The rise of the 'video nasty' (A teaser segment from my largest piece on film ever) *a work in progress*

The 1970’s were undoubtedly one of, if not the most, progressive and creatively rich years in American cinema to date. It was rife with the ambitiously unprecedented force of new directors of the 60’s and they challenged narrative conventions and developed representations of culture, politics and emotive discourse and exposition. In the wake of the Vietnam War and the subsiding of Cold War paranoia, film dared to delve deeper, to look further and create some of the most powerful and illuminating works of art and human reflection ever. With new possibilities also comes new threats and it could be argued, and many have, that film has facilitated some of the most abhorrent, voyeuristic and morally corrupt items dared to be considered art or entertainment.     

    Lessons learnt from a slew of European visionary talent, Clouzot, Bergman, the pivotal Italian neo-realism movement helmed by such influential figures as De Sica, Renoir and Rossellini, all create a veritable smorgasbord of inspiration. These earlier talents not only fed inspiration but also created a benchmark many would strive to reach, but, when film was not studio led out of necessity and independently funded cinema became a viable possibility, the flood gates really opened.

    The 70’s were the years that filmmakers such as Coppola, Scorsese, Polanski, even directors like Milos Forman were working in America at the very peak of their powers creating the best of their art. Taxi Driver (1976) reviewed and re-established the role of narration in film and looked at social and political insecurities further than the most confrontational Film Noirs of the 40’s. Chinatown (1974) looked at 30’s political and economic corruption with a subtlety and ambiguity nearly unheard of in films of its ilk. Though the 70’s were home to some of the most forward-thinking films, it was also the birthplace of what were, in the UK in 1982, coined the ‘video nasties’. The term ‘video nasty’ was one used to identify a very certain glut of film that were defined by their low production values and exclusively and unashamedly extreme and exploitative violence and/or sexual content. In the decade and a half preceding the Video Recordings Act in 1984 there was a very noticeable lack of a regulatory power guarding the sales of videos. This allowed low-budget ‘shlock’(something that is inferior or shoddy) cinema, largely from the U.S.A and Italy, to find an audience they would have never reached if they had attempted to be passed under the eyes of the British Board of Film Censorship and into cinemas. The ‘video nasty’ thrived in the years before the Video Recordings Act and were lapped up by the “corrupted and depraved” and lambasted and damned by the civilized figures of authority in equal measure. However, somewhere between The Toolbox Murders (1977), Hard Gore (1974) and I Spit on Your Grave A.K.A Day of the Woman (1978) and the heady heights of The Godfather (1972) can be found the sharpest and darkest portraits and reflections of contemporary American society.