Author Archives: Yassa t

Pink Flamingos

The film of the week was Pink Flamingos and surprisingly, I really enjoyed it. This is different from any other film I’ve ever watched. The film was about a couple that runs a baby making company that give the babies to lesbian couples that want a child, trying to compete with divine for the tittle of being the filthiest people alive. In the beginning, I was questioning why the family lived in a trailer. By the end I understood why. Divine was a person not to be messed with. Once Divine received that package with the turd, the film started to get interesting. The dialogue in the film was very entertaining. The soundtrack from beginning to end had me feeling fierce but not as fierce as Divine. There were so many times that divine tripped wearing her heels but I looked past it because she was Divine, I don’t want to get on her bad side. I don’t want her to come lick my belongings and have them reject me. The Insect was something I didn’t expect at all. I didn’t know what to expect in this film. I didn’t watch a trailer, I just saw the gif someone put up of Divine in one of the past posts. I saw more than I bargained for, from the butthole scene to the insemination to incest to the castration to the cannibalism. That family is not to be messed with.

In the reading Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag, she literally has notes and it is not written in essay styles. Camp is not created to be serious even though it is about serious topics. It is not easy to make camo intentionally. Camp depends upon the perception of innocence, parody that doesnt recognize itself. This means that camp is an aesthetics of distance of ambivalent identification also explains why it’s hard to mass produce camp objects. More specifically, camp requires the perception of naive extravagance, a sense that the artist doesn’t realize that he’s too much to be taken seriously.

In Andrew Ross’ uses of camp, people think that camp is new and original but most people knew about it. There are different audiences for camp, not simply the gays. Historical definition of camp situates itself in relation to dominant power dynamics at any one time. Bad taste is actively produced by middle class people who are working to reject inherited values.

“Transgression is any act that violates law and morality more broadly it refers to the act of passing beyond any imposed limits” while freakery is “The complexity of studying how cult films break or challenge taboos by pinpointing the process of transgression”. Taboo crosses between impure and purity. Taboo scenes get an emotional response from audiences because things can be seen as gross and grotesque. Sick films took taboo and transgression to the extreme weather it is negative or positive.

Cult consumption states that “ Audiences are at the core of the study of cult cinema”. What the audience likes is what gets the most people watching it. In certain times, violence, subculture and censorship and sex were problematic for certian audiences.

Carnivals of Souls

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Carnivals of Souls is about a woman that survives a car crash that resulted in the car falling into the water. Mary was the only survivor. She wanted to put the crash behind her so she leaves town and becomes an organ player for a church in Utah. She continually sees a man that would appear and disappear and she learns that she is the only one that sees the man. At first she was not scared and would try to live her life but didn’t want to be alone. She was weirdly attracted to a deserted carnival. Mary would go in and out of existence. She was frightened and saw a doctor that tried to help her but she was planning on leaving town because she was fired but ends back at the deserted carnival. She sees souls dancing and following her. They crowned her and she disappeared and we learn at the end that she died in the car accident she was apart of.

The movie was slow in the beginning but it was interesting to see how scary movies were filmed back then. I was confused as to why she would go in and out of existence but it was creative the way that they would cut the sound in the film when she was out of existence. She was constantly running and looking for company from her creepy neighbor and the doctor that tried to calm her down. The neighbor didn’t want anything to do with her when he found out she had things going on in her life and was there just to try to sleep with her.

In the reading What is a Cult Horror film we learn that they are bad but not all bad. They tend to be good beside the budget. Cult horror films are not for everyone but they have their own fan group. The films are not classic and have a constructive formula. A woman is in distress and a man comes to try to save her. In the reading Cult Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces we learn that theaters were a place for people go to be distracted. Berlin adapted the American styles of theater with the lights and “their glamor aims to edification. He believed that people go to the movies to see something other than their own lives and I agree. In the reading Introduction to Distraction we learn that there is a system deposition characteristics of the different classes. Where you are from and how you live can impact the message taken away from a movie. Also the class of a person. There is a high and low of cultures. Education is the way people can move from a low class to a high class. The pure gaze is the emotional response to an artwork. It is the early age exposure to art before people tell you what is right or wrong. The reading Cult Fiction: Cult movies, Subcultural capital and the production of cultural distinction talks about the fight among the cult fans. Fans distance themselves from the mass culture, others by projecting abstract onto other fans. “ These fans often reserve their most direct and vitriolic attacks at both the cultures of the parents and the taste of other fans – fans who are dismissed as inauthentic.” Every Cult fan has their own opinions on cult films that come out.

