artistic autonomy. Providing glocalcommodities[vi] constitutes a double bind, first pointed out by de Valck (2013:46): peripheric filmmakers must present locally rooted, production location restricted films, that are considered “authentic,” as dictated by selection committees from the dominant acculturating center.

Before expanding on the verifiability of such an “authenticity”, I will address shooting location within the birth country of the filmmaker, as criterium. Lucio Castro’s Fin de Siglo (2019), where an Argentine filmmaker places a story in Barcelona, or Brazilian Karim Aïnouz’ Algeria based Mariner of the Mountains (2021) are ruled out of HBF funding, for example. Uprootedness and migration have long been a pillar of the Global South’s experience and having those stories foreclosed comprises another instance of erasure and incuriosity.  Global South filmmakers end up confined to the pedagogical mission of providing the center with images and narratives of the periphery. But only those that fit their mold of authenticity, frequently one that reassures the center about its better developed state.

Regional shooting requirements might trickle down funds to more local industry professionals.  Yet, I fail to see how an increasingly mobile and boundary fluid world, shouldn’t be mirrored in funding policy. Which is how a film like Castro’s, about two errant characters, ends up being self-funded. Even the stated intention to invigorate Southern media industries, does not entirely hold up, as many co-production funds require that a certain percentage of the budget be spent in the country of co-production. Hence, these ostensible forms of foreign aid[vii] directly benefit the European film industry (Campos 2015:101).

While Fin de Siglo does little to illustrate Argentina’s colonial past, or dictatorship, nor displays the dazzling landscapes of Patagonia or the Pampa regions, it is a riveting drama broaching topic of universal reach: the short-shelf life of erotic desire, and the conflicting drives to err and to belong. Wide-spanning themes aside, Castro’s film employs an unorthodox temporal structure which upends narrative conventions in riveting ways.  Numerous positive reviews (Dry, 2019; Aguillar, 2019; Goldstein, 2019; Kenny, 2019; Uhlich, 2019) frame his formal irreverence as poignantly subversive. Still, its modest circulation in the festival and art-house circuit, might be credited to how poorly it accounts for Argentina.

I’ll further problematize “authenticity” with one illustrative anecdote which highlights the consequences of Martel’s mediatic tourism. Brazilian filmmaker Andrea Seligmann Silva[viii] showed her awarded short film, Aonde São Paulo Acaba [Where São Paulo Ends] (1995)— about an aspiring hip hop singer from the outskirts of São Paulo— to her instructor Spike Lee in class at New York University. She was dealt a thorough scolding for, according to him, Brazilians should make films about samba, their legitimate musical production, and not copycat from the U.S.A. This episode confines the filmmaker to one admissible cultural production, samba, and enforces that peripheric filmmakers are not welcome to join non-territory specific discussions. Further, Lee’s reprimand ignores the fact that it is not only individuals who have become more mobile, but artistic productions as well. Rather than be curious about how hip hop got reconfigured in Brazil, Lee instead, discounts Brazilians as incapable of ingenious transformation, to frame them as mere copycats.

Separately, Lee’s comment glosses over the fact that Brazil has a myriad of musical traditions, all of them harking back to some immigrant or foreign influence: samba (Western Africa), maxixe (Polish Polka), forró (African Lundu and first nations Tupi Guarani). Cultural critic Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes’ repeated assertion that” In Brazil, nothing is foreign, because everything is foreign,” (Silva, 1990) arguably tears Lee’s critique asunder, and complicates any purist notion of authenticity, such as those upheld by festival funds. Like Brazil, many other countries from the Global South often have their myriad cultural productions boiled down to one salient manifestation, whichever got the most international projection.  This inconsideration of their variety, range, and richness, all of which collectively endow the region with generative potency and creative capital, seems disingenuous. The extent to which recognition of polyphony is denied (Stam and Shohat 1994), in a failure to represent peripheric groups in all their breadth, its productions are kept in the register of allegory, where narrow representations are expected:

The view of the nation as unitary muffles the “polyphony” of social and ethnic voices within heteroglot cultures […] the precise nature of the national “essence” to be recovered is elusive and chimerical […] national identity is mediated, textualized, constructed, ‘imagined,’ just as the traditions valorized by nationalism are “invented.” (Shohat and Stam 1994:286)

The arbitrary construction of national traits and the elusiveness of essence chimes with Argentine writer and filmmaker Cesar Gonzalez (2021) assertion that marginal characters are seldom endowed with more subtle affects like ambivalence, desire, envy, and instead are often reduced to one layer, a single story-serving purpose, and I add, to produce a construction that attends to the demands of dominant acculturation.

Stephanie Dennison states that while there are many films that create heightened national allegories, with positive and negative connotations, peripheric countries have more to lose as they simply do not have enough positive representation and recognition at large.  That is to say, while James Bond standing in for Cool Britannia, is as reductive as Borat standing in for Kazakhstan (Charles 2006), in an unleveled playing field, “reputation management” (Dennison 2021:42) is more consequential to the periphery.

This incuriosity into the complexities of the Global South’s cultural productions, reducing them to easily identifiable categories, “samba” for one, resonates with Phillips (2013) reminder that curiosity is never evenly spread out across a whole landscape of possibilities. It isn’t any different in the geopolitics of transnational cinema. Curiosity is topographically invested into the peaks, upon which Western self-assigned centrality seems installed, leaving entire valleys abandoned to incuriosity. This arbitrariness of authenticity implicates the film festival fund benefactor, as Brazilian critic Fabio Andrade (2023) reminds us, we have yet to hear of what comprises an authentically white or European film.

Reckoning with the historic-political dimensions to the asymmetry of the benefactor-beneficiary relationship in the chain of festival-funding, inclusion and distribution is bound to give us a better understanding of Latin America’s canonical irrelevance.  This is after all” a decision-making flow, initiated by the first world and accepted by the third world, a flow which characterizes many postcolonial relations” (Ross 2011:266). The effect of the burden of representation (of authenticity) befalls on the periphery and is enforced by the demands of the ideational center.

Prurient Illustration as Price of Admission

It must be acknowledged that Latin America was put on the festival map by a history of overtly political film movements, like Cinema Novo, Third Cinema and associated new waves, flaunting Latin America’s “poverty.” What followed this boom is categorized by Paul Rodriguez’s (2012) as melorealism— “no longer epic, spectacular, or revolutionary, but rather intimate, realist and ultimately, reformist […]”  (2012:108). Counter to Rodriguez’ description, Latin American filmmakers and scholars argue for a cinema that continues to be political by other means:

We do not believe reality is already constructed and that there is nothing else for us to do but accept it.[…] This focus on perception, on trying to see and discover little details of reality, that has nothing to do with an intimate and personal world, instead it is a lot closer to a political posture towards reality, seen as something that can be transformed (…) Film gives filmmakers and fieldworkers the chance to use audio-visual narratives as a tool to deconstruct perception and this is a political action.

                                                                                                                        Lucrecia Martel[ix]

Critiquing notions of what is authentic or political, is essential towards the goal to invigorate autonomous ideation in the periphery. Filmmakers who go against pedagogical tendencies, like Martel, or the members of the El Pampero collective, unsettle traditional political categorization, yet Alejandro G. Iñarritu affirms, distribution has yet to evolve to meet this level of talent (Gutierrez 2017:89). Circulation does not warrant the recognition of ideational legitimacy. Iñarritu’s statement speaks to my question about the grounds upon which Latin American films can be considered canon-worthy and by whom. We know the S&S’s voter pool to be diverse in composition, but within the range of professional curators, directors, and critics. Betancourt soberly defends that existing “outside of the cinephile echo chamber of festivals and film journals will depend on more attention being paid to the role of audiences” (2016:15), to define Latin American cinema outside of a system that would” […] limit it to curiosity worth dissecting, a new colonial window into the region.” (Betancourt 2016:15). While being more inclusive of audiences bears no guarantee of canonical inclusivity, framing publications, and festivals as an echo chamber, where a single belief system gets affirmed, is coherent with the Global North’s industry being the primary stake holder of this confining demand for “authenticity.” The cunning lies in being inclusive to keep the North’s place of ideational centrality intact.

While it is reasonable that “sociopolitical issues which transcend the cinematographic field.” (Ikeda 2021: 187) – immigration, clandestine drug trade, unemployment, poverty, child labor and prostitution (Jenkins 2018) — must find cinematic expression, their restrictive association with a supposed Global South authenticity turns coercive, the minute it becomes a condition for entering the filmic circuit. Martel does not problematize the existence of Hollywood, but its ravenous hegemony (Rua 2020), similarly, I do not problematize the existence of social realist films but question their prominent projection. Look no further than the curiously indexical recent titles Argentina, 1985 (Mitre 2022) and Chile’76 (Martinelli 2023), mining abject chapters of the dictatorship in both countries, as they adhere to established formulas of cinematic storytelling and remain firmly anchored in the personal trajectories of their protagonists.

This over representation of social issues comprises, in Bordieuan terms, a “universe of belief” (1996), which bleeds over surveys like S&S 100, and affirms underdevelopment as unsurpassable. Gonzalez’ coinage of marginality fetishism (2021) is predicated on two notions: that marginality is a commodity and that “poverty seduces and ultimately, proves the ideal scenario upon which other actors can project the phantoms that harass them daily.” (2021:6, TMO) Marginality fetishism denotes an implicatory projection in the West’s demands for a prurient “authenticity”.

The strings attached to festival funds reinforce a “developing world mode of being” (Ross 2011:264): an expectation that poverty and precarious conditions always be associated with this cinematic production (Gutierrez 2017, Betancourt 2016) when the reality is far more nuanced. Brazilian economist Edmar Bacha coined the termBelíndia “a tiny, rich Belgium surrounded by a vast, poor India” (The Americas 2017) to describe Brazil, which highlights the potential and capacity for prosperity. Yet the “Belgian” facet of the region simply does not gather much traction on transnational screens.  Proof is in the fact the vast majority of the S&S 250’s selections displays some “Indian” aspects of this descriptor. As polyphony gets muffled in the name of salient representations (of underdevelopment), the periphery dims out. Left to festival funds policies, this will continue to be the case, as its criteria rejects films that are simply not interested in overtly social, economic, and political dimensions, but may have a wealth of psychological, aesthetic, or philosophical propositions, in sum, the films that reject the burden of representation.

            In addition to these burden-enforcing criteria, de Valck’s case study of the Rotterdam Film Festival (2013) raises another under-acknowledged aspect of this transnational circuit: she rightfully points to a two-way flux for Latin American filmmakers. They benefit from the support of the HBF, the development award hosted by Rotterdam, but also endow it with a certain level of festival prestige:” Artistically, the fund desires to operate autonomously and to pick the most promising projects — many of which originate from Latin America, the region that helped establish its reputation” (2013:55). The under exploration of this aspect—a two-way flow where Latin American filmmakers conferred prestige to a now reputable festival and are not just passive recipients—seems to unfold into the S&S 100’s exclusion: gaining little credit for their role in the evolution of cinematic forms and festival culture.

In offering the coinage representative capital – whereby Latin Americans confer value upon the festival with productions that uphold its inclusiveness and relevance – to complement Manuel Betancourt’s idea of a cartographic impetus, I concede that this seems less important in canon drafting than it does in festival inclusiveness. This may trace back to the afore mentioned association between festival funding as foreign aid (de Valck, 2007), an incumbence which does not befall on S&S’s poll.

 

Towards a Decolonization of Distribution and Reception

 

 While festivals have never been a pure forum of aesthetic debates, they “stimulate a reverberation of the films among opinion formers” (Ikeda 2021: 186, TMO), generating buzz and ancillary promotional media for social platforms[x]. Some writers claim their consecration is not necessarily tied to their commercial viability (de Valck 2007, Elsasser 2005), which Ikeda, writing from the perspective of a South American, sees differently: “[…] debates about aesthetic matters end up having repercussion on commercial aspects, given that the films which resonate the most within the festival event have the higher probability to reach a larger number of markets.” (Ikeda 2021: 186, TMO). The time gap between articles (2005, 2007-2021) may well signal a change in the commercialization of art-house films, yet it seems easier for European researchers to validate art for art’s sake, than it is for a Brazilian writer or Paraguayan filmmaker to disregard commercial distribution and critical reach, aided by festival endorsement.

Premières are another strategic aspect of a film’s commercial career; thus, many festival funds also require privileges (Ross 2011:266, Campos 2015:102), and discourage debuts from happening at possibly more prestigious events, in another instance of festival self-validation. Ross adds that “it is hard to escape the view that third-world countries are producing cultural artifacts for their first world benefactors” (2011:267).

Domestically, Augustin Mango and John Hecht (2016) articulate the paradox of the Latin American film industry which simply cannot compete with Hollywood productions at the box office, even after it manages to somehow thrive in the festival circuit.  These cultural artifacts start looking like extractivist proceeds from this angle, given the asymmetry of the transaction. Except what these commodities provide is not intrinsic value, it is representative capital, conferring the celebratory gloss of inclusivity upon festivals and their funds.

There is, however, cause for optimism in a rising wave of alternative models for bridging Latin America to the global art-house market: from Pablo Larraín’s or Iñárritu’s alternance between American and home-based projects, to cooperatives like Brazil’s Filmes de Plástico or Argentina’s El Pampero. The latter has produced uncompromising films that reject the call of tropism, on multiple levels. Take for instance Trenque Lauquen (Citarella, 2022) or La Flor(Llinás 2018), both offer entirely divergent narrative paradigms by taking huge liberties within genre convention, but also, by the very nature of their sprawling four- and fourteen-hours duration, respectively. Such running times pose a challenge to an already struggling art-house circuit, at a post-pandemic moment.

