Global Cult Cinemas: De-Westernizing Cult Film Studies

Description

Discourses of cult cinema primarily centre around the West, with a particular emphasis upon Anglo-American cinema and fandom. Meanwhile, scholarship on world cinema privileges art cinema traditions and downplays those areas of popular cinema that intersect with cult. Global Cult Cinemas makes a decisive intervention by specifically addressing the transnational dynamics underpinning cult cinema. From studies of film reception that trace the international spread of cult film practices through to accounts of cult filmmaking traditions from a diverse range of film cultures, Global Cult Cinemas works towards the goal of de-Westernizing the discipline. With contributors and topics from across the globe, Global Cult Cinemas explores this de-Westernization through filmmakers and current events such as Alejandro Jodorowsky in the era of #MeToo, cinephilia in Pakistan, and the reception of the Czech Crazy Comedy. While broadening the study of cult cinema beyond its predominant US focus, this book disrupts the realm of traditional cult cinema scholarship.

Dolores Tierney is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. She has written extensively on Latin American exploitation and horror cinemas including chapters and articles in Cinema Journal (2014), Porn Studies (2019) and The Routledge Companion to Cult Cinema (2019), as well as the co-edited anthologies The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro (2014) and Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas and Latin America (2009). Iain Robert Smith is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College London, UK. He is the author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (2016) and co-editor of the collections Media Across Borders (2016) and Transnational Film Remakes (2017). He co-founded the SCMS Transnational Cinemas SIG and he is currently working on a monograph on cult traditions within Indian cinema. Shruti Narayanswamy is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews, UK. Her PhD research explores the representation of women in early Bombay cinema. She recently published an article in Transnational Screens on low-budget superhero films produced in Malegaon (2019) and she is currently preparing a post-doc project on the emergence of cult fandom within India and the South Asian diaspora.