From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse: Highbrow and Lowbrow Transgression in Cinema's First Century ed. by John Cline and Robert G. Weiner (review)

When George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (US 1968) was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970 as part of a Cineprobe programme honouring the director, the art-house truly met the grindhouse. Until that point, Romero's film had existed as an artefact of drive-ins, horror festivals and the grindhouse theatres along New York's 42nd street. The term itself - grindhouse - was seen at that point to equate a film of low budget and even lower quality with a mode of production aimed at churning out as many films as possible for maximum profit. These films were celebrated by fans of the genre, but panned critically. MOMA's choice to include Romero's work as part of their celebration of innovation in filmmaking marked one of the rare points when the cognoscenti of the art world chose to lift an example of grindhouse filmmaking to what they saw as a more respectable level of appreciation. Unfortunately, most criticism that focuses on exploitation or grindhouse cinema - instead of appreciating the films for their own merit - creates a place of tepid acceptance or a begrudging admiration for the lasting power of the genre. With the exception of a handful of recent works, if one wants to examine grindhouse cinema from an objective - or even celebratory - viewpoint, one has to turn to the work produced by the cult fan community, or by those emotionally invested in the genre. The choice for any film scholar seems to be one of selective praise or heavily biased enthusiasm.

In From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, John Cline and Robert G. Weiner approach grindhouse and art-house films from an equal vantage point. This work, and the volume that preceded it, arose from a series of panels organised by Cline and Weiner on 'Transgressive Cinema' presented at the SW/TX PCA/ ACA conferences over the past few years. The popularity of these panels, and the dearth of serious scholarship dealing with grindhouse films, convinced the editors of the need for a work of scholarship that would treat the connections between art-house and grindhouse in a more objective fashion. The editors use the flexible term 'transgressive cinema' as a way to connect these two seemingly disparate film designations. The editors and contributors to the book define transgressive films as those films able to 'push or break social boundaries and taboos, whether in the realm of bad taste, political representation, or certain kinds of formal techniques' (xix). The editors argue that it is transgression that unites the aesthetic, narrative and structural features common to both art-house and grindhouse films. This does not mean that the editors treat all grindhouse films as treasures - they would be the first to agree that several of the films in this genre are outright garbage - but it does mean that they are able to appreciate the fact that the study of grindhouse, exploitation and transgressive films is able to tell us something about both the production history of low-budget films and the social and political climate that produced them. As they suggest, 'Films outside the mainstream are worth studying' (xvii).

What separates this volume from Cline and Weiner's previous work, Cinema Inferno: Celluloid Explosions from the Cultural Margins (2010), is their decision to organise this text around the modes of production and exhibition of transgressive films. Rather than focus solely on subject matter, ideology or setting, this volume focuses on the directors, stars, sub-genres and exhibition spaces of transgressive films. What is shared by both volumes is Weiner and Cline's solicitation of material from authors both inside and outside of academic film studies. The editors acknowledge that with much of the material included within their text, previous scholarship is severely lacking. There are films, filmmakers and exhibition spaces...