B for Bad Cinema: aesthetics, politics and cultural value

Film studies has tended to be most comfortable in the realm of the exceptional (the masterpiece, the progressive text, the filmic controversy) and the popular (the blockbuster, the classical Hollywood film, the genre text). By and large, it has had less to say about the rest of film culture---the many thousands of films which do not get reviewed by critics, which lack the production values to be taken seriously as cinema, or which confound or contest norms of taste, aesthetics, and textual quality. Welcome to the world of B for Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics and Cultural Value, a three-day conference hosted by Film and Television Studies in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University. Held at the University's Clayton campus in south-eastern Melbourne, B for Bad Cinema was a welcome opportunity to hear from over a hundred scholars about recent research on a wide variety of topics and texts, loosely connected under the bad film rubric.