Key texts of paracinema: Hard Core (1989) – Linda Williams – Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992) – Carol J. Clover – The Monstrous-Feminine – Barbara Creed (1993) – Trashing the Academy (1995) – Jeffrey Sconce – Sleaze Mania (1999) – Joan Hawkins – Cutting Edge (2000) – Joan Hawkins – Porn Studies (2004) – Linda Williams

Paracinema is an academic term to refer to a wide variety of film genres out of the mainstream, bearing the same relationship to ‘legitimate’ film as paraliterature like comic books and pulp fiction bears to literature.

The term was coined in the early seventies by Ken Jacobs to denote countercultural and underground films of the sixties but re-coined in 1995 by Jeffrey Sconce, an American media scholar, to denote ‘an extremely elastic textual category’ which includes entries from seemingly disparate genres of the non-mainstream fuelled by oppositional taste strategies (see The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (2003)). Major theorists of the 1990s and 2000s paracinematic variety include Linda Williams, Joan Hawkins, Carol J. Clover and Barbara Creed (1993). [Aug 2006]

Off topic: Yesterday was my brother’s birthday party; of the music he played I especially enjoyed a recent album by British psych folk singer Vashti Bunyan and French singer Benjamin Biolay’s 2003 album Négatif.