The Politics Of Nordsploitation

The Politics of Nordsploitation takes a transnational approach to exploring Nordic 'exploitation' films in their industrial contexts, viewing them as not only political manifestations of domestic considerations but also to position Nordic film cultures in a global context. Incorporating a wide range of films, from international cult classics like They Call Her One Eye (1974), homegrown martial arts films like The Ninja Mission (1984) to contemporary crowd-sourced fan productions like Iron Sky (2012), this volume examines the remarkable diversity of genre-based, commercially and culturally exploitative film production throughout the Nordic countries – emphasized here through the term 'Nordsploitation'. This volume provides a historical exposition of largely ignored marginal films and film cultural patterns. It also outlines how influential these films have been in shaping the development of Nordic cinema. The effects are visible in the films of the new millennium as previously marginalized practices now enter the mainstream. With sharp insights and new research, The Politics of Nordsploitation redefines the concept of 'exploitation' and its role in small nation cinemas.

This book explores fictional representations of animals in animated and live-action film and television and examines the way these representations intersect with culture, race, gender, class, disability, and health issues. Contributors analyze the narrative functions of familiar animals as well as fantastic and hybrid creatures.

This book rethinks the study of European Cinema in a way that centres on students and their needs, in a comprehensive volume introducing undergraduates to the main discourses, directions and genres of twenty-first-century European film. Importantly, this collection is the first of its kind to apply a transversal approach to European Cinema, bringing together the East and the West, while providing a broad picture of key trends, aesthetics, genres, national identities, and transnational concerns. Lewis and Canning’s collection effectively addresses some of the most pressing questions in contemporary European film, such as ecology, migration, industry, identity, disability, memory, auteurship, genre, small cinemas, and the national and international frameworks which underpin them. Combining accessible original research with a thorough grounding in recent histories and contexts, each chapter includes key definitions, reflective group questions, and a summative case study. Overall, this book makes a strong contribution to our understanding of recent European Cinema, making it an invaluable resource for lecturers and students across a variety of film-centred modules.

How do we approach a figure like Mario Bava, a once obscure figure promoted to cult status? This book takes a new look at Italy's 'maestro of horror' but also uses his films to address a broader set of concerns. What issues do his films raise for film authorship, given that several of them were released in different versions and his contributions to others were not always credited? How might he be understood in relation to genre, one of which he is sometimes credited with having pioneered? This volume addresses these questions through a thorough analysis of Bava's shifting reputation as a stylist and genre pioneer and also discusses the formal and narrative properties of a filmography marked by an emphasis on spectacle and atmosphere over narrative coherence and the ways in which his lauded cinematic style intersects with different production contexts. Featuring new analysis of cult classics like Kill, Baby ... Kill (1966) and Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970), Mario Bava: The Artisan as Italian Horror Auteur sheds light on a body of films that were designed to be ephemeral but continue to fascinate us today.

Between the late 1950s and mid-1970s, British cinema experienced an explosion of X-certificated films. In parallel with an era marked by social, political, and sexual ferment and upheaval, British filmmakers and censors pushed and guarded the permissible limits of violence, horror, revolt, and sexuality on screen. Adult Themes is the first volume entirely devoted to the exploration of British X certificate films across this transformative period, since identified as 'the long 1960s'. How did the British Board of Film Censors, harried on one side by the censorious and moralistic, and beset on the other by demands for greater artistic freedom, oversee and manage this provocative body of films? How did the freedoms and restrictions of the X certificate hasten, determine, and reshape post-war British cinema into an artistic, exploitational, and unapologetically adult medium? Contributors to this collection consider these central questions as they take us to swinging parties, on youthful crime sprees, into local council meetings, on police raids of cinemas, and around Soho strip clubs, and introduce us to mass murderers, lesbian vampires, apoplectic protestors, eroticised middle-aged women, and rebellious working-class men. Adult Themes examines both the workings and negotiations of British film censorship, the limits of artistic expression, and a wider culture of X certificate cinema. This is an important volume for students and scholars of British Film History and censorship, Media Studies, the 1960s, and Cultural and Sexuality Studies, while simultaneously an entertaining read for all connoisseurs of British cinema at its most vivid and scandalous.

For much of the 20th century, the underground pornography industry - made up of amateurs and hobbyists who created hardcore, explicit "stag films" - went about its business hounded by reformers and law enforcement, from local police departments all the way up to the FBI. Rumors of this illicit activity circulated and became the stuff of urban myth, but this period of pornography history remains murky. Let's Go Stag! reveals the secrets of this underground world. Using the archives of civic groups, law enforcement, bygone government studies and similarly neglected evidence, archivist Dan Erdman reconstructs the means by which stag films were produced, distributed and exhibited, as well as demonstrate the way in which these practices changed with the times, eventually paving the way for the pornographic explosion of the 1970s and beyond. Let's Go Stag! is sure to point the way for countless future researchers and remain the standard work of history for this era of adult film for a long time to come.

The Mad Max Effect provides an in-depth analysis of the Mad Max series, and how it began as an inventive concoction of a number of influences from a range of exploitation genres (including the biker movie, the revenge film, and the car chase cinema of the 1970s), to eventually inspiring a fresh cycle of international low budget 'road warrior' movies that appeared on home video in the 1980s. The Mad Max Effect is the first detailed academic study of the most famous and celebrated post-apocalypse film series, and examines how a humble Australian action movie came from the cultural margins of exploitation cinema to have a profound impact on the broader media landscape.

The Politics of Nordsploitation takes a transnational approach to exploring Nordic 'exploitation' films in their industrial contexts, exploring them as not only political manifestations of domestic considerations but also to position Nordic film cultures in a global context. Incorporating a wide range of films, from international cult classics like They Call Her One Eye (1974), homegrown martial arts films like The Ninja Mission (1984) to contemporary crowd-sourced fan productions like Iron Sky (2012), this volume examines the remarkable diversity of genre-based, commercially and culturally exploitative film production throughout the Nordic countries – emphasized here through the term 'Nordsploitation'. This volume provides a historical exposition of largely ignored marginal films and film cultural patterns. It also outlines how influential these films have been in shaping the development of Nordic cinema. The effects are visible in the films of the new millennium as previously marginalized practices now enter the mainstream. With sharp insights and new research, The Politics of Nordsploitation redefines the concept of 'exploitation' and its role in small nation cinemas.