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

References

Beck, Jay (2008). ‘The Sounds of “Silence”: Dolby Stereo, Sound Design, and The Silence of the Lambs’, in Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda (eds.) Lowering the boom: critical studies in film sound, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp.6 8-86.

Bronski, Michael (1978). ‘Judy Garland and Others, Notes on Idolization and Derision’, in Karla Jay and Allen Young (eds.) Lavender Culture, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, pp.201-212.

Cather, Kirsten (2021). ‘Japan’s most famous writer committed suicide after a failed coup attempt – now, new photos add layers to the haunting act’, The Conversation, at https://theconversation.com/japans-most-famous-writer-committed-suicide-after-a-failed-coup-attempt-now-new-photos-add-more-layers-to-the-haunting-act-151903

Chion, Michel (1999). ‘Raising the Voice’, in Michel Chion and Claudia Gorbman (eds.) The Voice in Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press, pp.1-14.

Cook, David (1998). ‘Auteur Cinema and the film generation in 70s Hollywood’, in Jon Lewis (ed.) The New American Cinema, New York: Duke University Press, pp. 1-4.

Coulthard, Lisa (2016). ‘Acoustic Disgust: Sound, Affect, and Cinematic Violence’, in Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (eds.) The Palgrave handbook of sound design and music in screen media: integrated soundtracks, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.183-193.

Criterion, ‘Eclipse Series 17: Nikkatsu Noir’, at https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/655-eclipse-series-17-nikkatsu-noir

Dang, Harris (2020). ‘Stray Cat Rock: A Groovy Retrospective’, In Their Own League, at https://intheirownleague.com/2020/08/07/stray-cat-rock-a-groovy-retrospective/

Desjardins, Chris (2005). ‘Meiko Kaji’, Outlaw Masters of Japanese Film, UK: Bloomsbury, pp.59-73.

Evans, Gareth (2015). ‘Newly Filmed Appreciation’, interview, Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection, Arrow Video.

Feld, Steven (2015). ‘Acoustemology’, in David Novak and Matt Sakakeeney (eds.) Keywords in Sound, Durham: Duke University Press, p.12-21.

Fischer, Kirsten Cather (2012). The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

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

Galbraith, Stuart & Duncan, Paul (2009). Japanese Cinema. Los Angeles: Taschen America.

Goodhartz, Jeff (2000). ‘Asia’s Greatest Action Divas’, Asian Cult Cinema #26, pp.61-64.

Greene, Briane (2016). ‘Meiko Kaji: An Appreciation of a Female Badass’, Criminal Element, at https://www.criminalelement.com/meiko-kaji-an-appreciation-of-a-female-badass-stray-cat-rock-lady-snowblood-sasori-female-prisoner-scorpion-japan/

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.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15664/fcj.v21.i0.2707 

 

“I don’t need to go to the cinema to see action” – Jackson Jickson (2023)

Filmmaker Jackson Jickson Quintero was originally born in San Lorenzo, Esmeraldas, a small coastal town in the north of Ecuador and considered to be one of the most impoverished districts in the country (Federación de Centros Chachis de Esmeraldas FECCHE et al. 2017).  Like many livelihood-driven migrants in the late 1980s, his family eventually moved to Guayaquil  — Jickson was only three months old – the most densely populated city in Ecuador and host to the largest afro-descendent community to date (Navarrete 2019, Avilés Sánchez 2015).  At the time, Guayaquil’s development plans included an ambitious highway project called Vía Perimetral, traversing the city and providing direct connections to Puerto Marítimo, the city (and country’s) main port.  But even before construction began, irregular settlements or invasiones had already taken root alongside the expected highway.  Persuaded by land traffickers, many families settled in these territories without proper access to electricity, drinking water or sewage systems.  Jickson’s family was one of them, specifically moving to Isla Trinitaria, the last section of the highway. 

Conditions were even more problematic in estuary regions like Isla Trinitaria.  Being an island surrounded by three mangroves, its wetland geography was not conducive for complex developments and the few families that settled there did so in hut-like housing that ‘hindered’ contractors (Redacción Guayaquil 2010).  Starting in 1987, the island was subject to a hydraulic filling process to strengthen its foundations and allow for the new Vía Perimetral to cross by.  At this point, illegal settlements proved impossible to control. A few families turned into several hundred and then to a few thousand, reaching a population of 18,566 by 1990 (Morán 2019).  Eventually, what began as an unplanned ‘hindrance’ became a full-fledged settlement, with families gradually securing property rights. Reaching more than 90,000 inhabitants in 2015, the island continued to experience high levels of land insecurity, poverty, and violence, in addition to waste pollution in the nearby mangroves (Ibid).  It is under these conditions that Jickson produced two feature films, which he would sell at traffic lights and city buses alongside Vía Perimetral, almost thirty years after his arrival.

