Page 236 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

contemporary audience's relation to its genres, participating in a generic ritual has less to do with
socially sharing a public entertainment ritual that integrates a cultural and historical community and
more to do with participating in fragmented, narcissistic obsessions with pieces of generic conventions
that cannot be naturalised across a large narrative community. For this audience, the sacramental
ritualisations of genre become the material props of separate cults trying to return themselves to a
place in history.6
One of these major shifts in genre appeared in the early 1980s when a profound change in the
modes of film consumption moved the film viewing experience massively (more than television did
thirty years earlier) from the public to the private sphere. Video, with its incredible innovative ability
of repeated viewing, transformed films from collective experiences to privatised commodities which
may be used (like any others) in the process of individual identity formation and communication.
Another phenomenon that messed up former viewing practices was the advent of the blockbuster,
marked by the unexpected and phenomenal success of Star Wars (1977). It scrambled up and
ironically reversed the economic and artistic relationships between exploitation film and mainstream
cinema. Movie-brat filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas began to take the low-
budget adventure movies of their childhoods and recreate them as big-budget, hyper-real spectacular
entertainment for large audiences. The Hollywood blockbuster became increasingly dependent for
inspiration on the pulp fictions of the cinematic past. Here, the regulating action of narrative has
begun to lose its force: together with an attenuation of plot and related breakdown of charactet
motivation, these narratives often seem to undermine their own narrative structures through loosely
connected non-narrative events whose excessive display either of the visuals or the music becomes a
perpetual or aural format for the audience's own performance.
Far from being a complaint about the loss of good Aristotelian cinema, these two phenomena are
symptomatic of a heightened awareness of the differences between audiences and of the importance
of specialised constituencies such as fans and cultists. Audiences are no longer envisaged as passive
consumers but as active producers of popular culture. As I. Q. Hunter and Heidi Kaye argue, popular
culture is increasingly seen as diversified and demanding of its audience's intertextual literacy and
interpretative activity. Growing numbers of adaptations of literature, novelisations of films and new
media such as DVDs , C D - R O M s and the internet blur the lines between film and fiction, reader
and author, spectator and participant as well as between mass (low) and elite (high) culture. The
focus is instead on the interactive relationship between heterogeneous, self-reflexive audiences and
infinitely reinterpretable texts. Aesthetic judgements, therefore, are not to be taken for granted but
should be understood as forms of cultural capital, both exertions of social power and exercises in self-
description. Popular culture is engaged in a creative dialogue with its audiences, who choose or adapt
texts to suit their outlooks. Texts seem to demand the creation by the audience of yet more texts:
fans writing stories for zines, cultists reinventing disregarded films, net surfers trading information on
fictional worlds. The interactions within subcultures developed around different cultural forms are
located in a variety of contexts, from face-to-face meetings at conventions or conferences, through
fanzines and newsletters, to Usenet groups and websites. These different contexts offer a diverse range
of 'interpretive communities', positions from which groups and individuals relate to each other and
make meaning through texts.8

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