Cutting Edge

by Hawkins, Joan

• ISBN13: 9780816634149
• ISBN10: 0816634149
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr

Summary

Even before Jean-Luc Godard and other members of the French New Wave championed Hollywood B movies, aesthetes and cineasts relished the raw emotions of genre films. This contradiction has been particularly true of horror cinema, in which the same images and themes found in exploitation and splatter movies are also found in avant-garde and experimental films, blurring boundaries of taste and calling into question traditional distinctions between high and low culture.

In Cutting Edge, Joan Hawkins offers an original and provocative discussion of taste, trash aesthetics, and avant-garde culture of the 1960s and 1970s to reveal horror's subversiveness as a genre. In her treatment of what she terms "art-horror" films, Hawkins examines home viewing, video collection catalogs, and fanzines for insights into what draws audiences to transgressive films. Cutting Edged provides the first extended political critique of Yoko Ono's rarely seen Rape and shows how a film such as Franju's Eyes without a Face can work simultaneously as an art, political, and splatter film. The

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
I. Paracinema Culture and Psychotronic Style
Sleaze-Mania, Euro-trash, and High Art: The Place of European Art Films in American Low Culture	3	(30)
Medium Cool: Video Culture, Video Aesthetics	33	(20)
II. At the Crossroads
Art Houses and Horrorshows; or, Pauline Kael Meets Georges Franju	53	(12)
The Scalpel's Edge: Georges Franju's Les yeux sans visage	65	(22)
The Anxiety of Influence: Georges Franju and the Medical Horrorshows of Jess Franco	87	(30)
III. When Horror Meets the Avant-garde
Exploitation Meets Direct Cinema: Yoko Ono's Rape and the Trash Cinema of Michael Roberta Findlay	117	(24)
From Horror to Avant-garde: Tod Browning's Freaks	141	(28)
Monsters in the Art World: Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey	169	(36)
Conclusion: Mainstreaming Trash Aesthetics	205	(12)
Notes	217	(62)
Bibliography	279	(16)
Select Filmography and Videography	295	(8)
Video Distributors	303	(2)
Index	305