Style and Sensation in the Contemporary French Cinema of the Body tim palmer

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 prac- poraries (Neupert 299–304), however, this is a tice, cinema thrives on its ability to induce group connected more loosely, through com- forceful, vivid sensation—a tendency that in monalities of content and technique. The recent some cases is taken to extremes. Yet while the work of Denis, Dumont, and Noé, a trio best majority of world film engages its viewers to thought of as filmmaking figureheads or cata- convey satisfaction or gratification, there occa- lysts, offers incisive social critiques, portraying sionally emerges an opposite tendency, aggres- contemporary society as isolating, unpredict- sive and abrasive forms of cinema that seek a ably horrific and threatening, a nightmarish more confrontational experience. It is in this series of encounters in which personal relation- context that we can begin to gauge the impact ships—families, couples, friendships, partner- of a group of high profile French-language film- ships—disintegrate and fail, often violently. But makers, notably Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, at the center of this cycle, a focal point most and Gaspar Noé. Polarizing recent films such famously emblematized by Trouble Every Day, as Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001), Dumont’s is an emphasis on human sexuality rendered in Twentynine Palms (2003), and Noé’s Irrevers- stark and graphic terms. The filmmaking agenda ible (2002) have, in fact, already become icons here is an increasingly explicit dissection of the of notoriety in international film culture. To body and its sexual behaviors: unmotivated or some, this group and the related projects of predatory sex, sexual conflicts, male and female certain French contemporaries embody film- rape, disaffected and emotionless sex, ambigu- making at the cutting edge: incisive, unflinch- ously consensual sexual encounters, arbitrary ing, uncompromising. To others, such cinema sex stripped of conventional or even nominal is as indefensible as it is grotesque, pushing gestures of romance. Forcible and transgressive, screen depictions of physicality to unwelcome this is a cinema of brutal intimacy. limits, raising basic issues of what is accept- But there is more to this cycle than the sheer able on-screen. Either way, forty years on from depiction of sexual and social dysfunction. As the New Wave, French cinema is once more in we will see, although considerable critical en- the global critical spotlight. ergy has been focused on evaluating this new Unlike the movement embodied by Godard, French cinema, few have recognized its col- Truffaut, and their Cahiers du cinéma contem- lective ambitions for the medium itself, as the means to generate profound, often challenging tim palmer is assistant professor of film studies sensory experiences. In the age of the jaded at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. spectator, the cynical cinéphile, this brutal in- His essays on French, American, and Japanese timacy model is a test case for film’s continued film have appeared in Cinema Journal, Studies in French Cinema, and Film International. He is potential to inspire shock and bewilderment— currently writing Brutal Intimacy: Contemporary raw, unmediated reaction. For these narratives French Cinema for Wesleyan University Press. of the flesh, the projects of Denis, Dumont, Noé

22 journal of film and video 58.3 / fall 2006 ©2006 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois and their peers, are rendered via a radical, in- tivals. Corporeal cinema offers the prospect of novative use of film style, an ingeniously crafted widespread attention and intensive public en- barrage of visual and aural techniques. Besides gagement. In fact, such filmmaking and its con- their undeniably inflammatory subjects, it is comitant scandal at the Cannes film festival has this startlingly experimental stylistic treatment proved beneficial, even foundational, to the that makes these films so affecting in concep- fledgling careers of both Dumont and Noé: the tion and execution. The art-house thrillers that former derived from the interest and backlash result, insidious yet arresting to the point of inspired by L’Humanité, in 1999, and the latter shock in their design, engage forcefully at both provoked by Irreversible, in 2002. Little sur- an intellectual and visceral level. In fact, this prise, perhaps, that this has motivated a spate stylized representation of filmed bodies within of projects from a diverse range of filmmakers, agitational visual art recalls a discernible avant- male and female, and, of late, both French and garde trajectory. Important