Corporeal violence in art house cinema Cannes 2009 (original) (raw)

Scratching the Surface: For a reappraisal of Violence in Contemporary French Cinema

The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media, 2022

Introduction: Understanding the Violent Image When Julia Ducournau's film Raw premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016, paramedics were called to the theater to respond to reports of fainting, nausea, and malaise among some viewers during the screening. "Cannibal horror film too Raw for viewers as paramedics are called" 1 and "Moviegoers fall ill while watching cannibalism film, Raw" 2 are just a couple of the headlines that appeared in the press at that time. The reason invoked for this urgent reaction was the film's realistic representation of cannibalism, with its numerous close-ups of human flesh being cut, bitten, or mutilated. Adam Gabbat, in his review of the film, deemed it "a blood and guts offering" (Gabbat 2016, para. 2). Notwithstanding their provocative and catchy phrasing, these reviews constitute a good starting point for the analysis of cinematic violence I seek to chart out in this essay. Indeed, the choice of words brings to light two essential aspects of the violent image this analysis hinges upon, namely the excess that characterizes the representation of extreme acts of violence, and the immediacy that defines the viewer's relationship to such representations. My intention is to bring about a renewed understanding of film violence that enables us to move past the initial shock of perception to analyze the mechanisms at work in the relationship that is established between the viewer

Violent Corporeality in Cinema

The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media , 2022

What I have in mind here is to theorize violent corporeality on the cinematic screen—to treat it as a violent narratology of the body. I contend that violent corporeality is better explained through a commonsensical understanding of how one mobilizes the body in relation to the world and how the screen narratives can transform the interaction. In other words, the audience understands the body on screen just as they understand, to a larger or lesser extent, their own bodies in reality, all caveats considered. Stunt performances are eye-opening because they evoke and stretch the limitation of the body’s affordance—possibility of acting on the world before it would break—the things we know our bodies can and cannot accomplish. Violent corporeality is not simply a violent body. It is a twisted relationship between body and world, a divergence from their eased connection.

Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media

2016

would like to thank Eugenie Brinkema for the guidance and inspiration. Additionally, I would like to thank my graduate student colleagues on the doctoral program in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University, as well as the faculty members without whom these ideas could not have developed: Eric Rentschler, Laura Frahm, Tom Conley, and Ernst Karel. Lastly, I thank my partner, Anna Krieger, who always knows how to bring me back from the edge of the extreme. Chapter 1 Extreme Cinema: Revisiting Body Genres IntroduCtIon: What Is extreme CInema? What is extreme cinema? That is the question we intend to explore. In the decade leading up to the millennium, and in the years since then, we have witnessed the emergence of films that have pushed against, if not breached, conventions regarding the treatment of sex and violence in the cinema. For instance, self-appointed morality police, exasperated film scholars and critics decried films such as Eli Roth's 2005 film Hostel-charging the film with being too excessive, and dismissing it as "pornographic," "sadistic," or both. If nothing else, the near hysterical response to extreme cinema reveals that it appeals to the visceral experience of the viewer. And repeatedly, these films are accused of disregarding narrative conventions in favor of grandiose spectacles of gore and violence that play to the spectator's baser senses. Extreme cinema, then, is frequently associated with excessive brands of horror, or trends, for instance, in contemporary French cinema (or "New French Extremity" as James Quandt called it) featuring elements of brutal violence sometimes coupled with graphic sexual imagery. 1 We have no intention of disabusing the reader of these presumptions regarding extreme cinema, but would add to this, among other things, humor-the kind that makes one laugh so much it hurts. Furthermore, while the content of extreme cinema attracts considerable attention, and might be its most obvious feature, in many instances these films also experiment with form-composition, audio design, editing strategies. We survey here a wide range of international films that might be associated with extreme cinema. 2 We take Linda Williams's landmark essay "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess" as something of a touchstone. 3 Williams positions melodrama, horror, and pornography as the tripartite group of films that constitute the body genres. In all cases the spectator is invited to viscerally share in the

Violence in Extreme Cinema and the Ethics of Spectatorship

Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 2013

Do films that challenge us to turn away from the screen as a result of their depictions of violence raise issues about the ethics not of regarding the pain of others, but of watching films as a whole? Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s notion of revulsion, recent investigations into “extreme” cinema and Antonin Artaud’s concept of a “theater of cruelty,” this article argues that watching violence on screen is not necessarily a negative and voyeuristic exercise, but that it can be good for viewers to see graphic violence on screen. This is not simply a question of viewing onscreen violence per se. What also is important is that the filmmakers adopt a set of stylistic techniques that are defined here as “cruel.” Films (typically arthouse films) that adopt these techniques encourage viewers not to view violence for entertainment, but rather they encourage viewers to understand the potential in all humans to commit such acts. Such an understanding in turn forces us to lead our lives in an ethical fashion, whereby we do not unthinkingly follow a moral code, but rather choose and take responsibility for what we do. Furthermore, it encourages an “ethical” mode of film spectatorship in general: we watch films to learn not just voyeuristically about others, but also about what we ourselves could become.

