Recently, for the first time I watched Gaspar Noe's 2002 film Irreversible. Associated with the movement of cinema du corps (cinema of the body), more popularly known as the New French Extremity, which has gained prominence since the turn of the 21st century. Highly controversial upon initial release, while featuring graphic violence and being constructed in an unconventional fashion, it is the extended ten-minute sequence at it's centrepiece, in which Monica Bellucci's character Alex is brutally raped and beaten in a long take, that has continued to live on in notoriety. It is an excruciating scene, and as I was watching it I felt physically sick and began dry-heaving, several times coming close to turning it off because I was so revolted at the suffering I was witnessing I thought I might not be able to continue. However, as horrific as it is, I was glad I saw the film through to the end, as within the cerebral experimentation I knew I was watching a picture quite unlike any I had ever seen. Weeks later, as time goes on I'm still thinking about the film, and while others may disagree (it has a mixed reception of 57% on Rotten Tomatoes), some quite vehemently, I do believe it to be a masterpiece. It got me thinking,
"What other works of art have elicited similar such emotional responses?"
Without focusing on art as a wider whole (if I did that, I'd be going so far as to include Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son), I am going to focus specifically on the genre of film known as Extreme Cinema.
So, what is extreme cinema?
The history of extreme cinema originates alongside the censorship of art films, exploitation pictures, the liberalisation of depictions of sexuality in the late-20th century, and excessive violence and torture. The term itself comes from the growth in the early-21st century of Asian films, specifically those of South Korea and Japan (the former UK distributor Tartan marketed a number of these films under the Tartan Asia Extreme label, giving many of them their most widespread releases), although Japan in particular was exploring these avenues for some decades before with the pinku eiga. American cinema also had it's ventures with the rape and revenge picture, the slasher and the splatter genres, and Italian has a historic tradition of genre cinema, but the extreme side came along in the seventies with the giallo and the cannibal film. These pictures are often a source of debate among film fans and film critics, some even going as far as rankling the ire of the political establishment (infamously, Ruggero Deodato, after initial charges of obscenity, had them amended to include multiple charges of murder in relation to his 1980 film Cannibal Holocaust, only being cleared by the courts after having to prove that the actors were not legitimately killed onscreen).
Being a person who engages in a physical fashion to the stimulus around me through my senses and my intellect, this particular reaction probably says as much about myself as it does the works in question. "The Retch Effect," as I refer to it, is when I am driven by such an instinctive, gut impulse that my whole body surges towards this sickness that has me sounding like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. There are only a couple of other films I can recall having conjured up such a response:
1. Audition - Takashi Miike's film is one I have hailed for many years. I place it prominently among my ten favourite films of all time and feel there's a strong argument for it being perhaps the greatest horror film of all time (the other half of that argument goes to George A. Romero's Night Of The Living Dead). Despite having seen it around a decade ago and holding it in such high esteem, I have only returned to it maybe three or four times since. The first time I saw it I dug my hands into a cushion so hard that the imprints of my fingers were left there days after. There are a couple of key scenes which produced this reaction.
2. Eraserhead - I am a big fan of David Lynch, but only in the past few years did I watch Eraserhead for the first time (on a side note, it was very important in the process of writing my debut novel, Cat's Miaow). Since then, I have watched five or six times, and no matter how much I may appreciate the craftsmanship of the picture and the strangely beautiful way in which the story unfolds, at the film's climax I am always brought forth towards the dry-heaves. The reaction is always the same, to the point that even before I get there I can already start feeling my body building itself towards that horrific denouement. There's something so personal there in the pain which just drives home in a traumatic manner.
The question from here is that if I can react in such a way to some works, why not so to other works, some even more extreme in their content?
While I would by no means proclaim myself an expert, I do watch a fair degree of tough movies, and go out of my way to seek the films which, for better or worse, have pushed the boundaries of acceptability in cinema. However, despite the fact that their content might be considered extreme, I fail to respond in such a manner and they do not stay with me apart from the fact I have a knowledge that I do not feel I have gained anything of real significance from having seen them. Lucio Fulci's New York Ripper is one I always come back to, as any potential qualities it has get lost in a muddled tone that is, if not intentional, then certainly openly misogynistic and homophobic. Eli Roth's Hostel is a laughably bad picture that did nothing for me as a teenager, and I can only imagine that years of hardened cynicism and all-round grumpiness won't make it any better. A sad case is Tom Six, whose first two Human Centipede films, while not being great works of art, were good pieces of trash cinema that delivered exactly what it said on the tin, while his magnum opus, the orgiastic Gotterdammerung that was Human Centipede 3 was an outrageously self-indulgent piece of ego-stroking. And people get angry at Lars Von Trier! Even the multiplexes have been invade. Look at The Hangover Part II. Admittedly, I didn't like any of them, but this was a Fulci-level exploitation film wrapped up in the guise of comedy. The same can be said for Michael Bay's Transformers franchise. These are big, loud, brash and bombastic pictures which are essentially exploitation pictures dressed up as big-budget blockbusters.
From here, comes another question: apart from me getting slightly cross, why was it that these films had to little to no effect?
It is because they lack any central ideas. I forget if this is the exact quote (I'm not just being lazy, I did try to research it) but I believe it is from the Mademoiselle in Pascal Laugier's 2008 film Martyrs: "the most frightening thing about pain is that it has a philosophy." The same can be said for the film itself. Although featuring some of the most savage brutality ever committed to cinema, Martyrs is a film in which all of the violence has meaning (which is more than can be said for the glut of torture porn and found footage grot plaguing cinemas) and I would argue is the crown jewel of New French Extremity. Speaking of Lars Von Trier, the same can be said for Antichrist. In his best film to date, through the committed performances of lead actors Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe he creates a telling work on trauma, heartbreak and mental illness. The oeuvre of David Cronenberg, most specifically his body horror work and adaptation of J.G. Ballard's Crash, all have something under the surface that engages on a level beyond that of simple revulsion. Cast the net back to earlier works such as Pasolini's Salo, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and Ken Russell's The Devils, and all of these are made by artists at the peak of their craft doing something of great merit or meaning. Even in cinema's relative infancy, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's 1929 short Un Chien Andalou, featuring one of the most disturbing images in cinema history, that of a woman's eye being sliced open with a razor, is designed around dream logic, Freudian free-association and the psychological implications it has on the viewer. These are no mere provocateurs.
Content alone will not truly get under the skin of the viewer. Otherwise it is without meaning. Rather, it is the ideas behind the content that make a particular work disturbing. It is not enough to simply splash such extremities up on the screen in a lurid and exploitative manner that indulges in a subconscious craving towards violence and objectification. The depiction and portrayal of extreme content should be executed in a manner in which the viewer, while not necessarily deriving enjoyment in the classical sense, should have gained something, learning from the ideas presented to them by the overall experience. While perception is indeed in the eye of the beholder, it is the artist's responsibility to get across their message and aim to deliver something of meaning,
thus, the ideas behind the content.
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