Nobody likes movies like Teenagers from Outer Space or Wrestling

JEFFREY SCONCE

1 Lester Bangs. Psychotic

Reactions and Carburetor Dung

(New York: Vintage Books, 1988).

pp.

122-3.

2 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A

Social Critique of the Judgment

Taste

ICambridge MA: Harvard

University Press, 1984], p. 57.

3 Zontat's

Cjecto-Pod,

vol. 1, no. 1,

n.p.

Nobody likes movies like Teenagers from Outer Space or

Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy save any loon sane

enough to realize that the whole concept of Good Taste is

concocted to keep people from having a good time, from reveling

in a crossness that passeth all understanding.. . . But fuck those

people who'd rather be watching The Best Years of Our Lives or

David and Lisa. We got our own good tastes .. .

Written five years before Pierre Bourdieu published his monumental

study on the social construction of taste, Lester Bangs's diatribe

against a nebulously defined group of cultural custodians epitomizes

Bourdieu's contention that 'tastes are perhaps first and foremost

distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance of the

tastes of others'. 'It is no accident', writes Bourdieu, 'that when they

have to be justified, they are asserted negatively, by the refusal of

other tastes'.

Thus, in the spirit of Lester Bangs, the editors of

Zontar, a Boston-based fanzine devoted primarily to the promotion of

'badfilm', note that their publication 'is not for the delicate tastebuds

of the pseudo-genteel cultural illiterati who enjoy mind-rotting,

soul-endangering pabulum like Joseph Campbell and the Power of

Myth and the other white-boy 'new-age' puke-shit served up from the

bowels of PBS during pledge-week'.

Meanwhile, a 1990 issue of

Subhuman, a fanzine featuring articles on cinematic manifestations of

371 Screen 36:4 Winter 1995 Jeffrey Sconce

Trashing

the academy

Subhuman,

no. 15, from cover.

5 'Fanzines' are home-produced,

photocopied magazines circulated

among fans and devoted to an

often narrow area of interest in

popular culture.

E Temple of

Schlock

is another

fanzine dedicated to this cinema.

'necrophilia, 3-D surrealism, animal copulation, pregnant strippers,

horror nerdism, and bovine flatulence', labels itself a journal of

'eccentric film and video kulture'.

The stridently confrontational tastes espoused by Bangs, Zontar and

Subhuman over this fifteen-year period describe the gradual emergence

of a growing and increasingly articulate cinematic subculture, one

organized around what are among the most critically disreputable films

in cinematic history. Publications devoted to this 'trash' cinema

include such magazines, fanzines and makeshift journals as

Psychotronic Video, Zontar, Subhuman, Trashola, Ungawa,

Pandemonium, and the RE/Search volume, Incredibly Strange Films}

The most visible document of this film community is Michael

Weldon's Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, a subterranean

companion to Leonard Maltin's Movies On TV, which catalogues

hundreds of bizarre titles culled from Weldon's late-night television

viewing marathons in New York City. Taken together, the diverse

body of films celebrated by these various fanzines and books might

best be termed 'paracinema'. As a most elastic textual category,

paracinema would include entries from such seemingly disparate

subgenres as 'badfilm', splatterpunk, 'mondo' films, sword and sandal

epics,

Elvis flicks, government hygiene films, Japanese monster

movies, beach-party musicals, and just about every other historical

manifestation of exploitation cinema from juvenile delinquency

documentaries to soft-core pornography. Paracinema is thus less a

distinct group of films than a particular reading protocol, a

counter-aesthetic turned subcultural sensibility devoted to all manner

of cultural detritus. In short, the explicit manifesto of paracinematic

culture is to valorize all forms of cinematic 'trash', whether such films

have been either explicitly rejected or simply ignored by legitimate

film culture. In doing so, paracinema represents the most developed

and dedicated of cinephilic subcultures ever to worship at 'the temple

of schlock'.

The caustic rhetoric of paracinema suggests a pitched battle

between a guerrilla band of cult film viewers and an elite cadre of

would-be cinematic tastemakers. Certainly, the paracinematic audience

likes to see itself as a disruptive force in the cultural and intellectual

marketplace. As a short subject, this audience would be more inclined

to watch a bootlegged McDonald's training film than Man with a

Movie Camera, although, significantly, many in the paracinematic

community would no doubt be familiar with this more respectable

member of the avant-garde canon. Such calculated negation and

refusal of 'elite' culture suggests that the politics of social

stratification and taste in paracinema is more complex than a simple

high-brow/low-brow split, and that the cultural politics of 'trash

culture' are becoming ever more ambiguous as this 'aesthetic' grows

in influence. In recent years, the paracinematic community has seen

both the institutionalization and commercialization of their once

372 Screen 36:4 Winter 1995 • Jeffrey Sconce • Tiashing the academy

In a finngly perverse

tribute

Wwd

hnon

film

won

widespread

cr~tlcal acclalm and

yet

barnbed

the

box

otfice

maklng less man

SIX

m~ll~on

dollars

11s ln111al release In

the

USA

renegade, neo-camp aesthetic. Although paracinematic taste may have

its roots in the world of 'low-brow' fan culture (famines, film

conventions, memorabilia collections, and so on), the paracinematic

sensibility has recently begun to infiltrate the avant garde, the

academy, and even the mass culture on which paracinema's

ironic

reading strategies originally preyed.

Art

museums that once

programmed only Italian Neo-Realism or German Neo-Expressionism

now feature retrospectives of 1960s Biker films and career overviews

of exploitation auteurs such

Herschel1 Gordon Lewis and Doris

Wishman. No doubt to the dismay and befuddlement of cultural

hygienists like Allan Bloom and James Twitchell, academic courses

film studies increasingly investigate 'sleazy' genres such as horror and

pornography. Recently, the trash aesthetic has even made inroads into

mainstream popular taste. The ironic reading strategies honed by the

badfilm community through countless hours of derisive interaction

with late-night science fiction are now prepackaged for cable in

programmes such as Mystery Science Theatre

3000.

Similarly, Turner

Network Television now presents a weekly sampling of the

paracinematic pantheon in Friday night, '100% Weird' triple features.

Even Blockbuster video, America's corporate bastion of cinematic

conservatism, features a 'le bad' section in many of their stores, where

patrons can find the work of John Waters, William Castle and other

'disreputable' filmmakers. Perhaps most incredibly, Batman's director

Tim Burton recently directed a multi-million dollar biopic of

Wood

Jr, the director of such paracinematic classics as Plan

From Outer

Space (1959) and Glen

Glenda (1953), an artist who himself never

spent over a few thousand dollars on any one picture.' Clearly, in

cinematic circles of all kinds, there has been a significant realignment

on the social terrain of taste,

powerful response to what has been

termed 'the siren song of crap'.

373

Screen

364

Wlnm 1995 Jeffrey

Scare

Trashng

fhs

kademy

Zontar,

no. 8, n.p.

9 Zomar's

Cjecto-Pod,

vol. 1, no. 1.

n.p.

At first glance, the paracinematic sensibility, in all its current

manifestations, would seem to be identical to the 'camp' aesthetic

outlined by Susan Sontag some thirty years ago. Without a doubt, both

sensibilities are highly ironic, infatuated with the artifice and excess of

obsolescent cinema. What makes paracinema unique, however, is its

aspiration to the status of a 'counter-cinema'. Whereas 'camp' was

primarily a reading strategy that allowed gay men to rework the

Hollywood cinema through a new and more expressive subcultural

code,

paracinematic culture seeks to promote an alternative vision of

cinematic 'art', aggressively attacking the established canon of

'quality' cinema and questioning the legitimacy of reigning aesthete

discourses on movie art. Camp was an aesthetic of ironic colonization

and cohabitation. Paracinema, on the other hand, is an aesthetic of

vocal confrontation.