This article analyses the connections between Jickson’s filmmaking practice and Isla Trinitaria’s geographical, cultural, and ecological context.  Parallels between the two are not limited to just inhabiting a sensible urban space, but can also be expanded to questions of value, the transit of goods and services, and the expected environmental aftermath of such developments.  This article engages with with Axel Pérez Trujillo’s concept of ‘exposed insularity’ (2022), which analyses comparable case study related to islands, Jorge Furtado’s Ilha das Flores (Island of Flowers, 1989).  By ‘exposed insularity’ Trujillo recognises that islands constitute a rather open and vulnerable geographic space, prone to capitalist trajectories of trade and consumerism, despite expectations of narrowness and self-containment.  They identify these trajectories in Ilha das Flores, a non-fiction short film that criticises the literal island of waste that is located near the city of Porto Alegre, in the southeast coast of Brazil.  While Trujillo analyses the relations between consumption and waste on Ilha das Flores (the island) in the eponymous film, this article suggests that ‘exposed insularity’ can also be applied to alternative film practices that emerge from similar precarious conditions, like in the case of Jackson Jickson and Isla Trinitaria.

This article first discusses an anecdotal account of Jickson’s film practices, situating them within the local film industry of Ecuador at the time.  Described by some as a local ‘mini boom’ (Caselli 2012, De la Fuente 2015), Ecuadorian cinema experienced a significant leap in quantity and quality between the mid-2000s and 2010s.  In contrast, film expressions like Jickson’s were usually framed as Ecuador bajo tierra or underground movement, distributed outside commercial theatres, and characterised by low production value and guerrilla aesthetics (Alvear and León, Ecuador Bajo Tierra: videografías en circulación paralela. 2009). This assumption of an ‘unearthed’ cinema in Jickson’s filmography is further explored and attributed to global exchanges of cinematic taste and waste.  Compared to preferred production practices that prioritised theatrical exhibition and critical acclaim, Jickson’s films are usually seen as amateur, needing to be developed into a more palatable and professional aesthetic.  Jickson himself would embrace this pursuit as he attempted to fund future projects, gain recognition as a filmmaker and consequently secure a livelihood (Quintero Boboy 2023).  What makes Jickson’s case particularly relevant to Trujillo’s exposed insularity is its archipelagic marginality, open and exposed to capitalist trajectories even when such vulnerability proves detrimental for their welfare. 

Consequently, this article continues with a review of Isla Trinitaria’s social and environmental concerns, focusing on the period between 2012 and 2016.  Here, the argument of exposed insularity becomes even more relevant.  Not only was Jickson’s main filmography produced then, but it also correlates with a “zero tolerance” campaign against illegal settlements supported by the state (Presidencia de la República del Ecuador 2013).  This campaign eventually resulted in tragic forceful evictions, with sectors like Isla Trinitaria experiencing evident human rights violations despite being an already established settlement (Navarrete, Informe Sobre Desalojos Forzosos Isla Trinitaria 2015). Therefore, in addition to the ecological impact of the initial settlements, the human debris of these evictions attest for Isla Trinitaria’s increased vulnerability, affecting the mangrove as well as the physical wellbeing of its inhabitants. 

This article intended to close with a textual analysis of two of Jickson’s films: his opera prima Dime Hasta Cuándo(2012) and his sophomore feature Una Noche Sin Sueño (2016).  As of July 2023, these films are expected to be re-edited and re-released via online platforms.  However, since these films are not yet available, the textual analysis presented focuses on previews of these films available online.[1]  Here, I argued that Jickson’s body of work is able to capture the social and ecological tensions of Isla Trinitaria, even when not necessarily conceived with an environmental critique in mind.  In doing so, Jickson’s filmography reveals the exposed insularity that permeates Isla Trinitaria, given its unique positioning as an urban island adjacent to the city of Guayaquil.  This argument is further corroborated by analysing a video report by a local NGO, the Standing Committee for the Defence of Human Rights or CDH, that also showcases similar aesthetic techniques as Jickson’s films and further validating its witnessing potential. 

Exposed Insularity, Poetics of Relations, and Trans-Corporeality

To explore the multiple connections between Jickson’s film practice and Isla Trinitaria’s ecological concerns, an interdisciplinary approach is indeed required.  In this sense, Trujillo’s concept of exposed insularity provides some helpful insights to theorise these problematics, given Isla Trinitaria’s unique positioning as an urban island in the Golf of Guayaquil.  Pérez Trujillo relies on two main sources in developing this framework: the ‘poetics of Relation’ by Édouard Glissant (1997)and the concept of ‘trans-corporeality’ by Stacy Alaimo (2016).  From these two inputs, Trujillo concludes that “an exposed insularity critically traces the dark side of interconnections in the Anthropocene, revealing the often-ignored exchanges between bodily natures that come to the surface in island geographies” (2022, 137).  In this line, this article seeks to explore the economic, societal, and environmental trajectories that converge at Isla Trinitaria and that are present in the film texts of Jackson Jickson. 

