After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image

Julia Vassilieva, Constantine Verevis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415679268
• eBook ISBN: 9781317984689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the wake of the debates over high/low culture distinction spilling into the effective dismantling of the boundary that once separated them, the past decade has seen the explosion of 'bad taste' production on screen. Starting with paracinema or 'badfilm' – a movement that has grown up around sleazy, excessive, or poorly executed B-movies and has come to encompass disreputable and unworthy films – this trend has been evident in various formats: on television and in video-art, low-budget and straight to TV films, amateur and home movies. The proliferation of trash on screen can be seen as delivering the final blow to the vexed issue of taste.

More importantly, it prompts a reconsideration of some critical issues surrounding production, circulation, understanding and teaching of 'bad objects' in the media. This collection of essays, written by international film and television scholars, provides detailed critical analysis of the issues surrounding judgements of cultural value and taste, feeling and affect, cultural morals and politics, research methodologies and teaching strategies in the new landscape of 'after taste' media. Addressing global and local developments – from global Hollywood to Australian indigenous film and television, through auteurs Sergei Eisenstein to Jerry Bruckheimer, on to examples such as Twilight to Sukiyaki Western Django – the essays in this book offer a range of critical tools for understanding the recent shifts affecting cultural, aesthetic and political value of the moving image.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.

Introduction: After taste: Cultural value and the moving image

Julia Vassilieva and Constantine Verevis

Film and Television Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

The collection of essays offered in this issue of Continuum is an outcome of the conference ‘B for Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics and Cultural Value’, convened by Alexia Kannas, Claire Perkins, Julia Vassilieva and Constantine Verevis, and organized by Film and Television Studies at Monash University, Melbourne in April 2009. Taking place exactly 30 years after the publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s celebrated Distinction (1979) – a monograph that offered up a powerful critique of transcendental claims to culture – the conference not only paid (implicit) homage to Bourdieu’s legacy but also demonstrated how far the critique of taste has ventured in one particular cultural field: namely that of film and television studies.

The present collection’s title ‘After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image’ suggests the possibility of problematizing not only the judgement of taste but also the category of taste itself. The temporal and conceptual modality of ‘after’ continues the move initiated by the post-structural and postmodern critique of the subject, ethics, cultural theory and critical methods, previously elaborated by such scholars as Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1981), Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy (Who Comes After the Subject?, 1991), Terry Eagleton (After Theory, 2003), John Law (After Method, 2004) and John Frow (Cultural Studies and Cultural Value, 1995). Just as these previous interventions called for the rethinking of fundamental categories of inquiry in the humanities (in the light of earlier deconstructive critique), ‘After Taste’ urges a reconsideration of the notion of taste, and a dismantling of the high/low culture dichotomy (as facilitated by Bourdieu’s intervention). In the wake of a postmodernist assault on the high/low culture divide, the traditional trope of taste – a two-headed Hydra, with one head looking towards artistic quality, the other towards mass appeal – no longer holds. As has been recently demonstrated, not only is there an increasing understanding of how the intersection of categories of class, gender, age and ethnicity bear on the judgements of taste, but also of how taste is itself becoming increasingly omnivorous, where this omnivorousness itself is becoming a marker of distinction (Bennett et al. 2009). How are we to think, then, about the issue of cultural value in this new landscape? The answer – suggested by the ‘Bad Cinema’ conference – seems to be in accord with the move implemented in other fields of inquiry operating under the condition of ‘after’, where the focus of critical attention is shifting to the singularity of occurrence and expression, or what Giorgio Agamben (1993) defines as ‘whatever singularity’, whether it is subjectivity, moral and ethical choice, or the theorizing of cultural work. Similarly, the discourse of ‘Bad cinema’ seems to focus with a renewed energy on the analysis of aesthetic variations and textual specificities of film and television products, urging not so much redemption or valorization of marginal objects but a critical understanding and interrogation of the uniqueness of artworks drawn from either the ‘centre’ or the ‘fringes’ of cultural production, whether this be a Sergei Eisenstein classic or Takashi Miike spaghetti western, a Hollywood blockbuster or a home movie.

