![]() ![]() Because of their emphasis on spectacle rather than on narrative, these films, Schaefer argues, owed more to the “cinema of attractions” of early silent cinema, as analyzed by Tom Gunning (2004) (Schaefer, 38). ![]() Posters promised nudity and often stressed the topicality of the film by drawing on headlines, using words like “exposé” and “story” and asking questions audiences would expect the film to answer (Schaefer, 106-9, 114). With the exception of burlesque, all these genres were meant to be simultaneously sensational and educational, some of the sex hygiene films having been solicited by the state or army (Schaefer, 27-28). Exploiteers thus stepped in to profit from an existing market for sex hygiene films, drug films, vice, exotic and atrocity films, and nudist and burlesque films. With Hollywood desperately trying to improve its image (the Thirteen Points were issued in 1921), studios like Universal and Triangle stopped making films about sex hygiene and the white slave trade the enforcement of self-censorship, with the Don’ts and Be Carefuls of 1927 and the Production Code of 1930, confirmed that imagery and narratives involving sexuality, homosexuality, drug use and miscegenation were inappropriate. film industry filled a vacancy left by the latter in the 1910s. The emergence of this industry on the margins of the U.S. So it wasn’t until the mid-1950s that “exploitation” came to mean both “timely and sensational,” and came to have such a “bad reputation” (Doherty, 7).ģBoth Felicia Feaster and Brett Wood’s Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film and Eric Schaefer’s “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!” A History of Exploitation Films trace the history of exploitation cinema even further back by examining a body of lesser known films of the 1920s-1950s that Schaefer calls classical exploitation films. ![]() In 1953, still, a musical like The Band Wagon (MGM, Vincente Minnelli), as Sheldon Hall kindly pointed out to me in an email, could be promoted as “the exploitation picture of the year” simply because it promised to be highly successful. In the mid-1940s, exploitation designated “films with some timely or currently controversial subject which be exploited, capitalized on, in publicity and advertising” the A-feature The Pride of the Yankees (Samuel Goldwyn / RKO, Sam Wood, 1942) is one such example (Doherty, 6), though one could argue that producer Darryl Zanuck’s taste for the “headline type of title story” was already exploitative in that sense (Bourget, 99). For Doherty, exploitation cinema as we know it emerged in the 1950s with the advent of low-budget teenpics. Exploitation is not a genre, then, but a label.ĢCinephiles, film critics (Ken Knight, Richard Meyers) and scholars (Pam Cook, Thomas Doherty) tend to associate exploitation cinema with a specific period: the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. That these movies have often been exhibited in similar venues-grindhouses, drive-ins and today direct-to-DVD-reinforces their commonality. ![]() The arguments for considering the exploitation film as a genre are, then, mainly pragmatic: fans and critics often speak of the “exploitation film” as if to designate a specific genre. Evidently, these can mainly be put down to the mode of production. 2 Semantic characteristics include excessive images of sex and violence, bad acting, poor cinematography and sound syntactic characteristics include taboo themes, and flat characters or basic character arcs. 1 This is, no doubt, because these movies do, as a group, share common semantic, syntactic and pragmatic elements that, for Rick Altman, make up the “complex situation” that is a film genre (Altman, 84). The exploitation film is not a genre, and yet it is often described as such. “Easy” because they have long targetted what has since become the largest demographic group of moviegoers: the 15-25 age group (Thompson and Bordwell, 310, 666). “Easy” because they offer audiences what they can’t get elsewhere: sex, violence and taboo topics. “Easy” because they are almost always genre films relying on time-tried formulas (horror, thillers, biker movies, surfer movies, women-in-prison films, martial arts, subgenres like gore, rape-revenge, slashers, nazisploitation, etc.). Exploitation films are made cheap for easy profit. 2 The semantic refers to “linguistic meaning, i.e., the meaning in the dictionary, the syntactic to “ (.)ġWhat is exploitation cinema? Exploitation cinema is not a genre it is an industry with a specific mode of production.1 For instance, one fan’s blog speaks of “he exploitation genre” (See accessed on ). ![]()
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