Trash: The Graphic Genius Of Xploitation Movie Posters

Trash entertainment promises cheap thrills, titillation, and sometimes even previously undisclosed truths about the human condition. But often, those promises begin and end with the packaging. San Francisco filmmaker/archivist Jacques Boyreau runs a combination bar and museum called The Werepad, and spends his days attempting to divine the secret messages of pulp cinema, or at least understand its concurrent appeal and disquieting effect. Some of Boyreau's "Cosmic Hex Collection" of advertising art appears in his softback coffee-table book Trash: The Graphic Genius Of Xploitation Movie Posters, which consists of slick reproductions of dingy, creased, sensationalistic drive-in one-sheets. Boyreau divides his exhibition into six categories: Sex Trash, Action Trash, Horror Trash, Groovy Trash, Race Trash, and Docu Trash. Each section opens with a brief essay by the author about the commonalties of psychological manipulation in the posters that follow. The text provides useful cues to the theme of vulnerability in "Sex Trash" ads, and the subtle reduction of whites and blacks to hero or villain status in the "Race Trash" posters. Boyreau's insights are so keen that his book begs for more, but like the artwork it displays, Trash implies more than it offers. Aside from listing the copyright dates and the releasing studios for each of the movies depicted, the compilation fails to address any broader history of Trash Art. Some comments by the original designers would have helped, as would poster-by-poster analysis by the curator. Of course, Trash has an inherent archival value even without the extra effort. As Boyreau points out in his introduction, modern movie marketing doesn't have the throat-grabbing gusto of the work displayed here, except when contemporary designers purposefully go retro and ape the old school. But what exactly is being copied? What is the secret magnetism of a beaten-up piece of glossy paper, adorned with screaming faces, overflowing bodices, brandished weaponry, and occult surrealism? The ill-defined tug derives from what appears to be a glimpse of a world more vivid than the one outside the theater door, and that can really only be found in the glass case by the box office.

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