The deliberately provocative title of the conference – ‘B for Bad Cinema’ – sought to problematize cultural value but also referred to all those developments in the history of the moving image that at various points have been dismissed as ‘bad’, from B-movies of studio-era Hollywood to cult films and so-called ‘paracinema’. Terminologically ‘Bad cinema’ represents an expansion of the notion of ‘badfilm’ legitimized in film scholarship by Jeffrey Sconce in his influential essay ‘“Trashing” the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style’, first published in Screen in 1995. Inspired to a large degree by Bourdieu’s study of the social construction of taste and fuelled by the rise of cultural studies, Sconce’s article drew attention to the phenomenon of ‘paracinema’ (a term said to have been introduced by filmmaker Ken Jacobs) as one that problematizes cinema itself and the status of cinema studies. Sconce initially describes paracinema as a ‘most elastic textual category’ – one that ‘would include entries from such seemingly disparate subgenres as “badfilm”, splatterpunk, “mondo” films, sword and sandal epics, Elvis flicks, government hygiene films, Japanese monster movies, beach-party musicals, and just about every other historical manifestation of exploitation cinema from juvenile delinquency documentaries to soft-core pornography’ – before going on to describe the paracinematic as a mode of spectatorship, or ‘reading protocol’ (1995, 372). More recently, Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik have positioned ‘Badness’, aesthetic or moral, alongside a hyperbolic exaggeration of genre, intertextuality and explicit violence, as defining characteristics of the cult film, another sibling within the extended (and, perhaps, dysfunctional) ‘Bad cinema’ family (2008, 2–4). The Cult Film Reader, edited by Mathijs and Mendik in 2008, has provided a useful anthology in the theorization of ‘Bad cinema’, with articles ranging from Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer’s, through Sconce’s article, and on to contributions from J. Hoberman, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Paranormal Activity (2007) producer Steven Jay Schneider.

For Mathijs and Mendik, as for Sconce before them, the significance of ‘Bad cinema’ as a textual as well as a critical category lies in its striving ‘to valorise all forms of cinematic ‘trash’, whether such films have been explicitly rejected or simply ignored by legitimate film culture’ (Sconce 1995, 372). Thus, we can observe, with Benjamin, that ‘Bad cinema’ turns its gaze to the ‘historical trash heap’ where, as Slavoj Žižek suggested – in a recent expressive cinematic performance beside a colossal deposit of rubbish (Taylor 2008) – ‘we should start feeling at home’. Leaving aside Žižek’s timely call for rethinking ecology as a philosophy of trash, what is important for the present discussion is that trash operates here as both metonym and metaphor, where its subject matter reinforces the disturbing conjuncture between neglect, evacuation, abandonment and rescue inherent in the trope.

The specificity of the phenomenon of ‘Bad cinema’, and the polemic that surrounds this field, encompasses textual characteristics of cinematic material, conditions of distribution, circulation and reception, and the theorization of ‘trash’ at work within the academy itself. In this context, ‘Bad cinema’ promotes an alternative vision of cinematic ‘art’, challenging the established canon of quality cinema (and television) and raising issues of aesthetic criteria, authorizing bodies, and access to cultural capital. The anti-canon of ‘Bad cinema’ interrogates controversial subject matter, including all manner of representations of sexual degradation and depravity, torture and violence, cannibalism and mutilation; it marvels at the sight of blood, excrement and slime, and it embraces abject emotions stretching from shock, horror and disgust to boredom and ennui. The audience for ‘Bad cinema’ insists on and practices a number of calculated reading strategies, such as: rendering the bad into sublime; the deviant into defamiliarized; and, especially, the privileging of an ironic detachment that ‘redeems’, as it were, the controversial pleasure that ‘Bad cinema’ delivers, the strategy reflected in and embraced by the academic discourse on ‘Bad cinema’. Thus, above all, ‘Bad cinema’ valorizes diversity and difference, passionately cultivating signs of it in its subject matter, reading strategies and critical discourses. In all these aspects ‘Bad cinema’ reveals its generic allegiance to postmodernism in its typical characteristics as pointed out (as early as the mid-1960s) by critics like Susan Sontag and Ihab Hassan who argued that the work of postmodernists was

deliberately less unified, less obviously ‘masterful’, more playful or anarchic, more concerned with the processes of our understanding than with pleasures of artistic finish or unity and certainly more resistant to a certain interpretation, than much of the art that had preceded it. (Butler 2002, 5)

The critical moves that encompass discourses on ‘Bad cinema’ owe significantly – although often without an explicit acknowledgement of this genealogy – to such ideas as Michel Foucault’s articulation of the power/knowledge nexus (1980), Roland Barthes’ thesis on the death of the author (1977), Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard’s challenge to ‘grand narratives’ (1984) and Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction (1972).