Whether using duration to affirm creative autonomy or to invite viewers to dedicate a meaningful span of time to a contemplative state, El Pampero invites a very different experience from the sightseeing in and out, to use Martel’s analogy. Rethinking their pathways towards reception, they forged a relationship with Buenos Aires’ MALBA Museum which welcomed screenings of work that was bound to be rejected theatrically or circulate very limitedly, within the arthouse circuit.

Counter to imperialist expansionism of Barbie scale, El Pampero achieves a far more sustainable scheme as described by filmmaker Matias Piñero: “They’re no box office blowouts, but each film allows for the next one to be made. They maintain a certain stability, a kind of ecology. As a filmmaker, how do you measure success? For me, it’s the ability to keep making films.” (Brodsky 2023) El Pampero sees honing one’s voice as a filmmaker as no different than being an athlete, one must practice regularly. Rather than spend years going through the mill of lab-fundraising-production-festival-circuit, they have opted for stringent budgets, always secured with no strings attached. Laura Citarella is adamant: “We do not submit to funds that are going to give us conditions or changes to the project, I’m not going to get tutored by someone I don’t know on my own script.” (Brodsky 2023)

El Pampero does not ignore the transnational arthouse circuit, as once proposed by Third Cinema, which might seem isolationist and not entirely feasible today, but they set a viable example for a more scrupulous engagement between center and periphery, and in so doing, open avenues for more self-ideation in the South, and for lessening the asymmetry of 

Conclusion

While representative capital ostensibly displayed may secure festival’s funding as a form of foreign aid, on the other hand, its role in canon building remains slippery. This decade’s poll gender and racial balance progress does not offset the conspicuous absence of a cinematic production which has consistently fetched awards and funds in the festival circuit and leaves us to conclude that the ideational sphere has never been so vertical. At least in its conception of itself.

The persistence of the question posed to Sembene and Martel — Are your films understood in Europe? — remains symptomatic of transnational dynamics that get routinely affirmed. Conversely, there are a theoretical and practical resistances to such dynamics. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat’s polycentrism opposes tropism, down to the abolishment of the terminology World Cinema, which in fact involves a discreet omission— (rest of the) World Cinema—that necessarily affirms a single Euro-centrality. Meanwhile filmmakers, like Citarella, are finding ways to engage with this circuit on new, less asymmetrical terms.

Martel could have easily settled into being fêted by this circuit, and instead she remains firm in her suggestion that filmmakers divest from pasteurizing their art to the point of it being universally fetching as pamphleterian commodities and compete with the ideational center’s amassing of representative capital.  The lopsidedness of being conditionally included without necessarily being contended with, is explicitly present in arbitrary, colonial-minded, criteria for funding and festival inclusion, and more diffusely on this survey’s exclusion.  Vaster transnational reach becomes hampered, as a consequence. While concerning oneself with the distribution of representative capital can be generally benevolent towards promoting more equity, stopping at that is indeed prejudicial. Such practices benefit the includer more than it affirms ideational horizontality to the included.

In order to deprogram Euro-tropism, decolonial labor is in order, so we can collectively undo the echo chamber effect, from festival cultures to canonical appraisal. A genuinely more inclusive circuit might involve decolonial practices, from within and without, such as El Pampero’s modus operandi, in the hopes of dispensing with shallow, simplified visions of what Latin America ought to be. This may start with acknowledging hip hop protagonists from the outskirts of São Paulo as legitimate reconfigurations in a transnational, de-centered world, and entirely abolishing a narrow conception of “authenticity” for Global South productions, since no one ever required, for instance, that every English film displays genuine proof of Britishness.

The S&S 2022 poll has proven changes are not only attainable, but desirable towards an ideationally affluent cinema. While I concede that any list or canon will necessarily make exclusions, hopefully the next decade will allow more room for non-pamphleterian cinema from the Global South.

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[i] Elena Lazic first coined this term, arguing that “increased presence on screens does not necessarily translate into larger creative power or salaries in front of and behind the camera, and in fact may hurt the fight for these rights as it dulls the motivation to fight for them.” Bird, Daniel. “The Representation Trap” Animus, June 29, 2022 https://animusmagazine.com/2022/06/29/the-representation-trap/

[ii] Independent film programmer Herb Shellenberger posts about work precarity in film festivals on twitter. Shellenberger. Herb [htshell]. Twitter, https://twitter.com/htshell

[iii] There are a number of scam festivals today, that collect submission fees, do not take place, and occasionally issue worthless lists of winners. Mentioned by Marijke de Valck at 20th NECS Graduate Workshop, Festival Cultures: New Ways to Study Networks, Circulation and Canon Production, February 15, 2023, Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF, Berlin.

Kilkenny, Katie, and Alex Ritman. “People Can Be Exploited”: How Below-the-Radar Film Festivals Prey on Struggling Moviemakers, The Hollywood Reporter, October 31, 2019 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/how-below-radar-film-festivals-can-prey-struggling-filmmakers-1250714/ Accessed February 1, 2022

[iv]  Gatekeeping seats of power, like any other instances of oversized power, open the door for abuse, as has been the unfortunate case of Brazilian programmer Gustavo Beck (Felizardo, 2020). He worked with the Rotterdam, Vienna and Bafici Film Festivals and was accused by 18 women of sexual harassment and usurping his position with promises of festival inclusion. While festivals responded strongly and swiftly to these accusations (IFFR, 2020), Policies to prevent a curator from working on so many festivals, creating a conflict of interest and an unwarranted accumulation of curatorial power, have yet to go into effect. Such abuses prove particularly hurtful to peripheric cinematic productions as accumulation of representative capital by festivals becomes de rigueur, in the current climate.

International Film Festival Rotterdam “IFFR’s statement on Gustavo Beck accusations” 31 August 2020, https://iffr.com/en/blog/iffrs-statement-on-gustavo-beck-accusations Accessed Jan 3, 2023

Felizardo, Nayara e Schirlei Alves “‘As mordidas foram profundas’” The Intercept Brasil 28 de Agosto de 2020 https://theintercept.com/2020/08/28/curador-brasileiro-acusado-abuso-sexual/

[v] Term coined by Gil Branston to mean instances where artists are made to “stand in for their community and represent it in a certain way” Branston, Gill. Cinema and Cultural Modernity, Open University Press, March 2, 2001.

[vi] Paul Rodriguez defines glocal commodities as productions that are local in social landscapes, and global, by dealing in known genres, while remaining caught up in the flow of the dominant European and North American productions, like City of God (2002), or Identifying Features (2020).

Rodríguez, Paul A. Schroeder “After New Latin American Cinema” Cinema Journal 51, No.2, Winter 2012.

[vii] De Valck wrote on how the budget for the Hubert Bals Fund is derivative of the Dutch Foreign Relations office (2007). De Valck, Marijke. –. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam University Press, 2007.

[viii] As told to me in person on September 12th, 2022.

[ix] Originally in Spanish, translation my own. Gutiérrez, Carlos. ‘Cómo Latinoamérica pasó a ser un epicentro olvidado del cine internacional’. De Latinoamérica a Hollywood: Cultura cinematográfica latina en Los Ángeles, 1967-2017. Academia de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas, 2017:87.

[x] Festivals are generating media for archival and self-promotional ends which ranges from red carpet walks, Q&A’s, and press collectives. Shared over social media these exponentially raise a film’s potential for exposure.

REFERENCES

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FILMOGRAPHY

Aïnouz, Karim. Marinheiro das Montanhas, Vídeo Filmes 2021

Castro, Lucio. Fin de Siglo, Cinetren, 2019

Gomez, Sara. De Cierta Manera. Instituto Cubano de Arte e Indústrias Cinematográficas (ICAIC), 1977

Llinás, Mariano. La Flor, El Pampero, 2018

Martel, Lucrecia. La Ciénaga, Cuatro Cabezas, 2001

—La Mujer Sin Cabeza, Aqua Films, 2008

—Zama, Rei Cine, 2017

Martinelli, Manuela. Chile ‘76, Magma Cine, 2023

Mitre, Santiago. Argentina 1985, La Union de los Rios, 2022

BIOGRAPHY

Karen Sztajnberg is a Brazilian doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam and working artist who first graduated from Bard College (Film, B.A, 1997), then Columbia University (Film M.F.A, 2006). Her research topic is audience engagement events of South American films in a transnational festival and arthouse context.

Recent conferences include New York University’s Windows, Frames, Mirrors Conference (2021), Visible Evidence, Frankfurt (2021), PILAS, Cambridge (2022) and REBRAC, Leeds (2022). She has also contributed articles to Mistral Journal, Free State Review and MAI Feminism.

Credited as director, editor, screenwriter, and video artist, her work has been screened at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Lincoln Center Film Society, DocFeed, HotDocs, Visions du Reel, and in many art galleries, culminating in her solo exhibition at Appleton Square in Lisbon, Portugal.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v21.i0.2706  

 

In August 2018, the 75^th Venice International Film Festival played host, alongside new works from fêted international auteurs such as Alfonso Cuarón, Olivier Assayas, and Yorgos Lanthimos, to Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino, 2017), a remake of the 1977 horror film of the same name.[1]  The original Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977), a tale of witchcraft in a Berlin ballet academy, had never exactly attained widespread critical acceptance or mainstream recognition; its initial release in the United States saw it chastised as overly violent and incoherent by reputed critics such as Janet Maslin (‘”Suspiria”…does have its slender charms, though they will most assuredly be lost on viewers who are squeamish’), Gene Siskel (‘a weak imitation of The Exorcist’) and Bruce McCabe (‘too often more uncontrolled than the hysteria it’s trying to create’).[2]  However, the very abstraction of narrative and excess of violence which made Suspiria a hard sell for the critical establishment, coupled with the film’s bold, colourful visual style and operatic score by Italian progressive rock band Goblin, have also made it an object of enduring fascination for horror connoisseurs. It is, in other words, a quintessentially cult film. And yet, some four decades later, its remake premieres at a renowned, glamorous hub of European film culture, helmed by a celebrated director and featuring an international cast of stars. Just under five years later, Sight and Sound conducted its decennial poll of the 250 greatest films of all time—surveyed from lists by critics, programmers, and filmmakers from across the world. The original Suspiria appeared on the list for the first time, in 211^th place.[3] Also entering the list was Possession (Andrzej Zuwalski, 1981), a grisly psychological horror about a disintegrating marriage set against the backdrop of Cold War-era Berlin.[4] Once listed by the Director of Public Prosecutions as a ‘video nasty’ which could be seized by police as obscene material, it now places 243^rd on British film culture’s most sacrosanct list of canonical films.

Viewed all together, these developments suggest that in recent years the lines between the cult and the canonical have become less rigid than once they were. Any number of social and technological factors have contributed to this shift, including the emergence of a younger critical commentariat perhaps more open to genre films, and curated streaming services and widespread torrenting make it easier to access obscure, under-distributed or even banned films.

Films become cult objects for a myriad of cultural and aesthetic reasons beyond the scope of a single article, including but by no means limited to the highlighting of marginalised identities, representation of particular subcultures, unconventional approaches to or combinations of genre conventions, and the embrace of deliberately artificial or kitsch aesthetics. However, for the purposes of this essay, I wish to focus on one particular factor which has often both excluded films from mainstream respectability and by the same token made them the subject of ongoing, ritualistic fascination from more niche audiences—particularly (although not exclusively) in the horror genre. I refer here to a sense of abjection. Abjection is generally defined as the visceral horror which accompanies the complete breakdown of meaning, moral and psychological order, particularly as it pertains to the boundary between self and other. In approaching the concept of abjection, I am informed by Julie Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. She writes:

‘It is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a saviour…Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality is not abject; there can be grandeur in amorality even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law—rebellious, liberating, and suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady, a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you…’[5]

Abjection occurs, simply put, where order breaks down. Kristeva elaborates that ‘the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverises the subject…it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject’.[6] As a visceral medium attuned to its audience’s bodies and senses, cinema has a particularly potent capacity to evoke a sense of abjection, to produce through sound and image a liminal feeling of disorder and distress. The aforementioned Suspiria and Possession can both be seen as examples of abject cinema, disrupting the classical pleasure of narrative cohesion and identification with characters through their heightened, disordered visual styles, sparse and almost abstract narratives, and scenes of grotesque, intensely physical violence and gore. Through these, they produce in the viewer an incoherent excess of sensation, a disrupted and disrupting viewing experience. The same might be said of any number of other films in the horror genre—particularly those in the splatter or slasher subgenres. The abjection of these films, the sense of moral, psychological, and physical disorder they evoke, has historically precluded them from mainstream recognition or canonisation. But by the same token, the same attributes that exclude these films and subgenres from the canon (and indeed, the very fact of their rejection from the canon) has made them attractive to audiences fascinated by alterity, by experiences of terror, unpleasure, and excess beyond the purview of most mainstream cinema and indeed of everyday life. As such, they have become cult classics. Famously, Linda Williams writes of the importance of a sense of excess to both the appeal and the cultural dismissal of the ‘body genres’ of horror, melodrama and pornography. ‘Alone or in combination, heavy doses of sex, violence, or emotion are dismissed by one faction or another as having no logic or reason for existing beyond their power to excite. Gratuitous sex, gratuitous violence and terror, gratuitous emotion are frequent epithets hurled at the “sensational” in pornography, horror, and melodrama’. [7]  Excesses which disrupt, disorient, or appal, are often essential to both the disgusted rejection and obsessive fascination which cult subgenres attract.

However, as discussed above, in recent years the boundaries between the cult and the mainstream have become porous, not least where horror is concerned.  Films and genres once deemed too abject, too grotesque, too much for acceptance by critics and audiences are now celebrated by taste-making institutions in the film world. When the avowedly liberal-minded and middle-brow The Guardian is publishing editorials mulling on the legacies of women-in-prison films and the filmography of Dario Argento and Little White Lies compiling a ranked list of ‘video nasties’, abject cinema and its audiences are no longer simply outcast.[8]  Rather, such films are now almost sources of cultural capital, engagement with them a sign that the critic, spectator, or filmmaker is adventurous and esoteric in taste. What, then, is the place of abjection in cinema today? What becomes of those historically scorned genres when they are, however cautiously, embraced by the mainstream? It is my contention that these cultural shifts have given rise to a phenomenon I refer to as abjection chic, which in this essay I seek to define, analyse, and contextualise.

