Geistbusters

On nudity, nihilism and new genres: what do sexploitation filmmakers have to tell us about the genres of tomorrow’s cinema?

If you’ve seen any of Spider Noir, you might have lost interest at its simulacra low-contrast black and white cinematography. Celebrated? Much of it was a wishy-washy middle grey mess. As with all such attempted reanimations of old genres, there’s that feeling that while the show approximated the look, it remained incapable of resurrecting its spirit. Kathleen Kennedy was right: it’s time to let yesterday’s genres die.

Cinema has always been a technologically driven medium. Any proletarian telling of its history makes plain every innovation put cameras into more and more hands. While photography was once the hobby of the landed gentry, the middle 20th Century saw grubby journalists crawling across battlefields documenting as they went. Celluloid got smaller; cameras got lighter.

Yet insufficient consideration is given to how such technology co-evolved alongside the medium’s defining genres. A genre archetype is nothing more than a recipe of storytelling tropes that proved popular enough to be imitated. While we conceive of such genres as generally fixed, let’s contend they are plastic and that fluidity is in part caused by evolving technology. The western’s popularity waned as its grandeur and spectacle lessened and TV over-familiarised it. As those lighter, cheaper cameras turned the Vietnam War into nightly news, the brutal visions of Peckinpah and Leone devastated the western’s simplistic Zoroastrian morality, raising the audience’s appetite for blood, gore and cruelty. Cowboys and Indians were suddenly tame and old-fashioned.

Of course, the western didn’t die out entirely; it remains, modified and downgraded, much as T-Rex did by becoming a chicken. Other genres went extinct entirely. Newsreels, Buster Crabbe serials, surfer movies – now only visible as trace elements in the archive. Who here has ever seen a German Bergfilm? Workers leaving the Lumiere factory no longer inspire awe; trains pulling into stations no longer cause panic in theatres. If genres date at a comparable rate to the technology that creates them, they must document forgotten epochs of public taste. Have you never wondered what your grandfather kept quiet about watching?

Barbed Wire Dolls

All such refined discussions should start with Jess Franco’s Barbed Wire Dolls (1976). The film is a Swiss-produced women in prison sexploitation movie made for the German market. By degree, it’s part skin flick, part technically inept joke. While the film was the definition of a niche genre at the time, its content and form are unacceptable by today’s puritan standards. That caveat is indicative. Franco’s wider work is the X-rated poster child of dead genre.

In the film, Maria (Lina Romay) is imprisoned after her father (Franco) dies trying to sexually assault her. The prison is a hellish black site of sadistic guards, sexual exploitation and electro-torture. Unlike other more famous prison movies, nobody triumphs and hope does not set anyone free.

Today, Barbed Wire Dolls is dismissed as male gaze sleaze, yet some maintain it is worthy of re-evaluation as it’s arguably one of the bleakest films ever made. Its vision of a man-made hell elevates it above other films in its genre. This seemingly bizarre mix of tone and content seems radically at odds with what the audience must have expected. The film feels, to use a modern term, is more a bait and switch. Anyone looking for a good helping of pornography must have left whatever shady cinema they saw it in just a little unsatisfied. Did Franco have free reign with it so long as he hit the skin quota? Given it was released, we must infer that placeholder content is not a modern innovation. It delivered the basics, to a minimum of technical and genre standards. Its exploitative narrative style, obviously not timed around performance or story logic echoes the horror cinema of Fulci, Bava and Argento.  

Moreover, the film stands in significant distinction to the many other more skin-heavy movies in its genre. For contrast, consider Gefangen Frauen/Island Women (1979/1980), made by Barbed Wire Dolls producer Edwin C. Dietrich. This film, whilst nominally the same genre, is less a brutal prison drama and more about a correctional nudist colony. It opens with a not-entirely-germane-to-the-plot topless beauty competition, segues via a cliched El Presidente plotting, to the army kidnapping sex-workers from a brothel.

What follows is heavy on skin and significantly tamer than Barbed Wire Dolls. The filmmaker’s dedication to maximising the nudity really should be praised for its sheer insistence: exercising in the prison yard (naked), fighting (naked), breaking rocks (naked) and even launching clay pigeons (naked) – all with perfectly painted nails. The tone is lighter than Barbed Wire Dolls too, with one character unironically commenting: “It really isn’t that bad here”. Perhaps that’s creditable to less than faithful dubbing.