precursors in this international. Alongside Denis, Dumont, and light are taboo-breaking films maudits such Noé, this group includes both dynamically re- as Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien invented veterans as well as less-well-known, andalou (1928), Stan Brakhage’s Window Water younger iconoclasts, whose careers have been Baby Moving (1959), Barbara Rubin’s Christmas lent shape and purpose. Despite the ongo- on Earth (1963), Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures ing financial uncertainty in the contemporary (1963), and Carolee Schneeman’s Fuses (1967).1 French filmmaking industry—which in its struc- This article discusses the art and contexts of ture, funding, and organization is constantly this contemporary French cinema of the body, faced, in the words of Laurent Creton and Anne outlining the grounds for its reappraisal, and Jäckel, with “the danger of collapsing the aes- importance, as an unconventional development thetic into the economic and commercial” (qtd. in world film. First, the essay offers an account in Temple and Witt 219)—its uneven progress of the recent emergence and tendencies of this into the twenty-first century has in part been filmmaking phenomenon, exploring its major buoyed, it could be claimed, by an ongoing figures, projects, and professional motifs. dialogue between a radical minority of provoca- Second, it surveys the contours of its critical tive filmmakers whose work has attracted a reception, resituating the films within the often (disproportionate) degree of scrutiny and suc- heated scholarly, trade, and popular debates cess, both in France and abroad.2 they have instigated. Third, it concludes with a A contemporary survey reveals a core of close analysis of Trouble Every Day, Twentynine films and filmmakers that can be identified as Palms, and Irreversible, a pivotal trio of films artistic representatives, cultural ambassadors, whose medium-specific manipulations of the and industrial influences within this new French viewer show clearly the potential of this mode cinema of the body. Seminal in this context is of cinema to invoke a sensory experience at Catherine Breillat, known since the 1970s for times threateningly, violently attuned to corpo- her “audacious studies in female sexuality” real processes, the visceral interactions of bod- (Bordwell and Thompson 617). Her career hav- ies on-screen. ing become relatively marginal, Breillat enjoyed a sudden cultural renaissance in 1999 with Professional Provocation her picaresque parable of a young woman’s harsh sexual awakening, and the fundamental In today’s film marketplace, a transgressive incompatibility between the sexes, in the bit- cinema carries obvious commercial risks, yet terly titled Romance. In the wake of this break- it also offers the prospect of a raised artistic through, which has since become perhaps the profile, as well as, more pragmatically, an in- most widely discussed French film of the 1990s, creased visibility in the crowded schedules of a feminist landmark, Breillat has pursued art-house cinemas and international film fes- variations on the same theme. Reworking her journal of film and video 58.3 / fall 2006 23 ©2006 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois customarily severe filmmaking palette—drab of feminine psychology traced to physical and and muted color schemes, exacting long takes, sexual pathology, often literal or metaphorical deliberately awkward or uneven performances self-mutilation. This motif is clear in de Van’s often given by nonprofessional actors—Breillat fascinating short Alias (1999) and her debut continued her analysis of cynical sexual liai- feature, In My Skin (2002), which culminates sons in Romance’s counterparts: Brief Crossing with its desperate protagonist slashing her (2001), Fat Girl (2001), Sex is Comedy (2002), body with a knife while the image itself abrupt- and Anatomy of Hell (2003). ly divides into two, a disorientating split-screen Besides Breillat, similar brutal intimacy mo- effect. In de Van’s own analysis—an approach tifs have underlined the rise to global celebrity that epitomizes the experience of this brand of of François Ozon, whose work is typically—un- filmmaking—the effect is designed to assault comfortably—poised between farce and hor- the screen, to injure the image itself, in effect ror, incorporating graphic representations of rendering the stimulus directly from diegetic hetero- and homosexual desire. After shorts character to actual viewer (Rouyer 30). made as a nonprofessional, Ozon paid homage More generally, as the visual medium itself to Persona (1966) with the minifeature See the has developed in contemporary trade practices, Sea (1997), in