Abstract
Recent scholarship on the branding of contemporary cult Asian cinema for Western audiences has frequently drawn on Said’s seminal treatise Orientalism (1978) as a means to critique sensationalist marketing materials. Whilst the excessive character of paratexts produced by film distributors such as Tartan clearly facilitates such readings, in this article I argue that this oft-repeated criticism becomes problematic when employed indiscriminately to theorise, by extension, the audiences for these films. Drawing on a recent empirical study of responses to Asian Extreme cinema and its distribution in the UK and North America, I offer an intervention in this debate by constructing a more nuanced interpretation of the ways in which cult audiences articulate their attraction to cinematic representations of cultural difference.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 35-48 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Transnational Cinemas |
Volume | 8 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 28 Nov 2016 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Mar 2017 |
Keywords
- Asia Extreme
- affect
- agency
- audience studies
- encoding/decoding
- orientalism
- paratexts