Signifyin' Cinema: Rudy Ray Moore and the Quality of Badness (original) (raw)
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André Bazin, one of the major film theorists of the twentieth century, famously entitled his opus magnum <i>What is Cinema?</i> Picking up where Bazin left off, Adrian Martin recently re-inscribed the question within the context of contemporary cinema in his monograph <i>What is Modern Cinema?</i> The appropriate question for us to ask here would be "What is BAD Cinema?" However, by raising this question I seek not so much to introduce the BAD cinema discourse, but to interrogate it within the broader interdisciplinary framework that <i>Colloquy</i> has consistently advocated.<br>The organisers of the conference "B for BAD Cinema: aesthetics, politics and cultural value", which took place at Monash in April 2009 and from which the contributions to the current issue have been drawn, traced BAD cinema's pedigree to cult film, paracinema and its early predecessors in the form of B-movies of studio era.
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The goals of academic film scholarship can be vaguely defined as the desire to better understand cinema as a medium through different critical frameworks. Among these include the aesthetic devices film uses to communicate or how the medium is engaged with by audiences. Bad movies, an easily recognizable mode of cinema with no clear definition, have rarely been considered a practical area for study in this discipline, and this is in part due to the language used to describe them. Colloquial traditions refer to bad cinema with terminology that is highly evaluative,
The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture, 2020
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Richard Rushton, The Politics of Hollywood Cinema: Popular Film and Contemporary Political Theory
In trying to present Hitchcock as an Emersonian, Rothman provides wonderfully textured readings of his films and puts a new emphasis into Hitchcock criticism. However, his readings, for all their subtlety, too often occlude Hitchcock's obvious emphasis on spectacles of sensational, sexual violence that come to mean beyond, underneath, or in excess of the plots that authorize and work to contain them, and he disavows the ways that women are always the objects of this violence, especially in Hitchcock's greatest films. The power of Rothman's work is also its limit: he believes that every shot in Hitchcock creates 'a thought it makes knowable' (p. 285). But why should there be only one thought, and do Hitchcock's images only think? Psycho, Vertigo and Marnie solicit us not merely to think but also to enjoy. Rothman presents Hitchcock as a kind of American dream of reinvention, but that dream has always been sustained by a disturbing violence. Throughout the book, Rothman invokes Emerson's wonderful observation that we must pay 'tuition' for our 'intuitions' (p. 270), but he cannot see that in Hitchcock's world men and women are always made to pay at very different rates. Rothman's book is an important contribution to Hitchcock scholarship, but one that must be read with a feminist eye towards the particular cost of our tuition.
Cinema Against Spectacle: Technique and Ideology Revisited
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to denote the strand of film theory opened up by the work of Cahiers and Cinéthique in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with Rosen declaring, "Today it is possible to identify something we can call 1970s film theory." Cf., in addition to his preface in the present volume, Philip Rosen, "Screen and 1970s Film Theory," in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Grieveson and Wasson, op. cit., p. 264. 3. Cf., in particular, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). Admittedly the focus of the texts in this volume is more on Screen and its legacy in English-language film theory than Cahiers per se. 4. Cf. D.N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism, 2nd edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Rodowick's influential account of "political modernism" will be further addressed below. 5. Ibid., p. vii. 6. Of particular note here, with regard to Bazin's work, is the collection Opening Bazin, ed. Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), as well as Barnard's re-translation of a number of Bazin's key texts, cf. André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. and ed. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009). 7. A fuller account of the text's publication history follows below. 8. Cf. infra, p. 57. 9. Tom Conley, "Comolli Again," paper at Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, New Orleans, March 2011. 10. For more on Comolli's biographical background, cf. the two-part interview recently published in Senses of Cinema, which serves as a pendant to this introduction. Jean-Louis Comolli, interviewed by Daniel Fairfax, "'Yes, we were utopians; in a way, I still am...':