That's Exploitainment by Pia Santaklaus

I much enjoyed the Cinematheque presentation you made today entitled THAT’S EXPLOITATION. Informative and well curated. You obviously did a lot of research and managed to collect a very interesting bunch of film snippets, sound bites, slides and other quirky and impressive memorabilia. The talk seemed quite extensive and I imagine after the 2 full hours allocated for the presentation you had to cut your talk short. It isn’t surprising, as this is a very big subject and 2 hours can barely do it justice; nevertheless, you managed to fit in a lot of good information, and you did it in a clear and ordered way. I would have loved to have seen and heard all the rest of the program you’d prepared but had to limit.

You credited film historian Eric Shaefer’s book BOLD! DARING! SHOCKING! TRUE! as the major resource for today’s presentation. I aim to see if I can get a copy of that book to find out more for myself.

Permit me to share a few of my own thoughts on the subject of exploitation films:

I imagine that during the 1930s, 40s & 50s the often-present, ever-growing industry of smaller film companies and initiatives who made these non-Hollywood pictures did satisfy a definite gap in the market. One might see the energetic makers of these so-called exploitation films as the rebellious, independent, misunderstood or misrepresented little brothers of the bigger brother we call Hollywood.

Their influence was felt not only by all society, but Hollywood also. Their drive and ability to make quick, profitable films would have been secretly admired by parts of the perhaps less resourceful Hollywood. Their ‘hijacking’ of cinemas, distribution routes, audiences and related structures would have irked the Hollywood machine which would have preferred to own a monopoly over the industry. In all, the so-called exploitation market took some customers and profits away from the Hollywood machine in what I see as a ‘David and Goliath’ struggle; the giant Hollywood could not successfully quash or regulate the effective smaller rebel element.

When one considers that much of history has been written by the ruling powers, one might get some idea as to how the smaller, so-called exploitation industry (that often challenged and ignored the Hollywood path), were labelled with such a derogatory moniker.

To say that the so-called exploitation films are any more exploitative than many Hollywood films through the years is simply wrong.

One cannot assume that an audience is any more exploited by the so-called exploitation films than the audience of bigger budget mainstream Hollywood films. The audience has a choice whether or not to see films from either camp and in fact often demand such entertainments.
One cannot assume that the cast and crew of the so-called exploitation films are more exploited than those of Hollywood films. Clearly the Hollywood machine has a history of chewing up and spitting out (exploiting) many, many directors, actors, actresses, technicians and other employees. The relative term ‘exploitation’ negates itself in this scenario. One cannot single out audiences or makers of either film camp as being any more or less exploited than the other.

If nothing else, the smaller size of the so-called exploitation film crews would ensure smaller overheads and more control, and in this way, they might produce a less exploitative, more guaranteed, truer, clearer, less-compromised individual vision; something many Hollywood heads, being beaten at their own game, may have envied and deeply resented. Almost certainly, parts of Hollywood would have felt exploited by the perhaps piratical element of the so-called exploitation mob.

It is most likely that Hollywood initiatives developed the slanderous phrase of ‘exploitation’ in order to lead a wave of negative energy against their competition, the so-called exploitation groups. This tactic however, does seem hypocritical, as the makers of the so-called exploitation films were in many ways only following in the steps of big brother Hollywood, but on a smaller, cheaper, scale. Both provided product that had an audience, both shepherded their audiences into cinemas and ultimately, at the end of the day, they both tried to make money, some more than others. Hollywood accusingly calling their little prodigal brothers ‘exploiters’ is a lot like the pot calling the kettle black, or the raven chiding blackness. The criticism is unfair as the term might just as easily apply to the accusers.

I would offer that the so-called “exploitation films” deserve a more appropriate relabelling; something more befitting and approachable to market them with. I suggest ‘exploration films’, ‘calculation films’, ‘resolution films’, ‘challenge films’, ‘feeler films’, ‘questy films’, ‘dodge films’, ‘grapple films’ or any other name more suitable for these enduring, influential pieces that have been so wrongly given the negatively suggestive name ‘exploitation’.

Brett, thanks again for the fine effort.

Pia Santaklaus

Maniac Bride Child by Pia Santaklaus

I’d like to offer a few of my thoughts on today’s double at Cinematheque, MANIAC (1934) and CHILD BRIDE (1938).

First MANIAC: With all its flaws, I still enjoyed this relatively slap-dash, generic, low-budget ‘horror’ film. This film experience would have had a lot more impact in its day particularly as psycho-therapy was still in its relative infancy and viewers probably hadn’t been saturated with this sort of horror film. It opened with some beautiful haunting music and some early-scientific theories on mental disease, interestingly distinguishing the mind from the brain, suggesting the mind being the brain’s operator.

