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1. American Cult Cinema
2. Cult Directors and Cult Films
• The Director as Cult
• The Cult Director as Transgressive
Figure
• Post-Cinematic Cult Film
• Mathijs and Mendik ‘Introduction’ in Mathijs,
E & Mendik, X (Eds.) The Cult Film Reader
• Shaviro, Steven, Seeing into the Light: Delirious
Perception in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers.
www.shaviro.com/Presentations/Spring/

2. The film director as cult figure :
Artist/Visionary/Philosopher/Hero
• Robert Bresson (1907-99)
Paul Schrader (writer of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull;
director of American Gigilo, Light Sleeper)
argues that ‘The films of Robert Bresson
exemplify the transcendental style in the West.
(Expressing a) “phenomenology of salvation
and grace”’
• 'Bresson's oeuvre constitutes an investigation
of cinematic narration'
International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers

3. Auteurism as a concept and a fetish;
some key developments
• Cinema is equal in status to other art forms which display ‘profundity
and meaning’ (see Alexandre Astruc, Birth of a new avant–garde:
the camera pen (1948))
• Cinema has a new and unique language, and the language is ‘mise
en scene’ (see Francois Truffaut, A Certain Tendency of the French
Cinema (1954))
• Cinema affords directors a means of personal expression – the
stylistic signature or thematic personality– evident across a range of
films (see Andre Bazin, La Politique des auteurs (1957))
• The Americanisation of auteurism – The way a film looks and moves
should have some relationship to the way a director thinks and feels
(Andrew Sarris, Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962)

4. Some American auteurs’ cinematic
‘personalities’
• Sam Peckinpah’s ‘elegiac violence’
• Martin Scorsese’s ‘obsessive energy’
• Terrence Malick’s ‘contemplative poeticism’
• Quentin Tarantino’s ‘cinephiliac hyperactivity’
• Tim Burton’s ‘imaginative whimsy’
• Wes Anderson’s ‘annoying wackiness’
• David Lynch’s ‘David Lynchness’

5. Authorship : cults, creativity and commerce
• “From the 1980s onwards more films than ever before were
labeled cult and received cultist receptions. For the first time
cult cinema became self-aware of its status as cult, and, as a
result, the ritualistic reception of cult cinema became
institutionalised” (Mathijs & Mendik, 2008: 20).
• Authorship signature: institutional investment in the author
provokes a reading of textual features as evidence of
authorial enunciation
• Auteurism is a ‘commercial strategy for organising audience
reception…a critical concept bound to distribution and
marketing aims that identify and address the potential cult
status of an auteur’.
Corrigan, T. (1991) Cinema Without Walls, p.103

6. • ‘In the beginning , there was not an
author, just a film: Eraserhead…the film
was perfect; it still belonged completely
to its public, and the shadow of the
author had not yet fallen on the screen’
Michel Chion : 2006 p3

7. The making of the cult director
Lynch as brand

8. Russ Meyer: transgressing the good taste
of auteurism

9. Independent filmmaker as transgressive cult figure :
counter-culture youth cinema
John Waters (Pink Flamingos 1972,
$10 000)
Variety review : “one of the most
vile, stupid and repulsive films ever
made”
The Trash Trilogy :
Non-actors, friends, real locations,
uninterested in classical Hollywood
qualities
Distribution on arthouse college
circuit

10. Spring Breakers (Korine 2012)
John Waters' Top 10 Films of 2013
• 1. Spring Breakers: The best sexploitation
film of the year has Disney tween starlets
hilariously undulating, snorting cocaine,
and going to jail in bikinis. What more
could a serious filmgoer possibly want?
Source : indiewire 30/11/13
• It’s simultaneously straightforwardly
entertaining (sex, violence) and confusing
in its use of unconventional techniques of
narration
• It’s marketed as a ‘light’ genre film but it is
‘dark’ in its non-generic approach to
narrative, image and sound

11. ‘Spring Breakers became an instant cult classic when it
opened in cinemas this April (2013) thanks to its combination
of adult themes and provocative casting.’ NME June 24 2014
• It’s a film that provides female
protagonists and images of
women to-be-looked-at
• It’s a film about exploitation
that is also an exploitation film
• It seems both serious and
stupid, both innocent and guilty

12. Cult Characteristics of Spring Breakers
• Performers cast against type; James Franco but especially Selena Gomez
(Barney, Disney) and Vanessa Hudgens (Disney, High School Musical) in a
film by indie enfant terrible HARMONY KORINE, writer of Kids, director of:
• Gummo (1997)
• Julien Donkey Boy (1999)
• Mister Lonely (2007)
• Trash Humpers (2009)
• Spring Breakers (2013)
• Wide variety of stylistic approaches. Films all portray "losers" Celebration
of failure, American, white, lower class

13. How to be transgressive when extremism is
the new normal?
• Trash Humpers (2009) is the perfect
summary of Korine’s aesthetic of
‘white trash’ spectacle, i.e.
confrontational, abject whiteness
• But whereas Korine’s first feature
Gummo (1997) stood out as
powerfully ugly amongst the ‘good
looking’ innovations of indie cinema,
Trash Humpers emerged in a media
landscape in which spectacles of
abjection, excess and transgression
were (and still are) commonplace

14. James Franco and Werner Herzog on why
Spring Breakers is the most important film
of all time (Vice magazine, 01/11/13)
Imagine in a distinct German accent: ‘Three hundred
years from now, when people want to look back at dis time,
dey won’t go to the Obama inauguration speech, dey will go
to Spring Breakers.’”

