Welcome to the UC Berkeley Trash Cinema Conference and Film Festival page. This page will be continually under construction.
 
ATTENTION SPEAKERS! Please visit the Speakers’ Page for instructions and travel information.

 

"Born to Be Bad: Trash Cinema from the 1960s and 70s"
Conference and Film Festival
May 17 -19, 2002
University of California, Berkeley


 
Keynote speaker: Eric Schaefer
Emerson College, Boston
Author of "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Film, 1919-1959 (Duke University Press, 1999).

Guest: Xavier Mendik
Director of the Cult Film Archive in Northampton, UK

Whether they are low-budget films that have found a life as auctioned and traded bootlegs, high-profile successes that have fallen into second-run obscurity, or something in between, Trash films have left their mark on a different type of film history and writing. However these films have come to be defined ("trash," "cult," "exploitation," etc.), there is no doubt that they have had an effect on us and have led us down some unusual paths. This three-day international conference honors Trash films and the activities surrounding them.


Conference and Film Festival Schedule:
Conference at The Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, on the UC Berkeley Campus
Films at the
Pacific Film Archive (2575 Bancroft Ave. On campus facing Bancroft at Bowditch St.)


Friday, May 17, 2002:
Films at The Pacific Film Archive

7:00 pm       Color Me Shameless (1967) and Corruption of the Damned (1965) George Kuchar
Two throbbing mid-sixties extravaganzas of lust and lunacy from George Kuchar, the low-rent Douglas Sirk of the Bronx.
9:00 pm       Color Me Blood Red (1965) Herschell Gordon Lewis
Gore guru Herschell Gordon Lewis's splatter-satire profiles a demented painter on the bleeding edge of the beatnik avant-garde.

 

Saturday, May 18, 2002:
The Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

8:30 am       Coffee and Pastries
9:00 am
       Opening Remarks
Tamao Nakahara
(University of California at Berkeley)


9:30-11:00 am         Panel I  NY Trash

Joan Hawkins (Indiana University at Bloomington)
"Trash and Transgression: Gross-Out Aesthetics and the Late 70s Avant-garde"
Ara Osterweil (University of California at Berkeley)
"Hootchie Kootchie Kuchar: George and Mike's Trash Homage to Hollywood"
Dan Leopard (University of Southern California)
"Blood Red Empire: Herschell Gordon Lewis, Andy Warhol, and 'Slash and Stasis' Cinema"


11:00 am-12:30 pm            Panel II  Sexploitation + Beyond

Melissa MacDonald (McMaster University, Canada)
"Twilight Tales of the Third Sex: The Familiar Spirit of Lesbian Pulp Films"
Verena Mund (Feminale e.V., International Women's Film Festival, Koeln, Germany)
"Stephanie Rothman: Feminist Filmmaker of Sexploitation Comedies"
Joe A. Thomas (Clarion University of Pennsylvania)
"When Trash was Hip: Situating Deep Throat and Porno-Chic"

12:30-2:00 pm         Lunch Reception

2:00-3:30 pm            Panel III Monstrous Sex

Xavier Mendik (Cult Film Archive, University College Northampton, UK)
"Monstrous Sex: Horror, Eroticism and Cult Constructions of the 'Other' in the Black Emanuelle Films"
Tamao Nakahara (University of California at Berkeley)
"Barred Nuns: Italian Nunsploitation Films"
Steven Schneider (New York University)
"Mixed Blood Couples: Interracial Union in the Blaxploitation Horror Film"


3:30-5:00 pm            Keynote Address

Eric Schaefer (Emerson College)
"Sexploitation, Storefronts, and Sixteen: The Practice of Trash Historiography"


Films at the Pacific Film Archive

7:30 pm       Agony of Love (1966) William Rotsler
Introduced by Eric Schaefer.
A bored, buxom housewife takes up a profitable hobby in this sexploitation psychodrama. "Pure silicone-powered poetry."-Steve Seid
9:30 pm       The Student Nurses (1970) Stephanie Rothman
Stephanie Rothman in Person.
Nurses get an education in bedside manner in Rothman's exploitation classic-T&A with a feminist twist.

 

Sunday, May 19, 2002:
The Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

9:00 am       Coffee and Pastries

9:30 -11:00 am        Panel IV Guns, Wheels, & The Law

Harry M. Benshoff
(University of North Texas)
"Sexual and Textual Ambiguity in The Gay Deceivers"
Bill Osgerby (University of North London and University of Leicester)
"Sleazy Riders: Exploitation, 'Otherness' and Transgression in the 1960s Biker Movie"
Timothy Campbell (Cornell University)
"Metropolitan Traumas: The Poliziesco and the Experience of Modernity"


11:00 am-1:00 pm   Panel V  Distribution, Exhibition, & Reception

Ernest Mathijs (University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK)
"Born/Raised to be Bad: The Reception of (Belgian) Trash Cinema"
Jon Kraszewski (Indiana University at Bloomington)
"Recontextualizing the Historical Reception of Blaxploitation: Articulations of Class, Black Nationalism, and Anxiety in the Genre's Advertisements"
Amy Abugo Ongiri (University of California at Riverside)
"Bruce Lee in the Ghetto Connection: Blaxploitation, Kung Fu Theater and Black Spectatorship on the Margins"
Kevin J. Heffernan (Southern Methodist University)
"Musclemen, Moon Maidens, and Masterpieces: Trash Films and Feature Film Syndication in Sixties Television"

1:00-2:00 pm            Lunch

2:00-3:00 pm            Collector's Panel

Xavier Mendik (Cult Film Archive, University College Northampton, UK) will speak on the Cult Film Archive.
Ernest Mathijs (University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK) will speak on Alterimage, a new journal of cult and popular cinema.
Elliot Lavine (Programmer of the Roxie Cinema, San Francisco) will the join the conversation on programming cult/trash films.


3:00 -4:30 pm           Response Session

Participants:
Eric Schaefer (Emerson College)
Xavier Mendik (Cult Film Archive, University College Northampton, UK) on his recent anthology, Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and its Critics.
Linda Williams (University of California at Berkeley)
Steven Schneider (New York University)
Tamao Nakahara (University of California at Berkeley)

4:30 pm         Closing Remarks

Film at the Pacific Film Archive

5:30 pm       Welcome Home, Brother Charles aka Soul Vengeance (1975) Jamaa Fanaka
An ex-con seeks "soul vengeance" using a very unusual weapon in this Blaxploitation epic set on the mean streets of Watts.

The conference is free and open to the public. To purchase tickets for the films, please contact the PFA box office: 510-642-5249. For more information or special access needs, please call 510-527-6915 in advance.

 The evening films will be accompanied by a selection of exploitation trailers (courtesy of Joel Shepard of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) and a large assortment of cult film books will be on sale throughout the weekend. (Please note that this is for a fundraiser and will be CASH ONLY).

"Born to Be Bad" is organized by the Graduate Film Working Group (a Townsend Center Working Group and an ASUC-sponsored Student Group). The event was made possible with generous contributions by the Film Studies Program, the ASUC, The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Consortium for the Arts, and the Italian Studies Department, and with the cooperation of Steve Seid and the Pacific Film Archive.

 ATTENTION SPEAKERS! Please visit the Speakers’ Page for instructions and travel information. Other interested parties, please contact Tamao to take advantage of the UC hotel rates.

Contact Information:
Tamao Nakahara
Department of Italian Studies
6303 Dwinelle, #2620
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-2620
phone: 510-527-6915
email: TAMAO@socrates.berkeley.edu
 

For problems, please contact the webmaster: TAMAO@socrates.berkeley.edu