Like the analysis of Furtado’s Ilha das Flores that prompted the concept of exposed insularity the exchanges that take place in Isla Trinitaria can be attributed to its geographical positioning in relation to Guayaquil, but also at a more granular level when assessing the bodily relations between humans and with non-human entities.  Here, theories by Glissant and Alaimo overlap and complement each other.  Starting with the former and referring specifically to the Caribbean, Glissant understands the archipelago as ‘each island embody[ing] openness’ (1989, 139 in Truijlo 2022).  While a Martinique-born philosopher and poet with early ties to the negritude movement of Aimé Césaire, Glissant rejects the idea of islands as self-contained and isolated geographies (Mortimer 1992).  Rather, Glissant sees islands as spaces of relation that oppose the constraints established by continents, which in the case of the Caribbean are closely linked to colonisation and its resulting ‘creolisation’ (1997).  Pérez Trujillo draws from Glissant to conclude that the islands featured in Furtado’s film are open in a negative and positive sense: prone to the waste disposal that results from the global circulation of commodities but also porous to intercultural exchanges (2022, 137).  In this regard, Glissant’s motto reads quite suitable: “I can change through exchanging with others, without losing or diluting my sense of self” (Glissant and Ulrich Obrist 2022).

Insularity, therefore, acknowledges the concrete identity of islands but avoids imposing a narrative of self-containment and narrowness.  As this article seeks to discuss, places like Isla Trinitaria can be expected to develop a concrete sense of self that is also malleable, shaped by the persistent flow of people, goods, and services. Specifically, this identity is formed by the low-income internal migrants that populated the island, infrastructural developments like Vía Perimetral aimed at boosting international trade, and the production of afro-Ecuadorian cultural products like Jickson’s films.  But as the opening example of this article suggests, this malleability is also risky.  Related to Ilha das Flores, Trujillo combines the idea of insularity with Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporality, in particular its embedded exposure (2016).  By trans-corporality, Alaimo highlights substantial material exchanges that trespass an assumed divide between humans and their environment, or what they describe as ‘figure/ground relations’ (2018, 435).  The notion of ‘exposure’ comes into play as these transversal dynamics suppose an inherent risk, especially when discussing the toxicity of waste evident in Ilha das Flores, the island, later hypertextualized in Ilha das Flores, the film.  Pérez Trujillo interprets this toxicity considering Alaimo’s trans-corporality of toxic bodies, both human and non-human, which implies a shared vulnerability based on the precarious (2022, 139).  For the case of Isla Trinitaria, trans-corporality can be observed in the ecological debris of irregular settlements and forced evictions, in addition to the immediate toxicity of its precariousness, in the form of organised crime, violence and substance abuse.  These themes also resonate with Jickson’s preferred narratives.

To further assess the concept of ‘exposed insularity’ for Jackson Jickson and Isla Trinitaria, each of their trajectories are mapped before evaluating how these intersect in Jickson’s film texts.   As expected, Jickson is usually characterised as an underground / guerrilla filmmaker yet to find recognition within an Ecuadorian field of cultural production.  Likewise, Isla Trinitaria remains an urban slum that continues to struggle with irregular settlements, more recently exacerbated by a “zero tolerance” campaign and so-called environmental initiatives like Guayaquil Ecológico (Ministerio de Desarrollo Urbano y Vivienda, Ministerio del Ambiente 2013).  Therefore, this article continues by exploring the specific film industry articulations during Jickson’s production practice, which demonstrate a clear divide between the local cinema consumed in commercial theatres, and a bajo tierra movement that circulates outside traditional exhibition sites. 

Jackson Jickson and La Platota Musical

In feature piece for Revista Mundo Diners, journalist Elías Urdánigo (2013) provides a detailed account of Jickson’s cultural interests and practices.  The title of the piece, La Perla Negra (The Black Pearl), already hints to connections between the city and its Afro-Ecuadorian influences.  Often referred to as La Perla del Pacífico (The Pacific Pearl), Guayaquil hosts the largest Afro-Ecuadorian population in the country, even larger than Esmeraldas, the northern-most province in Ecuador and known for its Afro-Ecuadorian roots.  Born in Esmeraldas, it is not surprising to see Jickson’s family choosing to settle in Isla Trinitaria, the sector in Guayaquil that concentrates a large percentage of this population.  The title of Urdánigo’s piece suggests the dichotomy between the aspired glossiness of the city and the opacity of its predominantly black population.[2]

