Introduction

Abstract

This book began its life under the title “Illicit Images.” Having recently written a study of the interrelation between violence and aesthetics in American cinema, I next wanted to study (mostly) European art cinema and the particular strand within it that gravitated toward highly controversial, even extreme, representations of the body, of violence and of sexuality. In my mind, the term “illicit” suggested itself as an evocative phrase for the kind of subject matter that I was interested in; that is, until a colleague rather helpfully pointed out that the relevant films were all actually “licit.” It was not as if I was under any delusion that copies of, say, Baise-moi or Anatomy of Hell cold only be obtained on the black market, like snuff items; so what could possibly account for my thinking of such films in terms of the illicit? First of all, I realized that it was, to some extent, a case of domain conflation; there had been some leakage from the realm of the depicted onto the realm of the depiction. Clearly, some of the acts found in my corpus of films would be defined as illicit had they occurred in real life. But that was not the whole story. Notable, also, was the sense in which some of these films’ images made their violent disruptions experientially palpable as sensorial and cognitive assaults. One could perhaps be forgiven for misconstruing something that was capable of eliciting so much distress as forbidden wares.