The fact that the problematics of ‘Bad cinema’ remain at the forefront of academic interest testifies to the pertinence and unresolved character of issues of taste and value, despite the suggestion that the current moment can be characterized as post-postmodern, or a modernism after postmodernism informed by militant realism. Perhaps, then, as Mikhail Epstein has suggested (drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s insights), instead of using the prefix ‘post’ we should shift to the prefix ‘proto’: ‘everything that the previous generation perceived under the sign of post- the succeeding generation ought to view as proto-, not as a completion or rejection, but as a first draft of new cultural formations’ (2004, 45). If we approach the problematics of ‘Bad cinema’ in terms of beginnings and initiations, which would ‘presuppose an open future rather than a consummation of the past’, then such problematics can open new horizons for thinking through some major issues in the theorization of the moving image. In particular, this forges new ways to approach the nature of temporality, the structuring position of the apparatus, and the production of the subject.

Temporality is central to cinema, as Gilles Deleuze has persuasively demonstrated (1989). In a little bit more than 100 years of its existence, cinema has experimented massively with time. From time moving resolutely forward with history in the films of revolutionary Russian directors to the ‘dead time’ of Italian neo-realism, cinema has modelled and embodied different ways of thinking and experiencing time: linear and circular, mythic and epic, staying still and rushing ahead, ruptured and disturbed, elastic and condensed, and interrupted, by flashbacks and flash-forwards. What ‘Bad cinema’ adds to this panoply of temporalities is not a deviation from the linear model, which is by no means new to cinema, but the fact that such deviations are happening ‘not by design’ but rather as a result of accidents and mistakes, intrusion of chance and randomness, or – as Sconce notes – of ‘the systemic failure of a film aspiring to obey dominant codes of cinematic representation’ (1995, 385). By presenting in this way, ‘Bad cinema’ disturbs not only and not principally time, but more importantly what in cinema scholarship is traditionally defined as the filmic and profilmic. The profilmic refers to that which is in front of the camera – the actor, the setting, the props – which leaves its impression on film, and in this sense is ‘objective’. The filmic, on the other hand, indicates what is behind the camera – the domain of human agency and subjectivity which photographs, directs and edits the film – making all sorts of choices in the process. ‘Bad cinema’ ushers in the eruption of the profilmic, as the human agency behind the camera retreats into non-professionalism, guesswork, drunkenness, madness, or – as is the case of Andy Warhol – even leaves the scene altogether. The bleeding of profilmic into filmic, the diminished limits of control, and the ghostly appearance or disappearance of subjectivity is perhaps the main source of anxiety that ‘Bad cinema’ generates. Its problematic intentionality is located in the quicksand between record, surveillance, chance and mistake, not so much foregrounding the cinematic apparatus but leaving it to its own devices. While realist theories are rarely invoked in the discussion of the problematics of ‘Bad cinema’, this use of the apparatus can be thought of as a limit case in the paradoxical realization of André Bazin’s memorable wish for a ‘means of representation that escapes human intention and anthropomorphic privilege’ (During 2009, 92). It is to this dream of Bazin’s that Deleuze refers when he looks (surprisingly, as Lisabeth During has noted) to cinema to ‘restore our faith in the real’. What is at stake for Deleuze in this, writes During, is less ‘a model of the camera as independently operative’ than ‘the revelation of the inhuman in the world, openness to the world below and beyond our measurements’ (92).

