American Extreme

This dossier brings together a collection of articles on a number of filmmakers and filmmaking practices a little beyond Senses of Cinema’s typical focus. This serves as an introduction to and consideration of ...

“I think there was something internally stimulating to go (to) that space, collectively there was a high, a mutual fantasy, we forgot we were making anything – it seemed like the performance was really for one ...

When African-American filmmaker Jamaa Fanaka passed away in 2012, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive Jan-Christopher Horak stated that Fanaka was dismayed that his films were picked up by a vid...

John Waters is an icon of queer cinema, known for his use of grossness and bad taste. However, it is not grotesqueness alone that makes queer film akin to Waters’ work; his humour is distinctly politically di...

This article discusses cinematic extremes - on-screen sex and violence but also extremes of grain and texture and production cultures - in the work of several women directors closely associated with the undergr...

Abstract >> Hardcore horror meets at the intersection between pornography and horror. Films such as Fred Vogel’s August Underground trilogy, Shane Ryan’s Amateur Porn Star Killer series, Lucifer Valent...

In directing the taboo-themed It trilogy Crispin Hellion Glover broke away from his iconic role as George McFly in blockbuster Back to the Future (1985). In What is it? (2005) Glover’s insistence that he is n...

Using the starting point of the MoMA retrospective of the works of Bruce LaBruce, this article confronts the shifting perceptions of LaBruce as a transgressive provocateur of cinema. I argue that his most recen...

“You know the money shots in porn films? Well, this was just a different substance: it was red” – Director Roberta Findlay on the relationship between pornography and horror “Roberta is a pioneer, a ground-br...

In July 1974 in the seaside city of Sarasota, Florida, television journalist Christine Chubbuck pulled out a gun while broadcasting the news and shot herself in the head on live television. The whereabouts of t...