Exploring Film through Bad Cinema

David C. Wall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040406472
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Media Studies

Exploring Film through Bad Cinema offers an overview of the practice of film analysis through a specific focus on the concept of "bad" cinema within a series of broad cultural and historical contexts.

Providing a wide-ranging discussion of film from multiple perspectives, including history, aesthetics, and criticism, this broad theoretical engagement illustrates the ways in which the registers of value that we apply to film are inseparable from the wider discourses of taste that shape our culture. While loosely chronological, it is largely thematic in arrangement as it applies the traditional methods of film studies to in-depth discussions of some of the most notoriously (and compellingly) bad films in cinema history. Situating its analysis of a wide variety of films and filmmakers in terms of period, genre, and issues such as the emergence of narrative cinema, canon formation, and the politics of cultural hierarchy, it provides an in-depth consideration of the multiple and complex social and aesthetic discourses that shape our qualitative assessments of film.

Designed for both the lay reader and student of film, Exploring Film through Bad Cinema engages with a wide range of topics from film history and film theory to postmodernism, exploitation, and cult cinema. This theoretically and historically sophisticated analysis will appeal to researchers and scholars in film studies as well as cognate disciplines such as screen studies, visual studies, and cultural studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Creatures of the Screen
• 2 Early Film Form, Narrative, and the Cinema of Attractions
• 3 Cult, Pleasure, and Nostalgia: Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and the Triumph of Irony
• 4 “Paging Dr. Freud!” Theorizing John Boorman’s Zardoz
• 5 The World’s Worst Director? Ed Wood and Auteur Theory
• 6 Nudie Cuties and Radical Roughies: Doris Wishman’s World of Exploitation
• 7 Reel Nasty: The Night Porter, The Gestapo’s Last Orgy, and Sadiconazista Cinema of the 1970s
• 8 She Found It at the Movies: Pauline Kael and the Mystery of the Disappearing Film Critic
• 9 When the Blockbuster Goes Bad: Cleopatra’s Epic Excess and the Italian Peplum
• 10 The Worst Masterpiece Ever Made: Heaven’s Gate and the New Hollywood
• 11 Where Did It All Go Right?
• Index