Capital and popular cinema: The dollars are coming!

By Valentina Vitali

Capital and popular cinema responds to the need for a more solid academic approach by situating 'low' film genres in their economic and culturally-specific contexts and by exploring the interconnections between those contexts, the immediate industrial-financial interests sustaining the films, and the films' aesthetics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784997779

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Capital and popular cinema

Capital and popular cinema

The dollars are coming!

Valentina Vitali

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Valentina Vitali 2016

The right of Valentina Vitali to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN 978 0 7190 9965 6

First published 2016

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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In memory of Paul Willemen

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: national cinema and unstable genres

1  The time of popular cinema

2  The exclusion of giallo films from the history of Italian cinema

3  Mexico: the cinema of Fernando Méndez

4  The Hindi horror films of the Ramsay brothers

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Filmography

Index

Figures

1  Advertisement for La ragazza che sapeva troppo, from Il Messaggero, 27 July 1963.

2  Advertisement for La frusta e il corpo, from Il Messaggero, 28 August 1963.

3  The Supercinema in Rome.

4  Nora lying unconscious at the feet of Trinità dei Monti. Film still from La ragazza che sapeva troppo (Galatea s.p.a. / Coronet s.r.l., 1962: director Mario Bava).

5  The church of Trinità dei Monti reflected upside down in a puddle of rainwater. Film still from La ragazza che sapeva troppo (Galatea s.p.a. / Coronet s.r.l., 1962: director Mario Bava).

6  Film still from El vampiro (Cinematográfica A.B.S.A., 1957: director Fernando Méndez).

7  Poster for El grito de la muerte (Alameda Films, 1958: director Fernando Méndez).

8  Advertisement for Misterios de ultratumba, from Il Messaggero, 30 July 1960.

9  Advertising brochure for Ghutan (Ramsay Entertainment, 2007: director Shyam Ramsay). Courtesy of Shyam Ramsay.

10  VCD cover of Hotel (Vision Universal, 1981: directors Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay). Courtesy of Shyam Ramsay.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to Paul Willemen, who encouraged me to write it by challenging my arguments with unique insight every step of the way.

I would like to thank Jerry Pinto for discussing the Ramsay brothers with me and for facilitating my research in Mumbai, and Shyam Ramsay for interrupting his busy production schedule to talk about his films and for his permission to reproduce the advertising material included here. David Chapman read early drafts of the manuscript and offered valuable feedback, for which I am very grateful. Thank you also to Barbara Spina for compiling the index. The staff at the Bank of Italy’s library in Rome kindly allowed me to access periodicals that enabled me to trace the circulation of Mario Bava’s films. I am also grateful to the University of East London for sponsoring my research in Rome and Mumbai. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright owners of the illustrations included in this book; anyone claiming copyright should contact the author. Unless indicated otherwise, the translations of Italian, French and Spanish texts are mine.

Introduction: national cinema and unstable genres

In 1970 film theorists Paul Willemen and Claire Johnston wrote to Ian Cameron, founder of the British film journal Movie and, at the time, director of November Books, the publisher of the groundbreaking Movie Paperbacks series, proposing a book on Terence Fisher.

Founded in 1962, Movie had elaborated an oppositional stand within and against film journalism by posing the question of critical method in relation to a practice that was then considered not to have artistic value: Hollywood cinema. As Willemen put it, Movie’s position:

consisted of Leavisite literary criticism on the one hand, which, although dominant in departments of literature, became oppositional when mobilised in relation to something it had never been designed for, namely cinema; and, on the other hand, Cahiers du cinéma’s formulations of the politique des auteurs, the only precedent for a systematic oppositional polemic in favour of a ‘popular’ cinema. (Willemen 1983)

In the decade that followed François Truffaut’s 1954 essay ‘Une certaine tendance du cinéma français’, the term ‘popular cinema’ primarily referred to Hollywood cinema. During this period, it was Hollywood cinema that became a priority also for other publications, and it remained so until the mid-1970s, at least in the UK, where the focus of British film journals was essentially defined by the interests of small groups of intellectuals: Hollywood and British cinema (Movie, The Brighton Film Review, Monogram, Cinema), the avant-gardes (Cinema Rising, Afterimage), cultural theory (Screen). Of course each of these journals published essays on types of cinema outside their focal area, but the orientation of their criteria of relevance and the priorities within any given issue reflected relatively narrow and particular areas of interest. In this context, Movie Paperbacks published monographs on auteurs such as Jean Renoir, Claude Chabrol, Jean Vigo, François Truffaut, Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, John Ford, Allan Dwan, Luis Buñuel and Eric von Stroheim. Cameron’s reply to Willemen and Johnston’s proposal to devote a volume to Terence Fisher was, accordingly, that he (Cameron) would ‘take a little convincing that there is enough in Terence Fisher to produce a book and enough of a market for such a book, were it produced’.¹

