Abstract
The concept of transgression in the cinema has everything to do with problems of representation in relation to sexuality and gender, but maybe not quite in the way that one would think. Historically, the shattering of taboos in film has been intimately associated with the introduction of ever more explicit footage in the twin signifying realms of sex and violence. This, however, is the pedestrian version of the transgressive, the one privileging the shock value of the image, the one that seems depleted and used-up. Popular in the critical theory of the 1980s and 1990s,1 the Bakhtinian sense of transgression as a carnivalesque inversion of social, political and aesthetic norms may usefully be supplemented, if not supplanted, by another reading of the concept, one which takes seriously its literal meaning of “going beyond.” While it is true that the recent crop of controversial art films seem nihilistically to violate cultural standards that even within our contemporary post-ideological society are deemed sacrosanct, their transgressive power lies not so much in the act of scandalization itself as in their willingness to probe the limits of conventional representation. If the image that has osmotically structured our way of seeing can be conceived in terms of a membrane, a threshold of some sort, then the thrust of a transgressive cinema is the puncturing of this surface and the opening up onto view of that which is on the other side.
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Notes
See for instance Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, London: Methuen, 1986.
Clyde R. Taylor, The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract—Film and Literature, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 59.
See Claire Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 25, and Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16: 3 (1975), 36. The “semi-movement” referred to consists in part of a series of controversial films made by directors such as Catherine Breillat, Claire Denis, Jane Campion, Virginie Despentes, Lynne Ramsay, Michael Haneke, Carlos Reygadas and Michael Winterbottom in the period from circa 1999 to the present. Some of these filmmakers have a longer history of making provocative art, of course, and while the importance of previous feminist cinema from Dielman to Kathryn Bigelow (not to mention the legacy from Maya Deren in avant-garde film) should be duly acknowledged, it can be argued, I think, that it is only with the group of films spearheaded by Breillat’s Romance and Anatomy of Hell that narrative cinema has faced up to the theoretical challenge of Johnston’s and Mulvey’s texts.
The canonization of Breillat, Campion and, above all, Denis as some of the foremost contemporary arthouse directors is also reflected in the increased scholarly attention their ouevres have received recently. See for instance Dave Vasse, Catherine Breillat: un cinéma du rite et de la transgression, Paris: Complexe/Arte editions, 2004; Claire Clouzot, Catherine Breillat: Indécence et pureté, Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2004; Douglas Keesey, Catherine Breillat, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009; Dana B. Polan, Jane Campion, London: BFI, 2001; Chiara Mangiarotti, Figure di donna nel cinema di Jane Campion: una lettura psicoanalitica, Milan: F. Angeli, 2002; Kathleen Anne McHugh, Jane Campion, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007; Deb Verhoeven, Jane Campion, London: Routledge, 2009; Alistair Fox, Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011; Martine Beugnet, Claire Denis, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004; Judith Mayne, Claire Denis, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005; and Cédric Mal, Claire Denis: cinéaste á part, et entière, Paris: Editions de Verneuil, 2007.
Griselda Pollock, “What’s Wrong with ‘Images of Women’?” The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, ed. Screen, London: Routledge, 1992, 135–45; 142.
Camilla Griggers, Becoming-Woman, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, x.
This appears to have been the director’s own concept for the film as well. See Geoffrey Macnab, “Sadean Woman,” Sight and Sound 14:12 (2004), 22.
Anatomie de l’enfer caused vehement critical opprobrium among many reviewers upon its release. Most ferocious of all was perhaps Manohla Dargis’s attack on the film in the New York Times, in which she wrote off the film as a self-parody from a director who has “finally exhausted her resources.” See Manohla Dargis, “Strangers squirrel themselves away for four nights of sex and zero nights of fun,” The New York Times, 15 October 2004, 12. Breillat’s film was likewise lambasted in publications such as The New Republic, LA Weekly, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, The Globe and Mail, Entertainment Weekly, and Film Comment. Anatomie de l’enfer was also badly received by the audience upon its world premiere at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam on 23 January 2004. It may be noted that Pornocratie was published the same year as a much discussed book by another French Catherine, namely Catherine Millet, whose slightly scandalous La vie sexuelle de Catherine M may be seen to provide an additional contextualizing frame within which to ponder Breillat’s work.
Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, 136.
Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, 30.
Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990, 2.