which a young female drifter’s fix- digital-video and low-budget cinema have be- ation upon a sexually repressed mother climax- come in many cases fertile ground for figures es in bursts of psychological and physical vio- attuned to this cinematic tendency. Minimiz- lence. Following this, Ozon was invited to the ing production costs by relying on DV has, in 1998 Cannes film festival as part of its official fact, proved one way of realizing extremely selection—again a site of recognition for this confrontational, risky projects by directors vein of filmmaking—with his blackly comic sat- who are new to the cultural mainstream and ire of pent-up bourgeois (sexual) energies, and are therefore untried prospects as far as finan- an unraveling “ideal” family, Sitcom (1998). ciers are concerned. The actor-turned-director Ozon next progressed to a savagely explicit lov- Jean-Marc Barr, for example, shot his Franco- ers-on-the-run thriller, Criminal Lovers (1999), American “Free Trilogy”—a group of sexually before scrutinizing, again, the psychological- frank romantic parables, Lovers (1998), Too sexual conflicts between a mismatched female Much Flesh (2000), and Being Light (2000)—for duo in the international hit Swimming Pool just eighteen million francs, at that time the (2002). Indeed, Ozon’s sympathetic reception cost of a single average French feature (Prédal by both audiences and critics has done much 66–67). Elsewhere, the opportunities of DV as to raise the profile of French cinema itself, and a cheap and accessible filmmaking method more specifically its contemporary emphasis on led to unprecedented, albeit controversial, dissections of sexual and bodily functions. recognition for Coralie Trinh Thi and Virginie Textually related to Ozon, and sometimes Despentes, whose Baise-moi (2000) revived his collaborator, Marina de Van is another vital the 1970s rape-revenge format. Their film, on its figure in this professional context. Both film- release threatened with censure and defended makers are, moreover, graduates of la Fémis, by many, including Breillat, used the DV format a major national French film school and an im- to derive new shock value and claustrophobia portant cultural background for many corporeal from its sexually explicit imagery and actors cinéastes. La Fémis is a training institution, in from the porn industry, while replicating the fact, that has recently encouraged more pro- grimy, free-form, black-and-white cinematogra- vocative filmmaking methods, in particular an phy of a low budget, impromptu documentary. emphasis upon a stark treatment of the body Noé is a filmmaker similarly alive to the pos- on-screen, in its filmmaking exercises (de Van). sibilities of digital imagery, an efficient method As a writer, actress, and director in her own logistically and artistically. Thus he shot Ir- right, de Van’s career has derived from studies reversible on Super 16, then transferred it to

24 journal of film and video 58.3 / fall 2006 ©2006 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois high-definition video for digital postproduction simulated sex—and oblique narrative designs manipulation, before finally converting it to in international coproductions shot partially 35mm in a 2.35:1 widescreen ratio for its theat- or entirely in English. Important in this regard rical release. is Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy (2001), which Above all, however, this new French cinema was financed by companies from England, of the body has facilitated bold stylistic experi- France, Germany, and Spain. Shot with English mentation, a fundamental lack of compromise actors and set amidst dingy London suburbs, in its engagement with the viewer. Many film- Intimacy offers a naturalistic depiction of an makers have deployed visual designs and adulterous sexual relationship, motivated by imagery to create decisively original, unsettling neither love nor friendship, between a bitter aesthetic encounters. Philippe Grandrieux, a divorcé and an alienated wife. Olivier Assayas documentarian and multimedia artist whose followed suit in 2002 with a transcultural con- work is still not widely known or distributed spiracy thriller about Internet pornography, outside France, is a clear example of the fusing corporate espionage, and sexual consumption of mainstream plot elements with genuinely in his elliptically structured Demonlover, an avant-garde cinematic motifs. Grandrieux’s English-French-Japanese coproduction with a serial-killer road movie, Sombre (1998), and his multinational cast. In 2003, Dumont for the first even more graphically obscure tale of carnal ob- time moved his predominantly French crew to session, A New Life (2002), at times approach America to