That same year Raymond Durgnat, a contributor to the Movie Paperback series, devoted half a chapter of his A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence to a critical appraisal of Terence Fisher’s work for Hammer Films, which sought to situate Fisher’s horror films in the context of contemporary British culture. This was followed three years later by David Pirie’s now classic A Heritage of Horror: the English Gothic Cinema 1946–1972. It was published, significantly, by Gordon Fraser, a publisher who specialised in offbeat topics. Five years on (in 1978), Roy Armes wrote a damning and dismissing profile of Fisher’s work in his A Critical History of British Cinema:

Central to an evaluation of Hammer Films is the status of Terence Fisher … There are, as Pirie points out, links with the Gothic tradition in that the films are ‘peopled with key literary characters of another epoch …’ [(Pirie 1973: 166)]. But the relevance of such figures to the audiences of the twentieth century … is not altogether apparent, since the films eschew allegory and lack any social-political scheme of analysis … Ultimately … the weakness lies less in the Hammer formulas than in the personality of Fisher as revealed in his work. He is not an ardent Romantic fascinated by the dark recesses of the human soul, but a plodding and conventional director … Fisher … remains inexorably on the most pedestrian level of British commercial film making … the characters he presents so flatly are no more than stereotypes of popular fiction, depicted without psychological depth or complexity. (Armes 1978: 251–2)

The question posed, somewhat rhetorically, by Armes – ‘what may be the relevance of such figures to a contemporary audience?’ – is indeed worth asking for real, and it is to attend to that question that the pages that follow are devoted. For now, it is worth noting here that the criteria on the basis of which Armes proceeded to suppress the link between Fisher’s films and their historical context were a dismissal of ‘commercial film making’ as an essentially mechanistic set of operations, a Romantic idea of the author (Fisher’s ‘personality’) and the equation of ‘good cinema’ with narrative strategies derived from nineteenth-century European Realism (e.g. fully rounded characters). Our understanding of what falls within the category of ‘popular cinema’ has changed since Movie began to champion Hollywood films, and so have our attitudes towards films such as Terence Fisher’s, which we now call popular cinema. We may no longer dismiss such films; at least that is not the stated intention of most film historians today. And yet, since the publication of Armes’ A Critical History of British Cinema not much has changed in the way we discuss what we now call popular films: Romantic ideas of the author, nineteenth-century Realism and an undertheorised approach to the film industry’s complex relation to a country’s socio-economic fabric continue to block our understanding of popular films’ significance for the culture that produced them.

James Curran and Vincent Porter’s British Cinema History, first published in 1983 and used for the first university courses in film studies, also devoted half a chapter to Hammer Films. But it took another twenty years for an academic publisher, Manchester University Press, to issue Peter Hutching’s Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (1993). Two years earlier Sheffield Hallam University’s Centre for Popular Culture had published Tom Ryall’s British Popular Cinema, which was followed, in 1992, by Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau’s Popular European Cinema, a Routledge publication based on a conference organised by its editors at the University of Warwick in 1989. Other academic publishers followed suit, gradually, with similarly themed volumes and collections,² including Manchester University Press’ Inside Popular Film series, inaugurated in 1995 with Joanne Hollows and Marc Jancovich’s Approaches to Popular Film, and Eric Schaefer’s Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (1999). Simultaneously, from the mid-1990s British universities began to offer modules on popular genres, while academic conferences that took their cue from the University of Warwick’s 1989 conference started to proliferate.