One of the main characters, Dr Meirschultz (A Jewish-German name meaning ‘bright overseer’) worked in his lab wearing a white lab-coat, a kind of cliché mad-professor- cum-doctor. His ‘assistant’, Don Maxwell, was a vaudeville actor and impersonator who helped the doctor in a kind of ‘Igor’ capacity, though he looked more presentable than a cliché ‘Igor’. Maxwell would ultimately kill Dr Meirschultz and take over his likeness perfectly. Maxwell had this capacity to become a doppelganger. This doppelganger theme was probably taken from the Edgar Allan Poe story ‘William Wilson’ (1839) in which it features most heavily.

Shades of the Frankenstein story and motifs crept into MANIAC as Maxwell and the Doctor enter a morgue to snatch a dead body with the aim of reanimating it. During the morgue scenes we see short interspersed cuts of footage featuring a cat chasing a mouse (reflecting the real cat and mouse game they were playing), then we later see cat fighting with a cat, and later a dog fighting with a dog. Perhaps this prepares the viewer for the ‘cat fight’ which takes place in a subterranean vault even later in the movie between two real women struggling in their dog-eat-dog world.

So many Edgar Allan Poe references are scattered throughout this film that I would not baulk at suggesting that without the influence of Edgar Allan Poe, this movie could not have been made.
In one scene a woman actually mentions Poe and his story ‘Murder In The Rue Morgue’ (1841) which featured an orangutan. One scene in MANIAC finds a patient accidentally injected with adrenalin and turned into a beastly man resembling an angry wild orangutan or similar primate. In his hyper, ape-like state, the patient picks up a beautiful female and escapes with her in his arms (perhaps shades of KING KONG - 1933) to satisfy his primal urges. Again this ‘orang-utan’ scene references Poe, as Poe had employed the ape as a character in one of his stories.

Another scene in MANIAC, finds Maxwell ‘burying’ the Doctor behind a brick wall which is an obvious tip of the hat to Poe’s short story ‘The Cask Of Amontillado’ (1846).

Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1843) is also heavily referenced in MANIAC. In Poe’s story ‘Tell-Tale Heart’, the narrator has an imaginative mind which creates irrational fear that someone’s eye has a vulture-like gleam and imagines the gleam to be evil. In MANIAC, Maxwell sees a satanic gleam in various character’s eyes including Dr Meirschultz, female patients and even a cat that he fears enough to rip out it’s eye and swallow it to avoid the gleam.

On more than one occasion we see superimposed footage of ritualistic, satanic imagery, probably designed to represent the hidden evil that conspires to corrupt Maxwell. The dark side of his mind influences him in the wrong direction. This theme also might have its origins in a Poe story; in this case THE IMP OF THE PERVERSE (1845), the ‘Imp’ of course being a small inner demon that leads decent individuals to do the wrong thing and get in trouble.

On the subject of Poe, he also wrote a story called ‘The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether’ (published 1856) which dealt in part with the old torturous form of physical punishment that coincidentally featured in today’s second movie CHILD BRIDE (1938) in which the local female teacher closely escapes ‘tar and feathering’ by a vengeful mob of unsavoury men. I imagine the taunting insult “Chicken!” may have originated from this system of victimisation.

CHILD BRIDE starred a young actress Shirley Mill who adequately played the child bride ‘Jennie’. Some of her characteristics, including her demeanour and particularly her voice and the way she enunciated, seemed to very much mimic or respond to the style of the then upcoming popular young actress Shirley Temple.

In CHILD BRIDE we find a dwarf called ‘Angelo’ (angel) with a simpleton buddy called ‘Happy’. I wonder if the name ‘Happy’ was influenced by the animation SNOW WHITE (1937) in which one of the seven dwarves was called ‘Happy’.

I believe there is supposed to be an infamous skinny-dipping scene included in this film. Unless I fell asleep during the session, I did not see such a scene and so did not find the movie ultra-exploitative. The reality of child brides is indeed horrific, but this movie does go some way in exposing such issues. The young bride Jennie is admired and loved by a young boy called Freddie whose age is more appropriate to hers, and the movie ends on a ‘happy’ note with Jennie and Freddie together at last, though I’m not too sure the young, possessive Freddie will grow up to be a suitable enough husband for Jennie as he may have some anger-management issues which he revealed when we saw him intent on gunning down (murder?) the girl-bride’s evil and too-old husband.

A wonderful choice of films Brett. I thank you again, till next week.

Pia Santaklaus.

Exploitation Double Feature - this week at Cinematheque

Following up from last week's special on the history of classical exploitation movies, this week sees a special exploitation double featuring Dwain Esper's 1934 anti-classic Maniac and a mystery 2nd feature...

Maniac USA/1934/B&W/110mins/16mm/NFVLS Dir: Dwain Esper. Cast: Bill Woods, Horace Carpenter, Ted Edwards, Phyllis Diller.

This truly bizarre no-budget exploitation film made by a husband and wife team is thinly disguised as a docudrama on madness with more than a passing nod to Edgar Allan Poe. The opening title proclaims fear to be a psychic disease. A mad scientist, Dr Meirschultz, experiments on dead bodies obtained from the morgue by his even more insane assistant, Maxwell, a former vaudeville impersonator, who turns out to be the true maniac. Maxwell's bizarre visions include excerpts from Witchcraft Through the Ages and Siegfried.

