The A to Z of French Cinema (The A to Z Guide Series)
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It is packed full of information on how to visit the breathtaking scenery and locations where film history was made.
You will be able to immerse yourself in the lush green world where Star Wars created an alien landscape or take a trip around Swallows and Amazons country, not to mention joining the ranks of Withnail and I pilgrims or sampling the nostalgic Brief Encounter tea rooms where a tiny piece of grit kick-started an enduring romance. Your family are aware of this.
If you have even the remotest passing interest in the locations used in your favourite movies, it would be foolish to dismiss this book. It is astoundingly thorough. All the well-known and expected favourites are here: So far, so mostly not genre. But this book covers a lot of ground; from Alien Blood, to the aforementioned Withnail via 28 Days Later and a quintet of Ken Russell films.
Even included is a mention of Star Wars: This mentions most of the independent cinemas still operating in the area. All of them are gorgeous, small, intimate spaces, somehow still surviving against the onslaught of the chains. Finally, there is a run-down of Film Festivals running throughout the area. The content concludes with a list of Websites for more information. Building on the achievement of B genre predecessors like Invasion of the Body Snatchers in its subtextual exploration of social and political issues, it doubled as a highly effective thriller and an incisive allegory for both the Vietnam War and domestic racial conflicts.
In this transformed commercial context, work like Russ Meyer's gained a new legitimacy. In May , the most important exploitation movie of the era premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
It can be argued that cinema was created in France by Louis Lumière in with the invention of the cinématographe, the first true motion-picture camera and . Editorial Reviews. About the Author. Dayna Oscherwitz is assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies at Southern Methodist University. MaryEllen.
The project was first taken by one of its cocreators, Peter Fonda , to American International. The idea Fonda pitched would combine those two proven themes. AIP was intrigued but balked at giving his collaborator, Dennis Hopper , also a studio alumnus, free directorial rein.
In the late s and early s, a new generation of low-budget film companies emerged that drew from all the different lines of exploitation as well as the sci-fi and teen themes that had been a mainstay since the s. The major studios' top product was continuing to inflate in running time—in , the ten biggest earners averaged In , Corman had a producorial hand in five movies averaging He played a similar part in five films originally released in , two for AIP and three for his own New World: The biggest studio in the low-budget field remained a leader in exploitation's growth.
Reviewing Sisters , Pauline Kael observed that its "limp technique doesn't seem to matter to the people who want their gratuitous gore. One of blaxploitation's biggest stars was Pam Grier , who began her film career with a bit part in Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls Hill also directed her best-known performances, in two AIP blaxploitation films: Coffy and Foxy Brown Blaxploitation was the first exploitation genre in which the major studios were central.
Indeed, the United Artists release Cotton Comes to Harlem , directed by Ossie Davis , is seen as the first significant film of the type. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is also perhaps the most outrageous example of the form: The days of six quickies for a nickel were gone, but a continuity of spirit was evident. The crime-based plot and often seedy settings would have suited a straightforward exploitation film or an old-school B noir. The first three features directed by Larry Cohen , Bone , Black Caesar , and Hell Up in Harlem , were all nominally blaxploitation movies, but Cohen used them as vehicles for a satirical examination of race relations and the wages of dog-eat-dog capitalism.
Shivers , Rabid , The Brood In the early s, the growing practice of screening nonmainstream motion pictures as late shows, with the goal of building a cult film audience, brought the midnight movie concept home to the cinema, now in a countercultural setting—something like a drive-in movie for the hip. The midnight movie success of low-budget pictures made entirely outside the studio system, like John Waters ' Pink Flamingos , with its campy spin on exploitation, spurred the development of the independent film movement.
Even as Rocky Horror generated its own subcultural phenomenon, it contributed to the mainstreaming of the theatrical midnight movie.
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Asian martial arts films began appearing as imports regularly during the s. These " kung fu " films as they were often called, whatever martial art they featured, were popularized in the United States by the Hong Kong—produced movies of Bruce Lee and marketed to the same audience targeted by AIP and New World.
As Roger Ebert explained in one review, "Horror and exploitation films almost always turn a profit if they're brought in at the right price. So they provide a good starting place for ambitious would-be filmmakers who can't get more conventional projects off the ground.
Chiudi Segnala una recensione Noi di Kobo ci assicuriamo che le recensioni pubblicate non contengano un linguaggio scurrile e sgradevole, spoiler o dati personali dei nostri recensori. The film's imagery was another matter: How Much Have You Seen? Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: Surprisingly, the only performance worth watching in this film was, out of all people, Robert Pattinson. Retrieved 11 June
Just as Hooper had learned from Romero's work, Halloween , in turn, largely followed the model of Black Christmas , directed by Deathdream ' s Bob Clark. On television, the parallels between the weekly series that became the mainstay of prime-time programming and the Hollywood series films of an earlier day had long been clear. As production of TV movies expanded with the introduction of the ABC Movie of the Week in , soon followed by the dedication of other network slots to original features, time and financial factors shifted the medium progressively into B picture territory.