This sketchy outline of film historians’ position vis-à-vis Terence Fisher’s work and, more generally, popular films is not intended to offer a comprehensive account of the filmmaker’s nor commercial genres’ vicissitudes in relation to Britain’s national cinema canon. My point, rather, is that popular cinema’s acquisition (or not) of legitimacy has never been a linear process. Positions remained, for a long time, divided, and, to a lesser extent, continue to be so at the time of writing. And yet, while opponents to the study of popular genres are far from defeated, in 2015 it is clear that, during the last fifteen years, the tide has changed. Indeed, what are today customarily referred to as popular films have always been the object of study, but I am not concerned here with the immense body of non-academic writing and other activities on popular cinema – from such magazines as the French Midi-Minuit Fantastique and fanzines to film festival retrospectives and cinema websites. Rather, this book began as an attempt to identify the factors that have determined what may be a revealing shift within the canon of film studies. Why have European and North American academics begun to pay attention to films that, until the late 1980s, were beyond the pale of any educational institution? It is one of the contentions of this book that the changed attitude of Anglo-Saxon academia towards popular cinema is the symptom of a new relation between the (any) state (and the institutions it legitimates, including universities) and a specific cluster of interests within the broader, global economy.

Canons change all the time. As Peter Wollen has written, ‘in general, only during periods of challenge is the canon actually made explicit’, but ‘the implicit canon is in constant flux’ (Wollen 2002: 218). The reasons for the fluctuations that have led to the recent rediscovery of popular films are not to be found within the institutions that legitimate (or not) these films’ inclusion in the film studies’ canon. Pressures to publish and, in that way, to buttress one’s position within academia may lead a new generation of film theorists and historians to explore and document academically uncharted terrain, but it does not explain the choice of material selected for the exercise. Film studies, like other institutions, merely registers and lends legitimacy (or not) to interests that are external to it. It is on these external pressures that my investigation focuses. It is an approach that has required me to adopt a longer-term historical perspective than I had at first envisaged and, in the process, to turn my original question around: why were certain genres and films – now defined ‘popular’ – excluded from the academic canon of film studies until the end of the 1990s? What factors enabled film historians until then legitimately to claim that films such as Terence Fisher’s, in spite or even because of their centrality to national culture, had no relevance for contemporary society?

Throughout this book I refer to this large cluster of films as ‘unstable genres’, not because their generic features change (generic features always do), but because of the films’ unstable position within the canon. In spite of their recuperation since the mid-1990s, films belonging to genres such as horror continue to be studied separately: we have books and courses on specific national cinemas, and we have books and courses on popular film. Given that, as an industrial cultural form, any kind of cinema is, by definition, popular, it may be argued that, when applied to some films (e.g. horror movies) and not others (e.g. melodramas), the term popular has the function of sustaining that separation. The films of, say, Federico Fellini and Mario Bava are never studied as part of the same national cinema. The former can be found in any account of Italian cinema, the latter only in edited collections on the popular genres of a variety of countries, even if, as Italy’s 1960 biggest box office hit, Fellini’s La dolce vita / The Sweet Life must have been somehow more popular than Bava’s La maschera del demonio / Revenge of the Vampires / Black Sunday (1960). Hammer films, which have been included in accounts of British cinema more often than other unstable genres, and, to a lesser extent, the Italian western, which I discuss briefly in Chapter 1, are possibly the only exceptions among European and North American post-war cinemas. But as the contrasting positions of film critics and historians reproduced above show, even Hammer productions began to acquire some degree of (contested) legitimacy within and as part of British cinema only from the second half of the 1980s. Outside Europe and the United States this film historiographic two-tier sectorialisation does not necessarily apply: accounts of Mexican, Japanese or Filipino national cinemas regularly also feature films the generic categories of which would, in other national cinemas, be associated with popular (exploitation, cult, etc.) cinema. It follows that if we adopt a less parochial perspective, a further reformulation of my original question is in order: what are the factors that have led film historians to include horror, soft porn, wrestling and similarly exploitative, cheaply produced genres as part of some national cinemas and to exclude the same type of film from the accounts of the cinema in other countries?

The scope of this book is, for lack of a better term, global. I advance an argument that brings into comparative perspective one single dynamic – the relation between shifting economic interests, state policies and film historiography – as it plays out in different national cinemas. I am not in a position, nor do I intend, to offer an anthological approach that assesses the situation in each major film-producing country. In what follows I examine in detail three cases across three continents (Italy, Mexico and India) and briefly extend my argument to two others (Spain and Japan) in the closing chapter. What emerges is a pattern, a changing set of relations between institutions, interests and pressures that, taking into account historical particularities, can explain the priorities at work in the film historiographies of other national cinemas – priorities that determine film historians’ inclusion, or not, of popular genres into the national canon.