Films partaking in abjection chic knowingly evoke the stylistic and narrative conventions of films and subgenres which have been subject both to controversy and cult adoration for their narrative-disrupting excesses of violent and/or sexual imagery. However, in invoking these recognisable tropes, these films also disembody them, subduing their corporeal and sensory excesses of feeling to the more conventional pleasures of narrative coherence and distant aesthetic appreciation. Abjection chic is knowing—that the audience recognises that the film is engaging in intertextual quotation is the point—but not parodic; contrarily, films partaking in abjection chic often seek to convey an impression of high seriousness and thematic density. Abjection chic decontextualises and defuses generic tropes and images but does not deconstruct them; it does not interrogate their meaning so much as negate it altogether. We are not, then, in the sardonically satirical territory of The Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Holden Jones, 1982), nor are we dealing with the interrogation of horror conventions seen in Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997). Rather, abjection chic performs the double-edged act of acquiring the cultural (or rather countercultural) capital of abject cult cinema—thus suggesting the discerning, edgy taste of its makers and making an appeal to cult audiences—while avoiding the concomitant controversy or alienation of mainstream audiences. Of course, this contradicts the very disruption of narrative and aesthetic pleasure which defines cinematic abjection to begin with. Therein lies the fundamental problem with abjection chic. For scholars of cult, abject, or ‘bad’ cinema, what interests is the challenge that they pose to received wisdom about what makes for ‘good’ films and acceptable viewing practices. It is not excessively Romantic, nor unduly valorising of cult cinema and its audiences, to say that the alterity and unruliness of cult films and their (assumed) audiences are what makes them of interest to scholars; whether we embrace or recoil from them, they present a valuable challenge to our assumptions about what films and audiences are deemed worthy of respect.  In negating the abject, excessive, or disruptive qualities of the genres it evokes, abjection chic negates this subversive or alternative potential. Its prevalence thus indicates the potential problems of the mainstreaming of cult, complicating narratives of such which have sought to suggest the increased critical, scholarly, and mainstream regard for cult cinema as straightforwardly liberatory.

In this essay, then, I will explore and critique abjection chic and its problems by analysing the recent horror films Last Night in Soho (Edgar Wright, 2021) and Men (Alex Garland, 2022) as examples thereof. I will discuss how these films evoke the conventions of, respectively, giallo and folk horror, only to subject them to this process of disembodiment and aestheticization, producing smooth, coherent viewing experiences antithetical to most films in those two subgenres. These are by no means the only films exemplifying abjection chic in recent times. The horror film X (Ti West, 2022), about the cast and crew of a pornographic film falling afoul of a murderous elderly couple in 1970s Texas, can be seen as a dual example of abjection chic, playing on the countercultural connotations of both slasher films and pornography while scrupulously avoiding their respective excesses of violent death and real sex.[9]  Nor should abjection chic be taken to be confined entirely to the horror genre; see the manner in which the 1980s Gotham City created for the comic-book-villain origin story Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019) suggests the grimy New York seen in psychologically fraught vigilante films like Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and Ms .45 (Abel Ferrara, 1982). I elect to focus on Last Night in Soho and Men because they provide particularly dramatic and emblematic examples of abjection chic, drawing on especially recognisable subgenres wherein their disembodied treatment of their conventions is especially glaring. Here, I will show through close textual analysis how Last Night In Soho and Men evoke and then disembody the key motifs of the giallo and the folk horror film. Through these analyses, I will demonstrate how abjection chic denudes its sources of their transgressive physicality in service of experiences of aesthetic unity and narrative coherence, and mount a critique of the trend’s implications for cult cinema.

First, some definitions of terms relating to the two subgenres I am here addressing. Giallo refers to a style of Italian mystery and thriller film emergent in the late 1960s and enjoying continuous popularity into the 1970s and 80s, its name derived from the Il Giallo Mondadori label under which cheap paperbacks of mystery stories by authors such as Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace were sold in Italy; this brand itself was named for its yellow covers. Synthesising aspects of the traditional murder mystery with Gothic horror and splatter, giallo emerged in the Italian film industry in the early 1960s, inspired by the aforementioned pulp novels as well as psychological crime films emerging out of France and Germany, and the work of Alfred Hitchcock.[10]  Although the subgenre was quite diffuse, the typical giallo involved an amateur detective pursuing a masked, black-gloved killer who preys on women due not to any rational motive but a psychological disturbance. As the police prove ineffective and bodies pile up, the amateur detective will be drawn into a game of cat and mouse with the killer, nearly losing their own life in the process. Antonio Bruschini and Stefano Pisilli’s seminal tome on the genre Giallo & Thrilling All’Italiana notes that ‘a particular mix of sex and violence’ became a typical characteristic of the giallo, and lists several of the genre’s key motifs, all related to its intimate and fetishistic portrayal of violence; ‘knives, black gloves, camera movements, close-ups on the eyes of the assassin, as well as the disturbing and obsessive use of every minute detail’.[11]  Indeed, a sense of violent and sexual sensory excess is a central aspect of the giallo. Troy Howarth notes: ‘the threat of violence is always here, and voyeurism, sexual dysfunction and the like are never far behind. The ultimate result is a totally chaotic spectacle which inevitably bends, twists and destroys the (typically naïve) world views of their protagonists’.[12] Central to the genre, then, is a sense of moral and psychological disorder—of abjection, in other words.

Folk horror, meanwhile, refers to a style of horror film set in rural communities which are ‘malevolent, haunted, possessed by time and ancestral curses’; it is a genre ‘certainly defined by pre-Christian paganism, with its focus on rituals and sacrifice’.[13] Drawing on the work of Adam Scovell, Andy Paciorek defines the folk horror’s key traits as an emphasis on the rugged landscape and its history, a sense of isolation, a community with ‘skewed’ or alien ‘moral views’, and a ritualistic ‘summoning’ as its dramatic climax—traits also emphasised in the work of Keith McDonald and Wayne Johnson.[14]  Folk horror is perhaps still most associated with the so-called ‘unholy trilogy’ of British titles from the late 1960s and early 1970s—Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971) and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)—but is a global subgenre, encompassing the Polish Matka Joanna od Aniolów/Mother Joan of the Angels (Jerzy Kawalrowicz, 1961), the Korean Gokseong/The Wailing (Na Hong-in, 2016) and America’s The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015). Although perhaps not as immediately associated with violent extremity as the giallo, folk horror still contains a strong thread of abject brutality. From the rapes and tortures conducted by the titular villains of Witchfinder General to the sacrificial conflagration in which the protagonist of The Wicker Man perishes—to say nothing of the cranial traumas and baroquely tortuous rituals found in contemporary takes such as Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011) and Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)—pagan practice in the folk horror film often comes in the form of brutely biological violence.

In part because of their content, both of these subgenres have historically been restricted to cult appreciation. Mikel J. Koven argues for an understanding of giallo as ‘vernacular cinema’, by which he means ‘a kind of cinema intended for consumption outside of mainstream, bourgeois cinema culture’.[15] Critical of approaches which seek to contextualise giallo within Italian art cinema, Koven argues that ‘this genre was never intended for the art house, but for the grind house. These films were produced for marginalised movie theatres (and people), and for no other reason than immediate enjoyment’.[16]  Writing on folk horror in 2022, Jamie Chambers notes that ‘folk horror discourses to date have been furthered more by self-published enthusiasts within countercultural movements than writers drawing upon an interdisciplinary, international frame of reference within film studies’.[17] Newland concurring that there is observable ‘a contemporary ‘cultification’ of folk horror’ centred on ‘a subcultural reappraisal of a range of rural 1960s and 1970s texts but also the development of new, contemporary texts that draw on and mine (and are indeed haunted by) their textual antecedents’.[18]  With the essential motifs, cultural positions and relationships to abjection of giallo and folk horror established, we can now examine how Last Night In Soho and Men engage with these genres.

Last Night in Soho is a psychological horror film which follows aspiring fashion designer Ellie Turner (Thomasin McKenzie) as she moves to London to attend its renowned College of Fashion. Moving into a flat in Soho, Ellie begins to experience vivid dreams of the area in the 1960s, an era whose fashions and music she idolises. In these dreams, she follows the experiences of Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), an aspiring nightclub singer who lived in the same apartment several decades prior to Ellie. Ellie initially finds escape and inspiration in her dreams, but they soon take a dark turn as Ellie sees Sandie abused and forced into sex work by her manager Jack (Matt Smith). Soon, Ellie begins to suspect that her dreams are not simply imaginings but real spectres of the past, as they begin to spill into her waking life. When she envisions Sandie murdered by Jack, she grows determined to solve the case. The film’s blend of urban modernity with the fantastical, its focus on a physically and psychologically vulnerable amateur detective trying to solve a murder committed with a knife, and its use of a dichromatic red-blue lighting scheme in several scenes all place the film in relationship to giallo. In publicity for the film, both the filmmakers and several film journalists remarked upon the influence of giallo upon Last Night in Soho. Interviewed by the horror periodical Rue Morgue Magazine, director Edgar Wright and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns discuss the influence of titles such as Suspiria, Profondo Rosso/Deep Red(Dario Argento, 1975) and the work of Mario Bava on the film, while outlets such as Curzon and Flicks ran articles contextualising the film in relation to giallo, referencing titles such as La ragazza che sapeva troppo/The Girl who Knew Too Much (Mario Bava, 1963) and Giornata nera per l’ariete/The Fifth Chord (Luigi Bazzoni, 1971).[19] A sense of the film’s connection to giallo and its makers knowledge thereof was, then, a key-part of the film’s public-facing character—a textbook example of abjection chic.

One of the key motifs through which Last Night in Soho engages with the giallo is glass. Glass surfaces are prominent throughout giallo’s slickly modern interiors, providing avenues for voyeuristic gazing, distorted reflections expressing disordered psyches, and an instrument of violence which perforates flesh and punctuates murders with dramatic shatterings. Glass in giallo is where the interior violently meets the exterior, one of its key sites of abjection. Suspiriahas its first murder victim, Pat Hingle (Eva Axén) fall through a pane of stained glass, a large shard of which ends up embedded in her face, while in Tenebre/Tenebrae (Dario Argento, 1982), a murdered woman collapses backwards towards the camera, her fall shattering a glass partition. One of the most memorably macabre images in E Tu Vivrai Nel Terrore! L’aldilà/The Beyond (Lucio Fulci, 1981) features broken shards of a window broken by demonic forces flying into a man’s face, leaving gushing wounds. Last Night in Soho prominently employs the mirror motif in Ellie’s dreams, as a means of conveying the fusion of her identity with that of Sandy. In her first dream, Ellie enters a Soho nightclub where her reflection is shown in several mirrors in the foyer. As she talks to an attendant in the club, we see her reflection replaced with that of Sandie, while Ellie herself remains in the foreground. After Ellie examines ‘her’ new reflection, the camera abruptly pans back, Sandie now standing where Ellie did while Ellie replaces her in the mirror. Through this digital trickery, the film makes the relationship between reality and reflection ethereal and mellifluous, turning the glass surface into something ghostly and intangible. Traditionally, in a giallo film, when a glass surface serves as a conduit to vision, it does so as an embodied aspect of the mise-en-scene. For instance, when in L’uccello dale piume di cristallo/The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1971) the protagonist Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) witnesses an attempted murder through an art gallery’s glass doors, the tension of the scene is created by the fact that the glass allows Sam to see the murder while preventing him from intervening, the banging of his fists against the glass providing a visceral undercurrent. The reflective surface serves as a spectral site in Last Night in Soho, but in a manner unmoored from physical reality.

 As the scene progresses, Sandie descends into the nightclub down a large staircase lined by a series of mirrors in which Ellie’s reflection is shown, first in a medium shot from Sandie’s side then a wide shot of the club. Again, the disparity between reflection and referent serves to unmoor the mirror from physical reality, heightened by the distorting quality of the multiple mirrors which seem to reflect Ellie endlessly—turning her image spectral and weightless. This disconnect is heightened when Sandie, on the staircase, walks past Ellie in the mirror, forcing the ‘reflection’ to hurry after Sandie. The mirror is thus turned abstract, used to create images untethered from physical constraints. The stylistic use of the mirror in this scene clearly evokes its presence in the giallo, but where in that genre its physical weight and presence as an object within the mise-en-scene is paramount, the stylisation of this sequence instead makes the mirror weightless and intangible, a vehicle for compositions which defy any sense of realistic physicality.

As discussed above, the other primary use of the mirror in the giallo is as instrument of violence, smashing against and mutilating characters during the genre’s signature stylised murder scenes. Last Night in Soho evokes this use of the mirror, too, during a later scene wherein Ellie experiences a vision of Jack apparently murdering Sandie. After she and fellow student John (Michael Ajao) return to her flat from a Halloween party, Ellie begins to see Sandy and Jack in mirrors on the wall and ceiling, he looming threateningly over her, berating her and brandishing a knife, leading Ellie to cry out in distress. However, Jack soon materialises in the flat, looming over Ellie in a shot from her point-of-view. Scrambling to the ground, Ellie sees the knife-wielding Jack holding Sandie down on the bed mere feet away from her. Thus, the physical boundaries between reflection and reality are again unseated, lending a physical intangibility to the mirror’s presence within the scene. Stumbling in the dark, John trips and crashes into the mirror on the wall. As John flees the flat, a close-up shows his bare feet stepping on shards of broken glass. Glass’ generically traditional explosion from object of reflection to enactor of injury is thus carried out. But where, for instance, in Suspiria dramatic close-ups on Pat’s face as she is shoved through a pane of glass by her killer and the later pan over her face penetrated by a large shard create an indelible, embodied impression of violent injury, here the editing fragments and distances the audience from the contact between glass and skin. John’s injury is one of only several points of action in the scene, along with Jack’s apparent murder of Sandie playing out on the bed and Ellie’s horrified reaction, which are rapidly intercut. John initially crashing into the mirror and crying out is shown in two shots, each lasting only a second, the rapid cut between largely covering the moment of impact. The later shot of him stepping on shards is similarly brief. There is no moment where the audience might feel the injurious materiality of glass. Rather, it is evoked, but subdued to the scene’s narrative focus (Ellie’s vision of the murder). Last Night in Soho burnishes one of its most dramatic scenes with a signifier of giallo’s abject extremity, but defuses its affective ability to overpower narrative through the use of a more conventional editing scheme.

