Our second interview with fellow Visionary/scholar Kevin Bahr!
Hillary: So can you just start by telling me the title and describing your presentation and the content of your paper.
Kevin: I wish I had a catchy title for my paper because unfortunately the one I ended up using in this presentation is a mouthful it’s “Latin America in 70s Exploitation Cinema: Exoticism, Colonialism, and Youth Culture” which is pretty much exactly what the paper is right there. The main point that I’m trying to make is that exploitation cinema should be given due recognition from scholars because regardless of what you think of the films themselves, they offer a mirror into what audiences were interested in at the time. Because exploitation cinema is built on exploiting what audiences want so they provide a mirror into the society under which these films are produced. So, I decided to use that as a mirror to figure out what the image of Latin America was like because I was studying Latin American cinema, I was taking a class on it at the time, and I was using that Latin American cinema as sort of a backbone because I discovered the world of “Latsploitation” which is exploitation cinema from all over Latin America - which is Central America, South America, the Caribbean, all over the place. So I decided to take a look at Latin America in exploitation cinema, but not just their own Latin American exploitation but all over the world. I wanted to see how America used Latin America in their exploitation cinema, how Europe did it, and particularly Italy because they used it a lot in their cannibal-zombie films. And how Latin America used their own region of the world in exploitation films. That’s essential the gist of it.
Hillary: How did you go about selecting the films that you used as case studies and which films did you at first consider but then decided not to use? If any.
Kevin: Well the only one that immediately stood out to me, was the film “Snuff”. I hadn’t seen the film yet, but the marketing campaign was so hellbent on describing South America as this hellscape where anything can happen like the tagline says “The film that could only be made in South America where life is cheap.” That was the kind of movie that set me off. Then for Europe that was a difficult call, I think I went with “Zombie 2” only because there was already a fair amount of writing on the subject because “Zombie 2” is a well known and fairly well respected film. It’s not exactly the most critically acclaimed piece but among horror film fans it’s definitely up there with some of the better films - just for its gore effects really. I had a whole list of cannibal or zombie films to go with like I could have gone with “Cannibal Holocaust” which actually is a little different because that film is pretending to be a documentary so that could have been something totally different to talk about. And then a whole bunch of other films that take place in the jungle, especially the Caribbean jungle like “Zombie 2” does. So I picked “Zombie 2” A) because there was a lot of writing on it, and B) it was actually in the school library so it was much simpler. I decided on it and then I saw it, and I was reading up on a bunch of Latin American exploitation and the one that stood out to me was Jose Mojica Marins who is known as “Coffin Joe” and I decided to take a look at some of his films and his film “Awakening of the Beast” really fascinated me because it’s not like his usual gothic-horror films it’s about drugs, and LSD, and it’s also one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen which is really saying something. So I thought, this needs to be talked about a little more, and that’s how I decided on “Awakening of the Beast” because I thought this is a movie that is so insane and out there, there was only like 1 scholarly paper I could find on the matter, but I thought that someone needs to write on this film because it’s bonkers.
Hillary: So you just talked about how there was 1 scholarly source for that specific topic within your paper but is there a general scholar who covers this topic more in depth that you used for inspiration or that you referenced often in your paper.
Kevin: When it comes to scholars, you know I’ll read scholarly essays and all that, and I use them for inspiration as how to seek out certain things and how to look at certain movies. Not like telling me how to look at them but as an inspiration like you said, but I don’t often quote them in my own papers unless I directly use on of their ideas, simply because I want to try and challenge myself to come up with my own way of looking at it. And also, you know, when talking about these movies there’s such a focus on academia and scholarly papers being very - not dry - but just strictly the facts and they follow a very strict format. To me, the writers that are most inspiring are the ones that are not even qualified as scholars, they’re the film critics the ones that write about film and speak from the heart and get the chance to just discuss what they love instead of just fitting it in into a scholarly setting and that’s what really inspires me. So I kind of fit that in a little bit, because I didn’t want to be strictly academic because I feel that to write about these papers in an almost elitist setting would just be ridiculous.
