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

In the ever-growing terrain of cult film analysis, the study of 'trash', 'sleaze' or (to use Jeffrey Sconce's term) 'paracinema' has enjoyed what some might see as a disproportionate amount of attention, like a licentious peninsula seemingly poised to stage a coup and declare itself capital of Planet Cult. However, given that 'cult' can sometimes collapse too easily and interchangeably into 'trash', there is something to be said for a scholarly collection exploring cinematic 'sleaze' on its own terms. The study of 'trash cinema' is not always a pretty sight (if that is not too much of a tautology), sometimes sliding into unreflexive assertions of the supposedly transgressive politics of watching 'bad films' (particularly academics watching and writing about them). But we are in safe hands here. Sconce is the author of arguably the most influential essay on trash cinema, '"Trashing" the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style' (published in Screen in 1995, it is the 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' of 'bad movie' studies, at least in terms of citational ubiquity), and he has gathered together some distinguished scholars in the field.

Eric Schaefer provides a historical account of advertising strategies in US-distributed sexploitation films, focusing in particular on their less-than-flattering construction of their hypothetical (male) audience as sad, lonely 'goons'. Harry M. Benshoff argues that 'homo-military' films such as Reflections in a Golden Eye (Huston US 1967), The Sergeant (Flynn US 1968) and The Gay Deceivers (Kessler US 1969) are as much about the perils of repressing homosexuality as they are about representing queer desire itself as pathological or dangerous. Joan Hawkins examines the 'sleazy pedigree' of Todd Haynes, drawing out his affinity with trash and exploitation cinema. Kevin Heffernan, in his enjoyable account of the troubled history of Mario Bava's Lisa e il diavalo (Lisa and the Devil; Italy/West Germany/Spain 1973), and its bastardised US theatrical version, The House of Exorcism), manages the impressive feat of remaining outside the daunting shadow cast by Tim Lucas's gargantuan book about Bava (it tells us something about the canon that it is roughly the same size as Taschen's 2008 The Ingmar Bergman Archives, edited by Paul Duncan and Bengt Wanselius). Tania Modleski offers an ambivalent feminist reading of Doris Wishman, a figure who, as a rare female director with a paracinematic style, might be celebrated as 'bad girl' auteur were it not for the sexual violence in her 'roughies' (violent sexploitation). Modleski values Wishman for challenging the masculinity of trash as a woman who 'expanded the borders of bad taste' (69), even as she critiques the 'traffic in battery' (50) of films such as The Defilers (Frost and Friedman US 1965). Like several writers in the collection, Modleski offers no easy solution to this dilemma, but while she concludes that Wishman-as-feminist-trash-auteur is just not going to work, she is reluctant to leave her to 'the boys' to celebrate condescendingly as some kind of cinematic idiot savant. In fact, Modleski's essay is not the first feminist re-reading of Wishman (Moya Luckett's 'Sexploitation as Feminine Territory: The Films of Doris Wishman', in Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lázaro Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andrew Willis's Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (2003), provides a different and more 'positive' take on her films), but it is nevertheless one of the most striking essays in Sleaze Artists.

Sconce's 'Trashing the Academy' drew on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of 'cultural capital' to examine how 'trashophiles' negotiated their cult investments, positioning themselves in opposition both to 'high culture' and an imagined 'mainstream' consumed by the mundane masses. 'Paracinema' transforms trash into a kind of 'counter-cinema', but requires the ingenuity of the fanzine or Internet critics (increasingly joined by trashophiles within the academy) to turn ineptitude into authorial distinction. In his introduction to Sleaze Artists, Sconce seems at first...