About Paracinema
Paracinema is the mutation of high and low art: conjoining exploitation and academia, and boiling with energy, individuality and fun. Not just ‘genre’ cinema, Paracinema embraces all forms of transgressive media culture. As put by academic Jeffrey Sconce, back in 1995, in his seminal writings on the matter:
“As a most elastic textual category, paracinema would include entries from such seemingly disparate subgenres as ‘badfilm’, splatter-punk, ‘mondo’ films, sword and sandal epics, Elvis flicks, government hygiene films, Japanese monster movies, beach-party musicals, and just about every other historical manifestation of exploitation cinema from juvenile delinquent documentaries to soft-core pornography.” – Jeffrey Sconce in ‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style (1995)
PARACINEMA FEST is giving a home to the ridiculous, the shocking, the thoughtful, the horrifying, the forgotten. Emerging out of underground fan cultures, Paracinematic principles are rapidly spreading into the cinema landscape as we collectively begin to read between the lines of media - holding aloft unappreciated or unusual art, and pushing at the boundaries of “acceptable” culture. Our festival builds upon these rich traditions of cinematic love - a love that expands beyond conventional scaffolds into the mind-melding possibilities of an empathetic approach to film. Forget looking to ‘forgive’ a film’s faults, this is how we learned to stop worrying and love a bomb!
Perhaps director and film historian Frank Henenlotter, (Basket Case, Boiled Angels: The Trial of Mike Diana) said it best when he said:
“Often, through bad direction, misdirection, inept direction, a film starts assuming surrealistic overtones, taking a dreadfully clichéd story into new frontiers – you’re sitting there shaking your head, totally excited, totally unable to guess where this is going to head to next, or what loony line out of somebody’s mouth is going to be. Just as long as it isn’t stuff you don’t regularly see”.
Paracinema is the cinema of parties. It’s also the cinema through which many of us engage with the darker aspects of life. It can help us confront social ills, trauma, and mental health issues - thriving on the complexities that mirror those which troubles us. Transgression is the beating heart of Paracinema, but it’s not entirely about violence and disgust. Sometimes this conflict or disruption comes solely in the dismantling of a narrative convention, or sometimes simply in the complete refusal to give into irony and cynicism.
Paracinema is the realm of the explorer, looking for lost wonders, and pushing the known map of our culture into uncharted territory! This is a field of pluralities, of intersecting and divergent paths.
We’re focussed on art, culture and community – join us as we celebrate extraordinary creations that launch headlong into the future with passion, imagination, and the purest cinematic joy - whether they were made 100 years ago, or tomorrow.