The piece opens with Jickson at the crossroads of a busy street in Guayaquil.  Jickson leads a group of boys (or los muchachos as described by the article) selling DVDs of Jickson’s first feature film Dime hasta cuando (Figure 1), with the intention of raising funds for his following project Una noche sin sueño (2016).  While the first film had allegedly sold over 10,000 copies through street vendors, Jickson would not see much of these earnings.  Averaging one dollar per copy, this expected income would soon be spent in transportation, equipment rentals that consist primarily of a Canon prosumer camera, as well as refreshments for the boys (Urdánigo 2013).  In some instances, DVDs would be sold without Jickson’s knowledge to fulfil the immediate needs of these boys.  This vignette closely resembles hand to mouth conditions that permeate Jickson’s film production and Isla Trinitaria more broadly.  Indeed, Urdánigo also mentions that as a teenager, Jickson would sell sweets in interprovincial buses, work as an errand boy or help in construction sites, among many other forms of underemployment (Ibid).  Hence, it is not surprising to see Jickson and los muchachos engaging in a similar business model to promote these films, one that is all too familiar given their social positioning.[3]

Under these circumstances, it is worth asking how someone like Jickson would manage to produce a film in the first place.  In an interview for this article (Quintero Boboy 2023), Jickson stated that film production grew organically from early ventures in music management, still constituting one of his main creative outputs.  During the late 2000s and despite underemployment, Jickson met an undisclosed investor that awarded an unspecified amount of money to develop this interest.  At the time, Jickson worked as a storehouse clerk for a local telecommunications company, but still found space to produce music with some local performers, with a preference of tropical genres such as salsa and urban music.  Jickson’s opera prima Dime hasta cuando came about as a by-product of an intended music video, after realising that the footage was extensive enough to be turned into a feature film.  The name of Jickson’s music label La Platota Musical (Big Money Music) is a direct reference to this event, also related to the “big pockets full of change” that they would carry after a full day of selling their work on street buses (Ibid). 

The Ecuador Bajo Tierra movement

Film scholar Lúcia Ramos Monteiro (2016) refers to a phrase that captures the essence of what came to be known as Ecuador bajo tierra movement, which also relates to Jickson’s film practices described above: Filmo, luego existo (I film; therefore, I am).  The phrase was initially featured in the film Mas allá del Mall (Beyond the Mall, 2010) a local mockumentary that uses a colloquial tone to showcase the inner workings of underground filmmakers in Ecuador.  Onscreen, the phrase was articulated by underground filmmaker Nelson Palacios, although it was originally written by director Miguel Alvear to summarise the production practices and social struggles of the movement.  The phrase denotes a sense of urgency in film production to secure a livelihood, relying on alternative business models that operate outside the multiplex and depend on self-distribution and self-promotion.  Jickson film practice shows many of these characteristics, however, what makes it distinctive from other underground expressions is their unique racial and ecological positioning in relation to Isla Trinitaria.  It is this particularity that also connects with Trujillo’s exposed insularity, situating Jickson’s underground production at the margins of global capitalist trajectories of taste and waste.

Indeed, scholars that have studied Ecuador Bajo Tierra films (hereby EBT) tend to use terminology that implies a low-brow characterisation, which aligns with the movement’s relative position within a local field of cultural production.  The Ecuador Bajo Tierra label, for instance, refers to the idea of operating “beneath the dominant culture” which characterised American underground film but does not go as far as enjoying a fashionable tastemaker status among intellectual elites (O’Pray 2006, 63).  Rather, Alvear and film scholar Christian León accurately situate EBT films in “parallel circulation” to expected trajectories of local film production that see theatrical distribution as a marker of success (2009).  Film scholar Gabriela Alemán (2009) draws a similar conclusion, describing EBT films as distinct from the Ecuadorian cinema that is shown in theatres, targeted to the urban middle class and cultured elites.   Yet Alemán avoids offering a definitive exploitation categorisation, given that EBT films do not necessarily tackle forbidden or morally compromising themes, although coinciding with low-budget production and independent distribution (Schaefer 2007, Hunter 2013).  More recently, Carolina Stinisky (2018) approaches EBT films from the perspective of precariousness and hints to a ‘lesser’ cinema, or ‘less than’ the cinemas of small nations theorised by Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (2007).   Similar counterparts include Peru’s Cine Regional(Bustamante and Luna-Victoria 2014), Colombia’s Cines Populares (González Valencia 2020), and Nigeria’s Nollywood (Haynes 2016).  

