Entropic Cinema, or Trouble Every Day

Abstract

As critics and viewers of transgressive cinema, we are easily ensnared by a peculiar and quite possibly irresolvable conundrum. It goes like this: we are attracted to the cinema in no small part because it provides a particular experience, an aesthetic experience, that cannot be had elsewhere. Whatever the subject matter of the film, we trust that its form will act as a buffer against any anxiety or distress. Even the one filmmaker in the world most obsessively focused on punishing his audience, Michael Haneke, has acknowledged as much. “All important artworks, especially those concerned with the darker side of experience,” he muses, “despite whatever despair conveyed, transcend the discomfort of the content in the realization of their form.”¹ That is the theory. Practical experience at the movies is another matter. In his review of Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible (2002), celebrated movie critic and connoisseur Roger Ebert begins by observing that the film is “so violent and cruel that most people will find it unwatchable.”² Upon the film’s premiere in Cannes in the spring of 2002, 250 people left the theater, nauseated. Reporting from the Cannes festival seven years later, on May 17, 2009, Ebert’s writing is wound up, impassioned. He has just come out of a screening of Antichrist, the instantly notorious film by Lars Von Trier, which he rather glowingly describes as “an audacious spit in the eye of society.”³