Glauber Rocha, esse vulcão (J.C.T. Gomes, 1997)

João Carlos Teixeira Gomes. Glauber Rocha, esse vulcão. Rio: Nova Fronteira, 1997.


Ela (Rosa Maria Penna, mulher de Glauber) se recorda de que no trabalho de cinema ele era muito exigente e profissional, por possuir uma base teórica de alto nível e ser prátco no seus objetivos, apesar da sofisticação do pensamento. Unia-os aindao mesmo amor pelos museus da Europa, onde se demoravam pelas tardes. Nele ainda a impressionava a consciência que tinha de marketing cultural, que sabia administrar os seus contatos com os jornalistas, zelando pela sua imagem de realizador e, em suma, de profissional do cinema. (p.227)

A "Estética da Fome" é um ensaio sobre as relações culturais entre os países europeus e o mundo subdesenvolvido, secularmente estabelecidas num clima de opressão (já denunciado no Brasil, há mais de duzentos anos, pelo poeta-fazendeiro Gregório de Matos e Guerra), opressão essa que gerou o atraso social, a dependência política e a espoliação econômica, além, naturalmente da desfiguração cultural. A sedimentação da cultura é um trabalho de raízes, fundado naquilo que um país pode construir de mais característico através da ação de gerações sucessivas, anônima ou erudita, mas sempre produzidas de dentro para fora. As influências externas são inevitáveis e não devem ser repelidas, sob pena de cair-se no xenofobismo irresponsável, mas só produzem resultados positivos se assimiladas de forma que não se revelem desfiguradoras da cultura nativa. (p.270)

Glauber disse: Enquanto a América Latina lamenta suas misérias gerais, o interlocutor estrangeiro cultiva o sabor dessa miséria, não como sintoma trágico, mas apenas como dado formal do seu campo de interesse. Nem o latino comunica sua verdadeira miséria ao homem civilizado, nem o homem civilizado compreende verdadeira mente a miséria do latino. Para o observador europeu, os processos de criação artística do mundo subdesenvolvido só interessam na medida que satisfazem sua nostalgia do primitivismo; e este primitivismo se apresenta híbrido, disfarçado sob tardias heranças do mundo civilizado, mal compreendidas porque impostas pelo condicionamento colonialista. Este condicionamento econômico e político nos levou ao raquitismo filosófico e à impotência, que, às vezes inconsciente, às vezes não, geram no primeiro caso a esterilidade e, no segundo, a histeria. A esterilidade: aquelas obras encontradas fartamente em nossas artes, onde o autor se castra em exercícios formais que, todavia não atingem a plena prossessão das suas formas. O sonho frustrado de universalização: artistas que não despertam o ideal estético adolescente. (Paulo César Saraceni. Por dentro do Cinema Novo: uma viagem. Rio, Nova Fronteira,1993, p.180-181) (p.271)

Numa das mais radicais colocações dialéticas que tanto caracterizava o seu pensamento, formulou os conceitos de "cinema original" e "cinema de imitação" para defender a articulação do Cinema Novo em torno de um projeto uniforme de rejeição do cinema industrial de Hollywood, a ele contrapondo a idéia, sempre trabalhada, de "cinema de autor", para que pudesse refletir a nossa realidade de país subdesenvolvido sem qualquer artifífio ou embelezamento. Não queria que o espectador nacional fosse ao cinema para ver filmes brasileiros "à americana", ou seja, filmes que, cedendo à cultura de dominação, espelhassem as técnicas e os procedimentos típicos de Hollywood, condicionadores de uma falsa visão de mundo em escal internacional e comprometidos com objetivos de entretenimento alienado e lucro fácil, pela exploração sistemática da violência, da ilusão e do sexo. "Monstro produtor de ilusão" - assim qualificou o cinema de Hollywood, de tal forma poderoso que, diante dele, todos se curvavam, cedendo-lhe à influência. (p.365)

A única violência admissível para Glauber, pois, era a libertadora, ou seja, aquela que pode ajudar as vítimas pela denúncia da ação dos seus opressores. Nesse sentido é que se legitimava a exposição das cenas de violência, a fim de que o povo adquirisse a consciência das suas múltiplas formas de manifestação e aprendesse a repudiá-la. [...] Conscientemente, Glauber opunha essa estética do degradante aos "filmes de gente rica, em casas bonitas, andando em automóveis de luxo: filmes alegres, cômicos, rápidos, sem mensagem, e objetivos puramente industriais".
A exibição da violência, pois, não deveria ser um fim em si mesmo, como sucede nos filmes comerciais, mas sim um elemento de conscientização, para favorecer uma atitude de condenação e refletido repúdio. Se o artista tem a consciência plena dos seus meios, não há motivos para que rejeite os temas ditos feios ou contrangerdores, como a própria fome, porque não é a substância que desvela a arte, mas a forma que a envolve. (p.274) {Na arte o que importa é a forma}

Glauber só compreendia o papel do cinema no terceiro mundo como alavanca contra a opressão. Conduzir essa luta era função dos artistas, porque ele não acreditava que, no mundo capitalista e sobretudo nas áreas subdesenvolvidas, os políticos e os tecnocratas viessem jamais a resolver os problemas da sociedade. (p.375)

O processo de montagem não goza de unanimidade entre os grandes diretores e o grau do papel que assume para eles muito depende das suas vinculações estéticas. Roberto Rosellini, por exemplo, o grande iniciador do neo-realismo italiano, autor de obras fundamentais na história do cinema pós-guerra, como Roma, cidade abarta e Paisá, que influenciaram gerações de cineastas no mundo inteiro, em suas memórias qualifica a montagem como "o momento do embuste e da má-fé", porque transformava os montadores nos "verdadeiros donos do filme" (p.397)