In short, this body of research seems to define EBT films in relation to dominant film practices, both locally and globally.  However, scholar Rafael Ponce-Cordero also suggests that such phenomenon can be self-inflicted, what they describe as “neoliberalism from below” (2019).  Referring to the local bajo tierra movement, Ponce-Cordero identifies an internal need for recognition that is grounded in an understanding of success equated to profitability.  In other words, underground filmmakers seem to aspire to commercial exhibition, high production value and the expected profit gained from developing their craft, which are aspirations not solely imposed from the top.  As Ponce-Cordero would argue, underground filmmakers are aware of their marginal standing and embrace a narrative of progress as a means to find validation in the local film industry.  In this line, filmmakers like Jickson present themselves as self-made entrepreneur or todólogos (jack of all trades), able to adapt to as many demands a project can bring, in the hopes of eventually reaching financial security. 

The fact that many of these filmmakers remain at the margins despite their innate talent, desire and work ethic suggests structural barriers that prevent them to be fully acknowledged within a local film industry.  Whereas an “objective incompetence” can be observed regarding formal elements such as unpolished camera work, non-professional actors, over-the-top dialogue and unconstructed set design and locales, their marginality is not a matter of film training but a reflection of broader societal issues.[4]  Focusing on Fernando Cedeño’s Sicarios Manabitas (Hitmen from Manabi, 2004), Stinisky describes EBT films as “the precarious other” (2018, 187), showcasing their otherness through locales outside city centres but also through the creative ways in which they choose to produce and distribute their films.  Like with many “lesser than” cinemas from Peru, Colombia and Nigeria, films like Sicarios Manabitas “are considerably indebted to the action films of the Van Damme-Stallone-Segal trinity; as well as to the Mexican narcofronteriza (border/drug) film.” (Alemán 2009, 268).  In this sense, EBT films aspire to a global aesthetic defined by international tastemakers, but by failing to reach a high-production value or reasonable technical expertise, which León describes as an “imitation of an impossible model” (Alvear and León 2009, 22), they inadvertently become somewhat of a local parody.  For the case of Jackson Jickson, “the precarious other” directly relates to his vulnerability as an Afro-Ecuadorian filmmaker from Isla Trinitaria, also prone to these transnational influences.

Therefore, as underground filmmakers have internalised expectations of value and worth attributed to global film markets, they continue to inhabit what Gabriela Alemán describes as “the liminal space where globalization equals economic inequity” (Aleman 2009 272).  Yet, it is in this ‘badness’ that a sense of subversion begins to take place, making use of illegal circuits of distribution to cater to a demand that arguably exceeds traditional viewership in theatres (Ibid).[5]  Therefore, as Robert Stam would conclude for “garbage” more broadly, the dismissed and overlooked Ecuador bajo tierra movement has no option but to “reveal the social formation as seen “from below” (1998, 24), even when these filmmakers aspired to the same value systems that impose hegemonic control.

Isla Trinitaria and ‘Aesthetics of Garbage’

Applying an allegory of garbage to describe the Ecuador bajo tierra and by extension Jickson’s filmmaking practice can certainly be problematic.  Even the bajo tierra terminology has come into scrutiny by many underground filmmakers who would rather use a guerrilla moniker (Alvear and León 2009), Jickson included (Quintero Boboy 2023).  Scholars like Ramos Monteiro (2016) would propose terms like autodidacta or self-taught to move away from the negative connotations of the bajo tierra, including its unearthed and clandestine assumptions.  While these suggestions are undoubtedly valid, I believe that such concerns should also be explored in relation to Isla Trinitaria’s history of ecological damage, human displacement, and poverty, which also inform Jickson’s film texts.  These trajectories will reveal that, like the Ecuador bajo tierra movement, Isla Trinitaria also carries an assumed expectation of a lesser standing, even to the point of being at times being considered disposable.

Expanding on the development of Isla Trinitaria as an urban slum, it is worth mentioning the role of land traffickers in promoting irregular settlements in the sector.  According to Billy Navarrete who serves as director of the Standing Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CDH), land traffickers enjoyed a semi-tacit agreement with local authorities during the 1970s and 80s, which allowed them to promise land security and stability to incoming internal migrants (Entrevista Billy Navarrete – Isla Trinitaria | #Sobrevivientes PlanV 2019).  Operating at the border of illegality, land traffickers would facilitate construction materials to build houses, even without proper sewage systems or access to drinking water.  They would also mobilise local groups to ‘protect’ the slums, closely resembling guerrilla forces to counter expropriation efforts by the local police (Ibid).  In short, land traffickers played a two-fold role when negotiating property rights: capitalising on the needs of the collective but also using that collective force to secure political leverage.  Not surprisingly, many of these traffickers remained in the public sphere even after the turn of the 21^st century, maintaining important levels of popularity among low-income voters.[6]

