After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image
In the wake of debates over the 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 chapters, 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 and Sukiyaki Western Django the chapters in this book offer a range of critical tools for understanding the recent shifts affecting the 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.
Julia Vassilieva is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Monash University, Australia. She is author of Re-thinking the Experience of Immigration: From Loss to Gain (2010). She has published in Film-Philosophy, Senses of Cinema, Rouge, Cinema Studies and The New International Journal of Humanities, and contributed as an editor to Transcultural Studies: A Series in Interdisciplinary Research.
Constantine Verevis is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Monash University, Australia. He is author of Film Remakes (2006) and co-editor of Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (2010). He is currently co-editing a volume entitled B for Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics and Cultural Value for Wayne State University Press.
After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image
Edited by
Julia Vassilieva and Constantine Verevis
First published 2012
by Routledge
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2012 Taylor & Francis
This book is a reproduction of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Volume 24, Issue 5. The Publisher requests to those authors who may be citing this book to state, also, the bibliographical details of the special issue on which the book was based.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN13: 978-0-415-67926-8
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Taylor & Francis Books
Disclaimer
The publisher would like to make readers aware that the chapters in this book are referred to as articles as they had been in the special issue. The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may have arisen in the course of preparing this volume for print.
Contents
Julia Vassilieva and Constantine Verevis
Adrian Martin
Jane Mills
Jane Stadler
Julia Vassilieva
Lisa Bode
Simon Sellars
Tom Steward
Scott Wilson
Minette Hillyer
Richard Misek
Jodi Brooks
Jodi Brooks
Therese Davis
Belinda Smaill
Lisa Bode is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. She has written a number of articles on the critical and popular reception of troubling texts. Her current research interests are screen performance and technology, and deceased film stars. Her work has appeared in journals such as Cinema Journal, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Screening the Past.
Jodi Brooks is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the School of English, Media & Performing Arts at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her essays have appeared in a number of edited collections including Aural Cultures, ed. Jim Drobnick (YYZ Books, 2004), Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Indiana University Press, 1999) and in journals such as Screening the Past, Art & Text, and Screen.
Therese Davis is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Monash University, Australia. She is the author of The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition and Spectatorship (2004) and co-author with Felicity Collins of Australian Cinema after Mabo (2004). She is currently working on a large research project on collaborations between Australian Indigenous and non-Indigenous filmmakers funded by the Australian Research Council (with Nancy Wright and Brooke Collins-Gearing).
Minette Hillyer is Lecturer in Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, with a study of the home-made, midcentury movie. Her article about the bad porn/home-movie made by Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee appeared in Porn Studies (ed. Linda Williams; 2004).
Adrian Martin is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at Monash University, Australia. He is author of Qu es el cine moderno? (2008), Ral Ruiz: sublimes obsesiones (2004), The Mad Max Movies (2003), Once Upon a Time in America (1998), and Phantasms (1994). He is co-editor of Movie Mutations (2003), and the Internet film journal Rouge.
Jane Mills is Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Industries at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Her current research interests concern visual literacy learning among school students from low socio-economic backgrounds. Publications include Loving and Hating Hollywood: Reframing Global and Local Cinemas (2009) and The Money Shot: Cinema, Sin and Censorship (2001).
Richard Misek is a filmmaker and lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. His current research focuses on space-time in digital cinema, and on the relationship between urban space and screen space. He is author of
