Mikita Brottman
John Mercer
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Excess, according to Merriam-Webster, may be defined as “the state or an instance of surpassing usual, proper, or specified limits”[1]. In the light of this definition, the launch issue of the Cine-Excess eJournal surpasses the “usual, proper, or specified limits” of more traditional film journals in a number ways. Most significantly, it celebrates the fact that in 2011, in response to an application for a test screening review by Cine-Excess journal and conference founder Xavier Mendik and Professor Julian Petley, the BBFC not only reviewed, but overturned a 27 year censorship ruling on Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust, waiving all but one of their previous edits, and passing the film with no cuts apart from 15 unnecessary seconds of animal slaughter. To commemorate this victory, each article in the launch issue critically re-evaluates a specific “cult controversy”, followed by a commentary from the film’s director, featured performer, or another figure closely involved in its production or exhibition.
Another way in which Cine-Excess surpasses the “usual, proper, or specified limits” of similar publications is outlined in the journal’s mission statement, which emphasizes the union of academic and industrial discourses. In this light, the launch issue includes two reports from crossover cult cinema conferences attended by fans both inside and outside academia, as well as a separate review of the recent Sitges 2012 international film festival, with its strong appeal to both researchers and film followers of excess. In his articulate report on the Cultural Mythology of the Snuff Movie conference, held at Bournemouth University on November 23-24 2012, Mark Adams wonders why the concept of the snuff movie continues to hold such a charge when Internet sites such as DocumentingReality.com allow viewers to witness “real” death any time they choose. The answer, it seems, is not so obvious: as Julian Petley’s paper at the conference argued, in the popular perception of snuff, completely different kinds of films are being conflated and confused. |
Elsewhere, Mark McKenna reports from Hammer Has Risen From the Grave, another crossover conference, this one held in Leicester on July 13-14th 2012 to celebrate the forthcoming digitization of the Hammer Script Archive by the Cinema and Television History Research Centre at De Montfort University. Here, participants were offered a unique treat: the world premiere of the High Definition restoration of Hammer’s seminal The Curse of Frankenstein (1957).
Another way in which Cine-Excess surpasses traditional limits is its presentation of the work of graduate students alongside that of well-established scholars like Martin Barker, whose essay in this issue is an expanded version of the presentation Barker made at the Cine-Excess 2011 event, in the presence of cult luminaries including director Ruggero Deodato, and actor Giovanni Lombardo Radice. In this essay, Barker describes his involvement in a project funded by the British Board of Film Classification into audience responses to screened sexual violence. Barker was asked by the BBFC to head a team of researchers exploring how audiences understood and responded to a group of films which had proved particularly challenging for the board to classify for cinema or DVD release. Among them was Deodato’s The House on the Edge of the Park (1980), whose reception is the subject of Barker’s essay.
Cult status depends largely—often exclusively—on audience engagement; it is appropriate, then, that each essay in this launch issue pays close attention to consumption and reception. In her thought-provoking article on The Bunny Game (Adam Rehmeier, 2010), Jenny Barrett makes the case that media pundits and the BBFC have failed to understand the film’s engagement with sexual violence. She argues that The Bunny Game makes a bold statement about those who are marginalized and overlooked in American society and for this reason should not be easily dismissed. More broadly, Barrett’s essay considers the anxiety inherent in our relation to contemporary media culture, and asks important questions about complicit witnessing and the affective and ethical dimensions of spectatorship. The response to Barrett’s essay comes from Rodleen Getsic, the film’s lead actress and is an extremely powerful and personal reflection on what this controversial film means to her, and her understanding of the way an audience might engage with it. Getsic asserts that the film was conceived as performance art, and should be watched in this light. She challenges the assertion that the film eroticizes violence, suggesting instead that, since its scenes of sexual degradation that have their origin in her own experiences, their re-enactment was a form of personal catharsis. Her response provides a rationale for the extremities of The Bunny Game that is both lucid and grounded in a sense of personal conviction.
