Overview

"The Films of Jess Franco looks at the work of Jesús """"Jess"""" Franco (1930-2013), one of the most prolific and madly inventive filmmakers in the history of cinema. He is best known as the director of jazzy, erotically charged horror movies featuring mad scientists, lesbian vampires, and women in prison, but he also dabbled in a multitude of genres from comedy to science fiction to pornography. Although he built his career in the ghetto of low-budget exploitation cinema, he managed to create a body of work that is deeply personal, frequently political, and surprisingly poetic. Editors Antonio Lázaro-Reboll and Ian Olney have assembled a team of scholars to examine Franco’s offbeat films, which command an international cult following and have developed a more mainstream audience in recent years. Arguing that his multifaceted, paradoxical cinema cannot be pinned down by any one single approach, this edited volume features twelve original essays on Franco’s movies written from a variety of different perspectives. This collection does not avoid the methodologies most commonly used in the past to analyze Franco’s work—auteur criticism, genre criticism, and cult film criticism—yet it does show how Franco’s films complicate these critical approaches. The contributors open up fresh avenues for academic inquiry by considering his oeuvre from a range of viewpoints, including transnational film studies, cinephilia studies, and star studies. The Films of Jess Franco seeks to address the scholarly neglect of this legendary cult director and to broaden the conversation around the director’s work in ways that will be of interest to fans and academics alike."

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9780814344934

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Reviews

"A requisite for anyone conducting serious inquiry into Jess Franco. --Vanessa Ceia ""Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas"" For Franco fans, much of the information in this collection will be already well known; none the less the analysis of the individual contributions is engaging, and, though the more familiar Franco films still tend to be prominent in the discussions, the editors and contributors offer a reasonably three-dimensional perspective of the director that is well worth the reading time of anyone interested in his work or in Spanish and European horror filmmaking in general. The volume serves as a useful critical introduction and adds to the efforts elsewhere to reappraise the director. --Ann Davies ""Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies"" The authors in The Films of Jess Franco, by the mere choice of Franco as a critical focus, exhibit a commitment to intensive research. The product of this research is an engaging look at a forgotten corner of exploitation cinema. . . . The book proves that Franco's oeuvre has been almost criminally ignored, his horrotica a deep well for an academic discussion of exploitation cinema's artistic merits. --Alex Brannan ""Film International"""

Author Information

Antonio Lázaro-Reboll is senior lecturer in Hispanic studies at the University of Kent (UK), where he teaches Spanish and European film. He is the author of Spanish Horror Film and co-editor with Andrew Willis of Spanish Popular Cinema. Ian Olney is an associate professor of English at York College of Pennsylvania, where he teaches film studies. He is the author of Zombie Cinema and Euro Horror: Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary American Culture, as well as numerous essays on European cinema and the horror film.

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