Without an appropriate urban layout and controlled primarily by land traffickers, Isla Trinitaria experienced an aggressive destruction of the local mangrove.  Starting with the hydraulic filling that consolidated the island, urban waste increased as more families began to populate the area, equally affecting the surrounding estuary regions.  The precarity of these settlements also prompted high levels of violence and organised crime, in addition to heavy consumption and commercialisation of narcotics (García 2016, Naranjo 2016, Torres 2023).  By 2012, when Jackson Jickson produced his first feature film, the only few pockets of native vegetation left were located on the northeast side of the island, specifically near Cooperativa Mélida de Toral, one of Jickson’s shooting locations (García, Un cine crudo y popular surge de la Trinitaria 2015).  While northwards the estuary serves as a natural delimiter for the island, its southern border consists primarily of small scale or privately owned trading ports, visibly constituting a wall of cement that prevents further settlements (Figure 2).  A similar dynamic can be observed alongside the shoreline of the island, where many families were been evicted to build so-called Parques Lineales or linear parks, also featuring cement-based constructions.  Adding to the already mentioned Vía Perimetral that traverses the island, as Susana Morán would state in a journalistic piece for Plan V, “cement is synonymous with legalisation” in Isla Trinitaria (2019). 

Expanding on these evictions, nearly forty families situated near Cooperativa Mélida de Toral were forcefully expropriated from their homes (Navarrete, Informe Sobre Desalojos Forzosos Isla Trinitaria 2015).  This incident occurred on March 27, 2015.  Without proper notice and due diligence, four hundred armed policemen intervened the area, employing backhoe loaders to destroy these houses, many constructed with the local caña guadua and other vulnerable mixed materials.  From an ecological perspective and in line with the Guayaquil Ecológico programme, this decision was justified by the apparent environmental risk involved by irregular settlements, since many of these houses were built at the shore of the estuary (Mendoza Reynoso 2015).  However, only four years later, the lineal parks that replaced these households were considered “useless” and instead foster illegal activities such as thefts and drug use (Morán 2019).  In this line, considering Mary Douglas understanding of garbage as “matter out of place” (Douglas 2002), Isla Trinitaria continues to appear as an unfortunate ‘hindrance’, just as it did at the time of its hydraulic filling.

Guerrilla filmmaking from ‘The Trinity Island’

Certainly, the convergence of internal livelihood-driven migration, the scarcity of low-income housing, and insufficient strategies promoted by land traffickers, city, and state governments, have resulted in a significant environmental toll for Isla Trinitaria and its inhabitants.  This, compared to the marginality experienced by Jickson as a bajo tierra filmmaker that also aspires to traditional expectations of success based on profitability and commercial exhibition, have equally resulted in film texts that showcase an obvious transnational aspiration but cannot negate their immediate vulnerability.  Therefore, the following section analyses excerpts from two of Jickson’s films: his opera prima Dime hasta cuando (2012) and his sophomore feature Una noche sin sueño (2016).  These films are later compared to a video report by the CDH on the mentioned evictions, arguing that both examples showcase exposed insularity as theorised by Pérez Trujillo.

As stated before, unless acquired through street vendors on Vía Perimetral or similar urban intersections, Jickson’s films are not readily available.  According to Jickson (2023), his films were not shared online due to their sensible content, only uploading few excerpts for advertisement purposes on YouTube.  This decision might also be attributed to preventing piracy; however, the films continue to be requested, particularly by former Isla Trinitaria’s residents.  Jickson states that there is an interest in recalling the landscape of the island prior to the Guayaquil Ecológico programme and similar city-wide beautification project promoted by the city council.  The fact that Jickson’s films were produced around this period already hints to some potential parallels between these events, but also highlights their importance in terms of Isla Trinitaria’s own social memory.

Some obvious aesthetic coincidences can already be observed between the excerpts available from the films and the footage collected in the aftermath of these forceful evictions, each demonstrating their own sense of exposed insularity.  Narratively speaking, Jickson’s first film Dime hasta cuando tells the story of mafia groups fighting for territory in the island, also featuring love triangles and other non-related subplots that complement the film.  One preview available online (Dime Hasta Cuando – La Pelicula, Avances 2012) starts with the title “The Trinity Island” on black, accompanied by eery music that increases in intensity as the first scenes appear.  A handheld wide shot reveals a group of Afro-Ecuadorian teenage boys dressed in rugged sportswear, running through a paved intersection as they discover another boy lying dead on the pavement, covered in blood and construction materials.  The remainder of the preview consists of more criminal activity, such as pickpocketing or robbing a storefront while holding heavy guns.  A brief interlude features a vulnerable Jickson excusing his behaviour to a concerned partner.

