Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics (review)

I must admit that it was fairly difficult to pass up the opportunity to review a book called Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics. Although I'm happy to teach the greatest hits collection of cinema history, I admit that I'm secretly more offended if someone has never seen Barbarella than Citizen Kane. Throw in a cover image of large-breasted cheerleaders holding up their pom-poms for Satan and a blurb from Dana Polan that promises "Aztec blood sacrifices! Knife-wielding psychos!! Libido-crazed military men!!! Martin Heidegger!!!!" and, well . . . what chance did I have of resisting? The essays in the collection, says editor Jeffrey Sconce, "present a range of historical, industrial, political, and aesthetic questions that suggest exciting new avenues in examining the mechanisms of film practice and cultural production" (10). The most dynamic part of this collection, though, is that these multivalent questions are directed toward those most maligned of "low culture" texts, a range of cinema objects collected under the heading of "sleaze" cinema.

Rightfully, Sconce seems to have difficulty defining the parameters of this collection centered around works of "sleaze." As a term, it seems more expansive (and less linked to the industrial) than B or Z cinema, and yet it suggests a rawness and lasciviousness not contained in calling the texts simply "trash" or "bad" cinema. "Sleaze," as he says, "is less a definable historical genre than an ineffable quality—a tone that is a function of attitude as much as content—it by necessity evokes a whole range of textual issues, from the industrial mechanics of low-budget exploitation to the ever shifting terrains of reception and taste" (4). Though his collection uses "marginality" at the borders of taste, style, and politics as a means of drawing together the essays, locating the marginality becomes a difficult task when the center is so indistinct. I point this out as an appreciation rather than a complaint; too often the complexities of textual interplay become elided in the interest of tidy definitions and codified structures.

Ultimately, the collection sees sleaziness as "a circuit of inappropriate exchange involving suspect authorial intentions and/or displaced perversities in the audience" (4). In short, the collection seeks out perverse texts and, more interestingly, perverse audiences—which makes the title of the collection a bit curious. The phrase "sleaze artists" suggests a primary focus on authorship, and yet the majority of the essays seem to focus rather on "sleaze audiences." It's possible that the collection reads as a study of audiences as authors, sleaze artists all in all, but if so, this remains a suggestion rather than a claim pursued within the text.

Every essay in the collection follows through on Sconce's promise of innovative and provocative research, but I do want to point out a few notable examples in each section of the book. In part 1, "Sleazy Histories," the authors engage the texts primarily within the timeframe of their original release. Most focus upon largely ignored texts, whether by "mainstream" audiences or by existing historical narratives of the film industry.

Tania Modleski's contribution to the collection, "Women's Cinema as Counterphobic Cinema: Doris Wishman as the Last Auteur," examines the until lately forgotten career of Doris Wishman, "granddame of the grindhouse cinema." One of the fascinating elements of this essay is that the piece was actually written ten years ago and remained unpublished due to Modleski's uneasiness with Wishman's later forays into "roughies" and "kinkies" that eroticized the degradation and torture of women. Thoughtfully written with a consciousness about Modleski's own desires and investments, the piece situates Wishman within ideological shifts in feminist theory, ultimately arguing that both demonization and canonization of the director are selective and misguided. Instead, Wishman provides brief and fleeting moments of pleasurable engagement where, as Modleski says, "the impulse of a flesh peddler and the wishes...