Girl Gang Trailer

Here's a taste of this week's That's Exploitation program at the Chauvel Cinematheque.

That's Exploitation - this week at Cinematheque

This week at the Chauvel Cinema, Cinematheque presents the first in a special two week program devoted to the exploitation film of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

Starting this Saturday the 13th of September at 12 noon, and repeating on Monday the 15th of September at 6:30pm, Cinematheque curator Brett Garten presents a multimedia lecture on the social history of this colourful and controversial industry that grew in the shadow of Hollywood during the Hays code era.

Using rare film excerpts, trailers, and dozens of slides, Brett will explore the fascinating social and cultural factors that saw the exploitation film emerge, profile the shady entrepreneurs that pioneered the industry, as well as look in detail at some of the major films. Far from being just bad movies, films like Reefer Madness, Mom & Dad and Maniac, reveal a great deal about the anxieties of American life in the 20th century and the issues they raise are still debated today.

Spring 2008 Program

Click to enlarge the new program.

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Transcript of Introduction to Shangri-La

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Chauvel Cinematheque for the second part in a two-part program entitled Grindhouse Docos. On Saturday we saw Robert Ardrey's The Animal Within and tonight we will be having a look at Kevin Duffy's 1977 film Shangri-La.

I received a good response to the short series of grindhouse films I screened on the last program to coincide with the Chauvel's release of the Tarantino/ Rodriguez film, so when the time came to work on the current program, I thought it would be good to show some of the different types of films that played on the grindhouse circuit. I had these two films sitting around at home, so I blew the dust off them and gave them a run.

The tradition of the grindhouse documentary stretches back to the exploitation film of the 1920s and early sound period. The development of the Hays Code in the early 1930s saw the emergence of a sort of shadow exhibition industry, one that was not party to the moral imperatives of the code. Films like Damaged Lives, Test Tube Babies, Marihuana and many others used the pretext of documentary to avoid censorship and legitimate their production and exhibition as "educational". 

Within the exploitation field, several types of films emerged: the sex hygiene film, the exotic film, the atrocity film, the burlesque film, the nudist film, the drug film, and the vice film. Taken as a whole, they represent a kind of checklist of prohibitions found in the Hays code. The films were produced, distributed and exhibited outside of the Hollywood studio system. As Eric Schaeffer notes in his excellent book "Bold, Daring, Shocking True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959, they were, "centered on some form of forbidden spectacle that served as their organizing sensibility."

As the code's influence waned in the 1950s, two new developments in "educational" exploitation films emerged. Beginning with Mondo Cane, a smash hit in 1963, the marriage of the atrocity film (like Mau Mau above) and the exotic film gave birth to the mondo film. Their mixture of real and fake footage was overlaid with an omnipresent and often highly judgemental and misleading narration that provided the educational context. Although Cane was a surprise hit and was even nominated for an Academy Award, the mondo movie soon became a staple of grindhouse programming for the next twenty years.  

A parallel development in the exploitation film industry was the emergence of the pornographic sex education film. Sex education films of the mid-late 1960s, or "white-coaters" as they were called in the trade, due to the costumes worn by their ubiquitous "doctor" narrators, were the bridge between the soft-core films of the early 1960s and the hard-core films of the 1970s. Their educational pretense permitted shots of actual sex. It took only a few years before actual sex was permitted in narrative films, but the educational motif has survived as a kind of cinematic equivalent of the human appendix, an evolutionary relic of the past. Which brings me (finally) to Shangri-La.

Produced and directed by the relatively unknown sexploitation producer Kevin Duffy in 1977, although to me it looks earlier than that, Shangri-La is one of the rarest of all the mondo movies. It is not listed on the imdb and if you google it, you get nothing. Under the old classifications of exploitation the film would be labelled an exotic, dealing as it does with the hippie invasion of Goa in India, but like many mondo movies, it also shades into the drug film, the atrocity film, and in a brief shot of the birth of a baby, it even reminds one of the sex hygiene film, of which the birth-of-a-baby film was a small but very successful sub-genre. 

It's ironic that this film has probably more educational value today than it did upon its release as it is perhaps the earliest extant documentary footage of the hippie scene in Goa, which was the birthplace of rave culture. It is one of the more thoughtful examples of the mondo genre, but it does periodically come to a halt to foreground such dubious spectacles as nude yoga, acid flashbacks and skinny-dipping. There is something about Shangri-La that I find very appealing.  There are some really well-cut montages, an excellent sitar score, and some priceless footage of young people freaking out on drugs. But mostly it is that cosy nostalgic feeling I get from the narration, a nostalgia for a kind of transparency.

If you're expecting to see a lost classic of the cinema, you'll be sorely disappointed with this film, but movie buffdom does not live on the classics alone. One of the most interesting things about movie buffdom is how much it embraces and celebrates the bad as well, if not moreso, than the good. To love movies is to love bad movies, because bad movies are the norm.