ALTERNATIVE EUROPE

Whether defined by the comic excesses of Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia, the cult horrors of Black Emanuelle and the Italian 'Nunspoitation' movie, or the surreal vampire experimentations of Jean Rollin, trash and exploitation cinema represents the alternative face of European film. Although extremely popular with post-war audiences, these historically significant traditions of 'Eurotrash' have often been ridiculed or ignored by an established film criticism eager to define 'legitimate' European cinema as either avant-garde or socially realist. Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 investigates these previously under-explored national traditions of film culture, with essays and festival reports uncovering the social and cultural trends and tensions within a wide range of European exploitation movies. The volume considers such engaging and challenging topics as Russian, Belgian and Italian horror cinema, Gothic musclemen movies, Nazi 'sexploitation' cycles, German erotic cinema and 1970s European 'rogue cop' thrillers. Alternative Europe also includes interviews with trash directors and icons such as Brian Yuzna, Jörg Buttgereit and Giovanni Lombardo Radice.

January 2004
288 pages

978-1-903364-93-2 (pbk)

£16.99

£14.44 with 15% online discount add to basket

Ernest Mathijs is Assistant Professor in Film and Theatre Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of The Cinema of David Cronenberg (2008), editor of Cinema of the Low Countries and co-editor of Big Brother International: Formats, Critics and Publics (both 2004).

Xavier Mendik is Director of the Cult Film Archive at Brunel University and general editor of the AlterImage series. He is co-editor of Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon, and has written extensively on cult and horror cinema, including Fear Theory: Case Studies in European and American Horror Cinema, forthcoming from Wallflower Press.

'This exciting collection offers a rare and long overdue engagementwith many neglected European films, stars, directors, genres andcinemas. The book’s major achievement is that the contributorsmanage to locate their objects of study within relevant, historical,political, cultural and cinematic contexts and, in the process, toeffectively deconstruct their traditional 'strange-ness'. This is in itselfa major contribution to the study of European cinema.'
Dimitris Eleftheriotis, University of Glasgow