Arrow Video and Mario Bava

I have once again been invited to contribute to a blu ray release from those great people at Arrow Video. As I have been discovering the world of Mario Bava over the last two or three years it is perfect timing. I have been able to draw on the research I conducted for my paper on the Fancey family back in May AND my giallo paper in Italy in June. Also over the summer I wrote a chapter for Routledge on the Jacey cinema chain, which turned out to be directly relevant to my PhD after all. Part of that research involved interviewing the last surviving member of the Jacey family, John N. Cohen, who had personal dealings with the Fancey family, so this has all neatly dovetailed together. 

I am trying where possible to use things I am writing towards my PhD, which as far as I can tell is fine, but it does mean that by the time the thing is finished most of it will already have been published elsewhere, and I can kiss that offer of publishing it as a book goodbye. Still, I can't worry about that now. I just need a finished PhD, and then I can write books about anything I want.

Speaking of which, I am still working on Norman J. Warren's book. He is now shooting a new movie, which is exciting but does give me another chapter to write. I have interviewed several more people for it in the last couple of months, so I really hope I can get it finished within the next twelve months. It's driving me slightly insane.

Anyway, to be involved with Arrow is exciting again. I have written an essay on the Fancey family who were behind the distribution of Five Dolls For an August Moon. They also attempted, fairly unsuccessfully, to distribute Bay of Blood too. There is some overlap here with my essay for the Mark of the Devil blu ray, as that was also handled unsuccessfully by the Fanceys. As far as I can tell, despite Five Dolls For an August Moon receiving an X-certificate, with no cuts required, it looks like they just let it sit on a shelf. Seeing that the Fancey family archive appears to have gone up in smoke, it's likely that I will never know.

The new Arrow blu ray is due out on the 1st February 2016, and marks the third time now that I have been involved with them, and it is the fifth time I have contributed to a blu ray release (the other two being the BFI and Shameless). I hope there will be plenty more in the future...

X-Ploitation: How independent film distributors battled against the BBFC and won

A few weeks ago I was invited to write a guest blog post for an AHRC-funded project over at the universities of York and East Anglia entitled "Transformation and Tradition in Sixties British Cinema". Obviously I jumped at the chance to be part of a bigger project that ties in so well with my own research interests. Also I am a shameless whore when it comes to the chance to self-publicise. So if you head over to here you can read the post which came out of my MA research into the link between distribution and censorship. 

I have just found a new lecturing post at the University of Chichester teaching a video games module on a media studies degree, so some of my reading over the next couple of months is going to be in a totally different field to that which I am currently used to. Should be fun.

Fragile archives

A colleague of mine has let me borrow his personal collection of 1960s Monthly Film Bulletin issues.  As the only other place I have found these is in the BFI library, having access to them at home is quite an advantage. However, when I'm handling them I feel very nervous. At some point, probably around fifty years ago, he decided to tape each year together to make them into annual volumes. This means that when I'm trying to scan reviews I have all these fragile, yellowing pages flapping around desperately trying to tear themselves away from each other.

 

I have managed to scan several original reviews for some of the movies I have come across in the course of my research, and thought I would post a couple of them here. Dolls of Vice was a German prostitution drama, a surprisingly popular topic back then. This was probably for the exploitation potential, as highlighted here; "Beauty contests, striptease and undressing scenes."

More intriguing is the mention of a "sympathetic dwarf". And yes, several "climaxes" were censored. I have seen the original BBFC documentation, which included:

Reel 2: Remove all shots of girls wrestling

Reel 3: In strip-tease act remove shots of girls stroking their breasts

I have also come across Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, an early giallo that established Bava's style and influenced a whole rash of Italian and German crime movies, all seemingly obsessed with killers in black gloves and rain coats.

Blood and Black Lace is given a fairly complimentary review for a dubbed Italian horror film, with particular attention paid to the look of the film. Hardly surprising for Bava, although the reviewer is critical of other elements, describing the film as "derivative, for the most part poorly acted and written, and risible in its several descents into pathos." I must confess that I haven't seen this film yet, despite its classic status. I keep hoping that Arrow Video will eventually pick it up, as they have done such brilliant work with many other Bava titles. (edit - within a month of my writing this, Arrow did indeed announce a blu ray release of Blood and Black Lace)

I intend to continue my way carefully through these copies of Monthly Film Bulletin. Ideally I would love to talk to people who remember going to the flicks and saw some of these films, but I have come to realise that is an almost impossible task. The opinions of reviewers like those in MFB at least give me some idea of the contemporary reception of most of the movies my research is digging up.

European Erotic Cinema of the 1960s

I gave a paper at the Cine Excess VII conference held in Birmingham last week. The title was "Dolls of Vice: Eurotica repackaged for early 1960s British Audiences", and it focused on some of those European sexploitation films that were imported and shown in British cinemas. I chose Gala Film Distributors as my main case study, but as you can see to the right, Compton got a mention as well.

You can read the paper over at my Academia.edu page.

I am planning to develop this paper into a journal article and then a chapter for my PhD, so I'll be adding more information on Compton plus some other distributors like S.F. Films and Planet Films.

The conference itself had been moved from it's previous home in London, and from my experience last week it was a mistake. The attendance was quite tiny. It was a co-production between the University of Birmingham and Brighton University, and they didn't even seem to attract Birmingham uni students to it! I hope next time they do it in Brighton, which is much more a natural home for a conference like Cine Excess.

Sexploitation and Norman J. Warren

My research interests have always lain in the 1960s. I'm not entirely sure why, but that decade holds endless fascination for me. Before I started looking at international cinema, I spent a long time writing about British film in that decade. In 2010 I gave my first ever paper at a conference, and it was on Norman J. Warren's then unknown early sexploitation films. Since then, and I like to think partly thanks to my work, the BFI put Her Private Hell out on blu ray and DVD as part of their Flipside range. I was invited to contribute to the booklet for that release and attended the cast and crew screening, which was very exciting.

I have now uploaded that paper plus the imagery on my Academia.edu profile, so you can now read it, should you be so inclined. You can find it here.

(still from Loving Feeling (1968))