Jeffrey Sconce is a professor and cultural historian of media and film. [1] He is a professor in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University. [2] [3] [4]
Sconce has a B.A., B.S., and M.A. from the University of Texas, Austin, and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin Madison.
He is the author of The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity, published by Duke University Press in 2019, and Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, published by Duke University Press in 2000. [5] Chapters from Haunted Media have been translated into French and German. He is also the editor of Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Financing, published by Duke University Press in 2007.
As a media historian, Sconce's work concentrates primarily on the occult, supernatural, and psychotic accounts of electronic media technologies.
His 1995 article, "Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style," introduced the concept of paracinema, meaning an interest in low, tasteless and otherwise disreputable forms of cinema. [6] [7] "Trashing the Academy" has been reprinted in several anthologies on cult film. [8] [9] [10]
His 2002 article, "Irony, Nihilism, and the New American 'Smart' Cinema," introduced the concept of "smart cinema" to describe the stylistic and thematic interests of American independent filmmakers such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Todd Solondz, Neil LaBute, and Todd Haynes. [11]
Sconce has also written exhibition catalog essays for several contemporary visual artists, including Tony Oursler, Mike Kelley, Joshua Bonnetta, and Romeo Grünfelder.
Guggenheim Fellowship, 2020-2021
A cult film or cult movie, also commonly referred to as a cult classic, is a film that has acquired a cult following. Cult films are known for their dedicated, passionate fanbase, which forms an elaborate subculture, members of which engage in repeated viewings, dialogue-quoting, and audience participation. Inclusive definitions allow for major studio productions, especially box-office bombs, while exclusive definitions focus more on obscure, transgressive films shunned by the mainstream. The difficulty in defining the term and subjectivity of what qualifies as a cult film mirror classificatory disputes about art. The term cult film itself was first used in the 1970s to describe the culture that surrounded underground films and midnight movies, though cult was in common use in film analysis for decades prior to that.
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking developed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, inspired by Dziga Vertov's theory about Kino-Pravda. It combines improvisation with use of the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects hidden behind reality. It is sometimes called observational cinema, if understood as pure direct cinema: mainly without a narrator's voice-over. There are subtle, yet important, differences between terms expressing similar concepts. Direct cinema is largely concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's presence: operating within what Bill Nichols, an American historian and theoretician of documentary film, calls the "observational mode", a fly on the wall. Many therefore see a paradox in drawing attention away from the presence of the camera and simultaneously interfering in the reality it registers when attempting to discover a cinematic truth.
The University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) houses seven academic divisions: Film & Television Production; Cinema & Media Studies; John C. Hench Division of Animation + Digital Arts; John Wells Division of Writing for Screen & Television; Interactive Media & Games; Media Arts + Practice; Peter Stark Producing Program.
Film studies is an academic discipline that deals with various theoretical, historical, and critical approaches to cinema as an art form and a medium. It is sometimes subsumed within media studies and is often compared to television studies.
German expressionist cinema was a part of several related creative movements in Germany in the early 20th century that reached a peak in Berlin during the 1920s. These developments were part of a larger Expressionist movement in north and central European culture in fields such as architecture, dance, painting, sculpture and cinema.
A grindhouse or action house is an American term for a theatre that mainly shows low-budget horror, splatter, and exploitation films for adults. According to historian David Church, this theater type was named after the "grind policy", a film-programming strategy dating back to the early 1920s which continuously showed films at cut-rate ticket prices that typically rose over the course of each day. This exhibition practice was markedly different from the era's more common practice of fewer shows per day and graduated pricing for different seating sections in large urban theatres, which were typically studio-owned.
A sexploitation film is a class of independently produced, low-budget feature film that is generally associated with the 1960s and early 1970s, and that serves largely as a vehicle for the exhibition of non-explicit sexual situations and gratuitous nudity. The genre is a subgenre of exploitation films. The term "sexploitation" has been used since the 1940s.
Paracinema is an academic term to refer to a wide variety of film genres out of the mainstream, bearing the same relationship to 'legitimate' film as paraliterature like comic books and pulp fiction bears to literature.
Jordan Belson was an American artist and abstract cinematic filmmaker who created nonobjective, often spiritually oriented, abstract films spanning six decades.
"The Bellero Shield" is an episode of the original The Outer Limits television show. It first aired on 10 February 1964, during the first season. There are several similarities in the story's theme, plot, and structure to William Shakespeare's Macbeth, and many critics agree it was the series' take on that play.
Postmodernist film is a classification for works that articulate the themes and ideas of postmodernism through the medium of cinema. Some of the goals of postmodernist film are to subvert the mainstream conventions of narrative structure and characterization, and to test the audience's suspension of disbelief. Typically, such films also break down the cultural divide between high and low art and often upend typical portrayals of gender, race, class, genre, and time with the goal of creating something that does not abide by traditional narrative expression.
Extreme cinema is a subgenre used for films distinguished by its use of excessive sex and violence, and depiction of extreme acts such as mutilation and torture. The rising popularity of Asian films in the 21st century has contributed to the growth of extreme cinema, although extreme cinema is still considered to be a horror film-based genre. Being a relatively recent genre, extreme cinema is controversial and widely unaccepted by the mainstream media. Extreme cinema films target a specific and small audience group.
Paranormal radio shows are programs focusing on paranormal subjects such as unidentified flying objects, alien abduction, possession, conspiracy theories, ghosts and cryptozoology. They are broadcast via shortwave, AM and FM radio stations or via internet streaming, often as late night shows.
Marc Edward Heuck is an American actor, writer, and producer. He is best known for his role as The Movie Geek on the Comedy Central game show Beat the Geeks.
Murray Pomerance is an independent Canadian film scholar and author living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and adjunct professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Ernest Mathijs is a professor at the University of British Columbia, where he teaches film. He has published several books on cult films.
Francis Edward Dec was an American lawyer best known for typewritten diatribes that he independently mailed and published from the late 1960s until his death. His works are characterized by conspiracy theories and highly accusatory and vulgar attacks, often making use of conglomerate phrases like "Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God" to slander people, groups, or companies that he believed were engaging in electronic harassment against him, and gained a cult following from the mid-1980s onward due to his comedic incoherence. He has additionally been described as an outsider writer in the field of outsider literature.
American eccentric cinema is a mode of contemporary American filmmaking that emerged in what has been termed the metamodern or new sincerity. Its attachment to indie cinema has led some to consider it a movement and genre of cinema in the United States. Its key filmmakers, including Wes Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, and Spike Jonze, are at times referred to as the "American Eccentrics". It occurred during the 1990s and 2000s, when indie directors sought to create films that diverted from the style and content of Hollywood franchise films. American eccentric cinema came in opposition to the mainstream ideas of formulaic narratives and the digitisation within films and new technologies that came about during the time period. American eccentric cinema is marked by films that are "deeply concerned with ethics and morality, the obligations of the individual, the effects of family breakdown, and social alienation."
Charlotte Brunsdon is a professor of film and television studies at the University of Warwick and researcher. She was one of the principal researchers of the Nationwide Project.
The Sign of Death is a 1939 Mexican film directed by Chano Urueta and starring Cantinflas and Carlos Orellana. The film is part of Cantinflas's early starring roles where he teamed up with Manuel Medel.