Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 A Drive-in Theatre of the Mind: Nostalgic Populism and the Déclassé Video Object
- 2 42nd Street Forever? Constructing ‘Grindhouse Cinema’ from Exhibition to Genre to Transmedia Concept
- 3 Paratexts, Pastiche and the Direct-to-video Aesthetic: Towards a Retrosploitation Mediascape
- 4 Dressed to Regress? The Retributive Politics of the Retrosploitation Pastiche
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Selected Filmography and Videography of Retrosploitation Media
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
2 - 42nd Street Forever? Constructing ‘Grindhouse Cinema’ from Exhibition to Genre to Transmedia Concept
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 A Drive-in Theatre of the Mind: Nostalgic Populism and the Déclassé Video Object
- 2 42nd Street Forever? Constructing ‘Grindhouse Cinema’ from Exhibition to Genre to Transmedia Concept
- 3 Paratexts, Pastiche and the Direct-to-video Aesthetic: Towards a Retrosploitation Mediascape
- 4 Dressed to Regress? The Retributive Politics of the Retrosploitation Pastiche
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Selected Filmography and Videography of Retrosploitation Media
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Like everything else in the Square, the spirits are sites of struggle while functioning as a marketing tool. And each shift in the district's history reflects competing fantasies and desires […] The tour guide echoes an official fantasy, but critics of the New Times Square are equally nostalgic and limited in the ghosts that they choose to foreground.
Daniel Makagon, Where the Ball DropsEven more so than the drive-in theatres explored in the previous chapter, grindhouse has become both a contemporary signifier for interpreting exploitation cinema's wildly diverse past and a cinephiliac cue for remembering such films within the realm of a specific historical exhibition context. Most commonly associated with the 1960s and 1970s, grind houses are today regarded as independently operated theatres located in downtown or inner-city areas, showing double and triple features of exploitation films at all hours for a low admission price. For exploitation fans, they are also associated with violence, sexual deviance, dirtiness and cheapness – qualities reputedly shared by many of the films shown in such venues. In examining this phenomenon as an extended case study in the implantation of nostalgias, I shall briefly sketch the discursive history of these theatres to determine how and why the label ‘grindhouse’ gradually expanded from a theatre type to a generic term applied to a range of exploitation films in the post-studio era. My goal is not merely to complicate the present uses of the term but also to suggest how non-normative exhibition sites are more likely to be coded generically, with the effect of normalising Hollywood films and exhibition. Such ‘genrification’ has arguably made it more possible for present-day fans to use implanted nostalgias as a means of imaginative ‘time travel’ to past spatio-temporal sites (as discussed in Chapter 1). Here, and in the chapters that follow, however, I also discuss the roots of a so-called ‘grindhouse aesthetic’ (as numerous critics and fans have dubbed it) linked to a nostalgia for celluloid decay – a nostalgia indexing perceived sources of social decay that have become classed and gendered markers of ‘authenticity’ among contemporary fans who imagine themselves linked across time to past grind house patrons.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Grindhouse NostalgiaMemory, Home Video and Exploitation Film Fandom, pp. 73 - 118Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015