Who,

exactly, is the paracinematic audience at war with, and what

is at stake in such a battle? Consider the following diatribe from

Zontar:

Where the philosophical pygmies search the snob-ridden art

galleries, flock to the false comfort of PBS-produced pseudo-

gentility, WE look elsewhere. We seek the explanations for the

decline of Hu-Manity in the most debased and misunderstood

manifestations of the IDIOT CULTURE. Monster movies, comic

books, cheap porn videos, TV preachers, of course!!! But we search

ever deeper into the abyss. The Home Shopping Network.

Late-Night Cable TV-Product Worship-Testimonial Shows. Tiffany

Videos. We leave purity to those other assholes. The search for

BADTRUTH is only for the brave few, like you, whose

all-consuming HATE is powerful enough to resist the temptations of

REFINEMENT, TASTE, and ESCAPISM - the miserable crumbs

tossed from the table by the growing mass of REPUBLICAN

THIRTYSOMETHING COUNTRY-CLUB CHRISTIAN ZOMBIES

who now rule this wretched planet.

The paracinematic audience promotes their tastes and textual

proclivities in opposition to a loosely defined group of cultural and

economic elites, those purveyors of the status quo who not only rule

the world, but who are also responsible for making the contemporary

cinema, in the paracinematic mind, so completely boring. Nor does the

paracinematic community care much for the activities of film scholars

and critics. For example, an editor of Zontar's Ejecto-Pod, a sister

publication of Zontar, encourages readers to hone their knowledge of

trash-culture classics ridiculed by the academy (in this case the sword

and sandal epic, The Silver Chalice [Victor Saville, 1954]), thereby

'amazing your friends and embarrassing the jargon-slinging

empty-headed official avatars of critical discourse'.

At times, factions of the paracinematic audience have little patience

even for one another. This rift is perhaps most pointedly embodied by

374 Scran 36:4 Winter 1995 • Jeffrey Sconce •

Trashing

the academy

10 For a more detailed discussion of

the cultural pedigree, see

Bourdieu.

Distinction, p. 63.

11 Herbert Gans. Popular Culture

and High Culture INew York:

Basic Books. 1974). pp. 69-70.

12 In the film's most explicit nod to

the paracinematic mentality, one

particularly deranged character

bases his elaborate conspiracy

theories on the truth' to be

found in late-night,

science-fiction movies.

the competing agendas of Film Threat and Psychotronic Video, two

fanzines turned magazines with international circulations that promote

rival visions of the 'trash' aesthetic. While Psychotronic concentrates

on the sizable segment of this community interested in uncovering and

collecting long lost titles from the history of exploitation, Film Threat

looks to transgressive aesthetics/genres of the past as avant-garde

inspiration for contemporary independent filmmaking, championing

such 'underground' auteurs as Nick Zedd and Richard Kem. In a

particularly nasty swipe, a subscription form for Film Threat features

a drawing of the 'typical' Film Threat reader, portrayed as a dynamic,

rockabilly-quiffed hipster surrounded by admiring women. This is

juxtaposed with a drawing of the 'typical' Psychotronic reader,

depicted as passive, overweight and asexual, with a bad complexion.

Despite such efforts at generating counter-distinction within the

shared cultural project of attacking 'high-brow' cinema, the discourses

characteristically employed by paracinematic culture in its valorization

of 'low-brow' artefacts indicate that this audience, like the film elite

(academics, aesthetes, critics), is particularly rich with 'cultural

capital' and thus possesses a level of textual/critical sophistication

similar to the cineastes they construct as their nemesis. In terms of

education and social position, in other words, the various factions of

the paracinematic audience and the elite cineastes they commonly

attack would appear to share what Bourdieu terms a 'cultural

pedigree'.

Employing the terminology of US sociologist Herbert

Gans,

these groups might be thought of as radically opposed 'taste

publics' that are nevertheless involved in a common 'taste culture'. As

Gans writes: 'Taste cultures are not cohesive value systems, and taste

publics are not organized groups; the former are aggregates of similar

values and usually but not always similar content, and the latter are

aggregates of people with usually but not always similar values

making similar choices from available offerings of culture'.

Whether thought of as a subculture, an aesthetic or a sensibility, the

recent flourishing of paracinema represents not just a challenge to

aesthete taste, but the larger fragmentation of a common taste culture,

brought about by various disaffected segments of middle-class youth.

Although it would be difficult to define the precise dimensions or

identify the exact constituency of this particular taste public, I would

argue that the paracinematic community, like the academy and the

popular press, embodies primarily a male, white, middle-class, and

'educated' perspective on the cinema. Representations of this

'community' are rare, but can be glimpsed, among other places, at the

fringes of Richard Linklater's ode to baby-buster anomie, Slacker

(1991).

Linklater documents the desultory activities of bored students,

would-be bohemians and miscellaneous cranks, all of whom exist at

the economic and cultural periphery of a typical college town.

In a

more reflexive turn, a fanzine from San Francisco describes the world

of 'low-life scum', disheveled men in their twenties manifesting 'a

Screen 36:4 Winter 1995 • Jeffrey Sconce

Trashing

Die academy

Murder Can

fun,

14 Thn

particular

slnrggle over

c~nemat~c

taste

alsa

rakes

place

In a varlety

cultural

contexts

For an

account

cunlvatlon

of a dfsrepltable aesthel~c ~n

SWBdlsh

wuth

culture

see

Ghn

Balm

'Bewarel Rubblshl

Popllar culture and nrategles

dtst~nn~on'.

Young

Node

Jouml

of Youth

Research vol

(1994).

3H9

Bhlrdleu

D~stincfmn

16 Ibtd.

fascination with all things sleazy, bizarre, and macabre'."

Paracinematic interests also often intersect with the more famrliar

subcultures of science-fiction fandom. Regardless of their individual

interests and ultimate allegiances, however, the paracinematic audience

cultivates an overall aesthetic of calculated disaffection, marking a

deviant taste public disengaged from the cultural hierarchies of their

overarching taste culture.

Such acrimonious battles within a single taste culture are not

uncommon! As Bourdieu writes: 'Explicit aesthetic choices are in

fact often constituted in opposition to the choices of the groups closest

in social space, with whom the competition is most direct and most

immediate, and more precisely, no doubt, in relation to those choices

most clearly marked by the intention (perceived as pretension) of

marking distinction vis-a-vis lower

groups'.ls As the alienated faction

of a social group high in cultural capital, the paracinematic audience

generates distinction within its own social space by celebrating the

cultural objects deemed most noxious (low-brow) by their taste culture

as a whole.

Paracinema thus presents a direct challenge to the values

of aesthete film culture and a general affront to the 'refined' sensibility

of the parent taste culture. It is a calculated strategy of shock and

confrontation against fellow cultural elites, not unlike Duchamp's

notorious unveiling of a urinal in

art

gallery. As Bourdieu states:

'The most intolerable thing for those who regard themselves

the

possessors of legitimate culture is the sacrilegious reuniting of tastes

which taste dictates shall

separated'.l6 By championing films like

2000

Maniacs

(Herschel1 Gordon Lewis, 1964),

Bad Girls Go to Hell

(Doris Wishrnan, 1965), and

The

Incredibly Strange Creatures

Who

Stopped Living

and

Became Mixed-up Zombies

(Ray Dennis Steckler,

1963),

and by associating themselves with home shopping networks,

17 Jostein Gripsrud. ' "High culture"

revisited'.

Cultural Studies, vol.

3, no.

2119891.

p. 198.

Ibid.,

pp. 196-7.

