{"id":300376,"date":"2023-03-16T13:37:50","date_gmt":"2023-03-16T12:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kinodvor.org\/?p=300376"},"modified":"2023-03-16T13:48:55","modified_gmt":"2023-03-16T12:48:55","slug":"cult-film-conference-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kinodvor.org\/en\/cult-film-conference-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Cult Film Conference 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is a real honour to be present at the 10th<\/sup> anniversary of Kurja Polt. For any festival to run for more than a handful of editions \u2013 and some only ever run once \u2013 it is already a fantastic feat. But to create and keep running such a dynamic, innovative, and important festival is a rare and wonderful achievement, indeed. The Kurja Polt team, led by the irrepressible queen of all things genre Ma\u0161a Pe\u010de, should be congratulated for bringing to Ljubljana and Slovenia such a brilliant event and for making it stick. The last ten years have seen a compellingly eclectic range of films screened and knowing that genre greats like Christina Lindberg, Lamberto Bava and Fabrice du Welz, amongst many, many others, have tread the streets of Ljubljana (let alone having seen them hanging out in the Kinodvor caf\u00e9!), is truly magical for a city that I have grown to love like it was my own.<\/p>\n

We hope you can once again join us at our annual Cult Film Conference. This year we are delighted to welcome back two academic stalwarts of Kurja Polt in Dr Alexia Kannas (RMIT, Melbourne) and Dr Steve Jones (Northumbria University). I know that they are both as honoured as I am to be present at the festival\u2019s 10th<\/sup> anniversary edition. Alexia\u2019s talk will explore how the 1990s saw a seemingly curious collision: industrial music and the decade\u2019s fascination with neo-noir cinema somehow cohered to create a number of highly successful soundtracks. Following this, Steve will unpack the ways in which innovation and change in horror cinema can come about \u2013 seemingly counter-intuitively \u2013 by taking away<\/em> or compressing what we might expect to see rather than by fashioning new (and seemingly more \u2018original\u2019) elements.<\/p>\n

We are very much looking forward to sharing the Cult Film Conference with you all and, even more, celebrating Kurja Polt\u2019s 10th<\/sup> anniversary with you in true Slovenian style! We can\u2019t wait.<\/p>\n

– Dr Russ Hunter<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dr Russ Hunter<\/strong> is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television in the Department of Arts at Northumbria University. His research focuses on Italian genre cinema, European horror cinema and genre film festivals. He has published on a variety of aspects of Italian and European genre cinema and is the co-editor (with Stefano Baschiera) of Italian Horror Cinema (2016). He is currently writing a book on Italian giallo and horror director Dario Argento. He has published in numerous film encyclopaedias and reference guides and works closely with a number of European genre film festivals.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Downward Spirals: 1990s Neo-Noir and the\u00a0Pop Industrial Soundtrack
\n<\/strong>Dr Alexia Kannas<\/strong>, RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia)<\/p>\n

Kyle Cooper\u2019s\u00a0highly stylized\u00a0opening\u00a0credits sequence for David Fincher\u2019s\u00a0neo-noir\u00a0Se7en<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>broke new ground\u00a0in 1995;\u00a0the\u00a0influence\u00a0of its\u00a0scratched surfaces and typographical deconstruction\u00a0has been felt for decades since, both\u00a0in cinema and graphic design more broadly.\u00a0But\u00a0the\u00a0materialist quality of the\u00a0sequence\u2019s\u00a0images\u00a0is\u00a0modulated by a\u00a0remix of the Nine Inch Nails hit \u2018Closer\u2019 on the film\u2019s soundtrack, and the\u00a0song\u2019s mechanised rhythm and\u00a0attenuated creaking and\u00a0screeching both\u00a0precipitates the\u00a0narrative\u00a0violence to\u00a0come and\u00a0plugs\u00a0Se7en<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>into a cultural\u00a0moment that saw the\u00a0mainstreaming of industrial music occur via the rise of \u201cindustrial pop\u201d.\u00a0The 90s neo-noir soundtrack\u00a0demonstrates\u00a0this crossing from periphery to mainstream, with\u00a0bands like\u00a0NIN,\u00a0Marilyn Manson, Ministry and Rammstein\u00a0featured on the soundtracks for\u00a0crime\u00a0films such as\u00a0Reservoir Dogs\u00a0<\/strong>(Quentin Tarantino, 1992),\u00a0The Crow<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>(Alex Proyas, 1994) and David Lynch\u2019s\u00a0Lost Highway<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>(1997).\u00a0This talk investigates\u00a0the confluence of industrial music and neo-noir cinema in the 1990s,\u00a0examining\u00a0how this\u00a0symbiosis became\u00a0financially viable, and\u00a0how the sound of popular industrial music inflects the\u00a0meaning-making structures of the\u00a0neo-noir genre.<\/p>\n

