Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics by Jeffrey Sconce

Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style and Politics Reviews

• 
  Melanie

  I had picked this up with the intention of reading "The Sleazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes," but, as happens with a strong collection, I ended up getting sucked in and reading Tania Modleski's take on Doris Wishman, Chuck Kleinhans on pornography and documentary, an excellent look at "homo-military" films, and a stirring call for discernment even in the throes of cultish geekery.
  
  As the volume's title declares, these are explorations of the margins (of cinema, of taste, etc.), but all of the contributors (at least the ones I read) express a nuanced understanding of how these "margins" are constructed and of the various interrelated registers of culture (high/low/art/mass/camp/trash/etc.). I appreciated the emphasis on hybridity, especially in the article about Haynes: it's too often that cinema is viewed as points along a (wholly arbitrarily constructed) spectrum, with, say, Russ Meyer at one end, one of my beloved mid-20th-century Europeans at the other, and Hitchcock or Welles squarely in the middle.
  
  (Actually, this is something that I felt pretty strongly when reading Greg Taylor's "Pure Quidditas or Geek Chic? Cultism as Discernment." If cinematic geekdom has two extremes [using the spectrum above as the model:], my interests are located at the Artsy end...and yet I feel an incredible affinity for my fellow geeks at the Sleazy end. We're basically in the same boat: waiting for obscure treasures to show up in theaters or on DVD, endlessly picking apart scenes and fragments and trivia, obsessively educating ourselves and defending our predilections even when those around us--who just watch movies the way Normal People watch movies--think we're unhinged or perverse.)
  
  Anyway, it's a fascinating collection--all over the place in terms of genres and directors and arguments--and there's a lot to ponder. Modleski's piece in particular gets into some reconsidering of traditional feminist film theory (and feminist theory more broadly), which is exciting (and very appropriately ends with the demand for bad girls to unite). Good, interesting stuff.
  
  
• 
  Molly

  This is really a three and a halfer. I liked many of the essay, but thought that a number of them were underwritten or could have been better framed. The essay about synthesizer music in 80s horror films is fantastic, if a bit jargony at the outset.
• 
  Jason Coffman

  Excellent collection of essays on various cult cinema topics, including a chapter on Doris Wishman, an argument for "Friday the 13th" as para-paracinema, and a really funny and fascinating examination of boredom in the giallo (specifically Umberto Lenzi's "Spasmo"). Highly recommended.
• 
  the Skrauss

  Sconce verbalizes in this book an idea I have called "The esthetic of Half-assery." Sconce calls it "Genius of poverty." My pal Jake Stroh calls it "low tech, high touch."
  
  A few nice essays. Over-all, however, not my cup of tea.