Ibid.,

p. 197.

pornography and TV preachers, this community is, in effect,

renouncing its 'cultural pedigree' and attempting to distance itself

from what it perceives as elite (and elitist) taste.

Despite the paracinematic community's open hostility to the

'jargon-slinging avatars of critical discourse', many scholars see this

trend towards the valorization of 'trash' at work in the academy

itself,

especially in the realm of media studies. In ' "High culture" revisited',

for example, Jostein Gripsrud argues that a major segment of

contemporary media scholars routinely attacks all forms of high culture

while indiscriminately valorizing mass culture in its place. As Gripsrud

states somewhat sarcastically, 'Presenting oneself as a soap-fan in

scholarly circles could be considered daring or provocative some ten

years ago. Nowadays it is more of a prerequisite for legitimate entry into

the academic discourse on soaps in some Anglo-American fora.'

Gripsrud speculates that this proclivity among many contemporary

scholars to condemn high culture and valorize mass culture is a function

of their unique trajectory in social space. 'Such upwardly mobile

subjects are placed in a sort of cultural limbo, not properly integrated in

the lower-class culture they left, nor in the upper-class high culture they

have formally entered. Since they are newcomers, they are faced with a

need to make choices concerning what to do in and with their acquired

position.'

Gripsrud believes that the valorization of mass culture serves

as a form of 'symbolic homecoming' that allows such scholars to 'strive

for or pretend re-integration into the classes they once left, preferably as

"leaders" in some sense, "voices" for the people'.

Gripsrud's depiction of the intellectual in limbo is a particularly apt

description of the contemporary graduate student, the figure within the

institution of the academy who is perched the most precariously

between the domains of cultural, educational and economic capital.

Not surprisingly, paracinematic culture is a particularly active site of

investment for many contemporary graduate students in film studies.

Often, the connections between graduate film study and paracinematic

culture are quite explicit, since many students now pursuing an

advanced degree in film began as fans of exploitation genres such as

horror and science fiction. Some students retain their interest in trash

culture as a secret, guilty pleasure. Others, however, increasingly seek

to focus their work on these previously marginalized and debased

forms of cinema. Influenced by the importation of cultural studies to

the USA during the 1980s, and writing in the wake of film scholars

who were increasingly willing to address traditionally 'untouchable'

cinematic genres such as horror and pornography, many students in

media studies wish to continue pushing the limits of the traditional

cinematic canon and the constraints of conventional academic

enterprise. At stake is a sense of both institutional and cultural

distinction. As John Fiske writes, 'Many young fans are successful at

school and are steadily accumulating official cultural capital, but wish

to differentiate themselves, along the axis of age at least, from the

377

Xi winter 1995 Jeffre

Y S"™* •

'^hing the academy

20 John Fiske. The cultural

economy of fandom', in Lisa

Lewis (ed.), The Adoring

Audience |New York: Routledge,

19921.

pp. 3!M.

21 Bourdieu, Distinction, pp. 57-8.

social values and cultural tastes (or habitus) of those who currently

possess the cultural and economic capital they are still working to

acquire'.

As paracinematic texts and concerns increasingly infiltrate

film studies, however, many graduate students find themselves caught

between the institutional discourses (and agendas) of the film elite as

represented by the academy, and the 'fan' activities of the

paracinematic community with which they feel a previous affinity.

Raised in mass culture, such students are not always willing to give up

the excesses of the drive-in for the discipline of Dreyer. The question

is what to do with such textual experience and expertise.

Debate within the academy over the politics of the canon is not

new. Nor is it unusual for 'fan' cultures to make themselves heard

within the academy (most film scholars, one would assume, study the

cinema because they were a fan first). What is unusual in

paracinematic culture's gradual infiltration of the academy is the

manner in which this group so explicitly foregrounds the cultural

politics of taste and aesthetics, not just in society at large, but within

the academy

itself.

Graduate students with an interest in 'trash'

cinema often find themselves in the ironic position of challenging the

legitimacy of the very institution they are attending in order to obtain

cultural validation and authority over issues of politics and taste. Such

students are struggling to make the transition from a mere fan to an

accredited scholar. Though both fan and scholar may be equally

dedicated (and even knowledgeable) in their involvement with a

particular cultural form, they differ tremendously in terms of their

respective status within society as a whole. In a hierarchical social

system marked by the differential circulation of cultural and economic

capital, graduate students seeking to make this crucial transition of

accreditation must submit themselves, quite literally, to the discipline

of film studies in both its institutional and punitive forms. In doing so,

the discipline, works to shape both knowledge and taste, linking them

in a process that is every bit as political in the academy as it is in the

culture the academy seeks to study. As Bourdieu notes, 'At stake in

every struggle over art there is also the imposition of an art of living,

that is, the transmutation of an arbitrary way of living into the

legitimate way of life which casts every other way of living into

arbitrariness'.

In this way, the legitimizing function of the academy

in issues of knowledge, taste and aesthetics works to conceal relations

of power and control, both within the institution itself and the society

that sanctions that institution's cultural authority.

By challenging this disciplinary authority, the paracinematic

audience, both academic and non-academic, epitomizes what Bourdieu

terms the 'new style autodidact'. As described by Bourdieu, the

autodidact is a figure alienated from the legitimate mode of

educational and cultural acquisition. Estranged or excluded from

legitimate modes of acquisition, autodidacts invest in alternative forms

of cultural capital, those not fully recognized by the educational

378

Screerl

36:4 Winter 1995 • Jeffrey Sconce •

Trashing

the academy

Ibid.,

p. 87.

Ibid.,

p. 96.

system and the cultural elite. Bourdieu describes two backgrounds

typical of this new style autodidact:

'middle-ground' arts such as cinema, jazz, and, even more, strip

cartoons, science-fiction or detective stories are predisposed to

attract the investments either of those who have entirely succeeded

in converting their cultural capital into educational capital or those

who,

not having acquired legitimate culture in the legitimate manner

(i.e.,

through early familiarization), maintain an uneasy relationship

with it, subjectively or objectively, or both. These arts, not yet fully

legitimate, which are disdained or neglected by the big holders of

educational capital, offer a refuge or a revenge to those who, by

appropriating them, secure the best return on their cultural capital

(especially if it is not fully recognized scholastically) while at the

same time taking credit for contesting the established hierarchy of.

legitimacies and profits.

The autodidact is a person who invests in unsanctioned culture either

because he or she can 'afford' to, having already made a successful

conversion of legitimate cultural and educational capital into economic

capital, or who feel, because of their tentative and at times alienated

relationship with 'legitimate culture', that such disreputable

investments are more durable and potentially more 'rewarding'.

It should not be surprising, then, that paracinematic fans, as exiles

from the legitimizing functions of the academy, and many graduate

students, as the most disempowered faction within the academy

itself,

both look to trash culture as a site of 'refuge and revenge'. Such

autodidacticism constitutes, for Bourdieu, a form of 'counterculture',

one working to free itself from 'the constraints of the scholastic

market'. 'They strive to do so by producing another market with its

own consecrating agencies', writes Bourdieu, 'capable of challenging

the pretension of the educational system to impose the principles of

evaluation of competencies and manners which reign in the scholastic

market.'

For its audience, paracinema represents a final textual

frontier that exists beyond the colonizing powers of the academy, and

thus serves as a staging ground for strategic raids on legitimate culture

and its institutions by those (temporarily) lower in educational,

cultural and/or economic capital. Such a struggle demonstrates that

battles over the canon, in any discipline, are as much conflicts over

the processes and politics by which an entire academic field validates

its very existence and charts its own future, fought by groups within

the academy as stratified in their institutional power as society at large

is stratified in terms of cultural and economic power.

