ABSTRACT

Cult film director Takashi Miike’s hybrid homage Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) can be critiqued in terms of its derivative nature, its overstated affect, and its lack of psychological and thematic nuance – characteristics that are associated with ‘bad film’ genres such as the spaghetti western that Miike emulates and valorizes. The classification of texts as ‘bad film’ is often related to their exaggerated affective qualities and the cultural devaluation of emotion and bodily sensation by comparison with aesthetic and intellectual engagement. This article analyses Sukiyaki Western Django in terms of a phenomenology of affect, contending that the film deploys a kinetic, visceral cinematic aesthetic that is central to its meaning and to the relationship between the audience and the screen. The phenomenological method is used to level hierarchies of value, reappraise conceptions of bad film, and strip back the ingrained presuppositions of film theory. I argue that by bracketing traditional ways of understanding, phenomenology prompts a reassessment of how we make sense of cinema and a revaluation of the embodied role of the spectator.