make Twentynine Palms, a meander- a level of visual abstraction most famously as- ing Californian narrative of a couple’s sexual sociated with Brakhage, conveying piecemeal and physical demise, which marked an abrupt narratives of murder and brutality through lyri- departure from his typical production proto- cal flashes of unfocused colors, dense visual cols of shooting with nonprofessional actors textures, handheld camerawork, and barely in the rural Bailleul region of northern France. perceptible figure movements. Equally formal- More recently still, though, the methodolo- ist but at another aesthetic extreme is Jacques gies of this new French cinema have informed Nolot’s Porn Theatre (2002), a much less con- a number of projects made by filmmakers of frontational drama set entirely in and around different nationalities. In this framework have its eponymous venue. Nolot’s project is in part appeared candid and explicit sexual dramas to juxtapose ironically the sordid, emphatically such as Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers sexual setting with a beatific, even meditative (2003), David Mackenzie’s Young Adam (2003), visual logic. Thus, Porn Theatre depicts the por- and two contemporary sensations at Cannes: nographic habits of his characters via a suite of Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (2003) and meticulous and elegant long takes, showing the Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004). All of impersonal sexual interactions of the theater’s these films foreground scenes of graphic copu- community within serene, extended tracking lation that arrestingly structure their narratives. shots that highlight multilayered compositions Overall, then, this form of contemporary French in depth. In Grandrieux and Nolot’s filmmaking, cinema has proven influential within both beauty coexists uneasily with brutality. indigenous and international filmmaking—a More broadly, as film festivals and indig- successful formula for notoriety. But it is also enous film cultures have become increasingly a cultural development that has been widely, globalized, a trend towards internationaliza- hotly challenged on an international scale. tion has also informed the careers of key practitioners of the new French cinema of the Transgression and the Critics body. Another recent phenomenon is well- established French filmmakers using equally What to make of such a deliberately conten- explicit imagery—occasionally including that tious type of cinema? The tentative efforts most enduring of artistic-cultural taboos, un- made by critics and scholars to characterize

journal of film and video 58.3 / fall 2006 25 ©2006 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois this new French cinema of the body have re- most eyes, however, his broadly dismissive vived a cluster of discourses central to film analysis did the films scant justice, and a study and cultural debate: whether it is ap- number of stimulated writers offered direct or propriate for widely circulated films (and later indirect rejoinders. Given the controversial na- DVDs) to incorporate such extreme forms of ture of the films themselves, the commentaries aesthetic, sexual, and social provocation; or, tended toward extremes, with critics and schol- conversely, whether even high film art should ars alike fiercely divided about films labeled by be limited to more sanctioned forms of physi- some debased and (in pejorative terms) porno- cal desire and social interaction. While dealing graphic, and, by others, pioneering and genu- with these films, critics and scholars have built inely bravura. The films have also produced entrenched positions around the notion that political debate about freedom of speech and cinema should either infuriate or placate. artistic expression. One of the earliest attempts to engage A tone of fascination underlines most ac- with the brutal intimacy model came in the counts—curiosity laced with either suspicion 25 November 1999 issue of Libération, which or solidarity. In the former group is a piece by published an anonymous essay berating the James Quandt, who takes pains to outline what grim nature of much recent French film. The he sees as a “new French Extremity” but then article, reprinted in Le Monde Diplomatique the goes on rather perversely to cite the films of following February and attributed belatedly to Dumont, Grandrieux, Ozon, and others merely “journalist-cinéaste” Carlos Pardo, took to task to castigate their graphic content, dismiss their both rising and established French auteurs by artistic agendas as disingenuous, and deride critiquing their artistic goals. Very much in the their alleged pretentiousness (24–7). Equally vein of François Truffaut’s