On one hand, it would be easy to explain the turn towards trash

cinema as yet another example of the generational politics of the

canon in the academy, a struggle that legitimated cinema in the face of

literature, Hollywood in the face of art cinema and, most recently,

television in the face of Hollywood. But there is more here than a

379

36:4 WmtBl 1995 Jetfre

Y S"

™*

Trashing

the academy

struggle over the canon and the politics of object choice. The study of

trash cinema suggests a struggle over the task of cinema scholarship

as a whole, especially in terms of defining the relationship between

aesthetics and cultural criticism. Whether attacking traditional cultural

markets and intellectual institutions as a fan, or attempting to bridge

the two worlds as a student, the paracinematic audience presents in its

often explicit opposition to the agendas of the academy a dispute over

how to approach the cinema as much as a conflict over what cinema to

approach. At issue is not only which films get to be studied, but which

questions are to be asked about the cinema in the first place. What I

am interested in exploring in the remainder of this essay is the

relationship between paracinematic culture and the aesthete culture

this group associates with the academy, as well as the place of the

contemporary graduate film student in bridging these two often

antagonistic sensibilities. How are these groups similar, how do they

differ and, perhaps most importantly, how might the trash aesthetic

ultimately impact the academy? I am particularly interested in how the

two communities approach issues of cinematic 'style' and 'excess'. I

will argue that paracinema hinges on an aesthetic of excess, and that

this paracinematic interest in excess represents an explicitly political

challenge to reigning aesthete discourses in the academy. The cultural

politics involved in this struggle, however, can be clarified by first

examining similarities between aesthete and paracinematic discourses

on cinema.

24 Annette Michetson, 'Film and the

radical aspiration', in Gerald

Mast and Marshall Cohen |eds|.

Film

Theory

and Criticism (New

York: Oxford University Press,

1974],

p. 472.

Counter-cinemas

Throughout the history of cinema studies as a discipline, the

cultivation of various counter-cinemas, exclusive cinematic canons

that do not easily admit the textual pleasures of more 'commonplace'

audiences, has been a crucial strategy in maintaining a sense of

cultural distinction for film scholars. Frequently, the promotion of

such counter-cinemas has been organized around what has become a

dominant theme in academic film culture: namely, the sense of loss

over the medium's unrealized artistic and political potential. From this

perspective, the cinema once held the promise of a revolutionary

popular art form when, as Annette Michelson writes, 'a certain

euphoria enveloped ... early filmmaking and theory'. '[T]here was',

she continues, 'a very real sense in which the revolutionary aspirations

of the modernist movement in literature and arts, on the one hand, and

of a Marxist or Utopian tradition, on the other hand, could converge in

the hopes and promises, as yet undefined, of the new medium'.

Instead, these hopes were dashed by the domination of the public taste

and mind by Hollywood cinema. And while there has never been a

shortage of critical interest in the classical Hollywood cinema,

championing counter-cinemas that break with the conventions of

380

SaeeD 36:4 wimer 1995

•

Jetfre

V Sconce •

Trashing

the academy

25 For an influential account of such

an agenda, see Petet Wollens

'Godard and counter-cinema:

Vent

d'Est,

in Philip Rosen (ed.).

Narrative. Apparatus, Ideology

(New York: Columbia University

Press,

19861,

pp. 120-29.

26 Fiske. 'The cultural economy of

fandom',

p. 36.

Subhuman,

no. 16, p. 3.

Hollywood production and representation remains a central project of

film aesthetes and academics. This critical programme proceeds both

artistically, by valorizing a body of 'art' films over the mainstream,

commercial cinema, and politically, by celebrating those filmmakers

who seem to disrupt the conventional narrative machinery of

Hollywood.

In cultivating a counter-cinema from the dregs of exploitation films,

paracinematic fans, like the academy, explicitly situate themselves in

opposition to Hollywood cinema and the mainstream US culture it

represents. United with the film elite in their dislike of Hollywood

banality and yet frequently excluded from the circles of academic film

culture, the paracinematic community nonetheless often adopts the

conventions of 'legitimate' cinematic discourse in discussing its own

cinema. As Fiske notes, fan groups are often 'aware that their object

of fandom [is] devalued by the criteria of official culture and [go] to

great pains to argue against this misevaluation. They frequently [use]

official cultural criteria such as 'complexity' or 'subtlety' to argue that

their preferred texts [are] as 'good' as the canonized ones and

constantly [evoke] legitimate culture ... as points of comparison.'

Elite discourse often appears either earnestly or parodically in

discussions of paracinematic films. A fanzine review of the obscure

1964 film, The Dungeons of Harrow, is typical. The fanzine describes

the film as 'a twisted surreal marvel, a triumph of spirit and vision

over technical incompetence and abysmal production values. The film

can be seen as a form of art brut - crude, naive, pathetic - but lacking

the poetry and humor often associated with this style. Perhaps art

brutarian would better serve to describe this almost indescribable

work.'

As in the academic film community, the paracinematic audience

recognizes Hollywood as an economic and artistic institution that

represents not just a body of films, but a particular mode of film

production and its accompanying signifying practices. Furthermore,

the narrative form produced by this institution is seen as somehow

'manipulative' and 'repressive', and linked to dominant interests as a

form of cultural coercion. In their introduction to Incredibly Strange

Films, V. Vale and Andrea Juno, two of the most visible cultural

brokers in the realm of paracinema, describe why low-budget films

helmed by idiosyncratic visionaries are so often superior to

mainstream, Hollywood cinema.

The value of low-budget films is: they can be transcendent

expressions of a single person's individual vision and quirky

originality. When a corporation decides to invest $20 million in a

film, a chain of command regulates each step, and no one person is

allowed free rein. Meetings with lawyers, accountants, and corporate

boards are what films in Hollywood are all about. . .. Often

[low-budget] films are eccentric

—

even extreme

—

presentations by

3811

36:4 Winter 1995 Jeffrey Sconce •

Trashing

the academy

28 V. Vale, Andrea Juno and Jim

Morton leds), Incredibly Strange

Films (San Francisco: RE/search

Publications,

19861,

p. 5.

Zontar.

no. 8, n.p.

Ibid.

32 For examples of work on

exploitation cinema produced

within an academic context, see

Thomas Doherty,

Teenagers

and

Teenpics: the Juvenilization of

American Movies in the 1950s

(Boston:

Unwin Hyman.

19881:

and Eric Schaefer,' "Bold!

Oaring!

Shocking! True!": a

history of exploitation films.

1919-1959' (Dissertation:

University of Texas at Austin.

1994).

individuals freely expressing their imaginations, who throughout the

filmmaking process improvise creative solutions to problems posed

by either circumstance or budget - mostly the latter. Secondly, they

often present unpopular - even radical - views addressing social,

political, racial or sexual inequities, hypocrisy in religion or

government; or, in other ways they assault taboos related to the

presentation of sexuality, violence, and other mores.

Such rhetoric could just as easily be at home in an elite discussion of

the French New Wave or the American New Cinema. Products of a

shared taste culture, paracinematic cinephiles, like the scholars and

critics of the academy, continue to search for unrecognized talent and

long forgotten masterpieces, producing a pantheon that celebrates a

certain stylistic unity and/or validates the diverse artistic visions of

unheralded 'auteurs'.

Zontar, for example, devotes almost all of its attention to the work

of Larry Buchanan, who is celebrated as 'the greatest director of all

time'

and as a maker of films that must be regarded as 'absolute and

unquestionable holy writ'.

Elsewhere, Zontar hails Buchanan as 'a

prophet of transcendental banality ... who eclipses Bergman in

evoking a sense of alienation, despair and existential angst'.