15. More of James Franco’s considerations
• . Well, here is the film that shows the white dudes, the privileged dudes, using
black culture, YouTube culture, any culture that fits their needs to entertain
themselves, to turn themselves into stars in their own minds and the minds of
those around them. This is reality; this is Instagram.
• . This ain’t a happy teen romp. This is the movie that takes all that stuff that
makes your music and videos and social-networking lifestyles and uses it
against you. But it ain’t just a critique, little bitches. It is also a celebration. This
is why Selena and gang arein the film., their legends follow them into the
diegetic frame of the film, coloring everything they do like a mist of
metacommentary that is constantly saying, What you are watching is extreme,
yes, but it is all subtext, bitches. Every time you watch Britney Spears or any of
her current offspring swing around in skimpy lingerie, draping themselves
across sweaty bodies of anonymous men, the message is just this: fuck, fuck,
fuck; suck, suck, suck; violence; materialism; drugs, drugs, drugs; live fast,
never die because you will live on through Facebook legends; spring break,
spring break, spring break foreva!

16. Let James finish…
• ‘Spring Breakers is the neorealism of the Facebook
age, chopped, screwed, and digitized. Where The
Social Network was a movie about money, deals,
greed, backstabbing, and the resulting court case—
anything but the technology that defined the new
way kids were socializing—Spring Breakers is the
embodiment of such technological engagement. It is
everything that we are today. You’re welcome.’

17. Making a Cult Movie
Critical Gatekeepers
• Cutting edge academic Steven Shaviro at a conference on
‘Post-Cinema’ in Lisbon 6/12/13 praised the film’s ‘delirious
perception’ and categorised it as an example of new
filmmaking – post-cinematic, identified thus:
• Post-continuity; the coherent organisation of cinematic space,
time and narrative has lost its central importance, increasingly
important is immediate visceral affect caused by the sensory
overload of colour, light, texture, density, rapidity.
• Dispersed, multi-causal, impersonal narrative without the
organising rational centre of the heroic protagonist

18. SB’s post-cinematic form helps us understand its
cult appeal and its rejection
(which can only add to its cult appeal)
• Not a puzzle narrative (like Inception, Source Code, Minority
Report) that plays with time but can be pieced together to make
sense
• Remix Aesthetics : senseless repetition : scenes, images, music,
phrases, all create a cine-trance or liquid narrative
• Incomplete (unsatisfying) narrative ; e.g. related but non-linear
sequences
• Confusing ; characters are also incomplete, what they say doesn’t
make sense
• Irrational ; repetitions of scenes, different characters repeat the
same lines
• Disorganised ; action is out of sequence, images from the past
and the future leak into the present

19. Shaviro points out that our confusion is
caused by the film’s form
• Which sound/image track do we trust the most?
• Nubile bodies (exploitation via male gaze)
• Visual beauty of lighting, etc.
• Images of violence, decadence, & mayhem
• Transfiguration via slow motion
• Throbbing, pulsing music
• Spiritual, sublime voiceovers
• "I'm starting to think this is the most spiritual place I've
ever been ... Feels as if the world is perfect, like it's never
gonna end."
• Korine: "I think they mean what they say in some weird
way.”

20. Post-Irony
• Gender : young women take their place in public life,
but in their bikinis
• Class : Alien’s ‘shit’ of shorts and guns is the American
dream of democratic consumerism
• Race : the film excludes black people from its ‘dream’,
blackness is a commodity to be worn by white consumers
• We know that these aspects suggest ironic and critical
themes, but does the film’s form inhibit connection and our
ability to make critical sense – is it post-intelligent?

21. Is the global network of neoliberal capitalism
beyond human perception and cognition?
• Shaviro argues that the ‘film’s free-floating modulations of
intensity’ match neoliberal experience
• Post-cinema captures the ‘pulse’ or sensory ambience of the
world with its loops, samples of mixed time, and repetition with
minor readjustment, rather than progressive, forward-moving
and clarifying time that moves to a sensible conclusion about the
world
• This force, which is both aesthetic and political, pushes the film
out of sensible cinematic representation and into a sensuous
post-cinematic cult future

22. Spring Breakers’ cult status is not guaranteed by its transgressive
casting, nor even James Franco’s philosophising
• In the film there is no difference between hyper-conformism
and wild transgression, both are part of disciplined, hedonistic
consumerism

23. Spring Breaker’s cult status depends on our recognition that its
delirious layering of flesh and sunsets, heartfelt balladry and
electronic throb, stupid hedonism and corny spiritualism, creates
an image of the world that’s worth believing in

24. Conclusion : “Cult films transgress common notions of good and bad
taste, and they challenge genre conventions and coherent
storytelling,…and in spite of often-limited accessibility, they have a
continuous market value and a long-lasting public presence” (Mathijs &
Mendik, 2008: 11)
Auteurism values ‘good’ taste in films, based upon viewer recognition of
artistic coherence and consistency across films and genres; the cult of
the director appears to be at odds with the cult of the film
Spring Breakers is a film that demonstrates the complexities of
contemporary cult phenomena. It is undoubtedly part of the commercial
exploitation of the ‘Korine brand’, but it is also a film that will continue to
have ‘public presence’ due to its images that transgress good taste (in
movies) and good sense about the world
The film, like many cult classics, has a genuine sense of the modern
‘uncanny’, i.e. images that are hardly believable but undeniably
compelling