infamous polemic “A combative but from the opposite perspective is Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” (Truf- René Prédal. At one point in his Le Jeune cinéma faut 15–29), Pardo undertook a national film- français, an exhaustive survey of contemporary making diagnostic, rooting out a deep-seated French filmmaking, Prédal makes acerbic refer- cultural malaise while offering his contempo- ence to a vocal critical minority, such as Pardo, raries scathing rebukes. Pulling no punches, who attract disproportionate attention by mak- Pardo accused Breillat, Dumont, Grandrieux, ing glib dismissals of more adventurous, upcom- Mathieu Kassovitz, Noé, Ozon, and Erick Zonca ing directors. Such a position, Prédal contends, (a veritable who’s who of French cinema, then embodies the classic logic of censorship: to and now) of embodying in their work “despair generalize hazily using brief examples of filmic and defeatism . . . [a] fascination with the excess stripped of any context. This intolerance abject and the sordid” (28). Attacking the for extreme forms of cinema, sexual or violent content of contemporary French cinema, Pardo in content, to Prédal reflects nothing less than a nonetheless conceded its directors’ stylistic “systematic hatred for culture, intelligence and ambition, positioned “between naturalism at all freedom of artistic expression” (34). its most bleak, its most hopeless, and the man- Among other film scholars, the notion of a nerisms of the most affected formalism.” But, reinvigorated French cinema has been widely for his overarching conclusion, Pardo objected and often sympathetically debated. A number categorically to France’s ubiquitous on-screen of writers, often upholding the premise that sexual misanthropy. To him it represented noth- current French filmmakers display an affinity for ing less than a taste for “crime, pornography, the squalid and disreputable, have nuanced and contempt of people” (28). Pardo’s model by assessing more particularly In retrospect, Pardo’s main insight was to the focus on starker depictions of sexuality. In observe fruitfully the emergence of a new and what is already a seminal essay, “Cinema and previously overlooked trend in French filmmak- the Sex Act,” Linda Williams argues convinc- ing on the brink of the twenty-first century. To ingly that through their more open use of sex

26 journal of film and video 58.3 / fall 2006 ©2006 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois in high-profile narrative filmmaking, the French careers of these directors, its leading practitio- are indeed at the cutting edge of world cinema. ners, developing their credentials as auteurs Williams devotes most of her essay to Romance and differentiating their films from the more and Fat Girl, which, along with Intimacy and pallid and censored American cinema. Baise-moi, “defy the soft-focus erotic pretti- The violence in these films has certainly been ness, the contained lyrical musical interlude, reflected in their reception in the popular and that has marked the ‘sex scene’ of mainstream trade press. Trouble Every Day and Irreversible Hollywood” (21). Neither gratuitous in the por- received their world premieres, in successive nographic tradition, nor watered down in the years, at the Cannes Film Festivals of 2001 and censored Hollywood mode, this unhindered 2002, where they were greeted with at best be- portrayal of sex, Williams suggests, allows “an musement and at worst strident disbelief. There, unprecedented emotional and physical hones- and at festivals around the world, screenings of ty” from which derives a cinema concerned with both those films andTwentynine Palms led to sexual identity, personal control, and youthful mass walk-outs and lurid dismissals from jour- character psychology (23). The template is also, nalists. The example of Irreversible is represen- as Kelley Conway observes, an aspect of screen tative. At Cannes, newspaper reports claimed representation that has become fundamental to that over 10 percent of the 2400 people in the the signature style and themes of many impor- film’s opening-night audience stormed out, and tant young French filmmakers (Conway). More that many of those who remained did so only to broadly, to Michelle Scatton-Tessier this preoc- jeer and catcall. The crossfire continued at other cupation with sexuality underpins a vital strand film festivals, such as London, Toronto, and of contemporary French cinema, visible in such New York. Once in limited release, all three films seemingly disparate films as L’Humanité and continued to receive emphatically polarized Amélie (2000), and its overarching concern with reviews, with vitriol dominating. Isolated voices social alienation and the