Emma Pett takes a close look at audience engagement in her research into the relationship between British audiences and Asian extreme films. In her essay, People Who Think Outside the Box, Pett explains the results of her research tend to confound popular assumptions about why people enjoy “extreme” films. Fans of Asian extreme cinema, explains Pett, often have a dynamic relationship with their favourite films based on their interaction with new technologies. Paul Smith, Press Officer for Tartan Video when the Asian Extreme series was launched, provides a response to Pett’s essay. Smith identifies Takeshi Miike’s Audition (1999) as the first in what was to become an especially popular line for the company. He also usefully places the rise of Asian Extreme in an industrial context, identifying Tartan Film’s position as the distributor responsible for the release of such controversial examples of European cinema as Man Bites Dog (André Bonzel, Rémy Belvaux, Benoȋt Poelyoorde, 1992) and Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997). Smith offers an especially useful industry-focused insight into fan-based practices and audience awareness of cult status.
Austin Fisher approaches audience reception from a rather different perspective in his essay on Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966), a film he describes as “a tour de force of the Spaghetti aesthetic”. Django’s status as a non-Sergio Leone text, Fisher explains, bestows upon it counter-canonical kudos—so much, in fact, that like many similar oppositional texts, it has spawned a host of tributes, imitations and unofficial sequels. To accompany Fisher’s essay, Xavier Mendik has interviewed Django’s star, the celebrated European actor Franco Nero. In a wide-ranging discussion, Mendik and Nero consider the social and cultural significance of Django and the international success of the “Spaghetti Western,” a genre with which Nero was intimately connected. The interview extends beyond Corbucci’s film to an engaged and reflective commentary on Nero’s work throughout the 60s and 70s, providing a fascinating insight into the career of one of cult cinema’s greatest stars. This essay will be instructive reading for anyone interested in the politics of the period (especially in relation to Italy) and the actor’s working practices.
Till (Faces of) Death Do Us Part, Italian scholar Nicolo Galliò’s compelling meditation on the Faces of Death filmsseries, looks at the ways in which this popular video series disseminated images of dead bodies—images commonly available on the Internet today, but rarely (if ever) seen when the films were originally in circulation. With an eye to understanding the way such images were consumed by different viewers, Galliò considers the relationship between cinema, violence, and digital media, drawing attention to the subjectivity of the individual responses. John A. Schwartz, the director of the Faces of Death series, responds to Galliò’s essay by foregrounding the perennial discussion around the verisimilitude of this kind of material—the questions about fact vs. fiction and “real” vs. “staged” that are also discussed in Jenny Barrett’s essay on The Bunny Game. Schwartz agrees that the Faces of Death videos make audiences confront mortality, but just as importantly, he argues, they challenge our usual assumptions about death.
In her classic essay of 1981, The Concept of Cinematic Excess, Kristin Thompson noted the elusive quality of excess, pointing out that it often “implies a gap or lag in motivation.”[2]. Thompson’s particular articulation of the term has been picked up by subsequent film scholars—most notably Linda Williams—as a useful way to make sense of the horror film. For example, writing about the excess of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Lucy Fife Donaldson refers to “horror’s concern with spectacle and extremes of expression in relation to the body.”[3]. Claire Henry’s essay in this volume The Last House on the Left: The Redemption of the Remake uses the concept of excess to consider the continuities and discontinuities between the original 1972 Last House and the 2009 remake. Henry notes that the while the violence of Dennis Iliadis’s remake is more excessive than that of the Wes Craven film, the moral ambiguities of the original have been ironed out; the remake, in fact, is marked by its ultimate recourse to a normative ideological position. In a productively critical response, Marc Sheffler (who played Junior Stillo in Wes Craven’s 1971 film) questions the premise of Henry’s essay and argues that the remake (a staple of Hollywood cinema) is an ultimately flawed enterprise. Sheffler argues that the remade Last House makes sense only in relation to the exploitation and deliberate shock of the original. Sheffler also offers insights into the original film’s production context, and his useful intervention reveals the tensions inherent in the critical practice of film analysis when set beside an industrial viewpoint (in this case, that of production personnel). The question of what a film “means” for audiences, critics and film scholars becomes especially interesting in the light of the film’s intentional meaning (or lack of one). This is an issue that goes right to the heart of the study of cult cinema.
