In “Trashing the Academy,” Jeffrey Sconce argues that the subculture devoted to paracinema possesses a similar level of sophistication and cultural capital to “elite cineastes.” He writes, The discourses characteristically employed by paracinematic culture in its valorization of ‘low-brow’ artefacts indicate that this audience, like the film elite (academics, aesthetes, critics), is particularly rich withContinue reading “Trashing the Academy (part 2)”
Category Archives: paracinema
Jeffrey Sconce, Trashing the Academy (part 1)
These are some initial thoughts on Jeffrey Sconce’s “Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” published in Screen in 1995. The most I could manage with my time this morning was a few short paragraphs, but I look forward to expanding them. In his 1995 essay “Trashing the Academy,” JeffreyContinue reading “Jeffrey Sconce, Trashing the Academy (part 1)”
Movies in Bad Taste
On a recent Patreon episode of Colors of the Dark, I heard a new (to me) term: para-cinema. In the same way that the paranormal lies outside the accepted bounds of normality and parapsychology lies outside the accepted bounds of psychology, paracinema lies (supposedly) outside the accepted bounds of (what many consider) cinema. Paracinema includesContinue reading “Movies in Bad Taste”
Jacob N. Given 