O que ele (Glauber) queria era a criação de "uma linguagem alternativa", não dependente do passado, e que representasse "a linguagem política mais avançada do Terceiro Mundo", expressando a realidade do Brasil e de todos os países que emergiram da dominação coloniaalista com as seqüelas conhecidas. (p.398)

A insistência com que ele defendia um projeto nacional, sua permanente pregação para que criássemos internamente um sistema de distribuição e exibição capaz de enfrentar e competir com aquele que nos impunha o exterior, a resistência que oferecia aos caminhos do cinema de Hollywood, tudo isto poderia criar a idéia de que Glauber era um incurável xenófobo, um ideólogo do nacionalismo chauvinista intransigente e, sobretudo, um rancoroso inimigo dos Estados Unidos. Tal imagem, porém, não corresponderia à verdade. ... Na entrevista concedida ao jornalista Flávio Costa, da Manchete, ao ser indagado sobre Como são os Estados Unidos, respondia, em pleno clima da guerra do Vietnã: Um grande país, com uma força enorme e que vive uma crise que, vencida, poderá abrir novos caminhos para a humanidade, sem guerra (...). O imperialismo está sendo posto em questão dentro dos EUA. E isto é mais importante do que se pode pensar à primeira vista. O povo americano é um povo extraordinário, porém viciado por uma máquina de informação que o aliena do resto do mundo. (p.381)

Stars (Richard Dyer, 1979)

Richard Dyer. Stars. London: BFI Publishing, 1998.

The aim of the book it to survey and develop an area of work in film studies, namely, film stars.

Within film studies, reasons for studying stars have largely come from two rather different concerns that may broadly be characterised as the sociological and the semiotical.

Sociological: centres on the stars as a social phenomenon and as being an aspect of film's 'industrial' nature. Films are only of significance in so far they have stars in them.

Semiotic: stars are only of significance because they are in films and therefore are part of the way films signify.

Dyer's book assumes that, on one hand, the sociological concern can only make headway when informed by a proper engagement with the semiotics of the stars (their signification in media texts). This is because, sociologically speaking, stars do not exist outside the media texts, therefore it is the media texts that have to be studied with due regard of the specificities of what they are (significations).

Equally, on the other hand, the semiotic concern has to be informed by the sociological, partly because it is on the basis of proper theorisation of an object of study, that one is able of to pose questions of it. Semiotics has to make assumptions about hos texts work before proceeding to analyse them. Granted that texts are social facts, it follows that textual assumptions must be grounded on sociological facts. You need to know what kind of thing a text is in society in order to know what kinds of question can be legitimately proposed, what kind of knowledge you can reasonably expect it to yield.

Horror Movies (Carlos Clarens, 1967)

Carlos Clarens. Horror Movies: an illustrated survey. London: Panther, 1971. (pp.312)

"It would seem logical to suppose that troubled art is born out of troubled times. But it would be wrong to be that systematic about it, for what period of history has siled in, pre-ordained and self-acknowledged a golden age? Edgar Allan Poe existed in a momentary by-way of relative peace and security in a new country still full of hope, yet his work is limned by the same dark phantoms that haunt E.T.A Hoffmann's, a writer who lived when Europe was an open field trampled by the Napoleonic Wars. The landscape of the mind does not always correspond to external circumstance" (p.9).

"Satan is immutable, it would seem, whether ancestral dark angel or devil in the flesh. Those who imagine him today are not the doctors of demonology but the psychiatrist, the anthropologist, the sociologist. To them, horror movies might be seen as a historical imperative, if not an as aesthetic necessity" (p.10).

"Only the best horror movies sustain their power to frighten through the passage of time. Yet this does not necessarily entail a loss of interest or even popularity. They gain a new dimension in perspective by appearing encrusted with the meaning of their period. Didn't Prometheus come to represent the Myth of Electricity (in Frankenstein) after being the Myth of Scientific Power and, before then, the mythical alibi for man's defiance of divine will? Didn't Mr Hyde become more recognisably human as we learned to accept that our forefathers endeavoured to conceal and represses? Besides making us nostalgic of the things we once feared, they help us to gauge the escalation of our insensibility. It follows that a supremely violent age like ours calls for unprecedented violence in its aesthetics manifestations" (p.11)

"Whether horror films set out to scare us or to elevate what scares us to the status of myths, the movies follow popular taste or at least try to, inasmuch as they are products of an industry, and are bound to reflect something of the collective unconscious of their audience. It may commonly be that the artistic best does not always coincide with the mythological most tangible: a film may hit a very definite chord in the public mind and still not be distinguished on any other terms" (p.12)

"In France, most of the movies discussed in this book fall under the rather vague (for Anglo-Saxons) heading of le fantastique. Besides horror films, le fantastique includes such titles as Alice in the Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, while excluding the more earthbound thrillers that carry no supernatural implications. I am aware of the shortcomings of 'horror films' as a designation - the term unavoidably carries it connotations of repulsion and disgust- but it is the one sanctioned by usage and the best available in English. Yet, in writing about horror films, I have occasionally included for illustrative purposes a fantastic movies that contains little or no horror. I have not singled out, however, serials such as Feuillade's Les Vampires or Universal's Flash Gordon, although their mention crops up in the text several times. Despite the fact that it contains some delightful moments of near-fantasy, Les Vampires is unshakeably (an in spite of its masked hoods and hooded vamps) on the side of light: its essence is poetry and movement and one would look in vain for the dark undertow of, say, the Fritz Lang serials, which are included. As for Flash Gordon, it is pure prewar science fiction, utterly devoid of anxiety, a superior adventure romance. But my respect for the serial excludes its inclusion here as a mere appendage to the horror film" (p.13)

"Finally, my exclusion of Les Diaboliques, Psycho, Repulsion and the more blatant borrowings from Krafft-Ebing are not as arbitrary as it may seem if we are to consider the Horror Film as the Cinema of Obsession, the rendering unto film of the immanent fears of mankind: damnation, demonic possession, old age, death, in brief, the night side of life. In Jungian fashion, I fell more compelled to single out and explore the visionary than the psychological" (p.14). [Clarens suggests the paternity of Psycho lies in Fritz Lang's M, cross of police dossier and psychiatric case-history]

"Horror, like beauty, may reside in the eye of the beholder; or in the attitude of the director towards his material. Most film-makers have, at one stage or another of their careers, felt the challenge to instil that elusive feeling of terror in the audience. There are unforgettable horror moments in non-horror films" (p.14).

