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- Title
High and low and in between.
- Authors
Betz, Mark
- Abstract
Over the past two decades, the study of European cinemas has undergone notable changes in its methods and protocols. The national cinemas model in particular has witnessed considerable complication as forces both centrifugal and centripetal have worked steadily to displace the nation-state as a stable centre for film histories and historicization. Similarly, the discipline's attention to audiences and institutions, both national and international, has led to increased awareness of how they shape categories and canons. In these respects, popular European cinema has enjoyed the longest front of scholarly attention; but the study of cult and exploitation (aided in no small part by the internet and the opportunities it provides for autodidact criticism) is not far behind; and even art cinema has in the past few years found a new place at the table. That said, the three also tend to be carrying on their own, private conversations. This essay attempts to open a new, group conversation, first by charting a course through some of the high/low cultural and iconographic interchanges among postwar European art, exploitation, and popular cinemas – with a focus on Italian cinema, whose cross-fertilizations are particularly rich and extensive. Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò is a nodal film that points both backwards to neorealism and forwards to contemporary Nazisploitation in several ways and across many films, the historical realities and continuing spectre of fascism in Europe being a common thread. The essay's second half argues for a reconsideration of the ways in which high, low, and popular media forms should be understood as overlapping and continuously folding into one another, and how established auteurist and genre modes of analysis inadequately address this history of postwar European cinematic imagemaking. It concludes with a call to adopt the Italian term for genre, filone, as a model and potential methodology for exploring and examining these interconnections.
- Subjects
EUROPE; MOTION pictures; MOTION picture history; FILM studies; ITALIAN films; PASOLINI, Pier Paolo, 1922-1975; SALO (Film); POPULAR films; ART house films
- Publication
Screen, 2013, Vol 54, Issue 4, p495
- ISSN
0036-9543
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.1093/screen/hjt044