The formula gives itself away as the film shares the same kill the-doctor-to-aid-escape-ruse as Barbed Wire Dolls. The film has its politics too, damning revolutionary movements as much as the dictators they’re fighting. It has more of a Shawshank Redemption ending with one of the heroines returning happily to the sex trade, one becoming the next dictator’s mistress and the third disappears from the plot entirely. The shocks of Barbed Wire Dolls are replaced by a recognisable pornographer’s leer.   

Franco has his own cult status; for some he was the Orson Welles of sleaze. He and Lina Romay lived and worked together for decades and died within a year of each other. Certainly, their cinema seems too confrontational for today’s mainstream tastes, but their work has enough fans to have warranted Franco a Guardian obituary. Their devotion to cinema is almost as moving as that of Welles and Gary Graver.

Female Vampire (1973) is recognised as Franco’s best film due to its dream-like abstraction and remains notorious for the 19-year-old Romay walking naked toward the camera in its opening scene. It was edited into many variant forms, by turns a horror story and/or a softcore one; it was never one fixed genre. Despite such identikit end results, it shows a genuine vision with added storytelling innovation as the vampire ultimately commits suicide, unable to live with her nature.

Barbed Wire Dolls was a genre fusion of tone and content, diluted in later films; Female Vampire wasn’t a fixed genre at all. For such fringe filmmakers, genre wasn’t an unflinching mould; it was just another aspect of the craft to be improved and refined. Look at any of yesterday’s popular hits – The Bodyguard comes to mind – and ask: “Why was that popular?” or in the case of Franco’s output: “What were they thinking?” That such things seem inexplicable to you proves the point. Times change. Popularity, genre conventions and the conditions that create them are as ephemeral as mayflies. 

Films such as those of Franco and Dietrich seem half-focussed, trying to be cinema and sleaze at the same time. The limits of the day’s technology are obvious; many look amateurish in the extreme and they’re barely cinema in any conventional sense. Yet, their sheer quantity meant a production pipeline existed and a clear market-driven evolutionary pressure was on their makers. Of course, their replacement was hardcore porn. You only need to watch Barbed Wire Dolls to see how different cinema was back then. Franco clearly knew his niche audience. Sadly, his cinema proved a gateway drug in a dead-end genre in the age dominated by Rocky, Death Stars and Traci Lords.  

Bygones and Has-Beens

What happened to Hal Hartley? In the late 80s and 90s, Hartley was a leading light in indie cinema, mentioned in the same breath as Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino and Atom Egoyan. Coming out of the Industrial Light and Magic 80s, Hartley’s cinema felt proletarian. Obtainable. Students couldn’t compete against Jurassic Park but might have taken on Hartley. His best film remains Amateur (1994), a story of an amnesiac pornographer and the woman trying to get away from him. Echoes, with dramatic licence, of Franco and Romay. Like Franco, Hartley made movies until the market and funding shifted. His niche closed as cinema went digital and everyone suddenly decided to like Iron Man.

To the same extent, all those straight-to-video 90s erotic thrillers starring the Shannons plotted the same arc. The genre was killed by the rise of internet porn. The brilliant Basic Instinct (1992) – a subversive Hitchcockian thriller Hitchcock couldn’t have made due to the standards of his day – was by degree in Franco’s tradition. Unlike Franco’s work, it came with a fashionable 90s feminist endorsement insisting the exploitation was empowerment.

Pick any time and date example of genre from the last century of cinema, go forward a few years and you’ll find a derivative form where the old paradigm has been ironed out and strip-mined. Yes, all the Michael Bayhem that followed sits squarely in a tradition shared with Franco. All are unitary examples of niche-focussed cinema in a medium where all originality eventually undergoes a big screen heat death. John Wick. Marvel, and Transformers are movies shorn of any nuance or subtlety. It’s evolution saying: “That worked. More of that!” Every potential trait, every fledgling genre is given a chance before an innovation-hungry audience. Public taste is stimulated by what is barely technically possible. The next new thing makes the drug more potent. Successful movies are called ‘hits’ for a reason.

Speciation

Franco’s cinema, the equivalent of 100 cigarettes a day and exhaust fumes, is the perfect example of a dayfly genre. In many ways, Franco was archaeopteryx and Barbed Wire Dolls a transitory form. But then all genres are transitory: they all depend on time and place. We could easily have picked Airport and The Towering Inferno.

Cinema’s current decline is due in part to our genres having ceased their evolutionary development. Cultural critics are calling Year Zero and decrying yesterday’s popular as ‘problematic’. Yet, filmmakers have always been detritivores. The theatre chains were built on the repurposed corpses of music hall. That same repurposing can be seen today with our genre entertainment – the instantly forgotten remake-rebootquels are a denial of a basic truth of the medium – the new technology that made those properties so iconic was what kept them one step ahead of what the audience knew it wanted – four decades ago. No matter how enjoyable Masters of the Universe is, it’s still a reanimated corpse flopping around in the zombi-zeitgeist. Remaking Barbed Wire Dolls would prove no more successful. Except for deep-frozen pathogens, such reheated archaea are unlikely to reestablish their dominance. 