"As we tend to pigeonhole the enormous mass of films laid at our disposal through seventy years of industry, we apply to movies the strict rules and superficial restrictions of genre headings, when horror films (and Westerns) at best obey no rules and transcend the limitations we impose on them. Let me the first to realise that such staggering number of movies can wreak havoc on any serious attempt at theorising. Most movies have their own voice, and none of them was created to support a single aesthetic or theory" (p.15)

The Wizard on Montreuil Paris, 1815-1913: Chapter about George Méliès and who the fantastic film 'accidentally' came into being. Méliès did not think the new invention of the motion picture (Lumière Cinématographe and Thomas Edison Kinetoscope) should merely record reality in a journalistic way. He thought it excluded poetry, fantasy and unbridled imagination therefore he set up a studio in Montreuil where he created his films Battleship Maine (1896), The Haunted Cave (1898), The One Man Band (1900), Trip to the Moon (1902), The Conquest of the Pole (1912), among others. In order to create his illusions, Méliès resorted to double and multiple exposure of the film, the gradual disappearance of the image (fade) and the slow transition from one image to another (dissolve), plus trap doors and other resources used by magicians and well as a great deal of pantomime trickery and stage-based acts. Clarens chapter is an homage to Méliès and his dream factory.

Recreational Terror (Pinedo, 1997)

Isabel Cristina Pinedo. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany: State of New York Press, 1997.

"As a product of mass culture the horror film is not a utopian form; it is not a politically transformative experience in any grand sense of the term" (p.4-5).

Characteristics of the postmodern horror genre: 1) violent disruption of everyday world; 2) blurs the putative boundary between good and evil; 3) throws into question the validity of rationality; 4) narratives are apt to end apocalyptically; 5) simulation of danger that produces a bounded experience of fear, not unlike a roller coaster.

"Much as the horror film is an exercise in terror, it is simultaneously an exercise in mastery, in which controlled loss substitutes for loss of control. The proliferation of apocalyptic, graphically violent horror films which dot the post-sixties landscape attests to the need to express rage and terror in the midst of postmodern social upheaval" (p.5).

"I argue that the slasher film creates an opening for feminist discourse by restaging the relationship between women and violence as not only one of danger in which women are objects of violence but also a pleasure one in women retaliate to become agents of violence and turn the tables on their aggressors" (p.6) [e.g. The Stepfather].

"Not all postmodern horror films bring to fruition the feminist potential of the genre. But that is not to say that they are otherwise without a progressive aspect" (p.6).

"The irrepressibility and inevitability of violence represented in these films speak to the sense of helplessness that results when the normalcy of violence (be it illegal varieties of street violence or state-sanctioned forms like corporate downsizing) is wrenched from its social context and made to seem extraordinary, unfathomable and inescapable" (p.7)

"In contrast to the classical horror film, the postmodern film locates horror in the contemporary everyday world, where the efficacious male expert is supplanted by the ordinary victim who is subjected to high levels of explicit, sexualized violence, especially if female" (p.16)

"People are no longer terrified by his films [Boris Karloff]. Why should they be, when the headlines of everyday life are more horrific?" (p.16)

"Much as the horror film is an exercise in terror, it is simultaneously an exercise in mastery, in which controlled loss substitutes for loss of control [again!]. It allows us to give free reign to culturally repressed feelings such as terror and rage. It constructs situations where these taboo feelings are sanctioned. This bounded experience of terror is constructed by various means: the temporally and spatially finite nature of film, the semipublic setting of the film exhibition, the acquisition of insider knowledge, and the use of comedy" (p.41)

"Frederic Jameson refers to the cannibalization of past productions as pastiche, an ironic self-awareness that calls attention to its own constructedness. Pastiche, the art of plagiarism, is the postmodern code that supplants modernism's unique mark of style (In: Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. pp.16). I am disturbed by the characterization, stated or implied, of pastiche as exclusively a postmodern phenomenon. when it comes to the horror film, pastiche is a long standing practice. The film cycles of the thirties and forties abound in countless remakes and sequels, although not enumerated as the are today. Pastiche is not a new theme; however, in the contemporary genre there has been an intensification"(p.47) [primary difference is the prominence of graphic violence to produce gory humour]

The Monster Show (David J. Skal, 1994)

David J. Skal. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. London: Plexus, 1994.