As this

rather tongue-in-cheek hyperbole suggests, paracinematic culture, like

that of the academy, continues to generate its own forms of internal

distinction by continually redefining its vanguard, thereby thwarting

unsophisticated dilettantes and moving its audience as a whole on to

increasingly demanding and exclusive paracinematic films. In its

contemporary and most sophisticated form, paracinema is an

aggressive, esoteric and often painfully ascetic counter-aesthetic, one

that produces, in its most extreme manifestations, an ironic form of

reverse elitism. 'The fine art of great badfilm is not a laughing matter

to everybody', says one fan. 'Its adherents are small in number, but

fanatical in pickiness. Badness appreciation is the most acquired taste,

the most refined.'

Invoking Larry Buchanan, the mastermind of films like Mars Needs

Women (1966) and Zontar the Thing from Venus (1966), as a greater

director than Ingmar Bergman, however, reaffirms that the

paracinematic community defines itself in opposition not only to

mainstream Hollywood cinema, but to the (perceived) counter-cinema

of aesthetes and the cinematic academy. Again, as with any taste

public, this elite cadre of 'aesthetes' cannot be definitively located in a

particular author, methodology, or school of academic/journalistic

criticism. Paracinematic vitriol also often ignores the fact that

low-budget exploitation films have increasingly become legitimized as

a field of study within the academy.

For purposes of distinction,

however, all that is required is a nebulous body of those who do not

actively advance a paracinematic aesthetic. As Vale and Juno state

broadly in their introduction to Incredibly Strange Films:

382

Saee

" &*

wimer 1995

•

Jeffre

Y Sconce

Trashing

the

academy

33 Vale. Juno and Morton (edsl,

Incredibly Strange

Films,

p. 4.

Ibid.

This is a functional guide to territory largely neglected by the

film-criticism establishment.... Most of the films discussed test the

limits of contemporary (middle-class) cultural acceptability, mainly

because in varying ways they don't meet certain 'standards' utilized

in evaluating direction, acting, dialogue, sets, continuity, technical

cinematography, etc. Many of the films are overtly 'lower-class' or

'low-brow' in content and art direction.

Vale and Juno go on to celebrate this cinema for its vitality and then

identify what is at stake in this battle over the status of these films

within the critical community. In a passage reminiscent of Bangs and

Bourdieu, they state, 'At issue is the notion of 'good taste', which

functions as a filter to block out entire areas of experience judged -

and damned - as unworthy of investigation'.

35 Gripsrud, 'High culture revisited',

p. 19a

Ibid.

Style and excess

Graduate students entering the academy with an interest in trash

cinema often wish to question why these 'areas of experience' have

been 'judged and damned' by earlier scholars. But though they may

attempt to disguise or renounce their cultural pedigree by aggrandizing

such scandalous cultural artefacts, their heritage in a 'higher' taste

public necessarily informs their textual and critical-engagement of

even the most abject 'low culture' forms. Gripsrud argues that

'egalitarian' attempts on the part of the culturally privileged to

collapse differences between 'high' and 'low' culture, as noble as they

might be, often ignore issues of 'access' to these two cultural realms.

As Gripsrud writes, 'Some people have access to both high and low

culture, but the majority has only access to the low one'.

Gripsrud

describes high culture audiences that also consume popular cultural

artefacts as having 'double access', and notes that this ability to

participate in both cultural realms is not randomly distributed through

society. As Gripsrud observes, 'The double access to the codes and

practices of both high and low culture is a class privilege'.

The phenomenon of double access raises a number of interesting

political issues concerning the trash aesthetic. For example, when Vale

and Juno write that these films address 'unpopular - even radical -

views'

and 'assault taboos related to the presentation of sexuality

[and] violence', this does not mean that paracinema is a uniformly

'progressive' body of cinema. In fact, in subgenres ranging from the

often rabidly xenophobic travelogues of the 'mondo' documentaries to

the library of 1950s sex-loop star Betty Page, many paracinematic

texts would run foul of academic film culture's political orthodoxy.

But, of course, this is precisely why such films are so vociferously

championed by certain segments of the paracinematic audience, which

then attempts to 'redeem' the often suspect pleasures of these films

383

Scree

36:4 winter

5 Jeffre

™*

Trashing

the academy

37 Such debates, in

turn,

should not

instantly assume that there only

exists an impoverished, 'single

access' reading of these films

within low culture', suggesting

formations that are without

irony. It is difficult to imagine,

for example, that an audience of

any historical moment or

cinematic habitus ever watched

Russ Meyer's odes to castration

anxiety and breast fetishism with

a 'straight' face.

38 James Monaco. The New Wave

(New York: Oxford University

Press. 1976), p. 9.

through appeals to ironic detachment. Double access, then,

foregrounds one of the central riddles of postmodern textuality: is the

'ironic' reading of a 'reactionary' text necessarily a 'progressive'

act?"

As pivotal as double access is in considering conventional debates

over representational politics, the influence of high cultural capital is

equally foregrounded in how the academy, the paracinematic audience,

and the students who claim membership in both realms attend to the

question of cinematic style. Of course, the ability to attend critically to

a concept such as style, whether it manifests itself in Eisenstein or a

Godzilla movie, is a class privilege, requiring a certain textual

sophistication in issues of technique, form and structure. Though

paracinematic viewers may explicitly reject the pretensions of

high-brow cinema, their often sophisticated rhetoric on the issue of

style can transform low-brow cinema into an object every bit as

obtuse and inaccessible to the mainstream viewer as some of the most

demanding works of the conventional avant garde. Both within the

academy and the paracinematic community, viewers address the

complex relationship between cinematic 'form' and 'content', often

addressing style for style's sake. This is not to say, however, that the

paracinematic community simply approaches trash cinema in the same

terms that aesthetes and academics engage art cinema. There is, I

would argue, a major political distinction between aesthete and

paracinematic discourses on cinematic style, a distinction that is

crucial to the paracinematic project of championing a counter-cinema

of trash over that of the academy. In other words, though the

paracinematic community may share with academic aesthetes an

interest in counter-cinema as technical execution, their respective

agendas and approaches in attending to questions of style and

technique vary tremendously.

For example, film aesthetes, both in the academy and in the popular

press,

frequently discuss counter-cinematic style as a strategic

intervention. In this scenario, the film artist self-consciously employs

stylistic innovations to differentiate his or her (usually his) films from

the cultural mainstream. James Monaco's discussion of the French

New Wave is typical in this regard. 'It is this fascination with the

forms and structures of the film medium . .. that sets their films apart

from those that preceded them and marks a turning point in film

history'.

Similarly, according to David Bordwell's concept of

parametric narration, a filmmaker may systematically manipulate a

certain stylistic parameter independent of the demands of the plot.

Such films are rare and are typically produced by figures associated

with 'art cinema' (Bordwell identifies Ozu, Bresson and Godard as

among those having produced parametric films). The emphasis here is

on applied manipulation of style as a form of systematic artistic

experimentation and technical virtuosity. 'In parametric narration, style

is organized across the film according to distinct principles, just as a

384 Screen 38:4 Winter 1995 • Jeffrey Sconce • Trashing fte academy

39 Oavid Bordwell. Narration in the

Fiction Film IMadison: Unrversity

of Wisconsin Press.

19851.

p. 275.

40 Vale. Juno and Morton (eds).

Incredibly Strange

Films,

p. 11-

Ibid.

narrative poem exhibits prosodic patterning or an operatic scene

fulfills a musical logic.'

Paracinematic films such as The Corpse Grinders (Ted V. Mikels,

1972) and She Devils on Wheels (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1968)

rarely exhibit such pronounced stylistic virtuosity as the result of a

'conscious' artistic agenda. But this is not to say that issues of style

and authorship are unimportant to the paracinematic community.

