Grind house cinema, and cultural distaste for the "other"
This week, we watched the 1922 film Nosferatu , and read two pieces of related literature by David Church and Harry M. Benshoff. Personally, I found Church's piece on the cultural phenomenon of so-called "grind house" cinema to be particularly interesting. Church examines the genesis, the "othering" by mainstream society, and fall of the grind house cinema through articles, records, and photographs dating from the 1920s through the 1980s. The subsequent reemergence of the romanticized grind house aesthetic (as in the 2007 film Grindhouse ) is also touched upon. In its heyday, grind house was a definitively out-cultural movement. Though publications sought to deride the cinemas as culturally inappropriate, dirty, sordid and otherwise worthy of contempt, Church argues that this was not exclusively due to the quality of films shown there; the cinemas themselves, and the environments in which they existed played just as much a role in their cultural perception. In...