Genre Paradigms in Cult film

An Introduction to Film Studies  791.43 Nel    Page. 128

"The most common-sense approach to genre is through iconography - the props, costumes, and setting. In the terminology of semiotics these are signs, visual signifiers, which can immediately alert us of the generic identity of a film."

So in a way, most films have our thinking done for us with the props, costume, setting, dialogue and musical signifiers connoting towards a genre type which have paradigms that we should recognize. In cult film some of these paradigms are more random and tend to be confusing. This is important as the paradigms in cult film push boundaries of cinematic use of iconography which makes the spectator think more into the narrative and genre of the film.

'Pink Flamingos' - The mother character is dressed as a baby who is in love with eggs.

This film is suppose to make its audience uncomfortable so just by putting the mother into a costume of a baby and her setting as a cot for baby's we are made uncomfortable as these aren't normal paradigms of mainstream film or even our reality.

She also talks a lot about eggs and in these scenes you constantly have this image of eggs that would make anyone sick of them. Although we think of eggs as a normal everyday thing John Waters had the idea of making the audience absolutely sick of them, really its so off putting but as we see here he is messing around with the way we persive props and in a normal film and how we see props in a film like this (which has the stronger reaction). Superbly done.

But the important part of genre in cult film is that these films open up new doors or ways of viewing cinema that not many other directors do to this extent. Without these films the spectator hardly every gets challenged so which director will have the confidence to achieve something that really pushes the boundaries of what we see on screen, and allow other directors to follow in the footsteps of cult films. If know one pushes the boundaries when will anyone learn something new, audience and director.