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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)
view
contents
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
books of related interest
The Cinema of George Romero: Knight of the Living Dead
The
Cinema of John Carpenter: The Technique of Terror
The Cinema of
David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions
The Horror
Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch
Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking
Beyond the Hollywood Canon
Sex and the Cinema
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