Style and Sensation in the Contemporary French Cinema of the Body

Abstract

I expect an artist to show me the edge. And to show me that edge, they must go over a bit to the other side. -Bruno Dumont AS AN ART FORM AND A PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE, cinema thrives on its ability to induce forceful, vivid sensation-a tendency that in some cases is taken to extremes. Yet while the majority of world film engages its viewers to convey satisfaction or gratification, there occasionally emerges an opposite tendency, aggressive and abrasive forms of cinema that seek a more confrontational experience. It is in this context that we can begin to gauge the impact of a group of high profile French-language filmmakers, notably Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, and Caspar Noe. Polarizing recent films such as Denis's Trouble Every Day (2001), Dumont's Twentynine Palms (2003), and Noe's Irreversible (2002) have, in fact, already become icons of notoriety in international film culture. To some, this group and the related projects of certain French contemporaries embody filmmaking at the cutting edge: incisive, unflinching, uncompromising. To others, such cinema is as indefensible as it is grotesque, pushing screen depictions of physicality to unwelcome limits, raising basic issues of what is acceptable on-screen. Either way, forty years on from the NewWave, French cinema is once more in the global critical spotlight. Unlike the movement embodied by Godard, Truffaut, and their Cahiers du cinema contemporaries (Neupert 2990 -304), this is a group connected more loosely, through commonalities of content and technique. The recent work of Denis, Dumont, and Noe, a trio best thought of as filmmaking figureheads or catalysts, offers incisive social critiques, portraying contemporary society as isolating, unpredictably horrific and threatening, a nightmarish series of encounters in which personal relationships-families, couples, friendships, partnerships-disintegrate and fail, often violently. But at the center of this cycle, a focal point most famously emblematized by Trouble Every Day, is an emphasis on human sexuality rendered in stark and graphic terms. The filmmaking agenda here is an increasingly explicit dissection of the body and its sexual behaviors: unmotivated or predatory sex, sexual conflicts, male and female rape, disaffected and emotionless sex, ambiguously consensual sexual encounters, arbitrary sex stripped of conventional or even nominal gestures of romance. Forcible and transgressive, this is a cinema of brutal intimacy. But there is more to this cycle than the sheer depiction of sexual and social dysfunction. As we will see, although considerable critical energy has been focused on evaluating this new French cinema, few have recognized its collective ambitions for the medium itself, as the means to generate profound, often challenging sensory experiences. In the age of the jaded spectator, the cynical cinephile, this brutal intimacy model is a test case for film's continued potential to inspire shock and bewildermentraw, unmediated reaction. For these narratives of the flesh, the projects of Denis, Dumont, Noe and their peers, are rendered via a radical, innovative use of film style, an ingeniously crafted barrage of visual and aural techniques. Besides their undeniably inflammatory subjects, it is this startlingly experimental stylistic treatment that makes these films so affecting in conception and execution. The art-house thrillers that result, insidious yet arresting to the point of shock in their design, engage forcefully at both an intellectual and visceral level. In fact, this stylized representation of filmed bodies within agitational visual art recalls a discernible avantgarde trajectory. Important precursors in this light are taboo-breaking films maudits such as Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's Un Chien andalou (1928), Stan Brakhage's Window Water Baby Moving (1959), Barbara Rubin's Christmas on Earth (1963), Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963), and Carolee Schneeman's Fuses (1967). …