Content area
Full Text
Ken Gelder
David Kerekes and David Slater; London and San Francisco: Creation Books, 1994, 1995, 1998; 284pp.
Killing for Culture is a detailed genealogy of films which feature scenes of actual deaths: tribal massacre films, ''snuff'' films, autopsy films, filmed suicides, Satanic abuse movies, and so on. It is one of a number of books around the place that chronicles trash culture, forms of cinema in this case which are so lowbrow that to look at them would in itself be an act of transgression. Creation Books, like ReSearch, has specialized in this sort of thing, and both publishers are ideologically attached to the idea of ''transgression'' in relation to the work they uncover--sometimes naiïvely and sometimes with justification.
The death film may or may not be transgressive, but it can certainly shock--which is what this book also aims to do, at least to a degree, through its scene-by-scene descriptions and its own participation as an ''illustrated history'' in the lurid visualities of its subject matter, showing off various grainy stills and film posters and so on. The gathering-together of so many weird films and quirky bits of information is surely a labor of love; yet the authors are at the same time highly critical of their subject matter. The question occurs at the end: so why did they choose to study films that show people actually [more about this below] dying? A partly generic, and partly peculiar, answer is given in a section on the mondo film:
Mondo cinema is largely ignored in film criticism.... Yet, as the sheer volume of titles below will testify, the genre has been popular and it is influential. Perhaps academia considers mondo to be unworthy of ''serious'' attention, or its convolutions too laborious to decipher? (84)
The extract gives us the raison...