Television films inspired by recent scandals—such as The Ordeal of Patty Hearst , which premiered a month after her release from prison in —harkened all the way back to the s and such movies as Human Wreckage and When Love Grows Cold , FBO pictures made swiftly in the wake of celebrity misfortunes. Nightmare in Badham County headed straight into the realm of road-tripping-girls-in-redneck-bondage exploitation. The reverberations of Easy Rider could be felt in such pictures, as well as in a host of theatrical exploitation films.
But its greatest influence on the fate of the B movie was less direct—by , the major studios were catching on to the commercial potential of genres once largely consigned to the bargain basement.
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Rosemary's Baby had been a big hit, but it had little in common with the exploitation style. In William Paul's description, it is also "the film that really established gross-out as a mode of expression for mainstream cinema. The Exorcist made cruelty respectable. By the end of the decade, the exploitation booking strategy of opening films simultaneously in hundreds to thousands of theaters became standard industry practice. Described by Paul as "essentially an American-International teenybopper pic with a lot more spit and polish", it was 's third-biggest film and, likewise, by far the highest-earning teen-themed movie yet made.
Most of the B movie production houses founded during the exploitation era collapsed or were subsumed by larger companies as the field's financial situation changed in the early s. Even a comparatively cheap, efficiently made genre picture intended for theatrical release began to cost millions of dollars, as the major movie studios steadily moved into the production of expensive genre movies, raising audience expectations for spectacular action sequences and realistic special effects.
Their disaster plots and dialogue were B-grade at best; from an industry perspective, however, these were pictures firmly rooted in a tradition of star-stuffed extravaganzas. The Exorcist had demonstrated the drawing power of big-budget, effects-laden horror. But the tidal shift in the majors' focus owed largely to the enormous success of three films: Steven Spielberg 's creature feature Jaws and George Lucas's space opera Star Wars had each, in turn, become the highest-grossing film in motion picture history.
Even as the U.
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Double features were now literally history—almost impossible to find except at revival houses. One of the first leading casualties of the new economic regime was venerable B studio Allied Artists, which declared bankruptcy in April The studio was sold off and dissolved as a moviemaking concern by the end of Despite the mounting financial pressures, distribution obstacles, and overall risk, many genre movies from small studios and independent filmmakers were still reaching theaters.
Horror was the strongest low-budget genre of the time, particularly in the slasher mode as with The Slumber Party Massacre , written by feminist author Rita Mae Brown. In , New Horizons released a critically applauded movie set amid the punk scene written and directed by Penelope Spheeris. The New York Times review concluded: Larry Cohen continued to twist genre conventions in pictures such as Q a. The Winged Serpent ; , described by critic Chris Petit as "the kind of movie that used to be indispensable to the market: In the words of one newspaper critic, it was a "shoestring tour de force ".
One of the most successful s B studios was a survivor from the heyday of the exploitation era, Troma Pictures , founded in Troma's best-known production is The Toxic Avenger ; its hideous hero, affectionately known as Toxie, was featured in several sequels and a TV cartoon series. The video rental market was becoming central to B film economics: Empire's financial model relied on seeing a profit not from theatrical rentals, but only later, at the video store. The growth of the cable television industry also helped support the low-budget film industry, as many B movies quickly wound up as "filler" material for hour cable channels or were made expressly for that purpose.
By , the cost of the average U. Three more—the science-fiction thriller Total Recall , the action-filled detective thriller Die Hard 2 , and the year's biggest hit, the slapstick kiddie comedy Home Alone —were also far closer to the traditional arena of the Bs than to classic A-list subject matter. Surviving B movie operations adapted in different ways. Releases from Troma now frequently went straight to video.
New Line, in its first decade, had been almost exclusively a distributor of low-budget independent and foreign genre pictures. In , New Line was sold to the Turner Broadcasting System ; it was soon being run as a midsized studio with a broad range of product alongside Warner Bros. A New York Times reviewer found that the initial installment qualified as "vintage Corman At the same time as exhibition venues for B films vanished, the independent film movement was burgeoning; among the results were various crossovers between the low-budget genre movie and the "sophisticated" arthouse picture.
The film's imagery was another matter: This result mirrored the film's scrambling of definitions: Fine Line was a subsidiary of New Line, recently merged into the Time Warner empire—specifically, it was the old exploitation distributor's arthouse division. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe , respectively , a child-targeted cartoon Madagascar , a comic book adaptation Batman Begins , a sci-fi series installment Star Wars: New York Times critic A.