Streaming is the most recent innovation to hit the film industry and the narrative run to support it is pure spin. Some maintain streaming is the revolution: instant and inexhaustive. The internet was that too and it killed the appetite for newspapers. Firewalls went up around all the major publications, just as they have now around the legacy studios. The non-standard running times and obscene budgets of prestige TV have reduced the quality of the output. Pilot season and shows aired whilst in production used to mean listening to the audience. That feedback loop is gone, and editorial is no longer responsible for quality. The auteurs of the 70s are mocked for the scale of their self-indulgence, yet much of streaming is guilty of the same crime.

The recent output of the name brands – Star Trek, Star Wars – all failed as the creators ran off their audience and made inorganic changes to the genres. Algorithms have improved nothing: today’s writing is sloppy. Where did the dangerous, the risqué and the antiauthoritarian spirit cinema inherited from the music hall go? When cinema became moderated content, it became safe and bland. Cinema became TV and TV shares three walls and a transparent front with panopticon prison cells.

The old genres are not working today. Nearly two decades of post-modern deconstruction and subverted expectations have killed off more ideas and forms than the Permian Mass Extinction. Are we forever condemned to simulacra reanimated corpses like Spider Noir? It wasn’t AI but its fusion aesthetic meant it came very close. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! perfectly epitomises another of today’s zombi-genres: the activist remake. It is an evolutionary dead-end: it didn’t evolve organically nor is it driven by an audience’s appetite. Snowballs leave bigger fossil traces. Making your fusion film genre isn’t enough. You need some of today’s anima in your zeitgeist.

This lacklustre and stale output explains why our cinemas now resemble Easter Island after the trees were cut down. Niche speciation is going on elsewhere: Hentaied turned the Evil Dead’s infamous sexual assault scene into a porn sub-genre. Anime’s genre eco-system co-evolved technology, audience appetite and distribution. The kids lap it up because it’s fresh. Those Avatar sequels, superficially technical wonders, weren’t fresh and had less cultural impact than that snowball: technology, genre and… nothing.

Yesterday’s cutting edge is now a pair of safety scissors. Yet, the movies of Franco and his peers feel like coiled springs; today’s feel like flat soda. Current filmmakers are speaking yesterday’s language; like the internal combustion engine, cinema is a 19th Century product, once wrapped in a monocultural audience. Its day has passed. We were big on movies, right up until the time we found something better. New technology always fractures the market by creating new niches sating new desires. Theatre begat opera and music hall. Now we have AI, OnlyFans, TikTok, Snapchat, Steam and Roblox. In the age of ballistic attention spans, the movies are as redundant as inch-thick Russian novels.

The eternally optimistic point to cheaper cine-cameras as the medium’s saviour: Hollywood quality is at your proletarian fingertips. Yet, there’s that feeling of tomorrow’s cinema being born with an extra thumb. Supergirl looks like DaVinci Resolve: The Movie: technically superb but lifeless. These news technologies aren’t improving the audience’s experience. They’re just Cherry Coke. Franco knew enough to stick to his niche using much less technology.

Filmmaking will survive; yet cinema’s future is highly doubtful. Tomorrow’s challenge is making something the mass audience might have FOMO for. Let’s call time on the remakes and rebootquels. None of these hit because genre is time/space dependent. Today’s reheated ready-meal movies lack cultural relevance and a pulse: those beautiful new cameras are just skin grafts on decades-old corpses.

Cinema has always been a medium driven by punctuated technological evolution and a fern-spike in new genres. Today’s challenge is no longer one of affordability, quality or even distribution. All those Star Wars AI YouTube channels have shown us new ways of doing the same old thing. What’s old is old again. Where is our fertile new ground?

We’re seeing cultural synthesis, not thesis and antithesis. Many deride Franco and his like, but they knew their audience and genres well enough to produce what sold. Genre is a market driver. Today’s cinema output is planned-economy Lysenkoism. The commissioning editors and executives are all market-deniers. They all need to take a simple and obvious lesson from Franco: make films for a real audience. Filmmaking is a vulgar medium. Its place is not solving world problems. It’s meant to be shameless escapism. Embrace it and move on.  

To survive, the medium, the genre and its technology must be allowed to co-evolve. Let’s hope there’s a comet coming.