Nearer, Father, Nearer

I'm currently writing an essay on art cinema and its representation of the body, gender, and identification. Ha. To me, the essay question is, in the words of Cher Horowitz, 'simply a jumping-off point to start negotiations.' Par exemple, take the essay I was supposed to write for the atrocious joke of a compulsory course, International Media Studies. I don't know how many of you out there are aware of this, but the discipline of Communication Studies is a vile pit of horror and despair. In order to avoid this, I would happily drink wasps, stab my eyes out with lit sparklers, and go on an over-60s singles cruise. But I digress. International Media Studies. I can't really remember the essay question - it was something about discussing theories of the way in which communication is enabled across countries or something yawn-worthy like that. Contraflow was in there somehow. It was supposed to be a 'research essay', in which you merely researched these boring theories and made some irrelevant comment on the way in which they applied to international media relations. I'm almost positive that essay would be laughed out of a HSC curriculum for being too simple.

So in the opening paragraph, I outlined exactly why this question and approach to the study of international media relations was tired and crap, and discussed Foucault's concept of power and how these power relations were enacted via the media - this constant back-and-forth between media outlets. I have no idea if this impressed any of my tutors (especially as one of them was ridiculous - she accused an entire class of plagiarism for using a modern version of the Harvard Referencing System - idiot), however, since I received a decent grade considering I failed an assignment due to my sheer refusal to stick to the assignment guidelines, I can only assumed one of them at least valued my articulately and well-written opinion of their ridiculous course.

And now I come to my current essay. Call me a slave to narrative cinema, but upon taking a course that focuses on the development of art cinema, I can now say with conviction that I hate art cinema with a passion reserved only for paedophiles, racists and homophobes. Ok, so maybe I don't hate them that much. I guess what I hate is that anything with a story is immediately dismissed as brainwashing rubbish enslaving a passive audience and a naked dude rubbing tomato sauce on his penis is considered a masterpiece. I'm almost positive this 'art film' has been recreated on many drunken football tours and buck's nights.

Many art films investigating the same thematic concerns as horror films have been automatically placed in a higher cultural category for far too long. For example, Stan Brakhage explores the demise of the human body in several films and while these are difficult to access, they are still praised for their contemplation of human frailty and ask the spectator to respond to the sight of the body in decay. So do horror films. Simply because a lot of them appear to be an excuse to show ample bosoms and graphic violence, they reveal what is usually unseen - death and the body's destruction. The unseen fascinates us, the unknown pulls us toward it and death is one of these things. Most of us don't know what our insides look like, so why not take a peak in the safety of the cinema or our own homes?

Zombie films contain the same themes of death and the contemplation of the body's destruction. Simon Pegg, my dream man, argues that slow-moving zombies are a metaphor for death, slow, yet sudden, always inevitable. Yet these are considered a lower form of cinema.

Artists who work in film always suggest that the experience of watching a narrative film is too passive, and their work challenges the spectator to be more active. Well, first of all, fuck you. The act of watching a film is never passive. They assume that simply because sitting in a room focusing your attention on a single space for a prolonged period of time is passive. It's an illusion. If watching a film was truly passive the images in front of us would not make any sense. Our brains and eyes are constantly assembling the footage we're given, and many films demand a physical and emotional response from us as well, such as horror, melodrama and, ahem, porn.

Many horror films privilege bodily sensation over narrative, and thereby form an alternative to narrative cinema. Sound familiar? Yeah, art film wankers say the same thing, only because a person decides it should be in a gallery it's better than a film about a guy cutting up teenagers with a chainsaw, or a film about the undead chowing down on human flesh like it's a tasty bucket of chicken.

After viewing many of these ridiculous films (and skipping more than the odd class out of sheer frustration), I have decided that the only value they have held is that now I know better how to make fun of them in my own narrative films. So how am I going to answer the essay question mentioned in the first line of this post? Well, essentially, I am going to suggest in an articulate and well-written prose style that art cinema and horror do the same shit, only horror does it better. Who knows, perhaps this may be my conclusion:

Art films are pretentious shit and horror films such as Wes Craven's Last House on the Left fucking rule.