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Reviewed by:
  • Cinema Inferno: Celluloid Explosions from the Cultural Margins
  • Jeff Hicks (bio)
John Cline and Robert G. Weiner (eds), Cinema Inferno: Celluloid Explosions from the Cultural Margins. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2010. 420pp. $60 (hbk).

In Mikita Brottman’s foreword to John Cline and Robert G. Weiner’s Cinema Inferno: Celluloid Explosions from the Cultural Margins, Brottman states emphatically that ‘Anyone reading this book must have a keen interest in horror movies’ (ix). While it may be true, her statement, and her subsequent exploration of her own reaction to watching The Exorcist (1973), kind of miss the point. The films explored in Cline and Weiner’s collection – often given such labels as cult, grindhouse, exploitation, psychotronic, drive-in, or simply trash, by film and cultural studies scholars – are too different, too complicated and too unique to fit within such a limited category. More importantly, part of the power and the charm of these films is that they resist easy labels or categorisation, existing instead in an undefined cinematic grey area.

Cline and Weiner deploy the term ‘transgressive cinema’ in their collection as a way to provide a more useful name for the films therein and to eliminate any negative stigma lingering within earlier descriptors. First used by filmmaker Nick Zedd in his 1985 work, Cinema of Transgression, ‘Transgressive Cinema’ was also the name given by Cline and Weiner to their pioneering panel at the 2006 Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference. There, Cline and Weiner sought to create a forum for scholars to present research on films that didn’t exactly fit within mainstream cinema studies. Cinema Inferno – and its companion volume, From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse: Highbrow and Lowbrow Transgression in Film’s First Century – grew from the seeds planted at that first conference and from the editors’ desire to present work that ‘dealt with the concept of “transgression” in film’ (xix). For the editors, transgression ‘pushes past the limit of what is acceptable to society at a given moment, while at the same time it redefines that limit’ (xx). The films covered in this volume are uncompromising in their attempts to challenge, subvert and – in some cases – tear down society’s social and cultural mores. As such, many of the films covered by Cline and Weiner have been denigrated by both critics and audiences alike, and several of the films here are conspicuously missing from previous publications within cultural and film studies. Even as authors such as Brottman, Jeffrey Sconce and Xavier Mendik begin to fill the [End Page 301] gaps in cult or exploitation film scholarship, there remains a number of subjects left unexamined.

Cline and Weiner organise their volume in six parts, each loosely centred on a central theme broad enough to corral chapters with widely disparate topics, but narrow enough to provide some cohesiveness and to allow the reader to make connections between cinematography, production style or film direction that aren’t readily detectible. If not for Cinema Inferno, I don’t think I would have ever considered Melvin Van Peebles’s Watermelon Man (1970) alongside Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). The chapters might be a little eclectic thematically, but this freedom of form allows for a much more inclusive list of topics covered. In fact, inclusivity is one of the hallmarks of both this collection and its companion volume. As with From the Arthouse, Cline and Weiner solicited chapter submissions for Cinema Inferno from both established film and cultural studies scholars such as Brottman, David Sterritt and Stephen Barber, and cult film aficionados such as Bill Landis and Xavier Mendik. The solicitation of material from both inside and outside of established film scholarship allows the editors to select work from authors who are the most knowledgeable about their subjects, regardless of previous experience or recognition.

The first section of Cinema Inferno, ‘Realisms’, presents chapters that explore the influence of Italian neorealist, French New Wave, and Soviet realist films and filmmakers on a handful of transgressive films. Included in this section is Bill Landis’s final essay, a look at the melding of Catholic imagery and stark portrayals of crime and vice in Pasolini...

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