Exploring Film Through Bad Cinema offers an overview of the practice of film analysis through a specific focus on the concept of ‘bad’ cinema within a series of broad cultural and historical contexts.

Providing a wide-ranging discussion of film from multiple perspectives including history, aesthetics, and criticism, this broad theoretical engagement illustrates the ways in which our registers of value applied to film are inseparable from the wider discourses of taste that shape our culture. While loosely chronological, it is largely thematic in arrangement as it applies the traditional methods of film studies to in-depth discussions of some of the most notoriously (and compellingly) bad films in cinema history. Situating its analysis of a wide variety of films and filmmakers in terms of period, genre, and issues such as the emergence of narrative cinema, canon formation, and the politics of cultural hierarchy, it provides an in-depth consideration of the multiple and complex social and aesthetic discourses that shape our qualitative assessments of film.

Designed for both the lay reader and student of film, Exploring Film Through Bad Cinema engages with a wide range of topics from film history and film theory to postmodernism, exploitation, and cult cinema. This theoretically and historically sophisticated analysis will appeal to researchers and scholars in Film Studies as well as cognate disciplines such as Screen Studies, Visual Studies, and Cultural Studies.

David C. Wall is Professor of Film and Visual Studies at Utah State University, USA.