"A good deal of this book has dealt with the long shadow of war reflected and transformed in the shared anxiety rituals we call monster movies. Wars tend not to resolve themselves , culturally, until years after the combat stops. The same is true of economic depressions, fatal epidemics, political witch-hunts -- the traumas can linger for decades." (p.386)

"World War I found a persistent symbolic expression in horror entertainment, a tendency that never really ended, and was only replaced by the symbol-distillations of World War II. The American nineties are still haunted by the Vietnamese seventies; the belief in the survival of Vietnam-era MIAs remains a powerful fixation in many quarters, a tenet of faith that psychologically concretizes at least one truth: that the Vietnam War was never really resolved, not in the world not in our minds" (p.386)

"She [Diane Arbus, photographer] saw that 'monsters' were everywhere, that the whole of modern life could be viewed as a tawdry side-show, driven by dreams and terrors of alienation, mutilation, actual death and its everyday variations. Working-class families, through Arbus' unforgiving lens, emerged as denizens of an existential suburban sideshow. Society dowagers were close cousins to Times Square transvestites. Caught at the right moment, almost anyone could look retarded. america, it seemed, was nothing but a monstershow. It was a revelation, a cause and a creed" (p.18)

"There are four primary icons on this carousel, which turns to a calliope dirge: Dracula, the human vampire; the composite, walking-dead creation of Frankenstein; the werewolfish duality of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and, perhaps most disturbing, the freak from a nightmare sideshow - armless, legless, twisted or truncated, now shrunken, now immense - it changes every time we look, a violation of our deepest sense of human shape and its natural boundaries. The carousel turns slowly, but steadily; if one looks long enough, one monster eventually blurs into another." (p.19)

"Caligari was derivative, no doubt, but it shared one honest source of inspiration with the new art movements, namely the Great War just past. The war had a tremenduous influence on the expressionist, dadaist, and emerging surrealist artists during the 1920s. In her recent book Anxious Visions, art historian Sidra Stich links the surrealist preocuppation with deformed and desfigured bodies to the sudden presence, following the war, of a sizeable population of the crippled and mutilated. Modern welfare had introduced new and previously unimaginable approaches to destroying or brutally reordering the human body." (p.48)

"Horror has always had a certain affinity for modern art movements and has often quoted their manneirisms, possibly because, at root level, they are inspired by similar cultural anxieties." (p.55)

"Dracula is a story about a particulary destructive and compulsive form of drinking; in the ensuing decades vampire stories would be colored increasingly by the metaphors of addiction." (p.124)

"By the time the MMPDA had the chance to view the finished version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Universal's Frankenstein had just opened to astonishing business, leading the industry to realise the Dracula was not a fluke, and 'horror movies' (the term was not widely used previously, and was in many ways an invetion of 1931) formed an important and profitable new category." (p.144)

"With Dracula, Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the psychic landscapes of castle, crypt and laboratory were definitively mapped." (p.145)

THE MONSTER SHOW uncovers links between horror entertainment and the great social crises of our time, as well as horror's function as a pop-cultural counterpart to surrealism, expressionism, and other twentieth-century artistic movements. Ultimately focusing on film, the predominant art form of the modern world, Skal examines the many ways in which this medium has played out the traumas of two world wars and the Depression; the nightmare visions of invasion and mind control engendered by the Cold War; the preoccupation with demon children and mutants that took hold as thalidomide, birth control, and abortion changed the reproductive landscape; the vogue in body-transforming special effects that paralleled the development of the plastic surgery industry; the link between the rise of the AIDS epidemic and a renewed fascination with vampires. The author looks at horror's popular renaissance in the last decade, a thought-provoking inquiry into America's continuing obsession with the macabre.

Skal also offers the reader some insights into the struggles that the rival studios faced during the horror film boom of the 1930's and the effects of the demarcation enforced by the Production Code. In addition the author explores Hitler's fascination with the symbol of the wolf, E.C's vastly popular and extremely graphic comic books and the works of Stephen King.Interestingly Skal reinforces the theory that the public appetite for horror movies seem to grow in proportion to actual horrors experienced at the time. The biggest booms in the horror product occured during the Depression of the late 20's, the advent of World War II, the Red Scare, the growing threat of nuclear war and finally to the AIDS epidemic of today.

The Monstrous-Feminine (Barbara Creed, 1993)

Barbara Creed. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge,1993.

In this book the author challenges the patriarchal (woman-as-a-victim) view by arguing that the prototype of all definitions of the monstrous is the female reproductive body. Against Freudian theories, which claim that women are terrifying because they are castrated, she claims that women terrify because they might castrate. From a feminist and psychoanalitical perspective Barbara Creed discusses seven faces of the Monstrous Feminine (woman-as-a-monster) 1. the archaic mother, 2. the monstrous womb, 3. the vampyre, 4. the witch, 5. the possessed body, 6. the monstrous mother and 7. the castrator or female castratice. The declared intention of the book is to explore the representaion of woman in the horror film and to argue that woman is represented as monstrous in a significant number of horror films. * Women monstrous in relation to her mothering and reproductive function. * Women's monstrousness linked to sexual desire.

Creed draws on Kristeva's concept of "abject" - the place where meaning collapses (p.9)-. The horro film is an illustration of the work of abjection (p.10). Kristeva sees the mother-child relationship as marked by conflict: the child struggles to break free but the mother is reluctant to release it. The mother's body becomes abject to the child. A function of Religion is to purify the abject. Horror film is a confrontation with the abject ( a form of modern defilment rite, reconciliation with the mother's body). Abjection both repels and attracts.

Rational Fears (Mark Jancovich,1996 )

Mark Jancovich. Rational Fears, American Horror in the 1950s. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.

PREFACE

"The 1950s, it is assumed, constitues a period of conservatism with horror, whether this conservatism is conceived of in aesthetic or political terms, and critics usually establish their owns ares as worthy of study by defining them as different from the horror of the 1950s." (p.1)

He takes issue with Robin Wood: "However, far from being 'all the same', even the 1950s invasion narratives are often markedly different from one another. They may share particular patterns and features, but they deploy them in very different ways." (p.2)

Shift from the relying on gothic horror towards a preoccupation with the modern world. The book is divided in three parts 1] invasion narratives (complex responses to condition of post-war america, internal changes and fear of Soviet agression) 2] the outsider narratives (an alternative to existing norms or feelings of alienation, isolation, estrangement or how American normality has become strange) and 3] narratives concerned with 'crisis of identity' (people unable to rely both on rationality or irrationality, emotion, intuition).