However, rather than explore the systematic application of style as the

elite techniques of a cinematic artist, paracinematic culture celebrates

the systematic 'failure' or 'distortion' of conventional cinematic style

by 'autuers' who are valued more as 'eccentrics' than as artists, who

work within the impoverished and clandestine production conditions

typical of exploitation cinema. These films deviate from Hollywood

classicism not necessarily by artistic intentionality, but by the effects

of material poverty and technical ineptitude. As director Frank

Henenlotter (of the Basket Case series) comments, 'Often, through bad

direction, misdirection, inept direction, a film starts assuming

surrealistic overtones, taking a dreadfully cliched story into new

frontiers - you're sitting there shaking your head, totally excited,

totally unable to guess where this is going to head next, or what the

next loony line out of somebody's mouth is going to be. Just as long

as it isn't stuff you regularly see.'

Importantly, paracinematic films

are not ridiculed for this deviation but are instead celebrated as

unique, courageous and ultimately subversive cinematic experiences.

For this audience, paracinema thus constitutes a true counter-cinema in

as much as 'it isn't stuff you regularly see', both in terms of form and

content. Henenlotter continues, 'I'll never be satisfied until I see every

sleazy film ever made - as long as it's different, as long as it's

breaking a taboo (whether deliberately or by misdirection). There's a

thousand reasons to like these films.'

While the academy prizes conscious transgression of conventions by

a filmmaker looking to critique the medium aesthetically and/or

politically, paracinematic viewers value a stylistic and thematic

deviance born, more often than not, from the systematic failure of a

film aspiring to obey dominant codes of cinematic representation. For

this audience, the 'bad' is as aesthetically defamiliarizing and

politically invigorating as the 'brilliant'. A manifesto on acting from

Zontar further illustrates the aesthetic appeal of such stylistic deviation

among this audience:

Transparent play-acting; mumbling incompetence; passionate

scenery-chewing; frigid woodenness; barely disguised drunkenness

or contempt for the script; - these are the secrets of Zontarian

acting at its best. Rondo Hatton's exploited acromegalic condition;

Acquanetta's immobile dialogue readings; the drunken John Agar

frozen to his chair in Curse of the Swamp Creature; - these great

performances loom massively as the ultimate classics of

385 Screen

36:4

Winter 1995 • Jeffrey Sconce • Trashing the academy

Zontar.

no. 8. n.p.

43 For an example of this literature,

see Ado Kyrou. 'The popular is

marvelous', in Paul Hammond

(ed.|.

The Shadow and Its

Shadow (London: British Film

Institute. 1978).

44 Kristin Thompson. The concept

of cinematic excess', in Rosen

led.].

Narrative, Apparatus.

Ideology, p. 130.

45 Thompson, The concept of

cinematic excess', p. 135.

Ibid.,

p. 132.

ZONTARISM. These are not so much performances as revelations

of Human truth. We are not 'entertained,' we rather sympathize

with our suffering soul-mates on screen. These performances are not

escapist fantasy, but a heavy injection of BADTRUTH.

The Zontarian moment of the 'badtruth' is not unlike the Surrealist

notion of the 'marvellous' (and indeed, the Surrealists were perhaps

the first cinephiles with an interest in bad cinema).

As with the

marvellous, the badtruth, as a nodal point of paracinematic style,

provides a defamiliarized view of the world by merging the

transcendentally weird and the catastrophically awful. Thus, rather

than witness the Surrealists' vision of the exquisite chance meetings of

umbrellas and sewing machines on a dissecting table, the

paracinematic viewer thrills instead to such equally fantastic

fabrications as women forced to duel in a syringe fight in the

basement of a schizophrenic vaudevillian who has only moments

earlier eaten his cat's left eyeball (Maniac! [Dwain Esper, 1934]),

Colonial era witches and warlocks crushed to death by men in Levis

corduroys who hurl bouncing Styrofoam boulders (Blood-Orgy of the

She-Devils [Ted V. Mikels, 1973]), a down and out Bela Lugosi

training a mutant bat to attack people wearing a certain type of

shaving lotion (The Devil Bat [Jean Yarborough, 1941]), and leaping,

pulsating brains that use their prehensile spinal cords to strangle

unwary soldiers and citizens on a Canadian rocket base (Fiend

Without a Face [Arthur Crabtree, 1958]).

Paracinematic taste involves a reading strategy that renders the bad

into the sublime, the deviant into the defamiliarized, and in so doing,

calls attention to the aesthetic aberrance and stylistic variety evident

but routinely dismissed in the many subgenres of trash cinema. By

concentrating on a film's formal bizarreness and stylistic eccentricity,

the paracinematic audience, much like the viewer attuned to the

innovations of Godard or capable of attending to the patterns of

parametric narration described by Bordwell, foregrounds structures of

cinematic discourse and artifice so that the material identity of the film

ceases to be a structure made invisible in service of the diegesis, but

becomes instead the primary focus of textual attention. It is in this

respect that the paracinematic aesthetic is closely linked to the concept

of 'excess'.

Kristin Thompson describes excess as a value that exists beyond a

cinematic signifier's 'motivated' use, or, as 'those aspects of the work

which are not contained by its unifying forces'.

'At the point where

motivation ends', Thompson writes, 'excess begins'.

'[T]he minute

the viewer begins to notice style for its own sake or watch works

which do not provide such thorough motivation, excess comes forward

and must affect narrative meaning. ... Excess does not equal style, but

the two are closely linked because they both involve the material

aspects of the film.'

Thompson writes of excess as an intermittent

386

Saee

" Sfc*

Wmte

1995

' Jeffrey Sconce •

Trashing

the academy

Ibid.,

pp. 132-3.

textual phenomenon, a brief moment of self-conscious materiality that

interrupts an otherwise conventional, 'non-excessive' film: 'Probably

no one ever watches only these non-diegetic aspects of the image

through an entire film.' But, Thompson writes further, these

non-diegetic aspects are nevertheless always present, 'a whole "film"

existing in some sense alongside the narrative film we tend to think of

ourselves as watching'."

I would argue that the paracinematic audience is perhaps the one

group of viewers that does concentrate exclusively on these

'non-diegetic aspects of the image' during the entire film, or at least

attempts to do so. Like their counterparts in the academy, trash

cinema fans, as active cinephiles practising an aesthetic founded on

the recognition and subsequent rejection of Hollywood style, are

extremely conscious of the cinema's characteristic narrative forms and

stylistic strategies. But, importantly, while cinematic aesthetes attend

to style and excess as moments of artistic bravado in relation to the

creation of an overall diegesis, paracinematic viewers instead use

excess as a gateway to exploring profilmic and extratextual aspects of

the filmic object

itself.

In other words, by concentrating so intently on

'non-diegetic' elements in these films, be they unconvincing special

effects, blatant anachronisms, or histrionic acting, the paracinematic

reading attempts to activate the 'whole 'film' existing ... alongside

the narrative film we tend to think of ourselves as watching'. One

could say that while academic attention to excess often foregrounds

aesthetic strategies within the text as a closed formal system,

paracinematic attention to excess, an excess that often manifests itself

in a film's failure to conform to historically delimited codes of

verisimilitude, calls attention to the text as a cultural and sociological

document and thus dissolves the boundaries of the diegesis into

profilmic and extratextual realms. It is here that the paracinematic

audience most dramatically parts company with the aesthetes of

academia. Whereas aesthete interest in style and excess always returns

the viewer to the frame, paracinematic attention to excess seeks to

push the viewer beyond the formal boundaries of the text.

