The Lickerish Quartet
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3 word format
document in english
film studies
school essay
date published 05/10/2007
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level : Advanced
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SummaryThe play between high and low culture has become an important subject in film studies and criticism. In particular, the subject has proved a relevant context for the exploration of exploitation films, and vice versa. In looking at exploitation film, critics and theorists have paid much attention to the films of Radley Metzger, who addresses the interaction of high and low culture in a most interesting and tangible manner. Looking at an article such as Elena Gorfinkel’s “Radley Metzger’s ‘Elegant Arousal’: Taste, Aesthetic Distinction and Sexploitation,” one can see the possibilities in placing Metzger’s films in this particular area of cultural studies. In general, all of his films comment on high and low culture in one way or another: he makes “art films” that play(ed) in grindhouses. Many of the critics and theorists who study exploitation films view this fact alone as a transgression of high and low culture. But Metzger’s The Lickerish Quartet (1970) takes this transgression much farther.
Table of Contents
- The play between high and low culture has become an important subject in film studies and criticism.
- The Lickerish Quartet and the rest of Metzger's body of work (prior to his hardcore porn films) separate themselves from the other exploitation films of the 1960s.
- In The Lickerish Quartet, Metzger makes this attempt through editing choices and the inclusion of works of art to enhance the atmosphere.
- When they do leave, their destination – the carnival – serves as their physical entry point into low culture.
- Interaction between the high and low gets more complicated in The Lickerish Quartet when the father and the woman begin an affair.
- The third transgression involves the treatment of the medium of film in The Lickerish Quartet.
- The spectatorship continues as the viewer watches the family and the rest of the audience watching the spectacle of the motorcyclists riding the Wall of Death.
- The first transgression of The Lickerish Quartet consists of its melding of genres:
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