It is in this scene that Last Night in Soho engages with another key motif of giallo; the stabbing. Blade-wielding, usually black-gloved killers are a staple of the genre, with terribly intimate murder set-pieces emphasising the sharpness of the weaponry, the gush of blood from wounds, and the physicality of perforation. As Koven argues, ‘one of the “pleasures of the text” in watching these movies is seeing not just ever-increasing levels of graphic violence and gore… but seeing the filmmakers’ imagination at work in the murderous use of a whole slew of normally benign implements. He goes on to note that ‘the single most popular weapon [in giallo]…is a knife—often a large kitchen knife, or failing that, the more easily concealed switchblade knife’, before reeling off a list of sharp implements employed to gruesome ends in the genre; ‘straight razors…scalpels, artist utility knives, or even letter openers can do the job with appropriate visceral impact’.[20]  He makes note of several creatively deadly implementations of sharp objects in the genre, from the use of a spiked metallic glove in 6 donne por l’assassino/Blood and Black Lace (Mario Bava, 1964) to decapitation by dredger in Mio caro assassin/My Dear Killer (Tonino Valerii, 1971).[21]  This focus on such an intimate, fleshy method of killing is essential to making giallo abject, a ‘body genre’ offering sensorily extreme, destabilising experiences of violence.

In the scene in question, Last Night in Soho’s Jack menacingly brandishes a large knife over the struggling Sandie, every inch one of the genre’s phallically-empowered male killers. The build-up to the murder, as Jack pins Sandie to the bed and threatens her, is, as mentioned above, subject to a disorienting process of quick cutting, the scene moving rapidly between the distressed Ellie, the confused James and the envisioned murder. This makes concentrating on the precise movements of Jack and Sandie, understanding the physicality of the violent act, rather harder for the spectator. As Jack apparently stabs Sandie to death, the editing grows yet more frantic, close-ups on the bloodied knife interspersed with Ellie’s horrified reaction, John fleeing the flat, and Ellie’s landlady Ms Collins (Diana Rigg) bursting into the room. As such, while the murder is rendered quite violent—with close-ups on the blood-soaked knife and a brief shot from above of Sandie screaming in pain—the hectic inter-cutting prevents the spectator from any prolonged physical or sensory engagement with it. The affective force of the stabbing, often allowed to dominate the scene in giallo, remains firmly contextualised within and thus subordinate to narrative context here. Let us contrast this with a similar scene in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, in which the film’s anonymous masked killer breaks into the home of his latest victim. The scene, involving a killer pinning a woman to a bed and stabbing her to death, is near-identical in its specifics to the above-described scene from Last Night in Soho, but the staging is a marked contrast. The killer pinning the woman to the bed and cuts open her clothes using a switchblade is largely captured in an unbroken medium shot from the side. There is no looking away from the display of physical force, the contact between knife and skin. As the killer slits the woman’s throat, a rapid cut takes us to an insert of bright red blood landing on a nearby surface. Where Last Night in Soho employs rapid editing to distract from and narratively frame its stabbing, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage initially uses a static, unbroken take to overwhelm the viewer with the physicality of violence, then employs a jarring cut not to provide reprieve but to heighten the awful kinesis of the moment of killing. The sadism, the arbitrariness, and the duration of the killing in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage cannot be evaded nor explained, while Last Night in Soho ensures that narrative context remains paramount.

Last Night in Soho returns to the knife-killing motif during its climax, when Ms Collins is revealed to in fact be Sandie — who survived Jack’s attempted murder and killed him in self-defence, before going on to murder, in revenge, the other men who had abused her. A montage shows Sandie cutting the throats of several of these men in her flat with a large knife. Again, the violence here is graphic, with grisly sound effects and spurts of blood, while the room is cast in red light—Profondo Rosso, indeed—which adds to an overall sanguine impression. However, the film’s editing strategies again subdue the violence to narrative order. The rapid cuts from one killing to the next prevent us from dwelling too long on the physicality of any one murder, while the sequence intersperses these killings with the older Sandie revealing the truth to Ellie in the present day. If giallo is in part defined by a tension between the rigours of a murder mystery plot and the disruptive excess of its violence, then Last Night in Soho stabilises that equation.  Sandie’s narration and the repeated returns to the present day firmly position these stabbings as a turn in the film’s plot first and foremost, preventing their visceral horror from overwhelming the scene. The film’s disembodiment of the knife motif is heightened by the rest of the climax, as a knife-wielding Sandie pursues Ellie up the tenement stairwell, determined to kill Ellie now that she knows of Sandie’s murderous past. The pursuit is played out in slow-motion, lending even Sandie’s brandishing the knife a weightlessness and grace, and is intercut with Ellie’s perception of the event. Hallucinating due to sleep deprivation and the influence of a sedative she was given by Sandie, Ellie perceives Sandie as her younger self (seen in the dream sequences) and the pursuit taking place on a glass stairway floating in a red, fiery void. This stylisation further abstracts the scene away from the physical, its locations and the physical movements contained therein made weightless, ephemeral. As such, even as the scene is still ostensibly driven by the physical threat of the knife-wielding Sandie, no sense of that danger as corporeally immediate can register. The signifiers of giallo dotted throughout the film are much the same as the 60s memorabilia which adorns Ellie’s room in the opening scene—decontextualised fragments of a bygone subculture.

Men, similarly, is a film awash in signifiers of a cult horror subgenre. Following Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley) as she retreats to the Herefordshire countryside to recover from the suicide of her abusive husband, James (Paapa Essiedu), the film takes place in one of the genre’s signature rural idylls with a dark side. All of the men in the surrounding community—including her landlord Geoffrey, the local vicar, and even a small boy—appear identical (all are played by Rory Kinnear), and exhibit increasingly invasive and abusive behaviour towards Harper; not least a nude, mute man who mysteriously emerges from the woods and begins stalking harper. As with Last Night in Soho, the film’s connection to genre history was a key facet of its marketing campaign. Interviewed by Lou Thomas for the BFI, director Alex Garland identified Men as a folk horror film and specifically referenced The Wicker Man as an influence.[22]  Critics for outlets both broadsheet (The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw) and cult (Bloody Disgusting’s Meagen Navarro) also identified the film with folk horror.[23]

One of the most consistent motifs of folk horror, of which Men makes prominent use, is landscape. Adam Scovell refers to ‘an emphasis on landscape which subsequently isolates its communities and individuals’ as essential to the genre, ‘skewing the dominant moral and theological systems enough to cause violence, human sacrifices, torture, and even demonic and supernatural summonings’.[24] A sense of the landscape’s isolating scale and inhospitable harshness is thus both a narrative engine for folk horror and a source of its sense of abject horror. The grass, the soil, the woodlands—these are folk horror’s abject terrain, physically and mentally perilous and impervious to normative religious and moral authority. In The Blood on Satan’s Claw, a mist-swept forest full of sharp, haggard branches and bronzed, autumnal leaves provides the location for a Satanic ritual conducted by a cult of children. The woodland is captured alternately in wide shots ,which fill the screen with its harsh splendour, and close-ups in which branches seem to reach aggressively towards the viewer. In Men, Harper wanders into the woods early in the film, exploring the forest near her house; under an overcast sky she wanders through green foliage and dark soil, unmistakably one of the genre’s eerily remote locales. However, the scene styles the location to lack a sense of physical heft. The woods are often shown in shallow focus around Harper’s face in close-up, rendered as an abstract green void through which she almost seems to float, rather than the concrete, harshly material space seen in The Blood on Satan’s Claw. In medium shot, Harper moves ahead in slow motion, while the camera slowly tracks in front, rendering the movement of both her body and the camera through the space weightless. Furthermore, the scene also elides diegetic sound in favour of an ethereal, ambient score, removing the sense of physical presence that might come with the sound of footsteps on soil. The experience of the woods in Men is thus defined by the abstract beauty of light and colour, and by Harper’s reaction, rather than any engagement with its materiality. The woodland’s status as a site of horror, a place of transition into the otherworldly and archaic, is retained, but without any trace of its physical threat.

The village pub is another locale essential to folk horror’s abject status. Often the gathering place for the rural community, the pub in folk horror is a space where drunken revels illustrate the community’s pagan atavism and alien moral values. Early on in The Wicker Man, for instance, the devoutly Christian Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) gets his first sense of just how out-of-place his faith and chastity are among the Celtic pagan residents of the Hebridean island of Summerisle when he stops at the Green Man Inn. There, he is discomforted as the locals raucously sing a bawdy song, close-ups on the uncomfortable Howie interspersed through disorienting edits with low-angled close-ups on singing men, their bellowing, weather-beaten visages seeming huge and imposing. In Witchfinder General, witch hunter John Stearne (Robert Russell) and his associates cavort with naked women in a tavern, a moment which confirms the animalistic appetites lurking beneath their supposed divine mandate. Sharp shafts of light cut through the darkened pub from above, calling attention to the squalor of the environment and to the pallor of exposed skin.

In Men, Harper ventures to the village pub after a series of distressing events, including the nude man attempting to break into her house. As with the forest, the pub is introduced in shallow focus, a blur of light and colour behind the head of Geoffrey, Harper’s landlord. As a backdrop, the space is abstracted away from the tangible into the purely aesthetic. Once the pub is established in a medium shot shortly before Harper enters, it is softly lit in orange hues by lightbulbs mounted on the walls, which cast a gauzy glow across the room, producing a sense of distance—a far cry from the harsh light which accentuated the pub’s physical squalor in Witchfinder General.  The scene’s focus is on a conversation at the bar between Harper, the bartender, Geoffrey, and a policeman as she wearily discusses her ordeal and is then horrified to be informed by the policeman that her stalker has been released from custody, with the officer dismissive of her fears. This conversation is captured largely in medium shots of the bar or close-ups on individual characters as they speak. The camera is steady, head-on, and the cuts measured and timed with the rhythms of the conversation; none here of the disorienting cuts or uncomfortably intimate, off-kilter framings of The Wicker Man. The affectively threatening aspects of the space and its inhabitants are never allowed to overpower the scene’s narrative focus. Thus, while Men continues the folk horror tradition of using the pub as a site of threat, and specifically sexual threat, that threat is allowed to exist only on the level of narrative, rather than in a sensorily palpable fashion.

As both Racionek and Scovell discuss above, the typical folk horror narrative proceeds towards a climactic summoning, an act of typically violent or horrific ritual in which the protagonist is helplessly and inexorably trapped. Racionek notes that the summoning ‘may involve a supernatural element such as an invocation of a demon, or it may be an entirely earthly…event such as an act of violence or a ritual sacrifice’, and whether supernatural or notthe summoning tends to act as a moment of overwhelming, narrative-disrupting violent spectacle.[25]  The most enduringly infamous summoning in the genre’s history is the closing moments of The Wicker Man, in which Sgt Howie is forced into the titular idol, which is then set ablaze in a ritual intended to restore fertility to Summerisle’s apple crop. As the island’s denizens sing ‘Summer Is Icumen In’ below the blazing Wicker Man, harrowing close-ups show a bloodied, sweating Howie praying through tears of terror as the flames close-in. The neo folk-horror Kill List closes with a ritual in which the protagonist is forced to fight and brutally stab to death a cloaked hunchbacked figure then revealed to be his wife and young child tied together. These are quintessentially abject moments, violations of moral taboo and inflictions of gratuitous suffering which chillingly lay bare the alien morality which runs through folk horror. Men climaxes with its own moment of summoning emphasising ideas of renewal and cyclicality, when Harper’s house is attacked by several of the identical men she has encountered throughout the film. In the garden, the nude, stalking man gives birth to the young boy out of a wound on his back, beginning a chain of events in which each of the men gives birth to another, pursuing Harper back into the house, where the vicar gives birth to an apparently resurrected James. Pushing the body to its limits and destroying the normative boundaries of self and other, this scene is on paper utterly abject. And yet its stylisation mutes its power. The ‘births’ are largely shown in medium shots from the side, providing the audience with a measure of distance from the scene’s bodily extremity. Furthering the scene’s sense of distance is the position of Harper within the scene. The grotesque body horror of the repeated ‘births’ is interspersed with cuts to Harper as she flees, reacting with a mute horror presumably intended to mirror that of the audience. In the finale of The Wicker Man, the audience’s point of identification, Howie, is mentally and physically destroyed, leaving the spectator adrift amidst its madness and violence. Harper, by contrast, remains a constant and stable figure of optical and psychological identification throughout the climax of Men. As grotesque as the imagery becomes, our identification with the protagonist is not disrupted or subsumed; where we are situated within the scene, and how we ought to react, remain unambiguous. Bodily extremity is present here, but as something to be looked at, to be distantly comprehended and contemplated on the level of symbolism. This is encapsulated in a shot which features Harper in focus in the right foreground of the frame while a bloodied, newborn man crawls towards her from the back of shot, in a shallow-focus blur. The abject extremity of a folk horror ‘summoning’ is present, but firmly subsumed to identification with character.  Men thus performs the double act at the heart of abjection chic, evoking the chthonic depths of irrational horror at the heart of folk horror, but appropriating them to more ‘elevated’ manners of viewing.