Paracinematic excess: Ed Wood, Jr and Larry Buchanan

Ed Wood, Jr's status has long been high in the paracinematic

community. Wood was an independent filmmaker in Hollywood

during the 1950s, known primarily for his work with Bela Lugosi. His

films are remarkably incompetent from a conventional perspective.

Wood's dialogue was often awful, his actors alternately wooden and

histrionic, and his sets pathetic and threadbare. Throughout his long

career as a filmmaker, Wood was unable (or unwilling) to master the

basics of continuity, screen direction or the construction of cinematic

space. His Plan 9 From Outer Space is perhaps the most famous

387 Screen 36:4 Winter 1995 • Jeffrey Sconce

Trashing

the

academy

'badfilm' of all, having become badfilm's equivalent of

Citizen Kane

as an inventory of characteristically paracinematic stylistic devices.

Though Wood's films were initially read as camp, the critical

discourse within paracinematic literature surrounding Wood has since

shifted from bemused derision to active celebration. No longer

regarded as a hack, Wood is now seen, like

Godard, as a unique talent

improvising outside the constrictive environment of traditional

Hollywood production and representation. As one fanzine comments,

'Wood's films are now appreciated less as models of incompetence,

and more as the products of a uniquely personal and obsessive

sensibility that best expresses itself through madly deconstructed

narratives enacted by a gallery of grotesque castoffs from the fringes

of Hollywood

bohemia'.a This is certainly the perspective that

dominates Tim Burton's cinematic treatment of Wood's career,

Wood

(

1994).

Wood's most notorious film and the movie that is central to his

status as a paracinematic filmmaker is

Glen or Glenda.

As detailed

extensively in Burton's biopic, Wood shot

Glen or Glenda

in 1953 to

capitalize on the public hysteria surrounding the Christine Jorgenson

sex-change operation. Also released under the titles

Led Two Lives

and

Changed

Sex,

the film purports to be an investigative

examination of the sex-change issue. Instead, the film is an odd plea

for public tolerance of transvestitism. The film's protagonist is a

young man named Glen,

transvestite struggling with the decision of

whether or not to tell his fiancee of his secret before their marriage.

From this central conflict, Wood fashions a vertiginous film that in a

bizarre and at times hallucinatory manner argues the virtues of

transvestitism. giddily shifting from documentary to horror film, from

police drama to sexploitation picture. In the midst of this generic

turmoil,

Bela Lugosi appears from time to time as a metanarrational

49 For a more complete orography

of Wood, see Rudolph Grey,

Nightmare of

Ecstasy:

the Life

and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr

(Los Angeles: Fecal House, 1992)

50 Fiske, 'The cultural economy of

fandom',

p. 24.

figure who punctuates the diegetic action with incomprehensible

comments and bizarre non sequiturs.

A casebook example of stylistic deviation as the result of the unique

conditions of production in exploitation cinema, Glen or Glenda is of

particular interest for paracinematic viewers because of the

extratextual identity of Ed Wood, Jr: Wood was himself a transvestite.

He not only wrote and directed Glen or Glenda, but also starred as the

troubled young transvestite, Glen. Fan legends (based on interviews

with surviving crew members) have it that Wood directed most of the

film while wearing his favourite chiffon housecoat and that he had an

obsession with cashmere sweaters (a fetish dramatically enacted in the

film's final

scene).

After his movie career ended in the 1960s, Wood

went on to write a number of adult novels with transvestite

storylines.

This extratextual information about Wood is key to the

paracinematic positioning of his films as a form of counter-cinema.

Knowing this information allows the paracinematic fan to more fully

appreciate the complexity of the cultural codes at work in a film like

Glen or Glenda. John Fiske argues that the cultural elite 'use

information about the artist to enhance or enrich the appreciation of

the work'. Within fan culture, on the other hand, 'such knowledge

increases the power of the fan to "see through" to the production

processes normally hidden by the text and thus inaccessible to the

non-fan'.

In the case of Ed Wood, Jr, the paracinematic aesthetic

combines an elite interest in 'enriched appreciation' with a popular

interest in seeing through 'production processes'. Paracinematic fans

use their knowledge of Wood's real life to 'enhance or enrich' their

engagement in his films, much as elites use their knowledge of

Godard's various positions in relation to Marxism to inform their

viewings. Vital to paracinematic pleasure, however, is this process of

'seeing through' the diegesis. For a sophisticated paracinematic

viewer, Glen or Glenda is compelling because it seemingly presents

both the textual and extratextual struggles of a man set against the

repressive constraints of 1950s sexuality, encoded in a style that also

challenges the period's conventions of representation. Paracinematic

fans appreciate films such as Glen or Glenda not only as bizarre

works of art, but as intriguing cultural documents, as socially and

historically specific instances of artifice and commentary. Set against

the bland cultural miasma of the Eisenhower years, Wood and his film

stand out as truly remarkable figures.

This interest in collapsing the textual and the extratextual, the filmic

and the profilmic, is especially pronounced in Zontarian interest in

Larry Buchanan, a Dallas filmmaker who made a number of AIP films

for television in the mid sixties. Buchanan's films rank among the

most low-budget productions ever attempted in commercial

filmmaking. Often following scripts from old black and white features,

these films were reshot in colour for the television market in two or

389 Sc

feen

3ei

win

'e'

'995 Jeffrey Sconce

Trashing

the

academy

Zontar,

no. 8, n.p.

three days for often less than a few thousand dollars. The finished

products are a test of even the most dedicated paracinematic viewer's

patience. With no money or time to reshoot, mistakes in dialogue,

camera movement and sound recording remain in each film. The films

are unwatchable for most mainstream viewers, and consequently have

assumed an exalted status among the 'hardcore' badfilm faction of

paracinematic culture.

As with the other visionary stylists in paracinema's shadow realm

of autuerism, Buchanan is valorized for his unique artistic vision.

Zontar positions Buchanan as a poor man's Carl Dreyer, celebrating

his particularly bleak and sombre approach. Importantly, however, this

bleak and sombre tone is as much a function of the conditions of

production as the product of Buchanan's 'genius'. A common strategy

when discussing Buchanan is to transform his films into profilmic

parables of artistic tragedy. Differentiating Buchanan from the more

accessible Ed Wood, Jr, for example, Zontar'& editors write, 'where

Ed Wood's films ultimately reassure the comfortably "hip" viewer of

the dynamic force of even the most downtrodden and despised corners

of human experience, the films of Larry Buchanan can only induce a

profound feeling of desperation, anxiety and terminal boredom. The

texture is not that of a tatty side-show, but that of the endless despair

and futility of human existence as reflected on the concrete pavement

of a Dallas parking lot.'

The Zontarian transformation of Buchanan's

work thus shifts the diegetic frame so that the action on the screen

becomes but the trace of an isolated moment of desperate human

activity, a farcical attempt at 'art' taking place on a particular day

many years ago in someone's garage, on a Dallas parking lot.

A contributor to Zontar describes this moment of profilmic nausea

as personally experienced in the climatic revelation of the monster in

the concluding scenes of Buchanan's Curse of the Swamp

Creature:

Seldom, if ever, has a more disappointing final monster revelation

scene been filmed.... The monster is unbelievably, spectacularly

cheap.... 'It' appears dressed in a white hospital smock, with

rubber monster-gloves and a minimal mask-piece consisting of two

painted PING-PONG BALL EYES set into a rubber bow. A

skin-head wig and a couple of cruddy fangs complete the 'monster

suit' ... which is more embarrassing than scary ... the

CREATURE itself must be the least convincing creation in monster

movie history. This is, of course, a subjective area, but I would rate

it far worse than the ROBOT MONSTER and at least as bad as the

CREEPING TERROR ... though of a different order, naturally.