In his essay on The Human Centipede (Tom Six, 2009), Steve Jones takes a close and clear-headed look at this much-maligned film and its equally snubbed sequel (The Full Sequence, released in 2011). Jones suggests the knee-jerk abhorrence expressed in response to The Human Centipede says a great deal about our relationship with our own bodies and their byproducts, notably faeces, a subject which, outside the realm of science and medicine, cannot be publically addressed. If the films are to be considered obscene, as Jones notes, it is only because our bodies themselves are regarded as fundamentally disgusting. When we are shown two figures desperately holding hands while helplessly imprisoned in the middle of the “centipede”, we are filled not with abhorrence, but with despair; the image precisely sums up the human condition.
Another way in which Cine-Excess surpasses traditional limits is its presentation of the work of graduate students alongside that of well-established scholars like Martin Barker, whose essay in this issue is an expanded version of the presentation Barker made at the Cine-Excess 2011 event, in the presence of cult luminaries including director Ruggero Deodato, and actor Giovanni Lombardo Radice. In this essay, Barker describes his involvement in a project funded by the British Board of Film Classification into audience responses to screened sexual violence. Barker was asked by the BBFC to head a team of researchers exploring how audiences understood and responded to a group of films which had proved particularly challenging for the board to classify for cinema or DVD release. Among them was Deodato’s The House on the Edge of the Park (1980), whose reception is the subject of Barker’s essay.
Cult status depends largely—often exclusively—on audience engagement; it is appropriate, then, that each essay in this launch issue pays close attention to consumption and reception. In her thought-provoking article on The Bunny Game (Adam Rehmeier, 2010), Jenny Barrett makes the case that media pundits and the BBFC have failed to understand the film’s engagement with sexual violence. She argues that The Bunny Game makes a bold statement about those who are marginalized and overlooked in American society and for this reason should not be easily dismissed. More broadly, Barrett’s essay considers the anxiety inherent in our relation to contemporary media culture, and asks important questions about complicit witnessing and the affective and ethical dimensions of spectatorship. The response to Barrett’s essay comes from Rodleen Getsic, the film’s lead actress and is an extremely powerful and personal reflection on what this controversial film means to her, and her understanding of the way an audience might engage with it. Getsic asserts that the film was conceived as performance art, and should be watched in this light. She challenges the assertion that the film eroticizes violence, suggesting instead that, since its scenes of sexual degradation that have their origin in her own experiences, their re-enactment was a form of personal catharsis. Her response provides a rationale for the extremities of The Bunny Game that is both lucid and grounded in a sense of personal conviction.
Emma Pett takes a close look at audience engagement in her research into the relationship between British audiences and Asian extreme films. In her essay, People Who Think Outside the Box, Pett explains the results of her research tend to confound popular assumptions about why people enjoy “extreme” films. Fans of Asian extreme cinema, explains Pett, often have a dynamic relationship with their favourite films based on their interaction with new technologies. Paul Smith, Press Officer for Tartan Video when the Asian Extreme series was launched, provides a response to Pett’s essay. Smith identifies Takeshi Miike’s Audition (1999) as the first in what was to become an especially popular line for the company. He also usefully places the rise of Asian Extreme in an industrial context, identifying Tartan Film’s position as the distributor responsible for the release of such controversial examples of European cinema as Man Bites Dog (André Bonzel, Rémy Belvaux, Benoȋt Poelyoorde, 1992) and Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997). Smith offers an especially useful industry-focused insight into fan-based practices and audience awareness of cult status.
Austin Fisher approaches audience reception from a rather different perspective in his essay on Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966), a film he describes as “a tour de force of the Spaghetti aesthetic”. Django’s status as a non-Sergio Leone text, Fisher explains, bestows upon it counter-canonical kudos—so much, in fact, that like many similar oppositional texts, it has spawned a host of tributes, imitations and unofficial sequels. To accompany Fisher’s essay, Xavier Mendik has interviewed Django’s star, the celebrated European actor Franco Nero. In a wide-ranging discussion, Mendik and Nero consider the social and cultural significance of Django and the international success of the “Spaghetti Western,” a genre with which Nero was intimately connected. The interview extends beyond Corbucci’s film to an engaged and reflective commentary on Nero’s work throughout the 60s and 70s, providing a fascinating insight into the career of one of cult cinema’s greatest stars. This essay will be instructive reading for anyone interested in the politics of the period (especially in relation to Italy) and the actor’s working practices.
