Cinema Inferno

Download or read book Cinema Inferno written by Robert G. Weiner and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing significant areas and eras of "transgressive" filmmaking, Cinema Inferno: Celluloid Explosions from the Cultural Margins is a collection of essays that explores many subgenres and styles that have received little critical attention. To provide a theoretical framework for transgressive cinema and its meaning, these articles discuss both contemporary films and those produced in the past fifty years. This volume begins with essays that examine the aesthetic of "realism," tracing it through the late Italian neorealism of Pasolini, the early films of Melvin Van Peebles, and Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. Another section focuses on '70s Italian horror films and thrillers, including a substantially different examination of filmmaker Dario Argento, as well as essays on critically underrepresented directors Lucio Fulci and Sergio Martino. A section on New York focuses on both radical independents, like Troma and Andy Milligan, and the social context from which a view of the metropolis-in-decay emerged. Other contributors explore the experimental work of the Vienna Action Group and controversial filmmaker Michael Haneke, as well as films and genres too idiosyncratic and disturbing to fit anywhere else, such as analyses of Nazi propaganda films, fundamentalist Christian "scare" movies, and postwar Japanese youth films. The final essays try to reconcile a mainstream flirtation with "transgressive" film and grindhouse aesthetics. Book jacket.