Having now examined Last Night in Soho and Men as examples of abjection chic, I think it prudent to return to Julie Kristeva’s definition of abjection:

‘…what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’

Looking over the two films surveyed, we can find many scenes we might describe as violent or intense. Yet is there disturbance? Is there ambiguity? Are the borders of identification, morality, taste—the very building blocks of the viewing experience—disrespected by the images? I contend not. Rather, the audio-visual styling of these films consistently preserves the schematic order of narrative and our moral and psychological alignment with the protagonist, and upholds the viewer’s aesthetic and cerebral distance from the image. Yet at the same time as these films scrub themselves clean of the abject extremity of their influences, they depend upon its absent, spectral presence for their tone and style, too. They are awash in signifiers of violent abjection, sites, objects, and situations which in their respective subgenres enact narrative-disrupting excesses of visceral horror, and our recognition of these signifiers as such is the point; that we understand that the filmmakers understand these lineages of cult filmmaking, and that we thus associate their film with its countercultural cache. That is the essential, unresolved tension of abjection chic—a tension which exposes the risks inherent in the mainstreaming of cult. Yet I would argue that, in part, it is just those distasteful, abject excesses which makes these films and genres valuable. To turn once again to Williams, ‘where we as a culture often disagree, along lines of gender, age, or sexual orientation—is in which movies are over the edge, too “gross”’.[26] Films which exist ‘over the edge’, which are ‘too much’, productively expose cultural fault lines, challenge us to consider where and why we draw the line. In evoking styles of film which go ‘over the edge’ but pulling back, nullifying their abject excesses in the service of more traditional narrative and aesthetic values, films like Last Night in Soho and Men discard their ability to challenge. There is an unresolved internal conflict within abjection chic, which shows the risks that come with the relatively increased visibility and acceptance of cult cinema. In being tentatively welcomed into the mainstream, cult genres are made subject to the mainstream’s ruthlessly capitalistic logic, whereby all is reducible to marketability, signifiers for taste and demographic appropriated without thought to context or meaning. The internal paradoxes of abjection chic show that the meeting between the cult and the canonical ought not to be uncritically treated as an unalloyed good, but should rather be accompanied by scrutiny. Abjection chic is a trend haunted by the ghosts of the extremities it nullifies—and as all scholars of cult cinema should know, it’s when the haunted is scrutinised and investigated that the strange truth is revealed.

---

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Ariston, ‘Venice Film Fest Lineup Includes, Coens, Luca Guadagnino and Alfonso Cuaron’ in The Hollywood Reporter, 25/07/2018. Accessed 17/05/2023

Bayman, Alasdair, ‘Last Night in Soho and its gory giallo influences’ at Curzon.com, 29/10/2021. Accessed 19/05/2023.

Berlatsky, Noah, ‘Mad Max: Fury Road is less radical than its B-Movie influences’ in The Guardian,  26/05/2015. Accessed 17/10/2023.

Bitel, Anton, Bogutskaya, Anna, Jenkins, David, Laitif, Leila, Strong, Hannah, Woodward, Adam, ‘Every Video Nasty ranked from worst to best’in Little White Lies, 13/10/2021. Accessed 17/10/2023

Bradshaw, Peter, ‘Men review — Alex Garland unleashes multiple Rory Kinnears in wacky folk-horror’ in The Guardian, 09/05/2022. Accessed 21/05/2023.

Bruschini, Antonio, and Piselli, Stefano, Giallo & Thrilling All’Italiana (1931-1983). Florence; Glittering Images, 2010.

Chambers, Jamie, ‘Troubling Folk Horror: Exoticism, Metonymy, and Solipsism in the “Unholy Trinity” and Beyond’ in JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Vol.61, No.2, Winter 2022, p.9-34

Gingold, Michael, ‘Exclusive Interview: The creators of ‘Last Night in Soho’ on giallo influences, the music of fear and more’ in Rue Morgue,28/10/2021. Accessed 19/05/2023.

Koven, Mikel J., La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film. Maryland; Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006

Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Roudiez, Leon S. trans., New York; Columbia University Press, 1982

Maslin, Janet, ‘’Suspiria’, a Specialty Movie, Drips with Gore’ in The New York Times, 13/08/1977, p.31. Accessed 17/05/2023.

McCabe, Bruce, ‘’Suspiria’ is fitful’ in The Boston Globe, 25/08/1977, p.29. Accessed 17/05/2023 through newspapers.com

McDonald, Keith, and Johnson, Wayne, Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film: Transnational Perspectives. London; Anthem Press, 2021.

Navarro, Meagan, ‘A24’s ‘Men’ Review — Alex Garland Unsettles With Surreal Folk Horror’ in Bloody Disgusting, 20/05/2022. Accessed 21/05/2023

Paciorek, Andy, ‘Folk Horror: From the Forests, Fields and Furrows, An Introduction’ in Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies, pp.12-19, Pacirorek, Andy, Hing, Richard, Malkin, Richard, and Peach, Katherine ed. Durham; Wyrd Harvest Press, 2018.

Petley, Julian, Film and Video Censorship in Contemporary Britain. Edinburgh; Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Rose, Steve, ‘Mellow giallo: has the horror genre lost its ability to shock?’ in The Guardian, 16/08/2021. Accessed 17/05/2023.

Scovell, Adam, ‘Where to begin with folk horror’ for British Film Institute, 08/06/2016. Accessed 21/05/2023

Siskel, Gene, ‘Fox covers its prints on its part in ‘Suspiria’’ in The Chicago Tribune, 07/08/1977, p.7. Accessed 17/05/2023 through newspapers.com

Thomas, Lou, ‘Alex Garland on Men, his surprising rural chiller: “All folk horror owes The Wicker Man something”’ for British Film Institute, 25/05/2022. Accessed 21/05/2023

‘The Greatest Films of All Time’ in Sight and Sound, April 2023, Vol.33, No.3, pp.50-53

FILMOGRAPHY

The Blood on Satan’s Claw. Directed by Piers Haggard. UK; Tigon British Film Productions/Chilton Film and Television Enterprises, 1971.

E Tu Vivrai Nel Terrore! L’aldilà/The Beyond. Directed by Lucio Fulci. Ita; Fulvia Film, 1981.

Funny Games. Directed by Michael Haneke. Austria; Concorde-Castle Rock/Turner.

Gokseong/The Wailing. Directed by Na Hong-jin. S. Kor; Side Mirror/Fox International Productions, 2016.

Joker. Directed by Todd Phillips. USA; Warner Bros. Pictures/Village Roadshow Pictures/Bron Creative/Joint Effort/DC Films, 2019.

Kill List. Directed by Ben Wheatley. UK: Warp X/Rook Films/Film4 Productions/UK Film Council/Screen Yorkshire, 2011.

Last Night in Soho. Directed by Edgar Wright. UK; Film4 Productions/Perfect World Pictures/Working Title Pictures/Complete Fiction Pictures, 2021.

Matka Joanna od Aniolów/Mother Joan of the Angels. Directed by Jerzy Kawalerowicz. Pol; Studio Filmowe Kadr, 1961

Men. Directed by Alex Garland. UK; DNA Films, 2022.

Midsommar. Directed by Ari Aster. USA/Swe; Square Peg/B-Reel Films/A24, 2019.

Ms .45. Directed by Abel Ferrara. USA; Navaron Films, 1981

Possession. Directed by Andrzej Źulawaki. Fra/W. Ger; Gaumont/Oliane Productions/Marianne Productions/Soma Film Productions, 1981.

The Slumber Party Massacre. Directed by Amy Holden Jones. USA; Santa Fe Productions, 1982

Suspiria. Directed by Dario Argento. Ita; Seda Spettacoli, 1977.

Taxi Driver. Directed by Martin Scorsese. USA; Bill/Phillips Productions/Italo-Judeo Productions, 1976.

Tenebre/Tenebrae. Directed by Dario Argento. Ita; Sigma Cinematographica, 1982.

L’uccello dale piume di cristallo/The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Directed by Dario Argento. Ita/W. Ger; Seda Spettacoli S.p.A/CCC Filmkunst GmbH, 1970.

The Wicker Man. Directed by Robin Hardy. UK; British Lion Films, 1973.

The Witch. Directed by Robert Eggers. USA/Canada; Parts and Labor/RT Features/Rooks Nest Entertainment/Maiden Voyage Pictures/Mott Street Pictures/Code Red Productions/Scythia Films/Pulse Films/Special Projects, 2015.

Witchfinder General. Directed by Michael Reeves. UK; Tigon British Film Productions, 1971.

[1] ‘Venice Film Fest Lineup Includes Coens, Luca Guadagnino and Alfonso Cuaron’

[2] ‘Suspiria, a Specialty Movie’, ‘Fox covers its prints on its part in ‘Suspiria’’, and ‘’Suspiria’ is fitful’

[3] Sight and Sound, April 2023, Vol.33, No.3, p.50

[4] Ibid

[5] Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p.4

[6] Ibid, p.5

[7] Williams, ‘Body Genres’, p.3

[8] See ‘Mad Max: Fury Road is less radical than its B-Movie Influences’, ‘Mellow giallo: has the horror genre lost its ability to shock’ and ‘Every video nasty ranked from worst to best’

[9] The ‘Pearl’s Peep Show’ viral marketing campaign conducted by distributors A24 for the film’s prequel Pearl (Ti West, 2022) also uses stag films as a source of abjection chic

[10] Bruschini and Piselli, Giallo & Thrilling All’Italiana, p.10

[11] Ibid, p.11

[12] Howarth, The Haunted World of Mario Bava

[13] Paciorek, ‘Folk Horror’, p.13-14 and McDonald and Johnson, Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film, p.57

[14] Paciorak, Folk Horror Studies, p.13

[15] Koven, La Dolce Morte, p.19

[16] Ibid

[17] Chambers, ‘Troubling Folk Horror’, p.11

[18] Paul Newman, ‘Folk Horror’, quoted in ibid

[19] See ‘Exclusive Interview: The Creators of “Last Night in Soho” on Giallo influences, The Music of Fear and More’, ‘A guide to giallo, the horror genre inspiring Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho’ and ‘Last Night in Soho and its gory giallo influences’

[20] Koven, La Dolce Morte, p.63

[21] Ibid, p.63-64

[22] ‘Alex Garland on Men, his surprising rural chiller’

[23] ‘Men review — Alex Garland unleashes multiple Rory Kinnears in wacky folk-horror’ and ‘A24’s Men review — Alex Garland Unsettles With Surreal Folk Horror

[24] Scovell, ‘Where to begin with folk horror’

[25] Racionek, ‘Folk Horror’, p.15

[26] Williams, ‘Film Bodies’, p.2

Biography

Milo Farragher-Hanks is a second-year PhD student in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, where he previously completed his MA and MLitt in the same subject. His work focusses on the history of moral panic around cinema, comparing cases of moral panic across different national and historical contexts in order to illustrate the centrality of the fear of the body and the senses to such controversies. Combining textual analysis of controversial films with close readings of the arguments of their opponents, his work seeks to excavate the unspoken role that revulsion towards the physical and sensory has played in the formation of moral judgements — around film and elsewhere.

DOI: 10.15664/fcj.v21.i0.2701

 

Meiko Kaji was a singer and actress in the Japanese exploitation cinema of the 1970s, a feminine cinematic icon of vengeance who used her voice in interesting juxtaposition to violence. Her filmography exemplified the inherent beauty and dangers of Japanese grindhouse through performances that embodied the anarchic spirit of the time. Pairing her cinematic appearances with songs that vocalise themes of vengeance, they intertwine with her central feminine struggles through lyrics that paint the films’ violence.

Kaji was particularly prolific between 1970 and 1974. This was a period where Japanese cinema struggled to retain audiences that were becoming increasingly captivated by television, resulting in “the sluggish film industry” needing help in revitalising.[1] This “required films that would stand out”, resulting in “the coming 70’s heralding a newer, edgier take”,[2] successfully ushering in “the era when turnover was at its highest”.[3] During the 1950s, women were little better than “window dressing” for the “macho world” of samurai action films and yakuza crime dramas, as “aggressive physical behaviour by a woman was not tolerated in mainstream entertainment.”[4] Conversely, Yuko Mihara Weisser argues that the 1970s provided “the most nurturing climate for the concept of action divas to grow,” guiding an aesthetic of grace amidst the brutality.[5] Weisser highlights how far Japanese female characters had progressed in representation, “undeniably influenced by America’s feminist movement” with “a bolder, naughtier approach to entertainment”.[6] To Laura Treglia, exploitation cinema in the 1970s prided itself on featuring “powerful visions of women’s rebellion and retributive fury”.[7]

Kaji was one of many female performers raised by studios to exploit their bodies in cheaply produced films that could be delivered to youthful Japanese audiences as quickly as possible (in 1970 alone, Kaji performed in twelve films). Rikke Schubart described her as “a hauntingly beautiful, enigmatic, and seductive actress”, whose characters possess “a lonely existence immersed in darkness”.[8] Playing fashionably dressed gang leaders, convicts, outlaws and assassins, Kaji all but replaced the male-dominated samurais that came before. She found immense popularity due to her combination of striking performance with beautiful singing in ‘enka’ style, which combines traditional Japanese musical techniques with electric instrumentation, sentimental lyrics and evocative vocals (the songs mostly being those she composed herself). This allowed for her “memorable outlaws bent on revenge” to stand out from the many other women acting in very similar films at this time, as the songs are what made her films unique.[9] She was one of the first Japanese women on screen to embrace violence and be widely loved for it, joining contemporaries who, as Alicia Kozma writes, performed “complex female characters whose actions openly question normative ideas of appropriate female action and gender stratification”, with her “radical representations of female sexuality” creating an interesting microcosm of the changing times.[10] To this end, “the star persona of Meiko Kaji is located between the extraordinary powers of a castrating gaze and the existential malaise of a female killer,” a persona she embraced yet which ultimately stifled her growth.[11]

Beginning with an exploration of Kaji’s deadly silence and the singing that stems from patriarchal oppression in Joshū Sasori / Female Prisoner Scorpion (Shunya Ito, 1972-1973), I go on to explore the love songs of vengeance characterised by Shurayuki-hime / Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973-74) and Gincho Wataridori / Wandering Ginza Butterfly (Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1972), followed by an analysis of the anarchistic singing that arises in Nora neko rokku / Stray Cat Rock (Yasuharu Hasebe & Toshiya Fujita, 1970-1971). I conclude by arguing that both her first lead performance in Kaidan nobori ryū / Blind Woman’s Curse (Teruo Ishii, 1970) and her most recent appearance in Subarashiki Sekai / Under the Open Sky (Miwa Nishikawa, 2020) suggest a narrative that disowns the violence her career is characterised by, rejecting her popular image to arrive at a peaceful resolution.

