Abstract
This introductory chapter provides an account of extreme cinema and extreme cinema studies. Scholarship has investigated some aspects of genre theory in relation to the production trend, but a rigorous study has not yet been completed. The chapter justifies the use of genre studies and outlines the relationship between extreme cinema and Linda Williams’s concept of “body genres.” Body genres are fundamentally about producing sensations in the viewer. Thus, this chapter links the study of genre to contemporary film philosophies which explicitly focus on the body of the spectator. It also explains the value of phenomenological film theory up to the present and its relevance to extreme cinema studies. Following these methodological sections, it provides an overview of the book and stakes of its arguments, that is, filmmakers can adopt genre conventions as a tool for ethical and political critique.
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Notes
- 1.
Most scholars agree with these terms: it is not a genre, a style, or a movement but a recent production trend for extreme representations of sex and violence as well as transgressions of the formal codes of art cinema. Cf. Quandt (2011); Grønstad (2006: 163); Beugnet (2007: 25); Vincendeau (2007: 205); Horeck and Kendall (2011: 3, 5); Frey (2014: 158–160); Frey (2016: 6–8). William Brown (2013: 26–28), incorrectly in my view, contends that extreme cinema “perhaps constitutes” a genre.
- 2.
Viewing documentary in this way is only one of many definitions and practices. Indeed, the ties between experimental film and documentary film have frequently been noted by theorists from the 1930s up to the present. Cf. Dulac ([1932] 2011: 656); Grierson ([1935] 2011: 662); Minh-ha ([1990] 2011); Marks (2000: 10, 177). I will tease out the connections between these two genres in Chaps. 3 and 6.
- 3.
Cf. Elsaesser and Hagener (2010: 4–5): “Each type of cinema (as well as every film theory) imagines an ideal spectator, which means it postulates a certain relation between the (body of the) spectator and the (properties of the) image on the screen, however much at first sight the highlighted terms are ‘understanding’ and ‘making sense’, ‘interpretation’ and ‘comprehension’ […] Films furthermore presuppose a cinematic space that is both physical and discursive, one where film and spectator, cinema and body encounter one another […] Likewise, bodies, settings, and objects within the film communicate with each other (and with the spectator) through size, texture, shape, density and surface appeal, as much as they play on scale, distance, proximity, color or other primary optical markers. But there are additional ways the body engages with the film event, besides the senses of vision, tactility and sound: philosophical issues of perception and temporality, of agency and consciousness are also central to the cinema, as they are to the spectator.”
Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener’s claim (2010: 5) that the film is much more than diegesis and form, such as “extra-diegetic material” and the fact that spectators inhabit two (or more) worlds simultaneously—the diegesis and their own physical space—is additionally relevant to the study I undertake in Chaps. 6 and 7.
- 4.
The hybrid mode makes distribution difficult. “[A]ccording to [Raymond] Murray [CEO of Artsploitation Films], the apparently inclusive advantage of hybrid modes such as extreme cinema—artistically sophisticated yet with a titillating allure—can develop into a commercial disadvantage as well” (Frey 2016: 76–77) .
- 5.
Mattias Frey’s book-length critique of extreme cinema scholars who champion the trend as transgressive and ground-breaking without considering the industry or reception side is an invaluable reorientation of the field (Frey 2016; Bordun 2017). Unfortunately, nearly all of the research of my present volume was completed before its publication. In my attempt to read extreme cinema alongside genre and spectatorship, as well as film theory, I equally contest the scholars who emphasize the transgressive in extreme cinema without addressing reception, at least in hypothetical terms.
- 6.
- 7.
Kerner and Knapp (2016: 3) unconvincingly add comedy to Williams body genres , for “humor, and particularly its grotesque forms, can be deeply affecting, causing the spectator to ‘roll’ with laughter , cry, or bend over in involuntary spasm.” Extreme cinema, on the whole, does not make room for humor.
- 8.
In Screening Sex, Williams begins to think through extreme cinema and sensation—she refers to it as “hard-core art,” a nod to her field of interest, porn studies. Her chapter is “an initial typography of hard-core art film chosen from a range of possibility” (2008: 261).
- 9.
Following Leo Bersani, Williams (2008: 132–133) provides a distinction between the satisfying scratch of Deep Throat —“which emphasizes the telos of end pleasure”—and the itch in Last Tango, “which intensifies and increases sexual tension up to the limit case of […] self-shattering and death.” The binary restates the obvious and general: porn is for masturbation and art cinema for the philosopher or cinephile. I find such a conclusion inapplicable to extreme cinema, the latter cinema having a much richer and complex relationship with representation, sensation, and claims to knowledge/genre categorization.
- 10.
Helen Hester (2014) has published a book-length study about the contemporary shift from pornography as a genre to the use of the term pornographic in discourse. Among other topics, she studies “warporn,” “misery porn,” and the use of pornographic as a synonym for disgusting. Unlike Hester, I find critical value in thinking of pornography as a genre.
- 11.
Daniel Yacavone (2015: 14–15) contends that knowledge of the filmmaker, both as the person responsible for a given film as well as the artistic intention behind the film, is part of the experience of attending to it. Further considerations suggest, for Yacavone, that author intention is but one of many experiential and interpretative engagements a spectator has with a work. He writes: “In the appropriate application of […] relevant (prior) knowledge, as opposed to its mental bracketing or willed ignorance [such as a suspension of disbelief], viewers may literally experience more of the singular, irreducible, presented [film] world […] and not (necessarily) less. Such relatively more knowledge informed perception often leads to quite literally seeing and hearing something more, or different, on the screen than one otherwise might, not to mention to often feel more deeply in relation to it.” I adopt a similar approach to Yacavone’s broad account of spectatorship, particularly in Chaps. 6 and 7.
- 12.
Lingis (1996: 60): “To see a real thing is to sense how to position our forces before it; to see something is to know how to approach it and explore it.”
- 13.
Lingis (1996: 34) interprets Merleau-Ponty’s scenario as follows: “The particular movements we make toward things that move or stabilize are made possible by the movement our sensory-motor powers make to maintain themselves on the levels that extend and maintain a field. If, seated in the compartment of a train and waiting for the departure, we get absorbed in what someone is doing over in the adjacent train, then when one of the trains starts to pull out, it will be ours we experience as pulling us away from the scene or person we are holding on to with multiple interests. But if, when we entered our compartment, we settled into our seat, are now arranging our papers or starting a conversation with our fellow-passengers, then it is the adjacent train we see backing out across the side window. Later, engrossed in our reading or in conversation, it is the trees that lean over and file across the window of the train and not the car that pitches as the train mounts the hills.”
- 14.
The influence of Gestalt psychology on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology allows for a productive comparison between his writings on film and those of Rudolf Arnheim . Arnheim was also influenced by Gestalt psychology. Indeed, his 1933 volume Film as Art understands the sensory perception of films in similar terms to Laura U. Marks and Jennifer Barker . Cf. Arnheim ([1933] 2011: 281–282, 287–289).
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Bordun, T. (2017). Introduction: Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema. In: Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65894-0_1
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