Chapter 1 situates what most anthologies nowadays call popular films within a specific period – from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s – and offers a brief historical overview of the social changes that marked those years. Above all, Chapter 1 covers at some length the economic forces that underpinned the social and ideological climate of this period and indicates how they manifested themselves in the film industry. I outline a global economic pattern, even if the focus, at least in this first chapter, may appear to be the United States. This is partly because in these years (and after) it was the US economy and its performance that dictated, directly or indirectly, the economic trajectory of other countries, and partly because how precisely that global economic pattern materialised in other regions of the world is covered in detail in Chapters 2, 3 and 4.

My main argument is: (1) that it was a particular mode of capital, what I call ‘radical capital’, that produced popular films, and (2) that their visibility or not within a nation’s account of its cinema depends on the state’s relation to (its legitimation or not of) that mode of surplus accumulation at a particular point in time. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 trace the differing nature of that state–capital relation in Italy, Mexico and India, and how this impacted both on the production of giallo (thrillers) and horror films in these countries and, importantly, on these films’ position within Italy, Mexico and India’s accounts of their national cinemas. This leads me to the issue of critical positions that I highlighted at the opening of this Introduction. Positions vis-à-vis unstable genres such as horror cinema have tended to be examined through the lenses of notions of morality and censorship. I take critics’ arguments for and against censorship, nudity, morality and such like to be the symptoms of a more fundamental set of factors. At one level there is the state and its institutions’ relation to radical capital. This relation (any relation between the state and economic blocs) defines the limits within which filmmakers operate, though, importantly, not precisely how filmmakers move within those limits. At another level, there is the fact that critical positions vis-à-vis how filmmakers move within the limits defined by the state must be informed by film theorists and historians’ awareness (or not) of that state–capital relation – and thus by film theorists and historians’ imbrication in, or critical distance from, the forces that conduct it. At the end of Chapters 2, 3 and 4 I therefore consider the conditions and pressures that shaped contemporary film historians’ attitudes towards unstable genres, as well as their positions within, and their attitudes vis-à-vis, those circumstances. Lastly, Chapters 2, 3 and 4 each present a differently specific historiographic dynamic and, with it, a different set of issues. The situation in Italy, examined in Chapter 2, is representative of much of the rest of Europe and the United States until the mid-1970s, where popular films formed a significant share of the industry’s produce but where, owing to a particular and enduring coalition of forces, they were excluded, until the end of the 1990s, from academic accounts of national cinema. Mexico, discussed in Chapter 3, presents a diametrically opposite position. There genres associated, in Europe and in the United States, with exploitation circuits and marginal operators, have traditionally been considered central elements of Mexican national cinema. Chapter 4, on India, reveals a pattern somewhat similar to Italy, where, however, the order of determination – between political and socio-economic forces on the one hand, and film production and aesthetics on the other – raises the issue of asyncronicity, and, with it, questions about the relative autonomy of aesthetics.

Although no state can determine how a filmmaker operates within the limits it sets, to the extent that such limits do operate they must somehow leave marks on the filmmaker’s work. It follows that we should be able to see such limits at work in the body of the films (in the film-texts), and if not the limits as such, certainly their effects. The exclusion of a film from the canon of the national cinema of which it is inevitably part, or the dismissal of whole clusters of films on the basis that their ‘relevance’ to contemporary audiences ‘is not altogether apparent’ (Armes 1978: 251–2), suggests that the critic who performs the exclusion is either not aware of the limits imposed (and the possibilities afforded) by the films’ social, political and economic context, or that he or she is not capable of reading, in the film-texts, their effects, or both. In Chapters 2, 3 and 4 I focus on a small sample of films. My analysis of these films is intended to show that the obtaining economic and political pressures can be more clearly identified than has customarily been the case in books on cinema, and that, when identified, they can be brought to bear on the analysis of the films. In other words, I intend to show that it becomes possible to see such pressures at work in the film-texts, not necessarily directly, as so and so diegetically staged pressures, but as narrative strategies, as a menu of aesthetic choices and unintended effects.