" this situation also helps to account for the fact that many 1950s horror texts have not only acquired the status of classics for horror fans, but have also been so important to contemporary popular culture. 1950s horror not only lives as vital points of reference within popular culture, but many of the key practioners of contemporary horror (and indeed popular culture in general) often refer to 1950s horror text as the most significant and formative texts within their appreciation of horror in particular, and popular culture in general" (p.4)

Conclusion

Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers (1993) is a remake of a 50s horror classic. So is Attack of the 50 foot Woman, The Blob, The Fly, Invaders from Mars, Little Shop of Horrors, The Thing. Furthermore, Alien (1986) borrows from Them!, The Stepford Wives (1974) replicates elements of the Body Snatchers; Jaws takes visual images from the Creature from the Black Lagoon; the opening of It Came from Outer Space reappears in Starman (1984).

"As a result, it is important to note that while the contemporary horror genre has changed since the 1950s, it has not simply broken with the past. As was shown in the case of Psycho, these attempsts not only tend to ignore the processes which culminated in specific transformations, but also tend to ignore the ways in which earlier periods are constantly available for reworking and reinterpretation, and are not simply dispensed with, or rendered redundant" (p.303).

"Indeed, the importance of 1950s horror is that it established many of the preoccupations which are central to contemporary horror. It was the 1950s horror, for example, which moved the genre away from its concerns with exotic locations and began to place it firmly in the context of modern American society" (p.303-4).

It is also important because writers and filmmakers, such as Spielberg and Stephen King, were influenced by them.

"unlike many other areas of 1950s popular culture, 1950s horror has occupied a central place within the development of 'cult' ot 'trash' audiences, an important and well-established section of contemporary popular culture" (p.304) .

About Edward D. Wood's 'excentricity': " His films do no really conform to the dominat tendencies within the period, although he does draw upon certain elements of 1950s horror. Indeed, Wood's contemporary importance is not a product of his significance within the 1950s, but of the specific strategies of interpretation which contemporary 'cult' audiences have brought to the period. His significance is a product of the ways in which the period has been reinterpreted within the present" (p.304)

Pressing need to study the ways in which the readings of contemporary cult audiences are the product of differential distribuition of cultural capital and the struggles between different tastes formations. (Pierre Bourdier. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge,1984)

The Horror Genre, from Beelzebub to Blair Witch (Paul Wells, 2000)

Paul Wells. The Horror Genre, from Beelzebub to Blair Witch. Wallflower, London, 2000.


Introduction

"Like many people interested in the horror film, or indeed comedy, its allied genre, I view its analysis as something which should not strain too far after meaning for fear it might undermine the sensation created" (p.1)

"Thankfully the effects of horror or humour initially by-pass the inhibitions and intrusions of the intellect so the thrill can precede the theory" (p.1)

In the first section, Configuring the Monster, Paul Wells explores the key themes of the genre, the main issues and debates raised, and engage with approaches and theories that have been applied to horrors texts. The theoretical background is presented via the modernist context within which early horror texts evolved. Review of fundamental preoccupations, especially through psychoanalytical and gendered readings. Also includes case study that reviews indicative patterns of readings of horror films across different age groups (audience and reception studies). In the second section, Consensus and Constrain 1919-1960, and in the final section, Chaos and Collapse 1960-2000, he addresses the chronological evolution of the horror film, looking at how it reflected and commented upon particular historical periods. His analysis considers myth and gothic literature in early cinematic representations of horror. Post-war developments are reviewed in terms of revisiting this formulae. Contemporary gore and pathological states are considered through a discussion of auteurs reworking the genre field's of operation and its constant recycle.

Configuring the Monster

"The history of the horror film is essentially the history of anxiety in the twentieth century." (p.3)

"As the nineteenth century passed into the twentieth, this prevailing moral and ethical tension between the individual and the socio-political order was profoundly affected by some of the most significant shifts in social and cultural life. This effectively reconfigured the notion of evil in the horror text -soon to be a cinematic as well as a literary form - in a way that moved beyond the issues of fantasy and ideology and into the realms of material existence and overt challenge to established cultural value systems." (p.3)

* 19th century transformative discourses = political and economical theories, Karl Marx and The Communist Manifesto (1848). "Arguably the horror film embraces the leftist critique of this process, consistently invoking the 'monster' of the alienated and disadvantaged as the key protagonist against the bourgeois middle-class orthodoxies" (p.4)

"the genre has been used to explore modes of social 'revolution' in which naturalised ideas about bourgeois orthodoxies are transgressed, exposing how the 'working class' in Weimar's Germany, Depression-era America, Franco's Spain and so on have been oppressed and socially manipulated to maintain those advantaged by the late capitalism status quo." (p.4)

* 'Natural selection' as transformative discourse= Darwin's On the Origins of the Species (1859). Mankind artificially imposes itself upon the conditions of material existence, while nature changes the world slowly. Jekyll and Hyde, Birds would be films that address the 'revenge of nature'. Nature pitted against humankind's will to power.

* Friedrich Nietzsche's = " will to power" , humanity subject to degeneracy and spiritual crisis. He insists that humankind id nihilistic and Christian piety is the worst evil of all (as it does not come into contact with the reality of the world). Collapse of spiritual values echo in horror films.

* Sigmund Freud = emergence of psychoanalysis, structures of consciousness revealed at primal level. In the horror film this is usually linked to madness, dysfunctionality and psychosis, the monsters of the mind.