Aesthetization of violence and contemporary cinema: death meets sensuality

Ghrebh, 2012

This article discusses the aesthetization of violence in the contemporary scene and its reflection in cinema. Analyzing some similarities and differences on the way violence is shown in movies such as 300 (USA, 2006), Kill Bill (USA, 2003), Lady Vengeance (Korea, 2005) and Sin City (USA, 2005) , it studies the implications of media and its social mediations on the processes of violence aesthetization. It is important to stress that the term “aesthetization” is not used with a negative connotation, as something related to “falsehood”– as opposed to what would supposedly be “real”. Considering that representation is, by its own definition, that which is different from “reality”, the article treats “realism” as something utterly dependent on “interpretation contracts”. From this perspective, aesthetization does not corrupt reality, not even “objective” reference to reality. What it does corrupt, or at least transform, are specific socio-cultural “contracts” based on the “reliability” of certain modes of representation. The “contract ” under which movies such as 300 are watched, for instance, are based much more on sensibility than on credibility. Violence, in 300, Kill Bill and Lady Vengeance, is valued by its aesthetic qualities– the vividness of the blood spilling on white snow, the texture of flesh freshly cut, the rhythm of falling bodies. And, through aesthetization, violence is made somewhat erotic, a blend that take us back to Bataille and the intimate connection he proposes between death and sensuality.

Bodies without borders : body horror as political resistance in classical Hollywood cinema

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See, Seeing, Seen, Saw: A Phenomenology of Ultra-Violent Cinema

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2014

Vivian Sobchack claims in Carnal Thoughts that human bodies are continually remade by the “technologies of photography, cinema, and the electronic media” (2004, 135). One such sphere of contemporary media that continuously redefi nes the notion of the human body is horror cinema. The recent advent of so-called ‘gorenography,’ spearheaded by James Wan and Leigh Whannel’s Saw (2004), issues conceptual and philosophical challenges to the presentation and conceptualization of the phenomenal body. Following in the scope of frameworks advanced by both Sobchack and Jennifer Barker this paper aims to explore how the body of the Saw series is constructed and how it emulates both the conceptualized bodies of its viewers and the state of modern information flow in a technological age. It will be argued that the Saw series not only recognises viewers’ enjoyment of its genre conventions but also acknowledges and manipulates their engagement with the film as a phenomenological object through which a sense of re-embodiment can be enacted.

'The Dialectics of Cruelty: Rethinking Artaudian Cinema', in Cinema Journal 55:3 (2016), pp.65-89.

Antonin Artaud’s concept of a theater of cruelty and his scarce writings on cinema have profoundly infl uenced fi lm scholarship, especially in view of the large number of contemporary European fi lms that employ images of extreme violence and utilize an aesthetics of visual unpleasure. But is the politics of the Artaudian aesthetic to be reduced to the reproduction of gory images of revolting violence? This article explores the politics of Artaudian cinema by going back to Artaud’s writings on the medium and comparing them to Brecht’s writings on fi lm. The focus of this article is twofold: the fi rst part goes back to Artaud’s writings and investigates the politics of the cinema of cruelty, while the second uses as case studies Jonas Mekas’s The Brig (1964) and Costas Zapas’s The Rebellion of Red Maria (2011). The fi rst fi lm is a screen adaptation of a performance renowned for reconciling the theater of cruelty with a political context, while the second is a contemporary paradigm of a fi lm that draws on the Artaudian and Brechtian traditions with a view to responding to the political concerns of the present.

Cinema Against Culture: New Extremism in Cinematic and Social Context

MA Dissertation submitted to the University of Westminster. Regards the difficulties that recent trends in horror cinema represent to standards of sociality. New Extremism, a predominantly French cinema phenonemon, reframes explicit violence and sex in an attempt to expand their possible meanings within the world. This task has proved troubling for audiences and critics, two positions that I take for a starting point in the dissertation. In the paper I argue that New Extremism can in fact help to form a greater and more nuanced way of understanding cinematic violence.