To ascribe such choices and effects to an auteur or, indeed, to a filmmaker as metteur en scène, is simply to postpone the question. There is no need here to expand on Roland Barthes’ well-known essay on the ‘death of the author’ to remind ourselves that a text is ‘a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’, ‘a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’ (Barthes 1977: 146). Simplistic readings of Barthes’ essay have had a tendency of producing the kind of historiographic relativism the only benefit of which is to further the career of the (self-appointed or institutionally sanctioned) critic. But Barthes’ argument stands, with the added cautionary clarification that the ‘centres of culture’ out of which the material to make a film is drawn are always many and multi-dimensional, but not infinite and certainly not relative. Not everything goes. Not to dismiss a film is to ask, with Michel Foucault:

What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject-functions? And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’ (Foucault 1988: 210)

It seems to me that a new generation of film historians has rejected the indifference shown by historians such as Roy Armes as far back as 1978. It has returned to the questions first posed to popular cinema by Paul Willemen, Claire Johnston, Raymond Durgnat and David Pirie, among others, and decided that it does indeed matter ‘who is speaking’. At which point the question arises: how, precisely, do we qualify that speaking voice? In the chapters that follow I have sought to examine the modes of existence of a small cluster of giallo and horror films by pulling into my analysis a terrain that is as multi-dimensional as the limited resources and the space at my disposal allowed. Many of the factors I have taken into consideration do not belong to the domain of cinema or, indeed, of cultural production because I do not believe that movies exist in isolation. I have also explicitly adopted an order of determination that may appear, to some, as a little too close to economism. But to recognise the importance, even the primary importance, of socio-economic factors is not to say that aesthetics ‘reflect’ and/or are reducible to economic pressures. Aesthetics and economics are two different dimensions of existence; they will never be collapsible. Nor, however, are they fully autonomous: economics depends on language and cultural codes as much as films depend on industrial and financial circumstances. The question, rather, is: how do these two areas of experience communicate? Partly to pre-empt simplistic accusation of economic determinism, in Chapter 1 I outline the analytical frame that sustains theoretically the connections I draw in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 between the various domains of existence I pull into the equation: aesthetics, socio-economics, politics and so forth. I do not offer a comprehensive and detailed formulation of that analytical framework because it can be found in an essay originally written by Paul Willemen (2010). I have confined myself to showing that the frame he proposed in that essay can be put to productive ends in order to pursue this line of inquiry: which socio-economic dynamics precisely may be seen to be at work in any one film? And how do those dynamics present or express themselves as particular narrative or aesthetic orchestrations? It is a line of inquiry that may also enable us to understand why we have come to believe, rightly in my opinion, that films made in the 1960s and ignored by most since are still capable of speaking to us today.

The increased visibility of popular cinema within academia needs to be traced with greater precision than has so far been done, if only because what makes us responsive, today, to 1960s popular films may well be the current dominance of the economic interests that, from the mid-1970s, have proceeded to transform popular films’ strategies and address from a marginal to a centre-ground modus operandi. Film historiography cannot afford to allow the industry to dictate historians’ priorities. As Michael McKeon has observed, ‘modern knowledge is defined precisely by its explanatory ambition to separate itself from its object of knowledge sufficiently to fulfil the epistemological demand that what is known must be divided from the process by which it is known’ (McKeon 2007: xix). The reappearance of popular cinema within the canon of film studies at this precise conjuncture does not require a simple judgement ‘for’ or ‘against’. It requires, rather, critical distance and an adequate historical explanation.

1

The time of popular cinema

For 80 per cent of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s; or perhaps better still, they were felt to end in the 1960s. (Hobsbawm 1995: 288)

An important characteristic of academic publications on popular cinema is that, by and large, they discuss films made between the late 1950s and the early 1970s. Occasionally, earlier pre-World War Two films are considered,¹ but this does not contradict the fact that writing on popular cinema tends to cover the period from the end of the Korean War (1950–3) and the debacles of 1956 (Hungary, Suez, Aden) to the economic crisis of 1973. There are good reasons why these years have been the focus of anthologies on popular cinema. On the one hand, the cut-off date is connected with the mainstreaming in the mid-1970s, within North American cinema, of the generic features and other strategies associated with exploitation cinema (Cook 2000). Hollywood’s adoption of exploitation cinema’s generic menus and modes of distribution from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) onwards makes it difficult for cinema scholars to talk of films made from the second half of the 1970s and after that exploit the sales points associated with popular cinema as ‘popular’. I shall return to this point below. On the other hand, the developments that David Cook, among others, describes as having taken place in Hollywood from the mid-1970s onwards were part of a broader and longer constellation – a period that coincides with the installation of US hegemony after World War Two, not only in a Europe that was then in the process of reconstructing and was caught in the