"Horror films have been analysed within a range of theoretical paradigms and discourses. The genre has been addressed in the light of its theological and moral perspectives, its sociological and cultural dimensions, its politics of representation, and its configuration as a set of texts particularly conducive to psychoanalytical approaches. Problematically, the horror genre has no clearly defined boundaries, and overlaps with aspects of science fiction and fantasy genres. Also, in recent years, many of its generic elements have been absorbed into the mainstream thriller. Arguably, there is no great benefit in attempting to disentangle these generic perspectives. It may be more constructive to proceed on the basis of addressing the distinctive elements of any on text within a particular historical moment.

It may be noted that the horror genre is predominantly concerned with death and the impacts and effects of the past, while science fiction is future-oriented, engaging with how human social existence could develop and dealing with humankind's predilection for self-destruction. While science fiction is potentially utopian (although often critically grounded), the horror genre is almost entirely dystopic, and often nihilistic in outlook". (p.7)

Devils and Doubles (sub-chapter) "Psychoanalyst Otto Rank wrote 'Der Doppelgänger' in 1914, suggesting that the double was essentially the way in which the soul or ego sought to preserve itself, ensuring against destruction by replicating itself. Bound up with a narcissistic self-love which is self-protecting and strongly predicated to the denial of death, this act of 'doubling' can work in reverse. Once the double is cleaved or threatened, it heightens the degree by which mortality and the signs of death are enhanced. It is of no surprise, therefore, to see the prominence of the motive in the horror text". (p.9)

On Ann Radcliffe opinion about Horror vs Terror = "Radcliffe's definition is enabling in the sense that texts maybe viewed in the light of 'terror' and its potential radicalism, or 'horror' and its creation of a seemingly reactionary position". (p.11)

Horror Films in Content (sub-chapter) "Arguably, if the horror text is to be culturally and historically pertinent, film-makers have to engage with an aesthetic space free from the moral and ethical obligations of the social paradigm in which they live - only then they can comment upon, and critique the conditions of, the material world. If the social concern about violence in the horror film is to be properly addressed, for example, it is crucial that such issues be treated responsibly, looking at violence as a reality and not the tilitatory experiences of the adventure spectacles which passes uncensored into cinemas every week. The horror text does this in a variety of ways, and this is why, as a genre, it remains subversive and challenging because it foregrounds, through the comparative safety of fiction, the very agendas humankind needs to address in 'fact'. While it remains contentious, and subject to considerable opposition, the horror film makes us confront our complex 'darker' agendas, and in this it serves an important function as progressive and sometimes radical genre, in the face of reactionary stances". (p.24)

"Although seemingly nihilistic in outlook, the horror film can continually remind an audience of the things that about which it should neither be complacent nor accepting". (p.35)

Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962)

Playing drag and racing, a group of boys "accidentally" push another car off a bridge. The car, which had three girls in, quickly sinks and disappears into the river. Soon after the town people are at the spot in attempt to withdraw the car from the bottom of the river. As three hours have passed by since the accident everyone assumes the girls must be dead but a survivor unexpectedly creeps out the river.

Apparently a few days later but still not quite recovered from the shock, the survivor Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) decides to leave the town not to be seen again. She accepts a job as a professional organist in a church in Utah to start anew. As she is driving there alone, she begins seeing a ghostly apparition reflected in the side car window.

The figure seems to reside in an old run-down pavilion, a spooky abandoned amusement park to where she is strangely attracted. It is the abandoned Saltair Pavilion outside Salt Lake City. There is a shot of her in front of a promotional poster for the Pavilion and, on the poster there is a look-alike blonde with the same hairstyle. Saltair had been a family swimming, recreational facility and it looks like a cross between an Eastern Orthodox church and an Arabian Nights palace. The falling lake level doomed the swimming feature but the place operated as an amusement park until abandoned five years before the filming of "Carnival of Souls" (a story structure adapted to fit sets and locations to which Harvey had free access). Anyway, it is here that Mary must confront the personal demons of her spiritual insouciance. It is a quite scary movie but not the kind of scary that exploits blood and violence to make you jump. The plot is incredibly simple, all the haunting comes from the simple visual craft. The dead man seems to echo some German Expressionism, which I think is great, but the soundtrack and the sound itself lets down.

As much as a pervading sense of disquiet is enhanced by the efficient use of locations (a church, a vast ballroom, a decrepit and deserted amusement park at the end of a pier), the organ music is a bit irritating, however it brings in some disturbing religious images and undertones. There are, though, nice angular shots with the huge organ pipes in the foreground and the diminutive figure of Hilligoss far below. As a church organist, she is also "possessed" by her instrument, her playing alternates between the spiritual and the profane, and that deeply disturbs her wrapped-too-tight minister. There is the moment when she is alone on the highway and her radio will only pick up organ music.

Mary lodges in a boarding house and fends off the aggressive advances of her across-the-hall neighbor. The man is named John Linden, he is an alcoholic and very persistent in his attempts to seduce Mary. But those strange vision have not been left behind and she is still being haunted by the apparition of a ghastly-looking stranger. Mary is very indifferent to her job and to those around her. She is kind of "passive" and completely detached from the ordinary life situations. "I don't belong in the world….something separates me from other people" says Mary Henry. Quite lyrical! There is the isolation theme going on here, the drama of someone who feels they no longer belong.

I also liked the way Mary went from real life to "limbo", where people couldn't hear or see her.The two occasions where Mary Henry suddenly becomes invisible to everyone are much more vivid because Hilligoss is so beautiful. Unlike a person of average appearance, an especially beautiful woman walking down the street is used to drawing stares from virtually everyone. The director throws in some symbolism and the viewer has to fill in the gaps. Not much explanation is given, it seems just the supernatural at work. I thought it was excellent, very atmospheric but not truly spooky. The visions of the phantom man became more often, Mary goes to the abandoned carnival pavilion in the afternoon an experiences a surreal, dreamlike moments of sensual necro-beauty. All the phantoms come out of water to be reborn.

