Overview

Exploring Film through Bad Cinema offers an overview of the practice of film analysis through a specific focus on the concept of “bad” cinema within a series of broad cultural and historical contexts. Providing a wide-ranging discussion of film from multiple perspectives, including history, aesthetics, and criticism, this broad theoretical engagement illustrates the ways in which the registers of value that we apply to film are inseparable from the wider discourses of taste that shape our culture. While loosely chronological, it is largely thematic in arrangement as it applies the traditional methods of film studies to in-depth discussions of some of the most notoriously (and compellingly) bad films in cinema history. Situating its analysis of a wide variety of films and filmmakers in terms of period, genre, and issues such as the emergence of narrative cinema, canon formation, and the politics of cultural hierarchy, it provides an in-depth consideration of the multiple and complex social and aesthetic discourses that shape our qualitative assessments of film. Designed for both the lay reader and student of film, Exploring Film through Bad Cinema engages with a wide range of topics from film history and film theory to postmodernism, exploitation, and cult cinema. This theoretically and historically sophisticated analysis will appeal to researchers and scholars in film studies as well as cognate disciplines such as screen studies, visual studies, and cultural studies.

Full Product Details

Author:   David C. Wall (Utah State University, USA)
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.540kg
ISBN:  

9781032655246

ISBN 10:   1032655240
Pages:   194
Publication Date:   08 August 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Creatures of the Screen 2. Early Film Form, Narrative, and the Cinema of Attractions 3. Cult, Pleasure, and Nostalgia: Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and the Triumph of Irony 4. “Paging Dr. Freud!” Theorizing John Boorman’s Zardoz 5. Ed Wood and Auteur Theory 6. Nudie Cuties and Radical Roughies: Doris Wishman’s World of ExploitationHaHZHHJ 7. Reel Nasty: The Night Porter, The Gestapo’s Last Orgy, and Sadiconazista Cinema of the 1970s 8. She Found It at the Movies: Pauline Kael and the Mystery of the Disappearing Film Critic 9. When the Blockbuster Goes Bad: Cleopatra’s Epic Excess and the Italian Peplum 10. The Worst Masterpiece Ever Made: Heaven’s Gate and The New Hollywood 11. Where Did It All Go Right? Index

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Author Information

David C. Wall is Professor of Film and Visual Studies at Utah State University.

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