Jeffrey Sconce, “'Trashing' the academy: taste, excess and an emerging politics of cinematic style”

Tastes are often asserted negatively
Growing cinematic subculture organized around the most disreputable films, “trash” cinema
“As a most elastic textual category, paracinema would include entries from such seemingly disparate subgenres as 'badfilm', splatterpunk, 'mondo' films, sword and sandal epics, Elvis flicks, government hygiene films, Japanese monster movies, beach-party musicals, and just about every other historical manifestation of exploitation cinema from juvenile delinquency documentaries to soft-core pornography.”
Paracinema as a particular reading protocol or counter-aesthetic – valorize trash
Positioned explicitly against an imagined elite of tastemakers
Many paracinema fans are also familiar with the “official” canon – “calculated negation and refusal”
More than a simple high/low split
Cultural politics of “trash culture?”
Institutionalization and commercialization of trash (avant-garde, academy, mass culture)
Similar to camp in that it is “highly ironic, infatuated with the artifice and excess of obsolescent cinema,” but promotes a completely alternate, oppositional vision and canon of cinematic art (rather than reinterpreting the canon)
“Camp was an aesthetic of ironic colonization and cohabitation. Paracinema, on the other hand, is an aesthetic of vocal confrontation.”
No unity within the paracinema community (different “taste publics” within the same “taste culture”)
Paracinematic discourse possesses and competes for cultural capital, not unlike its enemies
Disaffected middle-class youth – predominantly white, male, middle-class, educated
Intersection with sci-fi fandom and other subcultures
“Regardless of their individual interests and ultimate allegiances, however, the paracinematic audience cultivates an overall aesthetic of calculated disaffection, marking a deviant taste public disengaged from the cultural hierarchies of their overarching taste culture.”
“As the alienated faction of a social group high in cultural capital, the paracinematic audience generates distinction within its own social space by celebrating the cultural objects deemed most noxious (low-brow) by their taste culture as a whole.”
“a calculated strategy of shock and confrontation against fellow cultural elites”
Renouncing their cultural pedigree and distancing themselves
Trend towards valorization of all trash and attacking all high culture exists in the academy also
Upwardly mobile lower-class subjects (ie: grad students) on the borderline between different domains use trash as a “symbolic homecoming”
Pushing the limits of the traditional canon and academic enterprise
Differentiation from traditional values and tastes
What to do with this textual experience and expertise in the paracinematic canon?
Do fan/scholars challeng the legitimacy of the institution they are using to obtain legitimacy?
Relations of power and control
The “autodidact” invests in marginal/alternative forms of cultural capital (not yet fully legitimate) as a site of “refuge and revenge” against the institutions of taste (Bourdieu)
Conflicts over canon are also about the processes and politics of legitimacy
Study of trash cinema suggests a struggle over the task of cinema scholarship in general
“Whether attacking traditional cultural markets and intellectual institutions as a fan, or attempting to bridge the two worlds as a student, the paracinematic audience presents in its often explicit opposition to the agendas of the academy a dispute over how to approach the cinema as much as a conflict over what cinema to approach.”
Not just which films, but what questions about film
Paracinema VS aesthete/academic approaches
The cultivation of various counter-cinemas is a familiar strategy in film studies
Sense of loss regarding cinema's early promise as a revolutionary popular art, destroyed by Hollywood
Endless pursuit of non-Hollywood cinemas, both on artistic/aesthetic grounds (art VS mainstrem) and political grounds (disruption of Hollywod conventions)
“In cultivating a counter-cinema from the dregs of exploitation films, paracinematic fans, like the academy, explicitly situate themselves in opposition to Hollywood cinema and the mainstream US culture it represents.”
Adoption of the positions, conventions and language of legitimate discourse even while being excluded from it and positioning themselves against it
Hollywood is seen as manipulative and repressive, paracinema as free and radical (not unlike other counter-cinemas, but positioned against those also)
Constant redefining of the vanguard, maintaining its distinction as an acquired taste
Often ignorant of the fact that trash films are now an accepted field of academic study
“'egalitarian' attempts on the part of the culturally privileged to collapse differences between 'high' and 'low' culture, as noble as they might be, often ignore issues of 'access' to these two cultural realms.” (Gripsrud)
“Double access” for culturally privileged (educated)
Redeem politically suspect pleasures through appeals to ironic detachment
“is the 'ironic' reading of a 'reactionary' text necessarily a 'progressive' act?”
Sophisticated rhetoric on low-brow cinema can make it just as obtuse and inaccessible as avant-garde and art cinema
Very different agendas for counter-cinema in paracinematic community and academic aesthetes
Academic aesthetes stress deliberate, strategic stylistic interventions
Paracinematic culture celebrates failures, distortions, eccentric auteurs working with limited resources and skills as unique, courageous and subversive
“the systematic failure of a film aspiring to obey dominant codes of cinematic representation”
“Paracinematic taste involves a reading strategy that renders the bad into the sublime, the deviant into the defamiliarized, and in so doing, calls attention to the aesthetic aberrance and stylistic variety evident but routinely dismissed in the many subgenres of trash cinema.”
Style becomes the focus rather than invisible – excess
Paracinematic viewers DO concentrate exclusively on the non-diegetic aspects/excess of the image (Thompson suggests that probable nobody does)
Calling attention to the text as a cultural/sociological document, rather than as a coherent diegesis, unlike academic aesthetes who focus on excess as an aesthetic strategy
“Whereas aesthete interest in style and excess always returns the viewer to the frame, paracinematic attention to excess seeks to push the viewer beyond the formal boundaries of the text.”
Ed Wood as an icon of paracinema, actively celebrated as a fringe genius (rather than the bemused derision of camp)
Glen or Glenda as a particularly interesting case because of the extratextual significance of the subject matter
Extratextual information key to paracinema's positioning as counter-cinema (allows the viewer to “see through” the text rather than to enrich its interpretation)
Not just bizarre works of art, but intriguing cultural documents
Collapsing the textual and the extratextual
The action on screen as a trace of an isolated moment of real human activity
“The swamp creature, intended to be a startling and menacing I cinematic revelation, is, in the last analysis, simply an overweight actor standing in weeds with ping-pong balls attached to his eyes on a hot day in Dallas in 1966.”
Look beyond the surface diegesis to the more interesting drama
What the critical viewer does with the freedom Thompson posits is a political question
Trash aesthetic offers a potential critique of:
Neoformalist analysis
Theories of 'radical' textuality
More to a film than its textual devices
Neoformalist divisions between skilled/unskilled audiences, artistic/non-artistic films
Always linked to taste as a sociocultural construct
Paracinematic discourse celebrates excess as cultural, not only aesthetic/textual (as in other forms of “against-the-grain” reading) – contextual questions
Does paracinema have the potential to radicalize even casual viewers (whereas Godard and Sirk can only radicalize experienced academy aesthetes)