SYMPOSIUM ON CULT FILM

 

In exploring cult cinema’s origins Dr Iain Robert Smith (King’s College London) will reflect upon how discourses of cult cinema have predominantly focused upon North American and Western European cinemas and audiences. Even when cult scholarship has expanded to include non-English language cinema from regions such as East and Southeast Asia, what nevertheless tends to define these cinemas as cult has been the subcultural fandom for those films in countries like the UK and US. His talk will raise a number of questions about the origin of cult and its "whiteness", and considers whether it might be possible to decolonise cult film studies. 

 

In "Good for Her": Revisiting the Masculinityof Cult,Dr. Kate Egan (Northumbria University) unpacks and challenges perceptions of an inherently masculine cult film culture and explores how the key canon of cult cinema, for a long time, tended to focus on male characters and explorations of masculinity. This talk focuses on the renewed cult appreciation for female-directed independent and art films of the 1960s and 70s such as Daisies (1966), Girlfriends (1978); the growth in female-orientated queer cult cinema with Bound (1996], But I’m a Cheerleader (1999), and Bottoms (2023); and the rise on social media of the appreciation of "Good For Her" films like Jennifer’s Body (2009), Midsommar(2019) and Pearl (2022). 

 

Ahead of the publication of theirnew British Film Institute book100 Cult Films: The Sequel, Prof. Ernest Mathijs (University of British Columbia) and Prof. Xavier Mendik (Birmingham City University) will give us some exclusive spoilers as to what made the list and what didn’t. In conversation with Dr. Russ Hunter (Northumbria University) they will reflect on how they made their selections, the challenges of identifying cult films and some of the controversies inherent in writing about cult cinema.

 

Following these presentations,Dr. Russ Hunter will chair a panel discussion with all speakers and the audience on the contemporary relevance of the term “cult” at a time when it has also become a buzzword that is often used for purely commercial reasons.