Silent but Deadly Scorpion

What is most striking about Kaji is that the characters she plays hardly ever speak. Many have written about the ferocity expressed simply through her eyes – a dangerous, “iconic stare”,[12] which Tom Mes describes as “able to impale whoever was unlucky enough to tread into their field of vision.”[13] Tony Williams notes how Japanese cinema strived to accentuate the femininity of its action heroines, resulting in Kaji having “greater depth” as it afforded her “a quieter, more brooding style of intensity”.[14] Jay Beck suggests that silence “serve[s] to engender fear in… the audience”, so whenever a film focuses on Kaji’s complete absence of sound, the audience is unnerved, unsure of when she will strike.[15] Lisa Coulthard emphasises this point, suggesting that “silence can make us aware of complicity”, which in turn impacts our bodies more vociferously when violence breaks out.[16] Weisser expresses “this unusual paradox” as creating “an amazing chemistry with her audience”, because despite her quietness, she “never shirked a demonstrative fighting display”, conveying hatred, sadness and fear entirely through “her reticent attitude and cold demeanour”.[17] Schubart compares Kaji to Clint Eastwood’s character in the Dollars Trilogy (Sergio Leone, 1964-1966), with both “creating a mythical hero” by convincing their directors to cut most of their lines, leaving them as mysterious, silent figures.[18]

In her silence, Kaji’s voice is instead felt through song. Fundamental to Kaji’s popularity was her singing a new theme song for each film,[19] “emoting the lyrics… as she would with dialogue from a film, playing the character behind the words.”[20] As Michel Chion writes, “the presence of a human voice instantly sets up a hierarchy of perception.”[21] The voco-centricity of Kaji’s singing leads her voice to take precedence over all other sounds. When she sings, the audience immediately becomes transfixed, her voice dominating all other sonic elements. As Kaji reveals, “it was common back then… for performers to sing the theme songs for the films they were in.”[22] However, not all actresses during this time could handle the singing aspects of their roles.[23] What made Kaji so remarkable was that she possessed attractiveness in both her appearance and voice, thus not only surviving in the tough environment, but flourishing in it. Kaji can be compared to Michael Bronski’s assessment of Judy Garland, for “when she sang she was vulnerable. There was a hurt in her voice that most other singers don’t have”.[24] It is the vulnerability in her singing that allows her to explore the plight of violated women returning for revenge, maintaining a delicate air around her as she articulates themes of vengeance through theme songs laced with poetic lyricism.

This is conveyed most strongly in the Joshū Sasori / Female Prisoner Scorpion films (Shunya Ito, 1972-1973) and their theme song ‘Urami Bushi / My Grudge Blues’. Opening with a shot of the Japanese flag standing proudly above a prison complex, the sense of Japan’s unwavering male authority is thrown into turmoil as the sirens announce Kaji’s prison escape. Upon her recapture, but not before valiantly fending off the guards, she menacingly stares into the camera while in voice over begins to sing. ‘Urami Bushi’, composed by Kaji herself, details how a man might flatter a woman with words such as “beautiful flower”, but will toss her away “once you’re in full bloom”. The woman here, having been fooled, is repeatedly lambasted by Kaji as “foolish”, with this being the “foolish woman’s song… her song of vengeance.” This adjective is replaced with each repetition of the chorus, becoming “lamenting”, “burning” and other despairing words. At the opening of Dai 41 Zakkyobō / Jailhouse 41 (Shunya Ito, 1972), Kaji is shown unremittingly sharpening a spoon with her mouth against the floor of a dank dungeon while her legs and arms are tied up, the lyrics now starting to talk about how even “shedding blood once a month” can’t make her forget about her unfulfilled dreams; although left to rot in a dingy prison cell, her singing the theme song assures the audience that she will eventually free herself and continue the rampage. And in Kemono Beya / Beast Stable (Shunya Ito, 1973), while running through busy Tokyo streets with the severed hand of the detective pursuing her attached by handcuffs to her arm, she refers to herself as “a bright red rose”, not wanting to pierce the men with her thorns but asking “how else will I get free?”; at the end of the film, she chants “I cannot die before I fulfil my fate; so I live on, driven only by my hate”, creating anticipation for more vengeance to follow despite the otherwise conclusive tone. Each time the song plays, a new stanza is lifted from the original, so that the song itself tells its own story across these films: from the plight of a woman being beaten and discarded by men, who cannot show her tears because then she will be hurt again, to finally liberating herself the only way she knows how – through vengeance.

Through the use of song, Kaji’s plight becomes intimately felt by the spectator, as an entity driven by a singular purpose, prevented from ever achieving happiness. Similar to Bjork’s singing in Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000) whenever reality becomes too painful to bear, so does Kaji sing to escape the brutal prison. Throughout these films, important moments – of escape, of violence, of reflection – are accompanied by the same song, lifting the themes outside of painful reality into a fantastical musical world that allows the message to be heard clearly by the spectator. As Steven Feld argues, knowledge is only gained “through an ongoing cumulative and interactive process of participation and reflection”, so the repetitiveness of the theme song heightens the audience’s grasp on the meaning behind the singing.[25] It liberates her from the gritty realism of an abusive, patriarchal world, each repeated use of the theme song heightening the juxtaposition between fantasy and reality. This was integral to Kaji’s performances, becoming the exemplary image of an elegant spirit of feminist vengeance, grappling with a fundamental identity of subjugation followed by violent liberation, as she overthrew authority and murdered the men that oppressed her, all while singing beautifully.

As shown by the lyrics, Kaji’s character is governed by forces beyond her control. Her voice, likewise, is shown as an entity that cannot freely express itself, which Liz Greene suggests is due to “a sound bias that restricts the female voice in cinema”.[26] To Kozma, these films are about women struggling “to maintain their independence in the face of threats from the male-dominated political system.”[27] It is “a brutal, darkly comic but ultimately feminist masterpiece”,[28] with lyrics that, as Treglia writes, “concern the burning everlasting resentment of women who have been deceived by men.”[29] She draws links between the frequent rape sequences that occur in these films to the brutal actions of Japanese soldiers during the Second World War, a taboo topic within Japan and thus only capable of being explored through such exploitation films, with “the use of identical music [alerting] the viewer to another breakdown of order”.[30] Singing becomes the only means of escape, Kaji reinforcing Schubart’s identification of how all female heroes during this period of cinema “were presented as Amazons who love to fight and kill, hate men, burn with sexual desire and delight in violence and destruction”, the vengeful lyrics becoming a weapon far deadlier than any knife.[31] Ito states that Kaji “removed her sexuality and stood up against authority” through her silence, a defence mechanism for surviving the harsh prison life, before violently lashing out against her brutal prison guards by expressing herself through song, which guides her body like a spectre.[32] When she sings about a woman’s “song for vengeance” at the end of the first film, she does so in tandem with going on a killing spree against the men who violated her, the fulfilment of her vengeance winning the audience’s favour having had to suffer through the silence with her. Kaji singing ‘Urami Bushi’ therefore gives her escape from prison a cathartic quality, as she is taking back control of her voice as a representative of all women violated by men.

Love Songs of Vengeance

Shurayuki-hime / Lady Snowblood and the sequel subtitled Urami renka / Love Song of Vengeance (Toshiya Fujita, 1973-1974) crystallised Kaji’s image as an elegant yet bloodthirsty spirit unrepentant about bringing vengeance for all violated women. Her character has been fashioned into a ruthless killer against her will, literally “born for vengeance” as stated by her dying mother soon after giving birth to her, her purpose in life now one of retributive fury for innocent women. At the beginning of the film, she confronts a gang who attempt to kill her, assuming she has come to assassinate their leader. Calmly standing in white kimono against falling snow, with an umbrella masking her face, she mercilessly hacks them down, the pure white scenery becoming spoiled by gushing blood. When the leader asks her “who are you?” before dying, she states that she is “revenge”; when he asks her whose revenge, she replies “those helpless people that have suffered thanks to you”. Her iconic deathly stare and the start of her theme song ‘Shura no Hana / Flower of Carnage’ then becomes the only answer she requires, the camera tracking her from overhead as she walks through the snow under her umbrella, the music overlaying their dead bodies with a lingering sense of romantic fury.[33] As she articulates by singing “I’ve immersed my body in the river of vengeance, and thrown away my womanhood many moons ago”, she is no longer a human living for her own means, but rather the living embodiment of this ethereal concept that is vengeance.

As the song continues, she moves from snow to forest and sea, practising her sword fighting while chanting about how the “begrieving snow falls” and that “an umbrella that holds onto the darkness is all there is”. Even as she sings from above the film’s diegesis, the sounds of her sword clashing against wood or whistling through the air, as well as the crashing waves and howling wind, remain audible, such that the singing becomes influenced by her environment and actions, the lyrics expressing her emotions with each swing of her sword. The ‘sonic space’ of the films thus becomes voco-centrically structured around her, so that every violent sound effect is musically dominated by the vengeful lyrics. Such a “musical dominant”, Coulthard suggests, “creates uncanny effects by dislodging the violence from realism and placing it in a musical realm that highlights its stylization and artifice”. This runs the risk of entirely eradicating diegetic sound and thus lessening the shocking effects of the violence for the audience.[34] This can be seen in Bara no Sōretsu / Funeral Parade of Roses (Toshio Matsumoto, 1969) – part of the contemporary Japanese New Wave movement – where such musical stylization directs “audience enjoyment in a manner akin to a laugh track”, with comedic music playing over the fights.[35] Nevertheless, it is in the climax where the music ceases to make the violence ironic, with a harrowing scene as the protagonist gouges her eyes out as part of an oedipal twist of fate, the carnivalesque music now horrifying rather than funny, while stumbling onto the street with frightening realism. Scenes of violence in Lady Snowblood, for all their musical stylisation, likewise never lose the sense of diegesis necessary to make the violence impactful: the slicing of her sword, splatter of blood against snow and grunts of men dying are fully audible and uninterrupted, so that there is no danger of the violence being dislodged from its place in reality. Kaji sings when she is the last one standing surrounded by complete silence, compounding the harrowing effects of the violence on the audience, to leave them with remorse for the devastating cruelty while priming them for further carnage.

The ‘Flower of Carnage’ theme song additionally signals the film’s end as Kaji dies with her vengeance fulfilled. Lying in the snow, her disembodied voice continues singing above the world while gazing upon the violence below – physically removed from Kaji and thus representing a transcendent view of vengeance. It runs counter to what is expected from a real person, who is restricted to speaking diegetically, ceasing to exist upon death as their voice is materially stuck to their body. Yet to Chion, “the richest of voice-image relations… [is] the situation in which we don’t see the person we hear.”[36] Her voice singing from outside the image causes all other sounds to disappear, conveying her plight more powerfully than diegetic singing allows, amplifying the vengeance themes of her films by extrapolating them to a holistic encapsulation of feminine struggle. The female voice has a sense of embodying the space internal to the listener rather than external, as Greene argues that the female voice is recorded “without a sense of the reverberant space in which it is situated”, providing “a very close aural perspective that invites intimacy with the audience”.[37] This gives Kaji’s voice a profoundly more resonant tone, impacting the audience and making them feel as though her call for feminine vengeance exists within them. Her singing the theme as voiceover represents the fantastical vengeance that frees her voice of bodily constraints, allowing her to live on after death and achieve a transcendent perspective on her world. The compulsion for vengeance that Kaji embodies thus transcends the text to live on sonically far beyond its time.

Kaji’s ‘love song of vengeance’ in these films aptly encapsulates her combination of violence and sentimentality. Gincho Wataridori / Wandering Ginza Butterfly (Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1972) finds itself situated in this thematic juxtaposition, with love becoming the very source and result of violence. Dressed in a kimono like her Lady Snowblood character, yet recently released from prison as though she were a reformed Female Prisoner Scorpion, the titular theme song accompanies her train journey back towards civilization in search of a future. The first words she sings are how “for a man I love, I’d give up my life.” No love interest has been established yet, but considering the complete rejection of men in Female Prisoner Scorpion, it instantly sets up Kaji as a romantic who by the end will either kill or die for whoever she gives her heart to. Indeed, the song returns to accompany her melancholic walk through the rain after the man she loved is shot and killed, the lyrics pattering down onto the blue and gold neon infused wet ground while Kaji tearfully walks under an umbrella, almost identical to the opening theme song sequence in Lady Snowblood; the stark similarities between both shots points to Kaji’s persona prevailing across films, a unified image shaped by studios rather than an actress playing different characters. The combination of romantic singing, dramatic cinematography and silent performance all serve to compel the audience towards anticipating a return to violence, which Kaji’s character sought to free herself from.

