Cult Cinema: A Critical Symposium (original) (raw)
Related papers
In the footsteps of 'The Wicker Man': personal mythopoesis and the processes of cult film fandom
2009
In contemporary cult film scholarship, the experiences of cult fans are too often subject to scholarly speculation rather than empirical observation, and tend to be limited to certain kinds of audience responses - deviant, rebellious, subversive. Even in instances where actual cult fans have been considered at all, scholars have largely produced synchronic snapshots rather than insights derived from sustained programmes of audience research. This study focuses on a faction of the increasingly visible cult following which has emerged in recent years around the British film The Wicker Man. Drawing on the personal testimonies of eight enduring fans of the film, I explicate and explore the range of experiences and complex processes involved in becoming and remaining a fan of The Wicker Man. I develop an approach to cult film fandom which aims to provide an account of the origins and evolution of a specific cult film formation. Combining textual analysis with a rich body of ethnographic ...
The Oxford Handbook of New Science Fiction Cinemas, 2023
The cult science ction (sf) lm is one that, in various ways, is excessive in relation to common understandings of the genre. It is typically weirder, stranger, quirkier, and/or of lesser quality than other sf lms. This chapter de nes that di erence and focuses speci cally on a cult subcategory-the quirky dystopian lm. With particular attention to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Alex Cox's Repo Man, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster, and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, the chapter explores how these black comedies use absurdity to offset the bleakness of their dystopian settings and to amplify their critiques of contemporary life. Their particular quirkiness becomes a marker of and for their cult audience who find in this character a reflection of themselves and their desire for individuality.
The allure of otherness: transnational cult film fandom and the exoticist assumption
Academic scholarship addressing transnational cult fandom, particularly Western cult fans forming attachments to films outside their cultures, has frequently addressed the issue of exoticism. Much attention has been paid to how Western fans are problematically drawn to artefacts outside of their own cultures because of exotic qualities, resulting in a shallow and often condescending appreciation of such films. In this article, I critique a number of such articles for merely assuming such processes without proffering sufficient supporting evidence. In fact, I argue that a number of such exotic-oriented critiques of transnational cultism are actually guilty of practising what they preach against: an insufficient contextualization of fandom and a tendency to downplay the messiness of empirical data in favour of generalized abstractions. Further, I argue that the constant critique of fans as avoiding contextualization has not only been overstated but stringently used as a yardstick to denigrate fan engagements with texts as improper. As such, fans are often ‘othered’ within such articles, a process mirroring the ways they are accused of othering distant cultural artefacts.
Meta-cinematic Cultism: Between High and Low Culture
Cinema – Arte, Tecnologia, Comunicação, 2016
Meta-cinema can depict film viewers’ attitudes towards cinema and their type of devotion for films. One subcategory of viewers - which I call meta-spectators - is highly specialized in its type of consumption, bordering on obsession. I contend that there are two main varieties of meta-cinematic reception, not altogether incompatible with one another, despite their apparent differences. As both of them are depicted on meta-cinematic products, the films themselves are the best evidence of my typology. My categories of film viewers are the ‘cinephile’, an elite prone to artistic militancy and the adoration of filmic masters; and the ‘fan’, a low culture consumer keen on certain filmic universes and their respective figures and motifs. I will base my rationale on four films that portray such reception practices: "Travelling Avant" (Jean-Charles Tacchella, 1987, FRA), "The Dreamers" (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003, UK/FRA/ITA); "Free Enterprise" (Robert Mayer Burnett, 1998, USA); "Fanboys" (2009, Kyle Newman, USA).