Gothic in the Horror Film 1930-1980 (David Punter, 1996)

David Punter, 1996. The Modern Gothic: Gothic in the Horror Film 1930-1980. In: David Punter. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present day. Longman, London, 1996 (p. 96-119).

The international history of the horror film to 1980 may be seen in three principal phases: the German masterpieces of the silent era; the developments in America between 1930 and the late 1950s; and the largely British-centered product of the 1960 and 1970s." (p.96)

"In this chapter, I want, as with the fiction, to restrict myself to American and British work, but it worth nothing from the outset that behind all subsequent horror films there lurks, in a curiously resonant parallel with eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, a German presence. It manifests itself in theme, in content, in a specific set of photographic styles, indeed in an entire mis-en-scene which runs from the range of Universal studios films of 1931 and 1932 to the Hammer cycle of the 1960s" (p.96)

"The horror film thus has a complexly twisted provenance: out, originally, of a body of legendary which owes much to real or fake German and central European sources and 'Transylvanian' settings, via English nineneenth-century fictional developments, but then mediated again through the directional styles of the great German directors, Wegener, Wiene, Murnau and Lang." (p.96)

"This is by no means to assume that all horrifying films are Gothic; but at the same time it is true that the fundamentally formulaic model which isconventionally known as 'the horror film' hs indeed many Gothic aspects." (p.96)

"... still the forgers of the most culturally prominent images of Frankenstein's monster and Dracula respectively." (p.96-97)

"In one sense at least the horror film is very similar to eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, in that, while being a popular form, it demonstrates on closer inspection both a surprisingly high level of erudition, actual on the part of its makers and also imputed to its audience, and also a very high level of technical virtuosity." (p.97)

"To connect the thematic and the technical, one might perhaps say that what the 1930s horror films essentially possessed were content to be unrushed, to allow space and time for their conceptions to emerge on the screen, and in doing so they managed to create a series of works which posessed a genuinely tragic quality, at least insofar as they realised a sense of powerful forces, forces of destiny, operative in human life." (p. 98)

"He is a splendid mixture of the diabolical and the gentlemanly..." (p.100)

"danger usually brings out not the best but the worst in people, and where it does bring out the best, that best is generally unrecognisable to the world outside. " (p.103)

"... Gothic act of divine defiance, and thus necessarily entailing its own defeat." (p.105) Promethean defiance

"... who is indeed a bourgeois character, trying to impose a schema of rationalism on the events with which he is confronted" (p. 106)

"... deliberate vulgarisation, which is presumably in itself a significant element of an attempt to deal with historical problems." (p. 107)

"Corman's films - and Price's acting - demand audience collusion, and it is this structural sense, and not merely because of the extent of their appeal, that they can most fairly be called 'cult' films. They permit their audience to asknowledge its own intelligent and reasonableness before deliberately abandoning. It has often been said that only a secure avant-garde can afford seriously to affront or abandon good taste, and certainly Corman's films afford intellectual relief - not scape - of a kind which cannot be far distant from the esxitement ladies in the late eighteenth century derived from observing the wickedness of an Ambrosio. Corman's cinema is neither realist nor psychological: it is, in a sense, a cinema of pure formalism, and only because it is so reliant on fixed form can it afford the gross excess of colour and dialogue which typify it." (p.107)

"When The Course of Frankstein first appeared, it was rapidly condemned on the grounds of explicit sadism, a criticism which seems to us now rather surprising, for the kinds of ritualised violence which occur in Hammer films seem very much bounded by assumptions of the form." (p.108-109)

"... Fisher shows him simultaneously capable of cruelty and disinterested kindness, and brings him into close proximity with the stereotype of the victimised pioneer." (p.109)

"That all the vampires, male and female, in Hammer's films are sexually attractive, sometimes to the point of caricature, recalls precisely scenes in Stocker like that of the three female vampires..." (p.110)

"For it is not enough to say that horror motifs have lost their bite because we no longer 'believe in' them: we have never believed in them as simply existent, but more as valuable and disturbing fictional images which gain their vitality, when they do, from the underlying truth which they represent." (p.118)

Horror (Mark Jancovich, 1992)

Mark Jancovich, 1992. Horror. In: Mark Jancovich. Horror. B.T. Batsford, London, p. (p.7-25).

Introduction

On censorship:"they claimed that 'video nasties' were a new category of media products, and that they had dangerous effects on viewers, especially young viewers. No clear definition of the video nasty existed but it was generally accepted that they were examples of pornography and horror" (p.7)

"the language which is frequently used to describe these genres is one of disease and contagion. They are referred to as as 'sick' and 'perverted', and their diffusion is described in terms of corruption and contamination" (p.7-8)

"the study of horror is important, if only because claims about it have had political effects - effects which extend far beyond the limits of the genre itself. However the social unacceptability as a genre has meant that there has been, as with the study of pornography, little real investigation of its forms and effects." (p.8)

Post-structural psychoanalytic criticism = shifts the focus of study from the individual artist or text to the system of signification itself. "they stress that all cultural activities have rules and codes, whether of language or visual imagery. Not the individual author who should be the source of meaning, but these rules and codes. They maintain that: our sense of ourselves as individuals (or our subjectivity) is not we who speak language but language which speaks us, the very way we think is determined by the structures of language" (p.9)

"In the case of horror it is claimed that the pleasure offered by the genre is based on the process of narrative closure, in which the horrifying or monstrous is destroyed or contained". Structure order- disorder- order re-established. The audience's pleasure is supposed to be based upon the expectation that the narrative will reach this particular type of conclusion, and the eventual fulfillment of this expectation."

This narrative structure is claimed to have specific ideological effects. Post-structuralism presents itself as a political project in offering an analysis of the se type of ideological effects.