THE MASTER DIRECTOR actually compounds the failure of his

creature by withholding it for so long. By building to his epic

anti-climax Buchanan makes the SWAMP CREATURE itself the

essence of disappointment and failure ... translated into cheap

390

Saee

" &•*

wime

1995

•

Jeffr

ev Sconce •

Trashing

the

academy

rubber

and

ping-pong ball eyes.

The

SWAMP CREATURE'S scaly

52 ibid

rubber fright-mask

composed

of the

very substance

despair.

The

swamp creature, intended

to be a

startling

and

menacing

I cinematic revelation,

is, in the

last analysis, simply

overweight

i actor standing

weeds with ping-pong balls attached

to his

eyes

on a

hot day in

Dallas

1966.

For the

paracinematic community, such

moments

impoverished excess

are a

means toward collapsing

i cinema's fourth wall, allowing

the

profilmic

and the

extratextual

I mesh with

the

diegetic drama.

The

'surface' diegesis becomes

I precisely that,

the

thin

and

final veil that

is the

indexical mark

of a

I more interesting drama, that

the film's construction

and

sociohistorical context.

: The politics of excess

: Thompson argues that the importance of excess is that it renews 'the

I perceptual freshness of the work' and 'suggests a different way of

i watching and listening to a film'.

\ The viewer is no longer caught in the bind of mistaking the causal

i structure of the narrative for some sort of inevitable, true, or natural

! set of events which is beyond questioning or criticism. . . . Once

) narrative is recognized as arbitrary rather than logical, the viewer is

I free to ask why individual events within its structures are as they

i are. The viewer is no longer constrained by conventions of reading

\ to find a meaning or theme within the work as the solution to a sort

53 Thompson. The concept of

j of puzzle which has a right answer.

cinematic excess', pp.

140-1.

| Excess provides a freedom from constraint, an opportunity to approach

i a film with a fresh and slightly defamiliarized perspective. As

! Thompson argues, through excess 'the work becomes a perceptual

I field of structures which the viewer is free to study at length, going

54 ibid.p HI

; beyond the strictly functional aspects'.

What the critical viewer does

\ with this newfound freedom provided by the phenomenon of excess is,

! I would argue, a political question, and one that lies at the heart of the

I conflict between the counter-cinema of the academy and that promoted

i by paracinematic culture. The very concept of excess, after all, as a

i relativistic term that posits a self-evident 'norm', is an inherently

I political evaluation. Exploring these politics of excess presents a key

I area where students who possess a trash aesthetic may impact the

I academic institutions to which they belong by questioning the goals,

i strategies and techniques of academically enshrined versions of 'art'

I cinema and the 'avant garde'.

i Specifically, the trash aesthetic offers a potential critique of two

I highly influential methodologies in film studies: neoformalist analysis

\ and theories of 'radical' textuality. Paracinema suggests that the

I 391 See*" 36:4 Winter 1935 Jeffrey Sconce

Trashing

the academy

55 See Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean

Narboni,

'Cinema/ideology/

criticism.

Part V.

Screen,

vol. 12.

no.

(19711.

pp. 27-36.

56 In Wollen's account of Godard's

significance as a radical

filmmaker, he identifies 'seven

cardinal virtues' of Godard's

aesthetic that oppose the 'seven

deadly sins' of orthodox cinema.

Godard's counter-cinema is thus

argued to feature narrative

intransitivity' rather than

'narrative transitivity' -

'estrangement vs identification,

foregrounding vs transparency,

multiple diegesis vs single

diegesis. aperture vs closure,

un-pleasure vs pleasure, and

reality vs fiction'. One cannot

help but be struck by how

certain paracinematic titles,

especially genre hybrids like Glen

Glenda,

match Wollen's

criteria point by point. For a

more complete account of these

distinctions, see Wollen. 'Godard

and counter-cinema: Vent

d'Est'.

neoformalist emphasis on art as defamiliarization might be more

complicated than the cataloguing of innovative, text-bound 'devices'.

If the paracinematic community celebrates a film, either earnestly or

parodically, as an invigorating artistic experience precisely because of

its utter banality, does that constitute a form of defamiliarization? For

whom and under what circumstances is any film defamiliarizing?

Since any notion of aesthetics is inextricably linked to historical issues

of representation and reception, what are the politics of a neoformalist

analysis that ultimately constructs a hierarchy of 'skilled' and

'unskilled' audiences, artistic and non-artistic films? (Do we really

want to claim that Last Year at Marienbad is somehow more 'artistic'

than Sweet Badass's Badass Song or even E.T.I What exactly is the

purpose of such aesthetic valuations other than to empower a certain

critic or a certain cinema?) If nothing else, the trash aesthetic serves as

a reminder that all forms of poetics and aesthetic criticism are

ultimately linked to issues of taste; and taste, in turn, is a social

construct with profoundly political implications.

Paracinema also offers a critique of the 'radical' aesthetic that seeks

to liberate, or at least politically agitate, audiences through the

application of disruptive textual devices, a project that coalesced in

theoretical and critical writings in film studies during the 1970s and

which continues to inform much work on avant-garde textuality. In

many respects, paracinematic discourses on excess greatly resemble

the symptomatic criticism so central to film studies during this

formative period. As with the devotees of Sirk, Minnelli and Lewis,

paracinematic viewers are interested in reading films 'against the

grain', ever on the alert for the trash film equivalents of Comolli and

Narboni's celebrated 'category e' films.

And, as in the

counter-cinemas explicitly designed by Godard or covertly implanted

by Sirk, paracinema's retrospective reconstruction of an avant garde

through the ironic engagement of exploitation cinema's history is a

'politicized' cinema to the extent that it demonstrates the limitations

and interests of dominant cinematic style by providing a striking

counter-example of deviation.

But while segments of academic film culture often appeal to a

refined code of aesthetics to apprehend and explain the potentially

disruptive forces of style and excess (an aesthetics most often

intentionally applied by an 'artist' to be successfully decoded by an

elite cinephile in a rarefied and exclusive circuit of textual exchange),

paracinematic culture celebrates excess as a product of cultural as well

as aesthetic deviance. Once excess cues the elite viewer to the

arbitrary structure of a narrative, he or she can then study the

'perceptual field of structures' in the work itself in appreciation of

artistic craftsmanship within a closed formal system. The

paracinematic viewer's recognition of a narrative's artifice, however,

is the first step in examining a field of structures within the culture as

a whole, a passageway into engaging a larger field of contextual issues

392 $a

een

s4 winter 1995

•

Jeffre

ScaKe

•

Trashing

Die academy

surrounding the film as a socially and historically specific document.

As a consequence, paracinema might be said to succeed where earlier

more 'radical' avant gardes have failed. It is doubtful that Tout Va

Bien (Jean-Luc Godard / Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1973), or Written on the

Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956) for that matter, ever 'radicalized' anyone

other than fellow academy aesthetes. Perhaps paracinema has the

potential, at long last, to answer Brecht's famous call for an

anti-illusionist aesthetic by presenting a cinema so histrionic,

anachronistic and excessive that it compels even the most casual

viewer to engage it ironically, producing a relatively detached textual

space in which to consider, if only superficially, the cultural, historical

and aesthetic politics that shape cinematic representation. In this

respect, one might argue that while academy icons such as Godard and

Sirk may have employed complex aesthetic strategies to problematize

issues such as the construction of gender, Ed Wood Jr, by his own

admission, actually fought in the Pacific during World War II with a

pink bra and knickers worn underneath his combat fatigues. As to

which form of political engagement and subsequent critical promotion

by the academy will prove more provocative and productive, it is open

for debate.

393

Scree

" ®*

winter t995

•

Jeff

'ev Sconce

Trashing

the

academy