ABSTRACT
León Klimovsky was a stalwart of the European commercial and exploitation cinema of the 1960s and 1970s working across a range of genres including: westerns; horror; comedy; war fi lms; historical epics; psychological thrillers and melodramas. Whilst still best known for his genre work in Europe, he had initially made his name writing and then directing ‘respectable’ fi lms in his native Argentina. As an example of a transatlantic director, Klimovsky’s work raises a number of important issues in relation to the academic study of such commercial work on both continents. In this chapter I want to consider a number of Klimovsky’s fi lms in relation to the shifting Argentine and European contexts in which they were produced, suggesting ways in which they might be read that refuses to simply celebrate their oft cited marginal status as ‘cult,’ ‘trash,’ and ‘exploitation’ as much of his work has previously been, instead reading them politically as ‘popular’ products of their times, acknowledging, as Jeffrey Sconce does, that such cult fi lms or “paracinema” are not necessarily a “uniformly ‘progressive’ body of cinema” (1995: 383). Indeed, it is through placing Klimovsky’s work fi rmly into these contexts that we can begin to see them as far from examples of progressive cinema and in fact often highly reactionary.