Ideological effects: Post-structuralism presents itself as a political project in offering an analysis of these effects. "The narrative closure of horror texts is not only claimed to contain the elements which are disturbing dominant order, but to produce psychological effect in the audience" (p.9). It suppresses conflicts which might threaten their subjectivities (sense of self). This process is referred to as 'the positioning of the subject within ideology' and is considered undesirable regardless of the ideology within the subject is positioned" (p.10)

"the reasoning behind this argument is that while we appear to express our own thoughts through the use of language, the very way in which we think is determined by the structures of language. The subject, or the sense of identity is made to appear natural and inherent. It makes what is social, constructed and historical to be individual and natural" (p.10)

Therefore: the very way we think is determined by the structures of language. The subject is a product of ideology. In positioning the subject within ideology, this sense of identity is made to appear natural and inherent.

Modern gothic, a reader (Allan Lloyd Smith, 1996)

Allan Lloyd Smith, 1996. Postmodernism/Gothicism. In: Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith (ed). Modern gothic, A reader. Manchester University Press, Manchester, p. (p. 1-19).

Introduction

"This essay attempts to interpret the unmistakable presence, through structural or verbal allusion, or wholesale rewriting, of the Gothic in some of the fictions of the postwar period." ( p.1)

"The Old Gothic, however, as the backdating of Stevenson's own tale suggests, doesn't stand still as a point of reference: even in the eighteenth-century, it was itself anarchic, popular, an indeed 'camp' recycling the past, long before Sir Walter Scott sought to transform and rationalise it into an official literary genre, the so-called 'historical romance'." ( p.1)

"Evidently, the Gothic is not merely a literary convention or a set of motifs: it is a language, often an anti-historicising language, which provides writers with the critical means of transferring an idea of the otherness of the past into present." ( p.1)

"As these essays demonstrate, there is no point in thinking of the Gothic as 'pure'; it is an apparent genre-badge which, the moment it is worn by a text, becomes an imperceptible catalyst, a transforming agent for other codes: the uncanny, a form of Gothic fantastic effect quite central to modern fictions of screen and novel, is not one code but a kind of gap between codes, a point at which representation itself appears to fail, displace, or diffuse itself." ( p.2)

"But these Gothic black spots, lurking like the sites of past road accidents in so many contemporary contexts, are not simple deconstructive aporias transformed into spatial metaphors; they form in themselves textual negotiations with history, and the corollary of this critical preoccupation of the Gothic's latest history of itself is a description of a present whose very presentness is diminished and vitiated by disruptive images of the past." ( p.2) Interference of the past into the present.

"The anxiety of influence is not a pattern for the authors and critics represent in this book - the Gothic, it seems, is a language that, by definition, belongs to no one; with its air of pastiche - only made, never born - it forms a ready-made language for the aesthetic and cultural politics of our time. ( p.3-4)

"The Gothic is perfect anonymous language for the peculiar unwillingness of the past to go away" (p.4)

"Reiteration is the modern form of haunting; reiteration of narrative manouevres and motifs, unholy reanimation of the deadness of the past that has the power to make something new" ( p.4)

"But whereas early Gothic proposed a delightful excursion through the realms of imaginary horror, contemporary use of the Gothic register strikes a darker and more disturbing note. It is the horror now that is real, and the resolution that is fanciful. Hence the peculiar effect we sometimes find, akin to the dropping of a stone through a spiders's web, when the actuality or realisations of the horrors of the contemporary life strikes through the web of highlighted representation with an effect that may be comic, or grotesque, or uncannily chilling." ( p.5) Although the popular evocation of horror is itself significant, the mode does not simply 'reflect' a modern condition by a form of inverted mimesis.

Modern Gothic- be it the "barbarous vitality of the Past, the Alien or the Other to erupt, and threaten the familiar plot, an accepted environment, the repeated pattern allows us first to glimpse, and then to reflect critically upon, the changing processes at work in our imaginings, and even in our theories, of our own contemporaneity." ( p.5)

American Gothic (John Hough, 1988)

Six young and wealthy friends from Seattle decide to go on a camping trip but they get stranded on a remote American island after having trouble with their hydroplane's engine. They spend the night in the woods and next day they find a Victorian-like house occupied by a strange family. Initially they are hosted by Ma, Pa only but soon they get to know their three middle-aged children and it becomes clear that they are among very demented people. The family are self-righteous, God-fearing American Puritans who lead their lives as if their still were in the 1920s'. (The dvd frontispiece is a parody)

They are skeptical of science and averse to mundane vices, such as smoking or having sex outside marriage. One by one the visitors start to get viciously murdered by the psychotic family members eventually only Cynthia (Sarah Torgov) alive. The fragile girl has a past trauma (she feels guilty of letting her own baby drown) and her experiences on the island are enough to snap her already fragile hold on reality. As she he is then incorporated by the family a reverse of fortune takes place and the victim becomes a monster.

The film addresses themes like: madness, incest, secrets from the past, rape, basically those features established by 18th century Gothic literature. A warning for the blood-thirst seekers: there is actually very little blood and gore. If I was to drawn on a general theme for this film it would have to be the fear of arbitrary forces from the past, the play of modern values against old brutal ones.

Although the production is fairly good (opening sequence with the plane, the woods scenes on the island) the film is really campy. The title was what attracted me the most but the film is a bit disappointing. As much as "everything has been done before" some horror films are actually capable of innovating those well-known aspects of terror. Enormously overacted the horror flick becomes increasingly risible towards the end. The presence Rod Steiger and Yvonne DeCarlo, as Pa and Ma, is enough to make this a good film. Though I think Fanny (Janet Wright) delivers a creepy performance which kind of saves the show.