Detour

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We watched the film Detour starring Tom Neal as Al and Ann Savage as Vera. Detour is about a piano player who lives in New York. He is in love and is going to see his women in California who went to pursue her dream of singing. He planned on getting to California by hitchhiking. The second person’s car he got into was a man with a lot of money and a complicated life. Al ends up driving while the man sleeps. It starts raining and that is when Al realizes that the sleeping man is dead. Al hides the body and acts as he is the owner of the car. On his way to California he picks up a woman whose name is Vera. She knew the original owner of the car and integrated Al about where he is and what happen. Al tells the truth and she doesn’t believe him at first but then realizes that she doesn’t care enough about the dead man and just wants more and ends up trying to help Al get rid of the car and acts as his wife so that they could stay together until everything was situated. Vera ends up being very greedy and wants Al to act as the dead man so that he could get money from the dead man’s family who he hasn’t seen in years. Al doesn’t want to do any of the things Vera wants to do and wants to see his women. Al ends up killing Vera by accident and leaves the place. He ends up getting caught at the end.

The film was made with a low budget and was made in 6 days. The movie was interesting and I didn’t expect anything that happened in the film. He was innocently running to get to the women that he loves but ended up getting into a mess that he did not sign up for. Meeting Vera was helpful and dangerous at the same time. She helped him realize that he could get caught by leaving the car unintended but then she became hungry for money. Vera liked having control took it too far. Based on her character the quote “‘I was fighting with the most dangerous animal in the world, a woman” was created. Vera was a woman that fought for herself and didn’t let a man control her. Sadly, she ended up dead but her killer was caught.

Walter Benjamin believed that in the era of mechanical reproduction, something happens to a work of art when it is reproduced. The Aura of at is lost. Technology changes everything. Authenticity is important and should be kept, but is lost when art is reproduced. He loved the social aspect of new things coming out of art. “Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter.” The original should always be more important and should be preserved. When replicas are made value is lost.

What is a cult film?

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Cult films consist of Taboo subjects, sex, nudity, violence, and monsters. Some films are good some films are bad. Some are low budgeted and some are high budgeted. They tend to touch on cultural topics but the word that would describe cult movies is exploitation!In order for a film to be considered a Cult film it has to fall under the category of anatomy, consumption, political economy, and cultural status. Each category has subcategories that goes into specifics of different types of cult movies. I didn’t know there were that many types of cult movies and I am excited to watch some of them in class.

Dwain Esper directed the film Maniac which people considered to be a bad film but opened doors for other films to be created. I just found the film to be different from what I watch in my free time and the quality was older. The storyline focused on what it wanted to get across and left many dead ends for some of the parts but film being in segments and having writing that the audience could read to get a better understanding of what was going on.

American Grindhouse was educational and entertaining at the same time. The Film helped me get a better understanding of what kinds of films are considered cult films. Coming into this class I thought I’ve seen only three or four cult films but seeing the examples of cult films my list has expanded and help me get a better understanding of why films were the way they were and what was going on during the time the films came out that influenced the film. It was said in the film that “video cameras were the way to start exploitation.”

Women played a big role in the production of the cult films from taking off their clothes on screen and to be willing to play roles that are explicit and exploiting how women are treated in households. “Women undersold themselves” and didn’t know that they could get played more for the acts that they were willing to perform in front of a camera when it came to the burlesque era and scenes. After some time violence was added to motion pictures. Male fantasies came to life, saving women from distress and women being whipped into submission because sex wasn’t allowed to be shown in films at some point.

The teenage rampage era in the 1950s must have been an interesting time. Films were being made about teens not being understood by their parents and feeling like an outcast and being arrested, and the crime rates increasing. That was the time drive-in theaters were popular and I wish I was alive for those times, don’t you? Has anyone ever seen the film “The Outsiders”, is that considered a cult movie?

My friend wanted to go to the movies and she picked the movie “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. I didn’t know what to expect but I didn’t expect it to be what it was. That film was different and I am so excited that we will be talking about it in class and that I am actually learning about films like it.