Extreme Cinema

EXTREME CINEMA ‘THIS IS AN EXCITING AND TIMELY BOOK. THROUGH IN-DEPTH FILM ANALYSIS, CLEVER REFORMULATION OF TRANSNATIONAL VISUAL CULTURE, AND SIMULTANEOUS ATTENTION TO FORM AND AFFECT, KERNER AND KNAPP OPEN UP OUR WORLD TO THE INTENSIVE CAPACITIES OF WHAT THEY JUDICIOUSLY CALL THE “VIEWING BODIES OF EXTREME CINEMA”.’ Tarek Elhaik, University of California, Davis Extreme Cinema examines the highly stylized treatment of sex and violence in post-millennial transnational cinema, where the governing convention is not the narrative but the spectacle. Using profound experiments in form and composition, including jarring editing, extreme close-ups, visual disorientation, and sounds that straddle the boundary between non-diegetic and diegetic registers, this mode of cinema dwells instead on the exhibition of intense violence and an acute intimacy with the sexual body. Interrogating works such as Wetlands and A Serbian Film, as well as the sub-culture of YouTube ‘reaction videos’, Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp demonstrate the way content and form combine in extreme cinema to affectively manipulate the viewing body. Aaron Michael Kerner has taught in the SFSU Cinema Department and Jonathan L. Knapp since 2003. Aaron Michael Kerner Jonathan L. Knapp is a PhD student in Film and Visual Studies at EXTREME Harvard University. Cover image: Nymphomaniac: Volume I, Lars Von Trier, 2013 © Zentropa Entertainments/The Kobal Collection Cover design: www.paulsmithdesign.com CINEMA ISBN 978-1-4744-0290-3 Affective Strategies in Transnational Media edinburghuniversitypress.com Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp Extreme Cinema Extreme Cinema Affective Strategies in Transnational Media Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp, 2016 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun—Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group UK (Ltd), Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 0290 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 0291 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 1446 3 (epub) The right of Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents List of Figures vi Acknowledgments vii 1 Extreme Cinema: Revisiting Body Genres 1 2 Hearing: With a Touch of Sound—The Affective Charge of Audio Design 21 3 Pain: Exploring Bodies, Technology, and Endurance 45 4 Laughter: Belly-aching Laughter 72 5 Arousal: Graphic Encounters 101 6 Crying: Dreadful Melodramas—Family Dramas and Home Invasions 130 7 The End of Extreme Cinema? 156 Bibliography 162 Filmography 173 Index 176 Figures 2.1 Berberian Sound Studio, Peter Strickland, 2012 32 2.2 Love Exposure, Shion Sono, 2008 34 3.1 Martyrs, Pascal Laugier, 2008 55 3.2 A Serbian Film, Srdjan Spasojevic, 2010 64 4.1 Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Larry Charles, 2006 88 5.1 Wetlands, David Wnendt, 2013 115 5.2 Helter Skelter, Mika Ninagawa, 2012 119 5.3 Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 1987 119 5.4 Helter Skelter, Mika Ninagawa, 2012 121 6.1 Strange Circus, Shion Sono, 2005 137 6.2 Why don’t you play in hell?, Shion Sono, 2013 139 6.3 Why don’t you play in hell?, Shion Sono, 2013 140 6.4 Antichrist, Lars Von Trier, 2009 144 6.5 Inside, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, 2007 145 6.6 Inside, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, 2007 148 Acknowledgments We would first like to thank all the people at Edinburgh University Press— namely Gillian Leslie, Richard Strachan, Eddie Clark, and Rebecca Mackenzie. Everyone at EUP was incredibly receptive to our project, and ensured that it was a smooth process from start to finish. We would also like to thank Johnny Walker (Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne), who encouraged us to reach out to Gillian Leslie at EUP. I (Kerner) would like to thank my colleagues who served as surrogate psy- choanalysts, or who simply inspired me: R. L. Rutsky, Julian Hoxter, Tarek Elhaik, Steve Choe, Daniel Bernardi. I (Knapp) would like to thank Eugenie Brinkema for the guidance and inspiration. Additionally, I would like to thank my graduate student colleagues on the doctoral program in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University, as well as the faculty members without whom these ideas could not have devel- oped: Eric Rentschler, Laura Frahm, Tom Conley, and Ernst Karel. Lastly, I thank my partner, Anna Krieger, who always knows how to bring me back from the edge of