Global Cult Cinemas calls for a decolonisation of cult film studies.
To date, discourses of cult cinema have predominantly focused upon Anglo-American cinema and its reception in the West. Even when cult scholarship has expanded to include non-English language cinema from regions such as East and Southeast Asia, what nevertheless tends to define these cinemas as cult has been the subcultural fandom for those films in the West. Shifting the focus onto cult film traditions and fandoms beyond the Anglosphere, Global Cult Cinemas makes a decisive intervention in the field by calling for a decolonisation of cult film studies.
This volume therefore interrogates both the coloniality and gendered nature of much cult scholarship and the extent to which an implicit white male perspective needs challenging in an age of decolonising the academy. Our contributors focus their research on circuits of cult film production and reception beyond the predominant Anglophone centres, with particular attention to cult practices across the Global South. Chapters include investigations of specific cult film traditions within countries such as Brazil, Indonesia and Pakistan, alongside explorations of the politics of indigenous cult filmmaking, the global circulation of cult icons such as El Santo, and the status of auteurs such as Alejandro Jodorowsky in the era of #MeToo. In sum, this collection critiques the Eurocentric assumptions that lie at the heart of much existing cult film scholarship, and offers new ways of theorizing global cult cinemas to work towards the goal of decolonising cult film studies.
Daugiau informacijos
Examining cult film traditions from all across the world, Global Cult Cinemas asks how the predominant Western theoretical and historical frameworks of cult might be challenged in light of a more global perspective.
Introduction De-Westernizing Cult Film Studies
Dolores Tierney (University of Sussex, UK), Iain Robert Smith (King's College
London, UK), and Shruti Narayanswamy (University of St Andrews, UK)
Part I Reconsidering the Cult Paradigm: Race/Gender/Postcoloniality
1. The Whiteness of Cult
Iain Robert Smith (Kings College London, UK)
2. Alejandro Jodorowsky in the Era of #MeToo
Victoria Ruétalo (University of Alberta, Canada)
3. Fangirls, Feminists and Horror Knitters: Female Audiences of Asia
Extreme Films in the Me Too Era.
Emma Pett (University of York, UK)
4. First Nations and Cult Cinema: Invisible, Assimilated, or Free?
Ernest Mathijs (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Part II Cult Audiences and Reception
5. Old Temple, New Worshippers: Contemporary Online Audiences for Indian Cult
Cinema
Shruti Narayanswamy (University of St Andrews, UK)
6. Nascent Cult Viewing: Spanish Language Audiences and Theatres in New York
and New Jersey 1969-1973
Dolores Tierney (University of Sussex, UK)
7. Cine de Culto, Cine Bizarro, Cine Inusual: Cult Cinema and Its Divergences
in Argentina
Jonathan Risner (Indiana University Bloomington, USA)
8. Cult Across the Curtain: Receptions of the Czech Crazy Comedy at Home and
Abroad
Jonathan Owen (Independent Researcher)
9. Maula Jatt; Or the Strange Case of Cult Cinema and Cinephilia in Pakistan
Syeda Momina Masood (University of the Punjab, Pakistan)
10. The Indonesian Context of Cult Cinema: The Cases of New Orders
Exploitation Films
Ekky Imanjaya (Bina Nusantara University, Indonesia)
Part III Cult Auteurs, Stars, and Genres
11. Precarity, Opportunism, and a Stroke of Luck: Rafaele Rossi and Cult
Filmmaking in Brazil
Stephanie Dennison (University of Leeds, UK) and Laura Cįnepa (Anhembi
Morumbi University, Sćo Paulo, Brazil)
12. Roger Corman in Ireland: The Saga of the Cult Auteur, the Irish Film
Industry, and the Transnational Straight-to-video Market in the 1990s
Nessa Johnston (Edge Hill University, UK)
13. The Cult of Rekha: Bollywood Stardom and Diva Worship in the Digital Era
Michael Lawrence (University of Sussex, UK)
14. From Cines de Barrio to Global Cult: The Films of El Santo, El
Enmascarado de Plata (The Man in the Silver Mask)
Antonio Lįzaro-Reboll (University of Kent, UK)
15. Out of South Africa: Direct-to-Video, Zaxploitation, and Allegories of
Space
Ivo Ritzer (University of Bayreuth, Germany)
16. Tales of Entrails: Animist Cult Horror in Southeast Asia
Rosalind Galt (Kings College London, UK)
Index
Dolores Tierney is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. She has written extensively on Latin American exploitation and horror cinemas including chapters and articles in Cinema Journal (2014), Porn Studies (2019) and The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema (2019), as well as the co-edited anthologies The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro (2014) and Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas and Latin America (2009).
Iain Robert Smith is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College London, UK. He is the author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (2016) and co-editor of the collections Media Across Borders (2016) and Transnational Film Remakes (2017). He co-founded the SCMS Transnational Cinemas SIG and he is currently working on a monograph on cult traditions within Indian cinema.
Shruti Narayanswamy is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews, UK. Her PhD research explores the representation of women in early Bombay cinema. She recently published an article in Transnational Screens on low-budget superhero films produced in Malegaon (2019) and she is currently preparing a post-doc project on the emergence of cult fandom within India and the South Asian diaspora.