Dr Alexia Kannas<\/strong>\u00a0is Lecturer in Cinema Studies in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia). Her research interests lie in the areas of cult cinema, performance, sound and cinematic place. She is the author of\u00a0Deep Red\u00a0(Columbia UP\/Wallflower, 2017) and\u00a0<\/strong>Giallo: Genre, Modernity and Detection in the Italian Horror Film\u00a0(SUNY Press, 2020).\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Subtraction and Compression in Contemporary Indie Horror
\n<\/strong>Dr Steve Jones, <\/strong>Northumbria University (Newcastle, UK)<\/p>\n

Viewers rely on genre conventions to recognise that a film belongs to a specific genre. Conventions help viewers to anticipate and appropriately decode the filmmaker\u2019s intentions and aesthetic choices, so that they can react accordingly. Recently, several contemporary independent horror filmmakers have been playfully innovating within the horror genre by playing with those conventional expectations. These filmmakers take standard horror plot setups but remove or compress what might seem to be essential conventional components.\u00a0This approach is particularly significant because innovation itself is synonymous with adding rather than removing or subtracting.\u00a0In this talk, I will take two films that take the same kind of standard horror plot\u00a0\u2013 teens camp in the woods and are murdered in succession \u2013 but play with audience expectations in different ways.\u00a0For example,\u00a0I Didn\u2019t Come Here to Die\u00a0<\/strong>(2010) jettisons the killer we would expect to see in such a narrative. This subtractive approach might sound absurd since it removes a seemingly essential subgeneric component (the killer), but the approach is naturalised by the generic narrative setup. Normally in films like\u00a0I Didn\u2019t Come Here to Die<\/strong>, the main cast are gradually \u201csubtracted\u201d as the bodies pile up, and the killer is also usually eliminated in the film\u2019s finale. Another subtractive approach is illustrated by\u00a0<\/em>Murder Loves Killers Too<\/strong>\u00a0(2009), which takes a similar plot setup, but compresses virtually all of the murders into the opening third of the film. By compressing the standard plot in this way, viewers are left without a clear roadmap for what is to follow in the remaining runtime: In this respect, most of what happens in\u00a0Murder Loves Killers Too\u00a0<\/strong>comes across as a surprise. By recasting an archetypal narrative structure and the genre\u2019s concerns in a new light, these films demonstrate that that even well-worn horror plots can generate new perspectives.<\/p>\n

Dr Steve Jones<\/strong>\u00a0is Assistant Professor in Media and Film at Northumbria University. His research principally focuses on sex, violence, ethics, and selfhood within horror film and pornography. He is the author of\u00a0Torture Porn: Popular Horror after Saw, and his forthcoming book \u2013\u00a0The Metamodern Slasher Film\u00a0\u2013 will be published later this year.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Cult Film Conference is presented in collaboration with Northumbria University (Newcastle, UK) and chaired by Dr Russ Hunter, Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at Northumbria. Lectures are conducted in English. Free admission. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":300379,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[61],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kinodvor.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300376"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kinodvor.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kinodvor.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kinodvor.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kinodvor.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300376"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kinodvor.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":300377,"href":"https:\/\/www.kinodvor.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300376\/revisions\/300377"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kinodvor.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kinodvor.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kinodvor.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kinodvor.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}