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Dear all, The Centre for Research into Film and Audiovisual Cultures (CRFAC) is pleased to welcome Constantine Verevis of Monash University, Melbourne to the University of Roehampton, London on Wednesday 25th September 2013. Dr Verevis will be presenting a talk entitled 'Vicious Cycle: Jaws and the Revenge-of-Nature Films of the 1970s.' (please see the full abstract below) The talk will take place at 5pm in the Queen's Building, Room 250. All are welcome. Directions to Roehampton can be found via this link: http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/Contact-Us/ I hope to see some of you there. With best wishes Iain Dr Iain Robert Smith Lecturer in Film University of Roehampton | London | SW15 5PJ [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | www.roehampton.ac.uk<http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/> Tel: +44 (0) 20 8392 3095 Vicious Cycle: Jaws and the Revenge-of-Nature Films of the 1970s Constantine Verevis (Monash University, Melbourne) In his account of a "momentous," decade-long period of (new) Hollywood filmmaking, the years 1975 to 1985, J. Hoberman writes that Jaws (1975) was "a brilliant modification of the current [that is, 1970s] disaster cycle that had its real-world equivalents in Vietnam and Watergate." He says, Jaws "imploded" the disaster film, paring narrative and effects back to "pure mechanism," and, in the process, ushered in a new era of high concept, Hollywood blockbusters. Perhaps the most calculated of (the many) films that attempted to capitalize on the massive commercial success of Jaws was The Deep (1977), an underwater adventure film based on Peter Benchley's first post-Jaws novel. Just as evidently, "Bruce," the giant white pointer shark of Jaws, initiated a rogue animal or "revenge-of-nature" cycle, consisting in the first instance of the Jaws sequels - Jaws 2 (1978), Jaws 3-D (1983) and Jaws 4: The Revenge (1987) - and also a series of "imitations" that included Grizzly (1976), Tentacles (1978), and Alligator (1980). In the first instance, this paper considers these revenge-of-nature films as a (discrete) "intergeneric" film cycle, one that is inaugurated by Jaws and exhausts itself with films such as Piranha (1978) and Piranha Part II: The Spawning (1982). At the same time, the paper interrogates the revenge-of-nature films as a (nested) "intrageneric" film cycle: that is, as part of a disaster movie genre that begins with Airport (1970) and concludes in 1980 with the parodic Airplane! (the latter, a film that directly references Jaws in its title sequence). In either case, Jaws and the revenge-of-nature cycle is not only indebted to the A-list disaster films of the early 1970s, but also reaches back to a (creature revenge) B-movie cycle of the same period - films such as Frogs (1972), Night of the Lepus (1972), and SSSSnake (1973) - and launches itself forward to the move recent Ozploitation cycle, which includes Black Water (2008), The Reef (2010), and Bait (2012). In attending to these various sets, this paper considers the relationship among "remake" (Jaws/Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954) "sequel" (Jaws 2), "series" (Jaws 1-4), "cycle" (revenge-of-nature) and "genre" (disaster film), knowing that each one of these categories can be contested (or is contested) in/through this description. Constantine Verevis is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. He is author of Film Remakes (Edinburgh UP, 2006) and co-author of Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Vol I: Critical Positions (Intellect, 2013). His co-edited volumes include: Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel (SUNY P, 2010), After Taste: Cultural Value and the Moving Image (Routledge, 2011), Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012), Film Remakes, Adaptations and Fan Productions: Remake/Remodel (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012), and B Is for Bad Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics and Cultural Value (SUNY P, 2014). 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