Grindhouse Double Bills and the Death of 42nd Street

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Ask a young cinephile what “grindhouse” means and you will usually get a description of a look: scratched prints, missing reels, jump-splices, over-saturated colour, a fake “our feature presentation” bumper. That look is an invention of the 2000s, a nostalgic costume assembled by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez for their 2007 double feature and copied a thousand times since. The real thing was never a genre or an aesthetic. It was a way of watching, tied to a specific few blocks of Manhattan, and when those blocks were redeveloped the way of watching died. What survives is a memory of a room, and a shelf of films that room built.

42nd Street - vo.rs

Grindhouse Double Bills and the Death of 42nd Street