Not that such a possibility is unproblematic, warns Agamben’s essay, ‘What is an Apparatus?’ (2009). If, since Foucault, the apparatus has been understood as a machine that produces subjectifications, then its function might now have changed. According to Agamben, in the current phase of capitalism apparatuses ‘no longer act as much through the production of a subject, as through the processes of what can be called desubjectification’ (2009, 20). The question to be raised in this context is: what kind of subjectivity – if any – is produced by the specific use (and misuse) of cinematic apparatuses celebrated by ‘Bad cinema’ practitioners? Contrary to the widespread celebration of a liberated subject-consumer of ‘Bad cinema’ texts – one allegedly enjoying unlimited freedom of ‘subjective’ interpretation – doesn’t a closer look at the process of engagement with the objects of ‘Bad cinema’ reveal the dissolution of the subject? Does the development of ‘Bad cinema’ indicate the emergence of a post-subjectivity, superseding the notorious decentred and fragmented subject of postmodernism? As Agamben observes: ‘processes of subjectification and processes of desubjectification seem to become reciprocally indifferent, and so they do not give rise to the recomposition of a new subject, except in larval or, as it were, spectral form’ (2009, 21).

On the other hand, the radical experience of desubjectification, that the discourse of ‘Bad cinema’ invites us to contemplate, can hold the promise of a position outside and beyond the dominant ideological inculcation of the subject, the position so hotly debated by critics of ideology of various orientations. And just as forcefully as ‘Bad cinema’ urges us to confront the limits of subjectivity, it urges us to grapple with the limits of meaning. If in the post-structuralist discussion of theorists such as Barthes (1983), Stephen Heath (1976) and Kristin Thompson (1986) the issue of meaning is framed powerfully by categories of the ‘third sense’ – an obtuse meaning and cinematic excess – then what does a shift from excess to trash entail? While the nonsensical nature of ‘Bad cinema’ production would rank highly among its defining features, rather than lament the possibility of the evacuation of meaning the critical response to this situation should encompass the rethinking of meaning as a horizon of engagement with life.

Performing alongside Žižek in the recent documentary Examined Life (Taylor 2008), Avital Ronell has said provocatively:

I am very suspicious historically and intellectually of the promise of meaning […] It’s been very devastating, this craving for meaning. It is something with which we are in constant negotiation. To leave things open and radically inappropriable, admitting that we haven’t really understood, is much less satisfying, more frustrating and more necessary, I think.

The heuristic advantage of ‘Bad cinema’ as an experimental field lies in opening new vistas of thinking about time, apparatus, subjectivity and meaning, and it is precisely this that accounts for the currency and urgency of ‘Bad cinema’, not only aesthetically, but philosophically and politically. But given that ‘Bad cinema’ operates not only as a textual but also as a critical category, it promotes and re-invigorates the analysis of the cultural value of ‘after taste’ by focusing closely on the singular historical, political, emotional, authorial, textual and temporal parameters of the moving image.

The four broad divisions – ‘Critical Methods and Approaches’, ‘Taste and Value’, ‘Feeling and Affect’, and ‘Teaching Bad Objects’ – outline the major concerns for this special ‘After Taste’ issue of Continuum. Part I, ‘Critical Methods and Approaches’, begins with ‘An Idleness Bordering on the Wacky’, an essay in which Adrian Martin looks to the work of Australian filmmaker Paul Cox to interrogate the place of ‘Art and Artists’ across a body of work that extends from the early successes of Man of Flowers (1983) and My First Wife (1984), through the artist biopics, Vincent (1987) and Nijinsky (2001), and on to recent releases Human Touch (2004) and Salvation (2008). The case of filmmaker Cox – someone ‘who makes movies about long-cherished ideals of art and artists within the circuit of arthouse cinema’ – provides Martin with the opportunity to address ‘some of the contradictions and struggles underlying the historical institution of art cinema’. Sampling a number of reviews of Cox’s work, Martin argues that, even though there appears to be a close fit between the classic interpretative rhetoric of institutional art cinema and Cox’s oeuvre, Cox might be better characterized as ‘a naïve art filmmaker’, someone whose ‘impulsivism’ places him in ‘a more idiosyncratic and riskier realm than formulaic, institutional art cinema’. Martin concludes that the ‘simple conflation of Paul Cox with … “high-art values”’ misses something that is ‘strange, recurrent and obsessive in his work’: namely, ‘the symptomatic contradiction [that] all his films dramatize between the supposed vital need for a High Art life, and the even more urgent need to finally, magically transcend it’.

In ‘Hollywood: Bad Cinema’s Bad Other’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Introduction: After taste: Cultural value and the moving image
• Part I. Critical methods and approaches
• Part II. Taste and value
• Part III. Feeling and affect
• Part IV. Teaching bad objects forum
• Index