Peter Stanfield

Cycles of sensation: popular media, thrills, and outrage

In a much-cited passage in her 1909 book The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, progressive reformer Jane Addams sketches a dystopian vision of the modern city, in which the gaudy sensuality of commercial culture has engulfed everyday life. Such brash enticements – exemplified by ‘the flippant street music, the highly colored theatre posters, the trashy love stories, the feathered hats, the cheap heroics of the revolvers displayed in the pawn-shop windows’ (27) – threaten to overstimulate the senses while impoverishing the imagination. Urban youth and the lower classes are especially vulnerable to the allure of such cheap and accessible attractions, she posits, because they lack the moral fortitude to resist their seductive promise. For Addams, sensory indulgence of this magnitude threatens a harmful degeneration of sensibility. Such heady accusations reverberate through countless campaigns against popular media that trade in sensation – from Victorian stage melodramas and sensation novels, through carnival exhibits, pulp magazines, tabloid newspapers, films, radio, television, comic books, popular music, videotapes, mechanical amusements, the World Wide Web, and video games. These crusading ‘cycles of outrage’, as James Gilbert (1988) terms them, frequently involve attempts by middle-class authorities to censure cultural practices that are not for, by, and about them. Serving as a conduit for anxieties over cultural power and cultural production, popular cycles of sensation frequently invoke threats posed to hegemony by modalities of difference, including class, race, sexuality, gender, non-normative bodies, crime – and, especially, youth. Sensational forms of popular culture can certainly provoke anxiety through their content, which often flaunts the spectacle of socially deviant behaviour, bodily or sexual excess, or underground subcultures (criminals, outsider refuseniks, rebellious youth, etc.). Beyond this, however, they are also challenging by virtue of their affective potency, as they aim to incite extreme reactions from their audiences – feelings of shock, horror, excitation, emotional abandon, or stunned disbelief. Such affective intensification may be alarming to both liberal and conservative sensibilities, but it is a key feature of the operational logic of popular media. It is debatable, moreover, whether such sensationalism is ever simplistically ‘exploitative’. In their very excesses of representation and emotion, such media ventures hold the promise of delivering insight or revelation, of inspiring new ways of looking at cultural formations that are often taken at face value. While our principal focus here is on cinema, most of the papers also seek to explore intersections between cinema and other cultural forms or trends that

Intent to speed: cyclical production, topicality, and the 1950s hot rod movie

This paper tracks the emergence, consolidation, and dissolution of the short cycle of hot rod movies that was exhibited from 1956 to 1958. The aim is to explore this cycles connection to topical issues and show how filmmakers used timely subjects. The paper examines the media frenzy that whirled around the subculture of hot-rodding and the sensationalist marketing strategies used to promote the films, which are linked to exhibition in drive-in theatres. There is an extraordinary mismatch between the thrills promised by the sales pitch for the films and the pedestrian action of the films themselves. While showing intent to speed, few examples of the cycle actually delivered on the promise to thrill. Finally, questions of turnover and the speed of production are considered. What draws these areas of interest together is a series of enquiries about what made hot rods and hot rod culture useful to film producers and audiences.

Hoodlum Movies: Seriality and the Outlaw Biker Film Cycle, 1966-1972

From The Wild Angels in 1966 until its conclusion in 1972, the cycle of outlaw motorcycle films contained forty-odd formulaic examples. All but one were made by independent companies that specialized in producing exploitation movies for drive-ins, neighborhood theaters, and run-down inner-city movie houses. Despised by critics but welcomed by exhibitors, these cheaply and quickly made pictures were produced to appeal to audiences of under-educated mobile youths. Plagiarizing contemporary films for plotlines, the cycle reveled in a brutal and lurid sensationalism drawn from the day’s headlines. Disreputable and interchangeable these films maybe, but their lack of cultural legitimacy and low ambition is a large part of the rationale for this study; inviting questions about seriality and film cycles that are otherwise ignored in histories of 1960s and 70s American film. Hoodlum Movies explains why and how these films were made, who they were made for, and how the cycle developed through the second half of the 1960s before coming to a shuddering halt in 1972.

“‘Got-to-See’: Trends in Social Problem Pictures and the Postwar Cycles of Juvenile Delinquency Movies”

Volume I: Origins to 1928. Preface. Acknowledgments. Contributors to Volume I. Part I: Setting the Stage. Part II: Origins to 1914 . Part III: 1915 1928. Part IV: Film and Culture: Summary Essays. Index to Volume I. Volume II: 1929 to 1945. Preface. Acknowledgments. Contributors to Volume II. Part I: Setting the Stage. Part II: 1929 1938. Part III: 1939 1945. Part IV: Film and Culture: Summary Essays. Index to Volume II. Volume III: 1946 to 1975. Preface. Acknowledgments. Contributors to Volume III. Part I: Setting the Stage. Part II: 1946 1955. Part III: 1956 1965. Part IV: 1966 1975. Part V: Film and Culture: Summary Essays. Index to Volume III. Volume IV: 1976 to the Present. Preface. Acknowledgments. Contributors to Volume IV. Part I: Setting the Stage. Part II: 1976 1988. Part III: 1989 1998. Part IV: 1999 Present. Part V: Film and Culture: Summary Essays. Index to Volume IV.