Nationality Identity politics and gaze Research

Anti Establishment, Identity Politics and Exploitation films

• MASH and anti-establishment
• Lone Wolf and Cub, Lady Snowblood, Hanzo the Razor and the Japanese establishment. “By the 1970s, the era of government corruption, left-wing urban terrorism, pollution scandals and the Vietnam war, the Japanese were constantly confronted with the fact that violence and social ills were inextricably linked, and many filmmakers were unwilling to whitewash this in their work. By adding nudity, sex and violence, the film studios hoped to appeal to lonely, frustrated young men, but the people who actually made the films - the directors, the scriptwriters and the actors - didn’t merely want to profit from them, like their bosses did. They were the same generation as their audience and understood them. They understood that the people in the theatres were frustrated with a social system that used them and then dumped them, frustrated with politicians and leaders of industry who made profits over their backs. At Toei, for example, Kinji Fukasaku’s gangster films cast serious doubts on who actually benefitted from the post-war reconstruction. The Female Convict Scorpion series starring Meiko Kaji and directed by real-life labour union leader Shunya Ito, are ostensibly women-in-prison exploitation flicks, but they ferociously attacked the country’s patriarchal power structure and its inability to owe up to its wartime past. One filmmaker who had long used violence as a tool to vent his social and political commentary was Hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice director Kenji Misumi.” - Tom Mes, from the accompanying booklet to Eureka Entertainment’s 2012 release of the Hanzo the Razor trilogy. “In the late 1960s the Japanese film industry was in crisis. With film audiences encroached upon by the rising popularity of television, the major studios found themselves in financial trouble. In desperation they looked to reliably commercial - notably sex and violence - in order to draw audiences back. They turned to a new breed of younger film directors, keen to vent rage and frustration against the outmoded social conventions still prevalent in their country. So long as these directors delivered cutting edge, dangerous films, they were given complete licence to infuse movies with personal and often rebellious preoccupations. A subversive edge at first crept into and then completely gripped Japanese popular cinema. The result was a veritable goldmine of extravagant, unique cult classics.” - Matt Palmer. From the accompanying booklet to the 2006 Eureka release of Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion.
• Female Prisoner Scorpion, Comfort Women, Stray Cat Rock, Lady Snowblood and Japanese Patriarchy. “The cinematic beauty of Female Prisoner #701 is as alien to other films in the cycle as its ferocious, enigmatic heroine and its feminist critique of patriarchal society. A rare treat indeed, the film you now hold in your hands is both a subversive, radiant art movie and a down and dirty exploitation classic.” - Matt Palmer. From the accompanying booklet to the 2006 Eureka release of Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion  

• Female Prisoner Scorpion, Sex and Fury, Female Yakuza Tale, Rape Revenge movies .
• Kill Bill
• Hanzo the Razor and his penis.
• Italian Giallo (Blood and Black Lace), The Evil Dead, Re Animator and gender in Horror movies
• Tenebre Dario Argento’s response to his critics
• Vera Chytilova’s Daisies

Racism, The Romance of the South, Blacksploitation, Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino

D.W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation An example of a racist movie is D.W Griffiths birth of a nation, which portrays the ku klux klan as heroes and black people as bad guys. Since then there have not been many films that have been racist in such an obvious way, but many have displayed examples of racism. For example films like Gone with the Wind and Song of the South depict black people as simpletons who seem perfectly happy in their life of slavery. In Gone with the Wind the main character Scarlett O’Hara passes some of the slaves who work on her family’s land in the street and they reassure her, “We’ll get those yankees!” as if they are on the side of the confederacy. There is also a character called Prissy who is a twelve year old girl in the book, but in the film is a fully grown adult who still has the characteristics of a child. They may have decided not to change her characteristics because they believed that those characteristics would still work in a black slave adult character. In Jasper, George Pal’s series of short animations, the main character Jasper is a stereotype of a black person that is clearly problematic by today’s standards. He has a brown head with big white lips and lives in a farm with his stereotypical mother and he loves watermelons.   Jasper however is a very loveable character and the series as a whole tends to romanticise black culture, whilst also stereotyping it. Jasper seems like it is made from a perspective of admiration, but is racist because of the ignorance of the  time it was made in.   

Blacksploitation

In america black people are a minority, but they make up a larger percentage of cinema goers than their overall percentage in the general population. In the 70s there was a short lived cinema trend of films trying to appeal to this market, which was discovered after the success of Shaft. These films were called Blacksploitation films and included films such as the William Crain directed Blackula. These films were important in the fact that they had Black actors, Black directors and were aimed at black audiences (which was rare at the time and still is in many instances), but some black filmmakers, such as Spike Lee, have stated that Blacksploitation films do not represent their experiences as black americans.

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing.

Do the right thing is a film which presents life in a largely black ghetto of New York city. It chooses to present the quirky side of life there and the uniqueness and humanity of the characters.There are no fire breathing bad guys in the film, as even the characters that cause some of the racial tension that the film explores are believable well rounded characters. At the end of the film there is a conflict in the street and the police show up to stop it, but they end up accidently killing a resident of the street when they are carelessly heavy handed and choke him to death whilst restraining him. This causes a riot.

Do the right thing explores the cause of similar riots, that have happened in the past and why there is often tension between police and black communities. It shows that the people involved in such riots are usually ordinary people with quirky and interesting characteristics and that it is often the way they are treat by authority and their social situation that would cause the anger which can drive ordinary people to participate in violence and destruction. This whilst also providing a social document of everyday life in the part of the city it is set in.

Jackie Brown, Django Unchained, Spike lee’s reaction and The Hateful Eight. “Django Unchained combines elements of the european Spaghetti Western - notably the bleak sensibility of Sergio Carbucci’s cowboy pictures - with the politicized edge of 1970s blaxsploitation films.” - p.926, 1001 Movies you must see before you die, Octopus Publishing Group Limited, 2015. “Tackling the topic of America’s slave-era history as a blood-soaked revenge western, Django Unchained was not without its critics. Nevertheless, the film’s angry, unblinking depiction of those brutal times clearly struck a chord, with Tarantino claiming - not without reason - that the film helped stimulate debate about slavery and race.” -  p.926, 1001 Movies you must see before you die, Octopus Publishing Group Limited, 2015. “I can’t speak about it because I’m not going to see it. I’m not seeing it. All I’m going to say is it would be disrespectful to my ancestors to see that film.” - Spike Lee in an interview with...