Rather than simply bookending the film like in Lady Snowblood, the songs in Wandering Ginza Butterfly are interlaced throughout the film more akin to Female Prisoner Scorpion, to signal the fundamental changes in the central character. Phillip O’Connor compares Kaji’s two roles: in Female Prisoner Scorpion she “is an instrument of mindless violence that has a purpose to destroy those who imprisoned her”, while in Wandering Ginza Butterfly she “is an instrument of destruction that is awoken again with terrible purpose because her friends and loved ones are threatened”, displaying violence as an expression of love.[38] Ultimately, she massacres the entire gang in a fit of revenge, the song concluding the film as she is arrested by police. O’Connor highlights a “wariness of more bloodshed and violence”, with these love songs having consequences beyond her control.[39] Upon ruminating about what tomorrow will bring, she sings how “I’ve lost everything, I’ve lost the last hope”, so that despite the triumph of the villains being killed, her voice puts into action the deep moral conundrums that audiences rooting for such violence may try to evade.

Singing as Anarchy

Such violence goes beyond mere individual feuds, with the yakuza-infested urbanity of Wandering Ginza Butterflybeing built on the back of the Japanese imperialism that pervades the two Lady Snowblood films. Kaji’s assassination quest to avenge her raped mother happens as a consequence of the radical revolutions that occurred in nineteenth-century Japan as the country propelled itself into the modern world through the Meiji restoration, which as the film itself states, resulted in peasants revolting against the government’s attempts to develop their “military power similar to that of foreign superpowers”[40] – ultimately leading to their subjugation after the Second World War. As expressed by the full version of ‘Flower of Carnage’, “the loyal, invincible and brave” soldiers are sent out to war and “solemnly resolved not to return alive, without victory” – for all the violence implicit in Kaji’s revenge-fuelled journey, it pales in comparison to the very real atrocities committed by the government acting in the shadows of the films.

This comes to the forefront in Lady Snowblood as a conflict of identity with America. Kaji infiltrates a masquerade ball in pursuit of her final target, where the uncharacteristically gentle Western ballads of high society can be heard playing alongside both a Japanese and American flag hanging on the banister. When Kaji kills the main villain, he tears down the Japanese flag as he falls off the balcony, painting a clear message of Japan’s integrity and morality crumbling. The music highlights how this is a Japan obsessed with their place in the world, their rapid importation of “Western technology, industrial practices and military strategy” signifying their increasing betrayal of the country’s old way of life as the societal elites sell the people out for the chance to stand next to the Americans.[41] As this is on the eve of the first Sino-Japanese War, Kaji’s voice in contrast to the diegetic music implies an anarchic spirit that rejects Japan’s ramping imperialism.

There is a politicisation seeping throughout Lady Snowblood, with the sinister presence of the Meiji secret police accentuating the anarchist sentiments at the centre of the plot. With Love Song of Vengeance, as Kaji’s single-minded quest for revenge has been fulfilled, she becomes more aware of the world around her. As said directly in the film, the politics are made more overt, with Kaji becoming swept up into a shadowy war between the secret police and anarchists, no longer “choosing to ignore the nation’s predicament solely to continue her journey along the road of carnage.” Yet as a result, there is a distinct lack of singing here, Kaji becoming like the ordinary people who are “as voiceless as ever” and fuming in silence, the government seeking “to eliminate insurgents who rebel against the almighty, divine nation that is Japan” proving the complete annihilation of her singing voice. Vengeance comes not in one individual’s hatred of other individuals as a lofty desire to avenge all women, but as a far more profound movement to attain justice against this corrupt and tyrannical authority that is now stripping Kaji herself of her iconic song. She finds herself entering into the company of lowlives that “lived with tenacity and spirit” in a “lawless district”, attempting to inspire an uprising that “will become so uncontrollable that the government will inevitably be crushed.” Anarchy thus defines the very fabric of this film, no longer hidden in visual symbolism or lyrical metaphors, but entirely in the blunt speech of its characters fighting against Japanese imperialism.

Crime festers in the shadow of this imperialism, informing the anarchic spirit and animosity towards authority that pervades the exploitation cinema of the 70s, including Nora neko rokku / Stray Cat Rock (Yasuharu Hasebe & Toshiya Fujita, 1970-1971). This series (Onna banchō / Delinquent Girl Boss, Wairudo janbo / Wild Jumbo, Sekkusu hantaa / Sex Hunter, Mashin animaru / Machine Animal, Bôsô shûdan ’71 / Beat 71) portrays modern Japanese society as full of feminine violence and unbridled liberty, with a general malaise enveloping all the characters. Tatsuya Fuji (Kaji’s co-star) asserts that contemporary viewers “can feel the strange power and passion which these films emit”,[42] with Fuji describing how “most of the time we didn’t have filming permission”, so all the street-level chaos came from a genuinely “feverish” attitude.[43] These films present a microcosm of their time, featuring “infectiously catchy songs of the 70s” so as to build a sonic space appealing to contemporary audiences, conveying scenes of underground bars imbued with anarchy as distinctly Japanese rock bands play psychedelic and distressing music diegetically to pull the audience further into Japan’s underworld of listless young women stuck in a criminal world.[44] Within it, Kaji stands as the boss of all women in Tokyo’s nightlife, with Fuji describing her primarily as “fashionable”, typical of a Tokyo city girl with “a very modern sense of beauty and charm.”[45] Jeff Goodhartz writes about how the director “decked her and the co-stars out in the absolute coolest clothing imaginable”.[46] It is an image that harkens back to the flapper girls of the 1920s in the West, who likewise found their new urban lifestyles to become the object of interest in the popular cinema of the time.[47]

Dominating the music scene portrayed in the Stray Cat Rock films is a sense of antagonism towards America. Fuji sheds insight into the social context behind these films, saying that “it was influenced by the conflict over the US/Japan Security Treaty in the 70s”,[48] which allowed “the United States to maintain military bases on Japanese soil” and led to wide-spread protests against American presence in Japan.[49] These protests began in the 1960s, inspiring the chaotic ambience that Yasuharu Hasebe and Toshiya Fujita would imbue into the social climate of these five films, themselves releasing to a resurgence of such sentiments. Such a political rift was exacerbated by the failed coup attempt on 25th November 1970 by Yukio Mishima, a famous writer in Japan who became angered by America’s control of his country. He attempted to lead a right-wing militia to restore the “political power to the emperor and to the Japanese military”,[49] a political undercurrent that ravaged Japan at the time, as seen in the harrowing lynchings of ‘mixed-race’ Japanese in Sex Hunter. On the one hand, Wild Jumbo sees Americans as easy pickings: Kaji and Fuji help American tourists take a photo, before Kaji steals an extortionate tip – the tourist’s disbelief is comedically subdued by Fuji’s “no… yes”, emulating Jean-Paul Belmondo’s “oh yeah” in Pierrot Le Fou (Jean-luc Godard 1965). On the other hand, Sex Hunter shows America as violating Japan’s sovereignty, with the gang emerging from a bar whose sign states “Welcome Americans… Japanese people welcome too”, displaying them as inferior in their own country. Later on, wealthy Americans attempt to force themselves onto the all-female Japanese gang after they’ve been sold out by the male rival gang, but are stopped by Kaji breaking in just in time with an arsenal of Coca Cola bottles fashioned into Molotov cocktails, burning the party to the ground with this epitome of American consumerism. Stray Cat Rock is thus concerned “with the strength and rebellion of youngsters against that background”, disenfranchised by the post-war attitudes of a Japan suffocating under America’s influence and the ensuing chaos of reactionaries vying for their former glory.[50]

Despite being set a century later, Stray Cat Rock echoes the similar sentiments found in Lady Snowblood, marking Kaji’s career in gang warfare and feminine vengeance as fundamentally rooted in the narratives of political injustice that have defined Japan’s identity in the twentieth-century. This becomes amplified when Rikiya Yasuoka sings as he enters Sex Hunter. Kaji had just had to fend off the male gang, but the male lead simply sings a love song, titled ‘Kinji rareta ichiya / Forbidden Night’. The politics keeping the characters constantly on edge is undercut by this romanticism, becoming a song they sing together at the end on the eve of their shootout with the gang. “We both devoured the short time we had” brings an emotiveness to their tragedy, retroactively turning the entire narrative – otherwise concerned with the racial tensions they have had to suffer – into a romance between these two characters fated to die. As the song he sang when they first met, the lyrics suddenly become pertinent to their current predicament, as “our night together will soon be over” – as the sun comes out, so do the bullets start firing. Although not concerned with vengeance, it shows how Kaji’s love songs are steeped in an anarchic rejection of the politics dominating the film – be it secret police and imperialism, or gangs and racism – with these beautiful moments of song putting an end to the violence.

A Voice for Peace

Song as the antidote to violence can be seen through a comparison between Kaji and Pam Grier. Also a female icon of vengeance in 1970s exploitation cinema, Grier was the “Queen of Blaxploitation”.[51] Brian Greene writes about Kaji as “Japan’s answer to Pam Grier”,[52] with Schubart calling them both “queen[s] of cult cinema and erotic bloodshed”.[53] Singing plays a strong role in Grier’s films, having sung ‘Long Time Woman’ for The Big Doll House (Jack Hill, 1971), reprised in Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997).[54] However, ‘Coffy Baby’, the theme song to Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973), is not sung by Grier (that honour goes to Denise Bridgewater), and so does not feel like it emanates from the character, focusing on her appearance rather than building up her need for vengeance as with Kaji: “sweet as a chocolate bar” and “rare black pearl” do little to express Grier’s feelings as she prepares her gun by sticking it into a stuffed animal. Despite exploring similar themes inside a similar type of cinema, their characterisation is quite different, because while Kaji is iconic for her silence, Grier speaks a lot, callous and cruel with plenty of mean one-liners.[55] For example, Grier’s first kill in Coffy has her bluntly state “this is the end of your rotten life, you motherfuckin’ dope pusher” right before pulling the trigger and blowing his head off – the kind of unnuanced line that Kaji worked hard to entirely eliminate from her own scripts, as it gives unnecessary aggression to a scene when the shotgun was all that was needed. Due to Grier’s performance not achieving Kaji’s level of tonal juxtaposition, the anger is communicated bluntly through the voice, which leaves the music feeling superfluous, as everything is understood plainly. This contrasts with Kaji, who leaves the rage to be felt by her piercing eyes, making her singing uniquely effective as the tension is released ethereally rather than tangibly, transcending the brutal violence towards a more spiritual consolidation of vengeance. Thus, although Kaji fills a similar role as Grier, her voice exhibits a distinctly different quality that gives increased nuance to the violence she sings of, highlighting a paradox between the immorality of violence and the desire to empower women.

Kaidan nobori ryū / Blind Woman’s Curse (Teruo Ishii, 1970) exemplifies this ethical struggle. It is the first time Kaji was in the lead role, and as O’Connor writes, “[she] bolts you to the ground with a completely toned, even, passionate and electric performance.”[56] As a leader of a clan with dragon tattoos, when she accidentally blinds another woman with her sword, it leaves Kaji traumatised – and when a cat licks at the blood, she becomes literally cursed. Already, Blind Woman’s Curse seems to be arguing against the use of violence, with the villain being the one seeking vengeance rather than the hero, entirely flipping the genre conventions on its head. In the final battle, Kaji is sliced across the back, which cuts out the eyes of her dragon tattoo; symbolically removing reliance on sight and inviting the audience to understand the story through hearing. After making amends with the woman who had placed a curse upon her, they end the fight with mutual respect, whereupon Kaji sings ‘Jingi Komori Uta / Lullaby of Honour’ (her very first musical release) as the final words of the film, making for a powerful ending as she chants “the dragon launches itself to fight for justice.”. It leaves the film with a lingering desire for violence, as neither the protagonist nor antagonist met their demise, so the audience has been deprived of such catharsis. It is this musical element that gives the film the emotional weight required to fully punch the message into the audience, who otherwise would have just been left desiring more bloodshed. Through the song and the recurring dragon motif, a new resolution is crafted, disowning the use of violence to resolve matters of justice.

This suggests a problem in the method of production in the Japanese film industry of the 1970s, considering their simultaneous profiting from and disownment of violence. While the American 1960s counterculture paved the way for the dismantling of the Hollywood studio system for the new era of independent productions that Grier found herself in,[57] studios became more powerful in Japan as they co-opted the sentiments of the time, engineering a stronger cinematic culture to stand against their American contemporaries.[58] These were not independent filmmakers tapping into the taboo tastes of an underground audience; they were studio-mandated products being churned out for a profit. The studios gravitated towards ‘pinky violence’ to “survive the financial crisis that swept the industry”[59] – an extreme form of grindhouse cinema with explicit sexual violence, creating a toxic environment for Kaji, whose body and voice were exploited.[60] Kaji’s vocal and visual image became the property of the male-dominated studios she worked under, moulded by their idea of what would make her popular.[61] As she states, “it was a company policy to make an actress into her own image, to aim in the direction each actress seemed to naturally be heading.”[62] Although Kaji’s ability to combine vengeful violence and singing forged her career, her singing of vengeance was restricted in an environment “corrupted by studio politics”, for “once they get a certain image of you, they don’t want anything different”.[63]

In an interview with Chris Desjardins, Kaji expressed gratitude for being “well received as an ‘outlaw’ character”, but resented that it caused her to be “pigeon-holed into a certain type of role”, ultimately pleased that she was in the last generation of actors who had to suffer such a fate.[64] It was a fate shared by Grier, the source of their success pushing them both towards obscurity. After reaching her peak in 1974, Kaji decided to transition to smaller acting roles, with a focus on television. Still content with ‘samurai’ period pieces, she took further her experience acting alongside Toshiro Mifune in Kōya no surōnin / Ronin of the Wilderness (Eiichi Kudo, Tokuzō Tanaka, Kazuo Ikehiro, 1972-1974) by spending the rest of the century mostly in shows like Onihei Hankachō / Onihei Crime Book (Masahiro Takase, Yoshiki Onoda, 1989-2001). Winning awards for her performance in Sonezaki Shinjū / Double Suicide of Sonezaki (Yasuzo Masumura, 1978)[65] – where the only violence she inflicts is on herself – she found this more rewarding than her “tailor-made star vehicles”.[66] Additionally, when not acting, she focused on her singing career, unbinding her voice from the violent films she sought to escape from by creating love songs that could exist independently.

