Grindhouse  

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"They can keep their Bressons and their Cocteaus. The cinematic, modern marvelous is popular, and the best and most exciting films are, beginning with Méliès and Fantômas, the films shown in local fleapits, films which seem to have no place in the history of cinema." --Le Surréalisme au cinéma (1953) by Adonis A. Kyrou


"Spending time in those theaters, I grew increasingly irritated by the offhand putdowns and snide of cinema snobs like the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael and The New York Times’s Vincent Canby, who implied that Times Square movies could only entertain low-IQ types, and seemed unable to praise anything beyond the hip new Fellini or Bergman film. I, on the other hand, felt their "old masters" were directors who hadn’t shown a new wrinkle in years,. To me, 42nd Street was where the real aesthetic innovations were being made. There was no permanent record of the type of exploitation films I had so relentlessly attended. So in June 1980, I started Sleazoid Express."-- Sleazoid Express (1984) by Bill Landis

 This page Grindhouse is part of the film series.Illustration: screen shot from L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat
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This page Grindhouse is part of the film series.
Illustration: screen shot from L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat

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A grindhouse is an American term for a theater that mainly showed exploitation films and other genre films up until the advent of home video, which made these kind of film theatres obsolete. It is also a term used to describe the genre of films that played in such theatres. These theatres were usually located in the vicinity of popular districts, red light districts or train stations. These cinemas, and the films that played there, were first celebrated by Ado Kyrou (the films shown in local fleapits, films which seem to have no place in the history of cinema).

Grindhouse films are also referred to as "exploitation films." Grindhouses were known for non-stop programs of B movies, usually consisting of a double feature where two films were shown back to back. Many of these inner-city theatres formerly featured burlesque shows which included "bump and grind" dancing, leading to the term "grindhouse." Beginning in the late 1960s and especially during the 1970s, the subject matter of grindhouse films was dominated by explicit sex, violence, bizarre or perverse plot points, and other taboo content. Many grindhouses were exclusively pornographic.

The 1980s home video market threatened to render the grindhouse obsolete. By the end of that decade, grindhouse theaters had vanished from Los Angeles's Broadway and Hollywood Boulevard, New York City's Times Square and San Francisco's Market Street. By the mid-1990s, they had completely disappeared from the United States.

There remains a strong nostalgic affection towards the now defunct grindhouse era amongst some cinephiles. An example is the film Grindhouse (2007). One half of this double feature was directed by Quentin Tarantino; the other half was directed by Robert Rodriguez. The films contain elements found in many grindhouse films. The two films are bridged by trailers for fictitious films that also fit into the grindhouse genre (sexploitation, slasher films, etc.). Grindhouse also features simulated film negative scratches and some clipped dialogue, to recreate the feeling that the print of the film is a worn and battered copy, which was often true of the prints of many films grindhouse theaters showed in their heyday.



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