ALTERNATIVE EUROPE
Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

Edited by Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik



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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.

Ernest Mathijs is Assistant Professor in Film and Theatre Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is the editor of Cinema of the Low Countries and co-editor of Big Brother International: Formats, Critics and Publics (both Wallflower Press, 2004).
Xavier Mendik is Director of the Cult Film Archive at University College Northampton, 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.

2004
288 pages
978-1-903364-93-2    £16.99 (pbk)


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chapter samples
List of contributors
Foreword by Jean Rollin
Introduction by Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik


reviews
'This exciting collection offers a rare and long overdue engagement
with many neglected European films, stars, directors, genres and
cinemas. The book’s major achievement is that the contributors
manage to locate their objects of study within relevant, historical,
political, cultural and cinematic contexts and, in the process, to
effectively deconstruct their traditional "strange-ness". This is in itself
a major contribution to the study of European cinema.'
Dimitris Eleftheriotis, University of Glasgow



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Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon
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