The nature of Jickson’s filmmaking explains its unstable camera work, running behind characters to follow action scenes, or experimenting with zoom settings to heighten emotionally charged conversations.  The mobility of prosumer equipment also led to continuity errors between cuts, unbalanced blocking and out of focus compositions.  But it is this lack of artifice in Jickson’s films that further witnesses the conditions of its production practices.  For instance, while the opening scene of the preview is shot on a concrete road, the surrounding houses show mixed materials and walls without plaster.  Other passages feature unpaved roads covered in mud and overgrown vegetation, with houses built from caña guada, a local material that resembles bamboo cane.  The final scene includes construction waste stacked on the side of a dusty road and zinc plates that serve as improvised property fences for the caña households (Figure 4).  Hence, as Morán would later explain (2019), cement constitutes a clear divide in Isla Trinitaria, a staple of the progress narrative promulgated by city and state officials, at the expense of vulnerable residents and the local mangrove.

This exposed insularity is not limited to the landscape of Isla Trinitaria but can also be extended to its effect on Afro-Ecuadorian bodies, in the form of organised crime, violence and substance abuse.  Jickson’s second film Una noche sin sueño(2016) stars Jickson as a successful business owner that loses everything after developing a drug addiction.  The film trailer (Pelicula una noche sin sueño con la participación de la artista maesa 2015) opens with a silhouette of an Afro-Ecuadorian woman lighting what appears to be a marihuana cigarette, outdoors and late into the night.  Her face is out of focus, whereas the overgrown vegetation in the background appears dimly lit and in focus.  The trailer follows with a super-cut montage of the woman seeking more drugs, a group of gang members on motorcycles and carrying guns, and clips of Jickson falling into insanity, waking up in the middle of an abandoned field.  Like in the previous excerpt, Jickson’s character is also confronted by his partner, who asks for an explanation as their house and other properties are about to be embargoed. 

In terms of aesthetic choices, the unstable camera work, unpolished continuity, and use of non-professional actors are also maintained in Una noche sin sueño.  However, Jickson seems to bring an additional layer of meaning by employing the landscape of Isla Trinitaria as an allegoric signifier.  To illustrate, the opening scene of the trailer also shows the addicted woman scavenging through the dirt, looking for coins to acquire more drugs.  The drug house that she visits is made of caña guadua, whilst the inside of Jickson’s house displays another type of wooden material: carefully carved sculptures to represent their lavished lifestyle.  Lastly, a more obvious connection can be observed in the abandoned field scene.  Shot from a low-angle perspective, two thirds of the frame are composed by construction debris: a mesh of rocks, wood, metal rods and landfill waste.  Behind the mesh, Jickson hunches, out of focus, to caress one of the few plants that remain in the field.  An unplastered wall serves as a backdrop while Jickson tries to make sense of his surroundings.  Almost unintendedly, the porosity of black bodies inhabiting a precarious islandic space appears to be portrayed in this human/ground encounter (Figure 5).

Interestingly, while Jickson’s films constitute fictional portrayals of this exposed insularity, they resonate with related works of non-fiction, in particular a video report by the Standing Committee for the Defence of Human Rights recorded only a few hours after the tragic evictions took place on March 2015  (CDH Guayaquil 2015).  The video, uploaded on YouTube the day after these evictions, opens with a group of young people gathered in front of the camera.  Outdoors and late in the evening, the group appears lit by a singular beam of light.  With a black and white colour correction, they are prompted by a question off screen: “Is this the first time that you have had to sleep on the streets?”, to which they respond altogether: “Yes, for all of us” (Ibid).  Subsequently, the camera walks around the rubble left by the backhoe loaders, featuring children sleeping on top of the debris, covered in blankets.  The camera is guided by worried residents, particularly mothers who express their anxiety on the situation.  The minute-long video closes with a tilt-down shot of two afro-Ecuadorian children attempting to sleep outdoors.

Compared to sensational television reporting or local sitcoms that portray Isla Trinitaria, the CDH report features many of the aesthetic choices of Jickson’s films, which gives validity to their witnessing potential.[7]  The unsteady camera work is justified and even anticipated, given the urgency of events and the stylistic expectations of a journalist report.  The video piece also displays the same housing constructions as Jickson’s films, predominantly built from caña guadua or zinc plates that function as walls.  Like the depiction of waste and construction material, these decisions can be attributed to Jickson’s inability to modify its environment when scouting locations, however, the fact that he chooses to portray such locales despite their reputation as irregular settlements, suggest that they constitute an intrinsic component of Isla Trinitaria’s identity.  

