[ecrea] CfP Special Issue of Transatlantica: Exploiting Exploitation Cinema

Exploiting Exploitation Cinema



This issue of Transatlantica (http://transatlantica.revues.org/) will 
focus on the margins of the Hollywood film industry: exploitation 
cinema. Though it is often associated with the 1960s and 1970s, the 
period of grindhouse double features, it has existed in the U.S. since 
the late silent era. Critics have argued that the implementation of the 
Hays Code in 1934 made it possible for independent producers to market 
films dealing with taboo material (namely sex and violence). From the 
beginning, then, exploitation cinema exploited scandalous material in 
order to exploit specific niche audiences. Not surprisingly, it has 
specialized in unsavory genre pictures often targeted at young 
audiences: various subgenres of the horror movie (the gore movies of 
Herschell Gordon Lewis, rape-revenge films, the slashers of the late 
1970s-early 1980s), scifi, softcore porn (the films of Russ Meyer), car 
and biker movies, fight films (wrestling, martial arts), women in prison 
films, and the blaxploitation cycle of the 1970s. Yet by displaying 
transgressive material, exploitation cinema also played a highly 
controversial political role in showing what Hollywood films repressed: 
the unseen of culture.

This issue proposes to examine the various forms of exploitation that 
exploitation cinema is implicated in and the way they interact:

(1) the economics of exploitation cinema and the exploitation of a 
specific audience group in terms of gender, race or fan base;

(2) the exploitation of a genre in terms of narrative, figures and 
motifs (many of these films started as a title and sometimes a poster);

(3) the exploitation of (racial, gendered, sexual, ethnic, social) 
stereotypes within the films;

(4) the contemporary recycling or exploitation of exploitation cinema by 
the Hollywood film industry, for instance, in blockbuster remakes of 
exploitation films or in the films of African American filmmakers or 
directors like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino.

Articles should aim at foregrounding the contradictions and conflicts of 
interests inherent in these forms of exploitation, namely:

(1) the discrepancy or reconciliation between the conservative terms of 
the films as products and the politically transgressive content they 
offer, e.g. cautionary films of the 1930s;

(2) the ambiguous relationship between exploitation and independent 
cinema, and thus what would appear to be a reactionary form of cinema 
and a more progressive form, and also between exploitation cinema and 
contemporary mainstream cinema which simultaneously legitimizes and 
normalizes exploitation cinema by remaking it;

(3) the ambivalent representation of women and minority characters in 
terms of identity politics, e.g. the Final Girl, the Black Macho, etc.;

(4) the dilemmas involved in recycling motifs and figures of 
exploitation cinema: are they merely being exploited? how do 
contemporary films deal with the ambivalent politics of these films? are 
the radical politics lost in the mainstreaming of exploitation cinema? 
or are the incoherencies of the subtexts of exploitation films made more 
coherent?

Contributions are encouraged to combine, to various degrees, approaches 
based on film history, economics, audience and reception studies, genre 
studies, and feminist, gender, queer and race studies.

Proposals in English or French (300-500 words), including a 
bibliography, should be sent to David Roche ((mudrock /at/ neuf.fr)) by January 
31, 2014.

Bibliography

Albright, Brian, ed. Wild Beyond Belief! Interviews with Exploitation 
Filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.

Cartmell, Deborah, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye and Imedla Whelehan, eds. 
Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and its Audiences. London and 
Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 1997.

Chan, Kenneth. “The Shaw-Tarantino Connection: Rolling Thunder Pictures 
and the Exploitation Aesthetics of Cool.” Mediascope (Fall 2009). 
<http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/fall09_shawbrothers.pdf>.

Clover, Carol J. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror 
Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992.

Cook, Pam. “Exploitation Films and Feminism." Screen 17.2 (Summer 1976): 
122-27.

---.“The Pleasures and Perils of Exploitation Films.” Screening the 
Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema. London & New York: Routledge, 
2005. 52-64.

Corman, Roger, with Jim Jerome. How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood 
and Never Lost a Dime. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998.

Crémieux, Anne. Les Cinéastes noirs Américains et le rêve hollywoodien. 
Paris: L’Harmatan, 2004.

Dunn, Stephen. “Baad Bitches” and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action 
Films. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2008.

Hantke, Steffen, ed. Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear. Jackson, 
MS: UP of Mississippi, 2004.

Kaufman, Lloyd and James Gunn. All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I 
Learned from The Toxic Avenger. New York: Berkeley Trade, 2010.

Koven, Mikel J. Blaxploitation Films. Harpenden: Oldcastle Books, 2010.

Novotny, Lawrence. Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and 
Genre. New York and London: Routledge, 2007.

Rausch, Andrew J., ed. Gods of Grindhouse: Interviews with Exploitation 
Filmmakers. Albany, GA: BearManor Media, 2013.

Rouyer, Philippe. Le Cinéma gore : une esthétique du sang. Paris: Le 
Cerf, 1997.

Schaefer, Eric. Bold! Daring! Shocking! True: A History of Exloitation 
Films, 1919-1959. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1999.

Sconce, Jeffrey, ed. Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, 
Style, and Politics. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 2007.

Sims, Yvonne D. Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film 
Heroine Changed American Popular Culture. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006.

Walker, David, Andrew J. Rausch and Chris Watson. Reflections on 
Blaxploitation: Actors and Directors Speaks. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow 
Press, 2009.

Williams, Tony. Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror 
Film. Cranbury, NJ, and London: Associated University Presses, 1996.

Willis, Andrew. “Forced to Fight (1991): American Martial Arts Movies 
and the Exploitation Film Tradition.” Scope 18 (2010). 
<www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue= jul2000&id=285>.
Wood, Robin. Hollywood: From Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond. New 
York: Columbia UP, 2003 [1986].

David Roche
Professor of film studies
Professeur d'études filmiques
DEMA, Université Toulouse Le Mirail (Toulouse II)




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