Now an old woman, Subarashiki Sekai / Under the Open Sky (Miwa Nishikawa, 2020) represents her full transformation, rejecting violence in its entirety as her singing has nothing to do with vengeance. Here, she is playing a minor role as a kind, elderly lady trying to help an ex-yakuza member (played by Koji Yakuzo) who has just been released from prison, “a pariah whose soul is crushed by systemic discrimination and a world of hypocritical conformity.”[67] Celebrating his full integration back into peaceful society, towards the end of the film she sings with no calls for violence; it is to congratulate him getting his first proper job, singing about the stars wishing him happiness. She is fully outside her popular image now, disowning her previous anarchist spirit as she fully embraces a conventional life inside society: like the ex-yakuza desperately trying to leave his old ways behind him, so does she seem to be trying to escape her image as an icon of feminine vengeance towards her more authentic, loving self. Although in the film there is a glimpse at the glamour of the yakuza life when the protagonist is temporarily tempted to return, upon further inspection that entire world is crumbling in the face of Japan’s new order.[68] Kaji’s voice dies down as applause erupts, the first time the diegesis has given a proper reaction to her singing, as though the film characters themselves are applauding the actress for the completion of her redemption and the release of her need for vengeance.

Conclusion

The Japanese exploitation cinema Kaji made her name in is now largely relegated to the past, a movement that began and ended in that very specific, localised moment of history. Yasuharu Hasebe, who directed Kaji in Female Prisoner Scorpion, believed “that films belong to their own eras”, which is why he thought that what he made could never last beyond a week.[69] But through Kaji they have, her songs keeping this period of Japanese exploitation cinema alive. For instance, Quentin Tarantino grew up on international exploitation films and was eager to pay homage within his own filmmaking.[70] Kaji’s singing influenced the aesthetic of Kill Bill (2003-2004), as Lucy Liu’s character is directly modelled on Lady Snowblood, with ‘Flower of Carnage’ and ‘My Grudge Blues’ playing in both films.[71] Kaji’s spirit of feminine vengeance manifests itself within the film to bring further eloquence to the already poignant drama and action, simply through use of her songs. As Martijn Huisman elaborates, it led “to an international revival of interest in the career and work of Meiko Kaji”, as by hearing her ghost in the lyrics, listeners were compelled to discover their origin.[72] Therefore, there is a timeless factor to her songs, the themes of feminine vengeance remaining ever pertinent for its listeners and connecting all her roles together.

Music is an effective gateway into understanding certain cinematic movements, with Meiko Kaji’s singing bringing to life the beauty and dangers of Japanese exploitation cinema in the 1970s. Her performances embodied the anarchic spirit of the time, her sense of urban femininity combining with theme songs to amplify the societal conflicts she herself experienced, fighting for women’s liberation in an environment dominated by patriarchal studios. By singing about feminine vengeance so profoundly, she gave a voice to silenced characters, highlighting the violence against women plaguing society and thus touching audiences across time and cultures. But Kaji’s singing of vengeance itself reveals the systematised problem of her work environment and her rejection of the image associated with her. Thus, singing becomes the means by which she can escape this fate of endless, exploitative violence, creating a female hero who goes beyond mere vengeance.

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[1] Weisser (2001), ‘Japanese Fighting Divas 101’, p.45-46

[2] Ibid. p.52

[3] Treglia (2022), ‘Figuring Female Resentment in Japanese 1970s Grindhouse Cinema’, p.51

[4] Weisser (2001), p.49

[5] Huisman (2017), Flower of Carnage: The Revenge Films of Meiko Kaji, p.3

[6] Kozma (2011), ‘Pinky Violence’, p.38

[7] Schubart (2014), The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, pp.107-108

[8] O’Connor (2014), ‘Blind Woman’s Curse’

[9] Weisser (2001), p.50

[10] Fuji (2006), interview

[11] Schubart (2014), p.119

[12] Evans (2015), interview

[13] Mes (2017), Unchained Melody, video

[14] Williams (2000), ‘Addendum’, p.60

[15] Beck (2008), ‘The Sounds of Silence’, p.81

[16] Coulthard (2016), ‘Acoustic Disgust’, p.185

[17] Weisser (2001), p.52

[18] Schubart (2014), p.108

[19] Huisman (2017), p.11

[20] Mes (2017)

[21] Chion (1999), ‘Raising the Voice’, p.5

[22] Desjardins (2005), Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film, p.65

[23] Weisser (2001), p.50

[24] Bronski (1978), ‘Judy Garland and Others’, p.202

[25] Feld (2015), ‘Acoustemology’, p.13-14

[26] Greene (2009), ‘Speaking, Singing, Screaming’, p.63

[27] Kozma (2011), p.38

[28] Galbraith & Duncan (2009), Japanese Cinema, p.114

[29] Treglia (2022), p.51

[30] Ibid. pp.63-64

[31] Schubert (2014), p.44

[32] Ito (2006), interview

[33] Hampton (2016), ‘The Complete Lady Snowblood’

[34] Coulthard (2016), p.184

[35] Ibid., p.185

[36] Chion (1999), p.9

[37] Green (2009), p.64

[38] O’Connor (2015), ‘Wandering Ginza Butterfly’,

[39] Ibid.

[40] Lady Snowblood, Extras: History

[41] Ibid.

[42] Fuji (2006)

[43] Ibid.

[44] Dang (2020), ‘Stray Cat Rock: A Groovy Retrospective’

[45] Fuji (2006)

[46] Goodhartz (2000), ‘Asia’s Greatest Action Divas’, p.62

[47] Mulvey (2023), ‘Flappers on film’

[48] Fuji (2006)

[49] Kapur (2018), Japan at the Crossroads, p.1

[50] Cather (2021), ‘Japan’s most famous writer committed suicide after a failed coup attempt’

[51] Fuji (2006)

[52] Schubart (2014), p.41

[53] Greene (2016), ‘Meiko Kaji’

[54] Schubart (2014), p.107

[55] Ibid. p.43

[56] Ibid. p.42

[57] O’Connor (2014)

[58] Cook (1998), ‘Auteur Cinema and the film generation in 70s Hollywood’, pp.1-4

[59] Criterion, ‘Eclipse Series 17: Nikkatsu Noir’

[60] Treglia (2022), p.52

[61] Fischer (2012), The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, p.123

[62] Desjardins (2005), p.62,68

[63] Ibid. p.72

[64] Ibid. p.66

[65] Huisman (2017), p.21,24

[66] Mes (2017)

[67] Lee (2020), ‘Under the Open Sky’

[68] Kao (2021), ‘Under the Open Sky’

[69] Hasebe (2006), interview

[70] Steve Rose (2004), ‘Where Tarantino gets his ideas’

[71] Huisman (2017), p.22

[72] Ibid., p.11

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Greene, Liz (2009). ‘Speaking, Singing, Screaming: Controlling the Female Voice in American Cinema’, The Soundtrack, p.63-67.

Hampton, Howard (2016). ‘The Complete Lady Snowblood: Flowers of Carnage’, at https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3856-the-complete-lady-snowblood-flowers-of-carnage

Hasebe, Yasuharu (2006). ‘Testimonies of Outlaws – The Faces of the 70s’, interview, Stray Cat Rock: Limited Edition Box Set, Arrow Video.

Huisman, Martijn (2017). Flower of Carnage: The Revenge Films Of Meiko Kaji, MH1986, at https://www.mh1986.com/publications/flower-of-carnage-the-revenge-films-of-meiko-kaji/

Ito, Shunya (2006). ‘Shunya Ito: Directing Meiko Kaji’, interview, Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection, Arrow Video.

Kao, Anthony (2021). ‘Review: Under the Open Sky Poignantly Depicts a Former Yakuza’s Societal Re-entry’, Cinema Escapist, at https://www.cinemaescapist.com/2021/08/review-under-open-sky-japan-movie/

Kapur, Nick (2018). Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise After Anpo, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kozma, Alicia, (2011). ‘Pinky Violence: Shock, awe and the exploitation of sexual liberation’, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, 3(1), pp. 37–44.

Lee, Maggie (2020). ‘Under the Open Sky Review: Koji Yakusho Gives Virtuoso Turn in Ex-Convict’s Heartbreaking Rehab Drama’, Variety, at https://variety.com/2020/film/reviews/under-the-open-sky-review-subarashiki-sekai-1234770805/

Mes, Tom (2017). ‘Unchained Melody’, visual essay, Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection, Arrow Video.

Mulvey, Laura (2023). ‘Flappers on film: the young modern woman in 1920s cinema’, lecture, University of St Andrews, 6 March 2023.

O’Connor, Phillip (2014). ‘Blind Woman’s Curse’, EasternKicks, at https://www.easternkicks.com/reviews/blind-womans-curse/

O’Connor, Phillip (2015). ‘Wandering Ginza Butterfly’, EasternKicks, at https://www.easternkicks.com/reviews/wandering-ginza-butterfly/

Rose, Steve (2004). ‘Found: where Tarantino gets his ideas’, The Guardian, at https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/apr/06/features.dvdreviews

Schubart, Rikke (2014). ‘Godmother of them All: The Rise and Fall of Pam Grier’, Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970-2006, London: McFarland Incorporated Publishers, pp.41-64.

Schubart, Rikke (2014). ‘Meiko Kaji: Woman with a Vengeance’, Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970-2006, London: McFarland Incorporated Publishers, pp.107-122.

Treglia, Laura (2022). ‘A Woman’s Grudge: Figuring Female Resentment in Japanese 1970s Grindhouse Cinema’, in Xavier Mendik and Julian Petley (eds.) Shocking Cinema of the 70s, London: Bloomsbury, pp.51-69.

Weisser, Yuko Mihara (2001). ‘Japanese Fighting Divas 101’, Asian Cult Cinema #31, pp.45-52.

Williams, Tony (2000). ‘Addendum’, Asian Cult Cinema #26, pp.59-60.

Films

Eiichi Kudo, Tokuzō Tanaka and Kazuo Ikehiro (1972-1974), Ronin of the Wilderness, Japan: Mifune Production.

Jack Hill (1971), The Big Doll House, USA: New World Pictures.

Jack Hill (1973), Coffy, USA: American International Pictures, Papazian-Hirsch Entertainment International.

Jean-Luc Godard (1965), Pierrot Le Fou, France: Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica, Rome Paris Films, SNC.

Kazuhiko Yamaguchi (1972), Wandering Ginza Butterfly, Japan: Toei Company.

Lars von Trier (2000), Dancer in the Dark, USA & various: Zentropa Entertainments et al.

Masahiro Takase and Yoshiki Onoda (1989-2001), Onihei Hankachō, Japan: Fuji.

Miwa Nishikawa (2020), Under the Open Sky, Japan: Warner Brothers.

Quentin Tarantino (1997), Jackie Brown, USA: Miramax, A Band Apart, Lawrence Bender Productions, Mighty Mighty Afrodite Productions.

Quentin Tarantino (2003-2004), Kill Bill Vol 1 & 2, USA: Miramax, A Band Apart, Super Cool ManChu.

Sergio Leone (1964), A Fistful of Dollars, Italy: Jolly Film, Ocean Films, United Artists, Constantin Film.

Sergio Leone (1965), For a Few Dollars More, Italy: Produzioni Europee Associati, Arturo Gonzalez Producciones Cinematográficas, Constantin Film.

Sergio Leone (1966), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, USA: United Artists, Produzioni Europee Associati, Arturo Gonzalez Producciones Cinematográficas, Constantin Film.

Shunya Ito (1972), Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion, Japan: Toei Company.

Shunya Ito (1972), Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, Japan: Toei Company.

Shunya Ito (1973), Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable, Japan: Toei Company.

Teruo Ishii (1970), Blind Woman’s Curse, Japan: Nikkatsu Corporation, Dainichi-Eihai.

Toshio Matsumoto (1969), Funeral Parade of Roses, Japan: Art Theatre Guild, Matsumoto Production Company.

Toshiya Fujita (1970), Stray Cat Rock: Wild Jumbo, Japan: Nikkatsu Corporation.

Toshiya Fujita (1971), Stray Cat Rock: Beat 71, Japan: Nikkatsu Corporation.

Toshiya Fujita (1973), Lady Snowblood, Japan: Toho Film.

Toshiya Fujita (1974), Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance, Japan: Toho Film.

Yasuharu Hasebe (1970), Stray Cat Rock: Delinquent Girl Boss, Japan: Nikkatsu Corporation.

Yasuharu Hasebe (1970), Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter, Japan: Nikkatsu Corporation.

Yasuharu Hasebe (1970), Stray Cat Rock: Machine Animal, Japan: Nikkatsu Corporation.

Yasuharu Hasebe (1973), Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701’s Grudge Song, Japan: Toei Company.

Yasuzo Masumura (1978), Double Suicide of Sonezaki, Japan: Art Theatre Guild.

Biography

Ash Johann Curry-Machado is a final year MA (Hons) Film Studies student at the University of St Andrews. He has conducted original research on the St Andrews Film Societies and Film Festivals, as well as the St Andrews documentaries made between 1971 to 1983, for the Cinema Cultures Vertically Integrated Project. He is a coach on the Summer Teams Enterprise Programme, producing original research on cinema in Scotland. His reviews have also been published in Film Matters. Research interests are in the fields of Film Materiality, Film Sound, Screen Comedy and Asian Cinema.