This is article has contended that Jackson Jickson’s own filmmaking practice, as well as Isla Trinitaria islandic geography, display exposed insularity as theorised by Axel Pérez Trujillo, given their unique geographical, cultural, and ecological positioning.  This argument has been supported by mapping the capitalist trajectories of trade and waste evident in Jickson’s body of work as a bajo tierra filmmaker, and Isla Trinitaria’s long history of ecological damage, human displacement, and precariousness.  At a more specific level, this exposed insularity has been analysed in the film text of Jackson Jickson, resorting to few excerpts and previews available online.  These have also been compared to a video report by the local Standing Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, constituting an important record of forced evictions and human rights violations in Isla Trinitaria, which take a higher resonance when considering the predominantly Afro-Ecuadorian makeup of the island.  In both instances, Isla Trinitaria is portrayed as an open and vulnerable archipelagic space, prone to the debris of global exchanges of goods and services and the resulting exposed trans-corporality between human and non-human agents.  As Rob Nixon states: “Casualties of slow violence—human and environmental—are the casualties most likely not to be seen, not to be counted.” (2011, 11).  In this sense, despite their technical shortcomings, Jackson Jickson’s films can potentially become a vehicle for these casualties to be seen, either by Isla Trinitaria’s inhabitants and residents directly affected by the illegal expropriations, or even those that, like CDH Guayaquil, can end up also seeing themselves taking action against the mesh of global trajectories of waste.[8]

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Biography

Dr María Fernanda Miño Puga is an Associate Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, Department of Film Studies. She is currently working on her first monograph entitled “Ecuadorian Cinema for the 21^st century”, where she examines the intersection between film narratives, aesthetics, and production practices in Ecuadorian Cinema, and their relationship to film policy and industry in the 21^st century.  She holds a PhD from the University of Saint Andrews (Scotland, UK), and two master’s degrees from Lindenwood University (St Louis, Missouri).  More recent interests include the concept of Buen Vivir (Good Living) in indigenous film and media, particularly in connection to decoloniality and the rights of nature.  Previous publications include research on political documentary, collective memory, participatory video practices in disaster settings, as well as local identities. 

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[1] The unavailability of these films, despite their remembrance and impact in local culture, speak of their ephemeral condition.  Paul Grainge describes the ephemeral as connoting “the evanescent, transient and brief… anything short-lived” (2017, 1).  This connotation also carries applications related to the peripheral, throwaway, and to questions of cultural value (Ibid), which directly relates to the positioning of Jickson’s films.  As a personal anecdote, unable to retrieve the DVDs of the films which I had previously acquired through street vendors, I reached out to Mr Jickson, who coincidentally was in the process of re-editing them.  In this sense, the initial films can be said to be irretrievable in their original form.

[2] One of Jickson’s shooting locations in Isla Trinitaria is Cooperativa Independencia 2, commonly known as ‘Nigeria’.  According to Urdánigo (2013), the nickname gained popularity in 2002, when residents chose to wear the Nigerian jersey during a local football tournament.  This anecdote further illustrates the racial makeup of the island as well how the population of the island identifies itself.

[3] Urdánigo emphasis on los muchachos finds resonance in a viral video circulated by Trinipuerto resident Jessica Alarcón, commonly known as ‘Mafia Chumi’ (2015).  Recorded on a mobile phone, the video features Alarcón smoking a marihuana joint and greeting her fellow muchachosdown the street.  After serving time in jail for alleged possession of drugs, Alarcón still aspires to become a television reporter (Párraga 2021)

[4] On the relation between badness in film and incompetence, see Bartlett (2019)

[5] Alemán, for instance, refers to illegal distribution avenues such as piracy as a means to overcome coloniality (2009, 263).  Analysing the politics of copyright and drawing on the work on Rocío Silva Santistévan (Silva Santisteban 2007), Alemán defends the use of photocopies to make available otherwise inaccessible film education and resources.  This line of reasoning would serve to further support her argument against giving a definitive latsploitation label to EBT films. 

[6] Sebastián Cordero’s film Sin Muertos No Hay Carnaval (Such is Life in the Tropics, 2016) portrays some of these dynamics for an unspecified urban slum in the city of Guayaquil.  The film was Ecuador’s official entry for the Academy Awards.

[7] On this note, two specific examples can be mentioned: En Carne Propia (In True Blood, 2008-2021) a news programme characterised by sensationalist stories aimed at low-income households, and La Trinity (2016-2017) a local sitcom that uses Isla Trinitaria as its main locale.  According to Jickson (2023), this latter example was directly inspired by him.

[8] As previously stated, the two films mentioned in this article are currently being re-edited, expected to be uploaded to social media soon. Jickson is currently working on a new project called Negro Mío (My Negro 2023) which he intends to turn into a Netflix Original Series (Quintero Boboy 2023).