Manchester University Press Capital and Popular Cinema: The Dollars are Coming!

Popular cinema has mostly been approached from a 'cult' perspective, that analyses or simply celebrates its textual and 'transgressive' qualities. In recent years a new generation of film scholars has began to champion the study of popular genres but the question as to why these films may be worthy of study today - 'what can they offer us now?' - is rarely asked. Capital and popular cinema answers this question by responding to the need for a more solid historiographic approach. The book situates 'low' film genres in their economic and culturally-specific contexts (a period of unstable 'economic miracles' in different countries and regions) and explores the interconnections between those contexts, the immediate industrial-financial interests sustaining the films and the films' aesthetics. Through in-depth examination of what may at first appear as different cycles in film production and history - the Italian giallo, the Mexican horror film and Hindi horror cinema - Capital and popular cinema lays the foundations of a comparative approach to film; one capable of accounting for the whole of a national film industry's production ('popular' and 'canonic') and applicable to the study of film genres globally. Based on new research and making available, for the first time in English, new information on the work of Mario Bava, Fernando Méndez and the Ramsay Brothers, Capital and popular cinema will be of interest to second- and third-year undergraduate students, post-graduate students, researchers and scholars working on cult and exploitation cinema, genre cinema, national cinema, film and media theory and in area studies.