Emilie Bickerton, Review of Anatomy of Hell, Sight and Sound 15: 1 (2004), 42.
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New York: Vintage Books, 1991, 11.
Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, ix.
W. J. T. Mitchell, “Visual Literacy or Literary Visualcy,” Visual Literacy, ed. James Elkins, New York: Routledge, 2008, 13.
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: A Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, 4.
Brian Price, for instance, has assered that for Breillat, “the visual display of sex is inseparable from the representation of the consciousness of her female characters.” See Brian Price, “Catherine Breillat,” Senses of Cinema 23 (2002), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/breillat.html.
Adrian Martin, “‘X’ Mark the Spot: Classifying Romance,” Senses of Cinema 4 (2000), http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/4/romance.html.
Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, 419.
Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham: Duke University Press, 2000, 162.
Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, London: Routledge, 1992, 6.
Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23: 3–4 (1982), 77.
Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible,’ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
See E. Ann Kaplan, “Introduction,” Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann. Kaplan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 2.
Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, 146.
Alison Butler, Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen, London: Wallflower, 2002, 16.
Meaghan Morris, Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, xvii.
John Jervis, Transgressing the Modern: Explorations in the Western Experience of Otherness, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, 159.
Peter Brunette, Michael Haneke, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010, 95.
Catherine Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image, New York: Berghahn Books, 2009, 136.
Bert Cardullo, “Shoot the Piano Player,” The Hudson Review, 56: 3 (2003), 525.
Fatima Naqvi & Christophe Koné, “The Key to Voyeurism: Haneke’s Adaptation of Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher,” On Michael Haneke, eds, Brian Price & John David Rhodes, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010, 139.
Emma Wilson, “État Présent: Contemporary French Women Filmmakers,” French Studies, 59: 2 (2005), 217–23; 222.
For an extended discussion of the monstrous in Trouble Every Day, consult Kate Taylor, “Infection, Postcolonialism and Somatechnics in Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day,” Studies in French Cinema, 7: 1 (2007), 19–29.
Mark Ledbetter, Victims and the Postmodern Narrative or Doing Violence to the Body: An Ethic of Reading and Writing, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996, 9.
Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007, 99. McGowan seems to conceptualize fantasy and desire as opposed entities.
Marks, Touch, xiii; xvii. The author draws upon Deleuze and Guattari’s work on “smooth space” to describe close-range spaces that are “navigated not through reference to the abstractions of maps or compasses, but by haptic perception, which attends to their particularity (xii). See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1440: The Smooth and the Striated,” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis:: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 474–500.
I would like to point out that the notion of the negation of pleasure pursued in this book carries no erotic connotations and is semantically distinct from Karmen MacKendrick’s idea of counterpleasure, which is linked to various pleasureable transgressions. See Karmen MacKendrick, Counterpleasures, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999.
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” New French Feminisms, eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New York: Schocken, 1981, 253; and Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, “The Graphic in Filmic Writing: À bout de soufflé, or the Erratic Alphabet,” Enclitic, 5: 2 & 6: 1 (1982), 147–61.
I am aware of Caroline Bainbridge’s somewhat similar term “feminine cinematics,” which she explicitly relates to the work of Luce Irigaray and which involves a different set of films. See Caroline Bainbridge, A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
See for instance Lynn Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, 13.
Linda Williams, “Second Thoughts on Hard Core: American Obscenity Law and the Scapegoating of Deviance,” More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power, ed. Pamela Church Gibson, London: BFI, 2004, 165–75; 173.
Laura Mulvey, “Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde,” Framework 10 (1979), 3–10; 4.
David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989, 313.
In his seminal essay on counter-cinema, Wollen famously presented conceptual differences between mainstream cinema and counter-cinema in a binary chart: pleasure versus non-pleasure, transparency versus foregrounding of devices, fiction versus reality, identification versus estrangement; closure versus open-endedness etc. Wollen was concerned with the relation between form and ideology and claimed that the strategies of counter-cinema promoted critical awareness where mainstream film only generated illusions. For similar critics like Comolli and Narboni, the support of counter-cinema aesthetics implied a certain skepticism vis-à-vis formal beauty. See Peter Wollen, “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’Est,” Afterimage 4 (Fall 1972), 6–17, and Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” Screen 12: 1 (1971), 27–36.
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© 2012 Asbjørn Grønstad
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Grønstad, A. (2012). Spaces of Impropriety. In: Screening the Unwatchable. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230355859_5
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