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
Conclusion
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
In his essayistic meditation on ‘film's end’, Stephen Barber details the decaying string of old theatres concentrated on Broadway avenue in central Los Angeles, which he deems physical fragments of cinema's living end in the digital age. Once glamorous picture palaces whose audiences have since migrated to other, newer theatres elsewhere in the vicinity, these cavernous spaces fell into disrepair during the second half of the twentieth century, eventually becoming grind houses for Spanishlanguage films, exploitation cinema and hard-core adult movies. When I coincidentally ventured down this same street in 2010, during the period of my research about 42nd Street, I quickly recognised the lingering traces of former grind houses in these ignored, repurposed theatre facades nestled amid the surrounding inner-city bustle. The pavements below, primarily peopled with Latino faces, remained vibrantly alive with activity but the ornate theatre frontages seemingly aroused little attention. In discussing the memories attached to these spaces, Barber's elegiac tone (not uncommon to such treatises on the ‘death’ of cinema) is worth quoting at length:
The impact of haunting carried by the disintegrated or re-used spaces of cinema results from a simultaneity of vision in which the entire temporal history of a cinema, with its contrary phases of glory and destitution, is compressed into the present moment, since the integrity of its filmic history has disintegrated along with its architectural infrastructure … with the result that any moment in a cinema's existence can abruptly resurge at will into the present, like a ghost-presence in a horror film, sonically underscored by the cacophony of memory. In that oblivious levelling of a cinema's history, each of its distinctive phases becomes equivalent to every other, and its temporal hierarchy is erased: the moment at which it served as a riotous all-night site for cult-film mania or pornography becomes inseparable from that of its prestigious moment of ascendancy as the venue for searchlightilluminated star-premieres. Time blurs, stops dead, and transmits itself intensively and multiply in the abandoned cinema, like a celluloid film-image trapped in the projector-gate, heated to incandescence before it finally burns up and vanishes.
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- Information
- Grindhouse NostalgiaMemory, Home Video and Exploitation Film Fandom, pp. 243 - 257Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015