In this introduction, Jeffrey Sconce begins with discussing Pauline Kael’s essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies” from 1968. In it, Kael expresses her admiration for the film Wild in the Streets and argues that it is more engaging than the acclaimed 2001: A Space Odyssey (Sconce, 2007). Kael also defends the preference of teenage audiences for such movies and states that they connect with their lives in an instant way (Sconce, 2007, p. 2). The idea presented is that the appeal of cinema lies in its scandalous origins, and true cinema enthusiasts enjoy talking about their love for bad movies rather than good ones.
The essay promotes a perspective of cinephilia that wants to preserve the original spirit of cinema by avoiding the trappings of respectability. The fact that cinema lovers tend to enjoy speaking about “bad movies” is still relevant today, and the popularity of such films remains high as well (Sconce, 2007, p. 9). In addition, over the recent decades, film scholarship has made a shift towards accepting the study of genres such as exploitation, sleaze and other “low” genres as worthy of academic research (Sconce, 2007, p. 2). In her article, Kael also states that cinephiles should not attempt to legitimize “trash” by attempting to fit it into an academic tradition through their education (Sconce, 2007, p. 3). She expresses worries that academic attempts to elevate popular movies by analyzing them through various methodologies will dilute the simple pleasure of movies like Wild in the Streets and The Thomas Crown Affair.
At the time Kael’s essay was written, film studies were trying to find value in every film through interpretive approaches of New Criticism and struggling with the concept of film legitimacy. Nevertheless, currently film studies have broadened their scope and are not just concerned with a film’s aesthetic legitimacy but with the worthiness of it as an artifact. Sleaziness is a feeling that one has about a film that requires judgment and that often implies a “circuit of inappropriate exchange involving suspect authorial intentions and/or displaced perversities in the audience” (Sconce, 2007, p. 6). There are many examples of films that can be considered sleazy and films that can’t, but “sleaziness” should not be confused with the genre of the film but with the feelings it evokes.
The article partly explains the cinephiles’ admiration of sleaze films by the fact that many artistic people are inclined to “champion the low over the high” (Sconce, 2007, p. 6). It is argued that a passion for the bad, sleazy or paracinematic cannot be understood only by thinking in terms of symbolic economies and social trajectories. It should also include the consideration of pleasure, affect and even obsession. There are unresolved fundamental contradictions in the definition, practice, and appreciation of cinematic art. Roland Barthes’ theories of S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text can be used to better understand the concept of “sleaze” and the competition among cultists and aesthetes in film culture. Essays related to sleaze artists and movies of the 20th century are listed further, including Tania Modleski’s “Women’s Cinema as Counterphobic Cinema” and Harry Benshof’s “Representing (Repressed) Homosexuality in the Pre-Stonewall Hollywood Homo-Military Film” (Sconce, 2007, p. 11). These essays also include Chuck Kleinhans’s “Pornography and Documentary: Narrating the Alibi”, Colin Gunckel’s “The Sign of Death”, Kevin Heffernan’s “Art House or House of Exorcism?”, and other works.
Reference
Sconce, J. (2007). Sleaze artists: Cinema at the margins of taste, style, and politics. Duke University Press.