Even before Jean-Luc Godard and other members of the French New
Wave championed Hollywood B movies, aesthetes and cineasts relished
the raw emotions of genre films. This contradiction has been
particularly true of horror cinema, in which the same images and
themes found in exploitation and splatter movies are also found in
avant-garde and experimental films, blurring boundaries of taste
and calling into question traditional distinctions between high and
low culture.
In Cutting Edge, Joan Hawkins offers an original and provocative
discussion of taste, trash aesthetics, and avant-garde culture of
the 1960s and 1970s to reveal horror's subversiveness as a genre.
In her treatment of what she terms "art-horror" films, Hawkins
examines home viewing, video collection catalogs, and fanzines for
insights into what draws audiences to transgressive films. Cutting
Edged provides the first extended political critique of Yoko Ono's
rarely seen Rape and shows how a film such as Franju's Eyes without
a Face can work simultaneously as an art, political, and splatter
film. The rediscovery of Tod Browning's Freaks as an art film, the
"eurotrash" cinema of Jess Franco, camp cults like the one around
Maria Montez, and the "cross-over" reception of Andy Warhol's
Frankenstein are all studied for what they reveal about cultural
hierarchies.
Looking at the low aspects of high culture and the high aspects
of low culture, Hawkins scrutinizes the privilege habitually
accorded "high" art -- a tendency, she argues, that lets highbrow
culture off the hook and removes it from the kinds of ethical and
critical social discussions that have plagued horror and porn. Full
of unexpected insights, Cutting Edge calls fora rethinking of
high/low distinctions -- and a reassigning of labels at the video
store.
General
Imprint: |
University of Minnesota Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
May 2000 |
First published: |
May 2000 |
Authors: |
Joan Hawkins
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 149 x 20mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
344 |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8166-3414-9 |
Categories: |
Books >
Arts & Architecture >
General
|
LSN: |
0-8166-3414-9 |
Barcode: |
9780816634149 |
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