Scott warned of the impending "extinction" of "the cheesy, campy, guilty pleasures" of the B picture. On the other hand, recent industry trends suggest the reemergence of something like the traditional A-B split in major studio production, though with fewer "programmers" bridging the gap. However, we are now witnessing a polarisation of film budgets into two tiers: The economic model was deliberately low-rent, at least by major studio standards.
It's also encouraging filmmakers to shoot digitally—a cheaper process that results in a grittier, teen-friendly look. And forget about stars. Of Atomic's nine announced films, not one has a big name". As the Variety report suggests, recent technological advances greatly facilitate the production of truly low-budget motion pictures. The development of digital cameras and postproduction methods now allow even low-budget filmmakers to produce films with excellent, and not necessarily "grittier", image quality and editing effects.
At the same time, [since the early s], the quality of digital filmmaking has improved dramatically. In a similar way, Internet sites such as YouTube have opened up entirely new avenues for the presentation of low-budget motion pictures. The terms C movie and the more common Z movie describe progressively lower grades of the B movie category. The terms drive-in movie and midnight movie , which emerged in association with specific historical phenomena, are now often used as synonyms for B movie.
The C movie is the grade of motion picture at the low end of the B movie, or—in some taxonomies—simply below it. The "C" in the term then does double duty, referring not only to quality that is lower than "B" but also to the initial c of cable. Helping to popularize the notion of the C movie was the TV series Mystery Science Theater —99 , which ran on national cable channels first Comedy Central , then the Sci Fi Channel after its first year.
Updating a concept introduced by TV hostess Vampira over three decades before, MST3K presented cheap, low-grade movies, primarily science fiction of the s and s, along with running voiceover commentary highlighting the films' shortcomings. Director Ed Wood has been called "the master of the 'C-movie ' " in this sense, although Z movie see below is perhaps even more applicable to his work. The term Z movie or grade-Z movie is used by some to characterize low-budget pictures with quality standards well below those of most B and even C movies. Most films referred to as Z movies are made on very small budgets by operations on the fringes of the commercial film industry.
The micro-budget "quickies" of s fly-by-night Poverty Row production houses may be thought of as Z movies avant la lettre. Latter-day Zs are often characterized by violent, gory or sexual content and a minimum of artistic interest; much of which is destined for the subscription TV equivalent of the grindhouse. Psychotronic movie is a term coined by film critic Michael J. Weldon—referred to by a fellow critic as "the historian of marginal movies"—to denote the sort of low-budget genre pictures that are generally disdained or ignored entirely by the critical establishment.
According to Weldon, "My original idea with that word is that it's a two-part word. I very quickly expanded the meaning of the word to include any kind of exploitation or B-movie. Use of the term tends to emphasize a focus on and affection for those B movies that lend themselves to appreciation as camp. B-television is the term used by the German media scholar Heidemarie Schumacher in his article From the True, the Good, the Beautiful to the Truly Beautiful Goods—audience identification strategies on German "B-Television" programs as an analogy to "B-movie" to characterize the development of German commercial television, which adopted "the aesthetics of commercials" with its "inane positiveness radiated by every participant, the inclusion of clips, soft focus, catchy music" as well as "promotion of merchandise through product placement".
Newly established commercial stations, operating without the burden of societal legitimacy, focused solely on profitability. To establish and maintain viewer loyalty these stations would broadcast reality shows, sensational journalism, daily soap operas, infotainment programs, talk shows, game shows and soft pornography.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Low budget commercial film genre. This article is about the film type. For other uses, see B movie disambiguation. Not to be confused with Bee Movie. B movies Hollywood Golden Age. B movies in the s. B movies exploitation boom and Midnight movie. B movies since the s. See also Schatz , pp. Taves like this article adopts the usage of "programmer" argued for by author Don Miller in his study B Movies New York: As Taves notes, "the term programmer was used in a variety of different ways by reviewers" of the s p.
Some present-day critics employ the Miller—Taves usage; others refer to any B movie from the Golden Age as a "programmer" or "program picture". In its peak year, , Grand National did produce around twenty pictures of its own. Finler lists The Country Girl as , when it made most of its money, but it premiered in December The Seven Year Itch replaces it in this analysis the two films happen to be virtually identical in length. See also Atomic Films: See also Shapiro , pp. It appears Corman made at least one true B picture—according to Arkoff, Apache Woman , to Corman's displeasure, was handled as a second feature Strawn [], p.
Archived from the original on 20 October Hayward, cited in Biskind , p. Finler lists Hello, Dolly! The Owl and the Pussycat , 51 minutes shorter, replaces it in this analysis.
The A to Z of French Cinema
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