7.06 Iconographic
comments on selected image groups
I have selected four groups
Animals, Circus, Comix and Horror film. The Animals subject areas is selected
because it is by far the largest group of images used in the Exploding Cinema
programmes. Circus and Comics are areas that illustrate Exploding Cinema's
allegiance to popular culture. Horror is part of this allegiance but is also an
'inferior' B movie mainstream genre with which there is much sympathy. Pages pertaining
to these themes will then be analysed in more detail.
Images of Animals,
including insects: With
at least 47 pages with animal images this is the most recurrent theme in the
programme images.
Augustine and Aquinas
followed Paul in denying the Hebrew bible's injunction of kindness towards
animals. Descartes went further, theorising them as without feeling or souls
and even Kant followed this Christian line. Jeremy Bentham was the first person
to argue for the interests of animals in Western ethics at the end of the
Eighteenth century. But it was not until Peter Singer's book in the mid 1970's
that this issue was seriously debated and the traditional Christian position
reappraised. This was also the first philosophical debate to give rise to a popular
movement.
Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that the
evils of this
life
of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings? What then must we do? Why,
work night and day, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human race! George
Orwell, Animal Farm[1]
This should be seen as part
of a whole ecology or environmental movements that arose at the same time and
has since become a major political force. Such concerns are at the heart of
Western counter cultures.
Animals appeared in folk
art, mythology and pagan religion because they were an important part of
people's rural lives. They inhabit the pages of Exploding Cinema's programmes
for different reasons. They are a symbol of nature but not of a romantic nature
nor of a nature 'red in tooth and claw'. The appearance of so many animals in
an urban production is surely a gesture against the historical division of
nature /culture. The animals are often in assertive even avenging postures.
They are co-inhabitants of the earth with us. We see animals holding cameras
and generally being active.
Half the animals depicted
are insects with their connotations of individual vulnerability but collective
ubiquity and indestructibility. They can also be pests, something that the
Exploding Cinema identifies with. Nature is here an antidote to a mainstream
cinema, which is a standard bearer for the triumph of technology and cultural
artifice.
The circus is the most
evocative and extreme form of live popular spectacle. A space of
contradictions; the exotic; the captured; a performance on dirt; a living
encyclopaedia of wonders; Lions and Tigers; impossible feats; unbelievable skills;
foreign smells; shock; danger... and all appearing and disappearing like a
mirage. Probably the most extraordinary sights a European child would ever see.
The clown[2]
paints the fixed smile of the courtier on his face. The upper class surrounded
themselves in the appearance of the happiness of their servants (whose real
moments of happiness were too coarse and vulgar!).[3]
The clowns actions though, are sad even laughable, a satire on the hapless
condition of the powerless.
The provenance of Exploding
Cinema in such popular forms has already been suggested.
Comics: The preferred reading
material of the modern young person is the comic. Comics like the Beano and
Eagle and later Marvel Comics played a regular part in the early lives of many
young people. Cheap illustrated publications were not considered serious
literature. Comic art is excluded from the art school curriculum as a vulgar
artform.[4]
Apart from its widespread
influence on most of our childhoods, the comic was a significant part of the
underground culture of the Sixties in specifically adult forms. A good example
is Robert Crumb who provided a loving satire of hippy street life, with its
incessant dope smoking and other inane behaviour, which is still widely read.[5]
The exclusion of the comic from the literature of the establishment was
perversely, a positive qualification for an underground cultural form.
There was something of a
revival of non-commercial comic culture in the 1980's with a focus on women
comic artists such as Carol Swain,[6]
comics as a form of artist's book, and self-organised 'alternative' comic
artist conventions.[7]
There
may be a future - or very ancient past truth in these derisory, vulgar,
foolish, dialogical forms of consumer subculture. (Barthes, 1977, p66)
The comic frame both
captures the moment - often the peak of action or depletion but accompanies
this with a mimetic text which transverses time. A text in which the frozen
characters speak to each other or philosophise to themselves. The frame is
activated in its stillness by this text which transports us beyond the images.
This transcendence of the image produces a set of what Barthes called obtuse
meanings. The quality of comics lies not only in their writing or graphic skill
but more importantly from meaning generated in the space between the frames, in
the tension between the graphic and the literary. A form that has many
parallels with film.
The Horror genre: Although long established in
cinema the growth of the horror film as a genre only took-off in the 1950s. The
first drive-in cinema opened in 1933 but they didn't really become commonplace
until car ownership became commonplace in the wake of the Second World War. By
1956 there were over 400 which were earning 25% of the total cinema box office.
The audiences were mainly young and this encouraged the film industry to begin
to make films tailored to this market. These were either rock music films like
'Jailhouse Rock' (1957) or horror films. The classic of the period, 'I Married
a Monster from Outer Space', was made in 1958.[8]
Effective horror films would
actually make the audience sweat, shake and scream with a mixture of thrill and
terror. This excitement went into a darker and more visceral area of emotion
than the kinaesthetic thrills of musicals or the teeth grinding tension of
thrillers. It reached for the substance of nightmare with which they shared a
context of darkness. And as nightmares are illusions, the horror film is closer
to its referent than the convention of realism that dominated respectable cinema.
This innate vulgarity did not allow them to be considered as serious cinema. As
a genre they had a minority or 'cult' following and stayed irrevocably low
budget.
Within the genre however
standards evolved and classics were recognised. George Romero's 'Night of the
Living Dead' made in 1968 on a low budget was one such. 'The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre' (1974), which has only got a British certificate in its uncut version
some 25 years after it was made, is another. Wes Craven's recent 'Scream'
(1996) has shown the genre has finally become accepted within the mainstream.[9]
Not that horror is a subject
that appears much in the films shown at Exploding Cinema.
[10]
It is more its outsider status as a low-budget cult genre
and the viscerality of its aesthetic that makes it a reference point in the
programme imagery.
[1] David Henshaw, Animal Warfare: the story of the
Animal Liberation Front (Fontana 1984)
[3] See Norbert Elias's The Court Society (Blackwells 1983)
[4] We can go further and say that literary culture was
iconophobic (See Tessa Watt, (1991) p 132- 139) which goes a long way to
explaining the low cultural position of comics and graphic novels. Whilst
teaching on a pre-diploma course in Colchester in the early Nineties we had to
ask students to remove comic art from their portfolio, however good it was, as
it would seriously jeopardise their chances of getting onto a degree course.
[5] For a film biography of Robert Crumb, see 'Crumb'
directed by Terry Zwigoff (Columbia Tristar, 1995)
[6] See 'Girl Frenzy' magazine from the late Eighties and
early Nineties (Box 148, Hove BN3 3DQ) and Roger Sabin's Comics, Comix and
Graphic Novels: a history of comic art
(Phaidon 1996)
[7] The First Small Press Comic Conference was organised
in May 1991. Larry Watson in Small Press Yearbook 1992 (S.P.G. 1991 p104)
[8] "Their emphasis on spectacle implicitly
recognised that the audience might have other things to do than just watch the
film." Popular Culture in the Twentieth Century, Richard Maltby ed. (Grange Books, 1994 p151)
[9] The A-Z of Horror Film, Howard Maxford (Batsford 1996)
[10] Few of the cryptic film descriptions in the Exploding
Cinema programmes use the term 'Horror'. See the list of genres in Chapter 10.