Till (Faces of) Death Do Us Part, Italian scholar Nicolo Galliò’s compelling meditation on the Faces of Death filmsseries, looks at the ways in which this popular video series disseminated images of dead bodies—images commonly available on the Internet today, but rarely (if ever) seen when the films were originally in circulation. With an eye to understanding the way such images were consumed by different viewers, Galliò considers the relationship between cinema, violence, and digital media, drawing attention to the subjectivity of the individual responses. John A. Schwartz, the director of the Faces of Death series, responds to Galliò’s essay by foregrounding the perennial discussion around the verisimilitude of this kind of material—the questions about fact vs. fiction and “real” vs. “staged” that are also discussed in Jenny Barrett’s essay on The Bunny Game. Schwartz agrees that the Faces of Death videos make audiences confront mortality, but just as importantly, he argues, they challenge our usual assumptions about death.
In her classic essay of 1981, The Concept of Cinematic Excess, Kristin Thompson noted the elusive quality of excess, pointing out that it often “implies a gap or lag in motivation.”[2]. Thompson’s particular articulation of the term has been picked up by subsequent film scholars—most notably Linda Williams—as a useful way to make sense of the horror film. For example, writing about the excess of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Lucy Fife Donaldson refers to “horror’s concern with spectacle and extremes of expression in relation to the body.”[3]. Claire Henry’s essay in this volume The Last House on the Left: The Redemption of the Remake uses the concept of excess to consider the continuities and discontinuities between the original 1972 Last House and the 2009 remake. Henry notes that the while the violence of Dennis Iliadis’s remake is more excessive than that of the Wes Craven film, the moral ambiguities of the original have been ironed out; the remake, in fact, is marked by its ultimate recourse to a normative ideological position. In a productively critical response, Marc Sheffler (who played Junior Stillo in Wes Craven’s 1971 film) questions the premise of Henry’s essay and argues that the remake (a staple of Hollywood cinema) is an ultimately flawed enterprise. Sheffler argues that the remade Last House makes sense only in relation to the exploitation and deliberate shock of the original. Sheffler also offers insights into the original film’s production context, and his useful intervention reveals the tensions inherent in the critical practice of film analysis when set beside an industrial viewpoint (in this case, that of production personnel). The question of what a film “means” for audiences, critics and film scholars becomes especially interesting in the light of the film’s intentional meaning (or lack of one). This is an issue that goes right to the heart of the study of cult cinema.
In his essay on The Human Centipede (Tom Six, 2009), Steve Jones takes a close and clear-headed look at this much-maligned film and its equally snubbed sequel (The Full Sequence, released in 2011). Jones suggests the knee-jerk abhorrence expressed in response to The Human Centipede says a great deal about our relationship with our own bodies and their byproducts, notably faeces, a subject which, outside the realm of science and medicine, cannot be publically addressed. If the films are to be considered obscene, as Jones notes, it is only because our bodies themselves are regarded as fundamentally disgusting. When we are shown two figures desperately holding hands while helplessly imprisoned in the middle of the “centipede”, we are filled not with abhorrence, but with despair; the image precisely sums up the human condition.
Footnotes
[1] Merriam W. Online, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/excess
[2] Thompson, K. (1999) 'The Concept of Cinematic Excess' (1981) in Braudy, L. and Marshall C. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford University Press, 517.
[3] Donaldson, L. F. (2010) ‘Access and Excess in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)’ in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, 1, 6. (www.warwick.ac.uk/go/moviejournal/)
[1] Merriam W. Online, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/excess
[2] Thompson, K. (1999) 'The Concept of Cinematic Excess' (1981) in Braudy, L. and Marshall C. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford University Press, 517.
[3] Donaldson, L. F. (2010) ‘Access and Excess in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974)’ in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, 1, 6. (www.warwick.ac.uk/go/moviejournal/)