GRINDHOUSE

UNIT 1 MEDIATECHNOLOGIES

OF REPRESENTATION

WHAT IS GRINDHOUSE?• A grindhouse is an American term for a theatre that mainly shows

exploitation films. It is named after the defunct burlesque theatres located on 42nd Street in New York City, where bump n' grind' dancing and striptease were featured.

• The introduction of television greatly eroded the audience for local and single-screen movie theatres, many of which were built during the cinema boom of the 1930s. In combination with urban decay after white flight out of older city areas in the mid to late 1960s, changing economics forced these theatres to either close or offer something that television could not. In the 1970s these theatres were put to new use as venues for exploitation films, either adult pornography and sleaze, or slasher horror and dubbed martial arts films from Hong Kong.

WHAT IS GRINDHOUSE?• By the 1980s, home video and cable movie channels threatened to render

the grindhouse obsolete. By the end of the decade, these theatres 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, these particular theatres had all but disappeared from the United States. Very few are in existence today.

• The Robert Rodriguez film, Planet Terror and the Quentin Tarantino film Death Proof, which were released together as Grind house, were created as an homage to the genre. Similar films such as Machete (also by Rodriguez) and Drive Angry have appeared since. The video games House of the Dead: Overkill, Wet and Shadows of the Damned serve as homage's to the grindhouse horror movies. The author Jacques Boyreau created a book about the Grindhouse Legacy and released Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box on 13 December 2009. The field is also the focus of the 2010 documentary American Grindhouse.

Characteristics of grindhouse

• Grindhouse films characteristically contain large amounts of sex, violence or bizarre subject matter. Quality varied, but low budget production values and poor print quality were common. Critical opinions varied regarding typical grindhouse fare, but many films acquired cult following and critical praise. Double, triple, and "all night" bills on a single admission charge often encouraged patrons to spend long periods of time in the theatres.

REGULAR POSTER GRINDHOUSE

REGULAR POSTER

GRINDHOUSE

THE TASK

• Manipulate the codes and conventions of a movie poster to transform it from glossy, well made, expensive movie to a low budget grindhouse movie poster.

• Find a movie poster (any film)• Use Photoshop to transform• Use images from film• Save original poster and compare to yours. • 4 periods to complete.