the extreme. Chapter 1 Extreme Cinema: Revisiting Body Genres IntroduCtIon: What Is extreme CInema? What is extreme cinema? That is the question we intend to explore. In the decade leading up to the millennium, and in the years since then, we have witnessed the emergence of films that have pushed against, if not breached, conventions regarding the treatment of sex and violence in the cinema. For instance, self-appointed morality police, exasperated film scholars and critics decried films such as Eli Roth’s 2005 film Hostel—charging the film with being too excessive, and dismissing it as “pornographic,” “sadistic,” or both. If nothing else, the near hysterical response to extreme cinema reveals that it appeals to the visceral experience of the viewer. And repeatedly, these films are accused of disregarding narrative conventions in favor of grandiose spectacles of gore and violence that play to the spectator’s baser senses. Extreme cinema, then, is frequently associated with excessive brands of horror, or trends, for instance, in contemporary French cinema (or “New French Extremity” as James Quandt called it) featuring elements of brutal violence sometimes coupled with graphic sexual imagery.1 We have no intention of disabusing the reader of these presumptions regarding extreme cinema, but would add to this, among other things, humor—the kind that makes one laugh so much it hurts. Furthermore, while the content of extreme cinema attracts considerable attention, and might be its most obvious feature, in many instances these films also experiment with form—composition, audio design, editing strategies. We survey here a wide range of international films that might be associated with extreme cinema.2 We take Linda Williams’s landmark essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” as something of a touchstone.3 Williams positions melodrama, horror, and pornography as the tripartite group of films that constitute the body genres. In all cases the spectator is invited to viscerally share in the 2 extreme CInema experience of ecstatic screen-bodies. Melodrama might elicit tears, pornography intends to sexually arouse, and horror might startle us, making us jump from our seats, gasp, cringe, or avert our eyes at the sight of gore. In contemporary American horror, dubbed torture porn—Saw and Hostel being the most representative films of this type—bodies are torn asunder, wrenched, and contorted. Spectators obviously are not subjected to grievous bodily injury, but they are nevertheless compelled to mimic onscreen violence—flinching, tensing up, wrenching the body away from the depiction of pain. There is in that sense a degree of violence inflicted upon the viewer. A number of scholars have taken up the subject of horror’s, and extreme cinema’s, capacity to affect spectators’ bodies in ways that explicitly and implicitly engage Williams’s concept. For instance, Angela Ndalianis’s concept of the “horror sensorium” is rooted in her argument that films enable us to “extract meaning from our bodies.”4 Indeed, one of the most common threads running through many of the edited volumes on extreme cinema is the interaction between the images onscreen and the bodies of spectators.5 What we wish to emphasize in particular, though, is the different types of responses that these films can elicit for different spectators. Take for instance the phe- nomena of “reaction” videos posted on YouTube (or some other hosting service)—where usually a static camera is trained on a small group of people recording their reaction to a film. InWatching “A Serbian Film” (Reaction Video), posted on the TwistedChimp YouTube channel, three young men sit on a couch to watch, as the title suggests, Srdjan Spasojevic’s 2010 extreme film A Serbian Film.6 To start, the young men share playful fraternal banter, but as Spasojevic’s film progresses (which is offscreen) the young men become increasingly agitated—anxiously bouncing their legs, mouths falling gaping open, hands thrown up over their mouth and eyes, the young man to the far right, his arms tightly folded, rocking back and forth before he retreats altogether. Reaction videos such as this exemplify the sensorial experience associated with extreme cinema. But sensorial experience is hardly a uniform phenomenon; some spectators respond quite differently—with laughter, for instance. Reaction videos frequently have nothing to do (or very little) with the films screened,

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