Dr Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies in the Department of Modern Languages, has just published a new collection: The Films of Jess Franco (Wayne State University Press, 2018), co-edited with Ian Olney, Associate Professor at the York College of Pennsylvania.
Jesús ‘Jess’ Franco (1930–2013) was a Spanish filmmaker, who directed around 160 films. He is best known as the director of jazzy, erotically charged horror movies featuring mad scientists, lesbian vampires, and women in prison, but he also dabbled in a multitude of genres from comedy to science fiction to pornography. Although he built his career in the ghetto of low-budget exploitation cinema, he managed to create a body of work that is deeply personal, frequently political, and surprisingly poetic.
Arguing that his multifaceted, paradoxical cinema cannot be pinned down by any one single approach, the new collection features twelve original essays on Franco’s movies, written from a variety of different perspectives. It opens up fresh avenues for academic inquiry by considering his oeuvre from a range of viewpoints, including transnational film studies, cinephilia studies, and star studies. The book effectively meets the challenge of Franco’s multidimensional cinema with multifaceted criticism – attentive to the shifting historical contexts, modes of production and consumption, and formats of Franco’s work – that supplements current Franco scholarship and suggests exciting new directions for its further development.
The Films of Jess Franco seeks to address the scholarly neglect of this legendary cult director and to broaden the conversation around the director’s work in ways that will be of interest to fans and academics alike.
For more details, please see the publisher’s page here:
www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/films-jess-franco