widespread fragmen- offered support for the embattled trio of film- tation of communal life in France (197–207). makers, but frequently in the case of Irrevers- Beyond these debates about the cultural ible—certainly the least-liked of the group—such legitimacy of films such as Romance, Baise- defenses were, in a series of unusual editorial moi, and Intimacy, it seems that the stakes decisions, often published alongside, or can- among critics continue to rise. Particularly in celled out by, a more damning account. Thus in the wake of the international arrival of Trouble journals as diverse as Sight and Sound, in En- Every Day, Irreversible, and Twentynine Palms, gland, and Positif, in France, critics such as Mark the furor surrounding French cinema and its Kermode, Nick James, Philippe Rouyer, and Gré- engagement with filmed sex has become, if gory Valens literally sparred in print, damning or possible, even more pronounced. As a group, acclaiming the qualities of Noé’s feature (Ker- these films continue but rework the trajectory mode and James 20–24; Valens 111–12; Rouyer of Breillat, Chéreau, and the others mentioned 2002: 113–14). One faction demanded censure above by depicting sex not just graphically but for an amoral treatment of sexual violence; the also more emphatically and in a framework of opposing group called for artistic freedom for an horror and criminal depravity. In Trouble Every uncompromising portrait of social and sexual Day, carnal appetites now literally consume dysfunction. Compromise was neither asked for others; in all three films, sexual consummation nor given. is depicted as wanton and animalistic, inher- ently destructive. But the renewed intensity of A Cinema of Sensation the brutal intimacy agenda—stylized but unro- mantic sex acts, encounters often devoid of any If we jettison the pejorative approaches to emotional context except berserk aggression these films, however, possibilities arise. A fun- and rage—has nonetheless still advanced the damental question remains unanswered: what

journal of film and video 58.3 / fall 2006 27 ©2006 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois is it about these works as films that renders the also be rejected. But what then? As Trouble experience of them so memorable, so vivid? Every Day, Irreversible, and Twentynine Palms While there is clearly a textual relationship, a demonstrate, the systematic pursuit of an oppo- discernable conversation in progress among site objective, the craft of agitation, sensation, Denis, Dumont, Noé, and their peers, these and provocation, gives rise to an artful cinema films have been scrutinized for their subject indeed. Indeed, the subversive practices that material but essentially ignored for the specifi- European art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s cally cinematic means through which brutal once deployed against classical film norms are, intimacy is actually conveyed. A crucial over- in certain sectors of twenty-first-century French sight, for there is evident both collectively and filmmaking, being meticulously revived. individually a remarkable, powerful exploitation The tactics used for such studied disorienta- of the medium by this trio—echoes of which tion, in both narrative design3 and film style, reverberate through the rejuvenated art cinema are varied, and often bravura. Trouble Every Day of contemporary France and beyond. uses parallel editing to depict the sexual and To analyze these films closely is to discover psychological decay of Coré (Béatrice Dalle, an array of devices designed to engross, bewil- whose casting recalls her iconically carnal role der, shock, but not to entertain in any conven- in Betty Blue [1986]) and Shane (Vincent Gallo), tional sense. Contrary to the unstated assump- who suffer, we surmise, from a horrific medi- tions of most contemporary film criticism, even cal disorder that induces them to cannibalistic that which deals with film festivals, not all film- urges during sexual arousal. Shane, ostensibly makers seek to charm, beguile, and engage the on his honeymoon, travels to Paris in search audience in regulated, upbeat terms. Cinema of a cure, but his enquiries fail. Instead, in need neither please nor conventionally amuse. an unsettling, open ending, he is left appar- The structures endemic nowadays to the major- ently embracing his condition, having carried ity of both international mainstream and art out a series of murders. Irreversible is even cinema—sympathetic characters that develop, more emphatically disorienting in its narrative talking us through their problems in order to structure, consisting of twelve segments that solve them; carefully plotted scenarios with in- defy the film’s own title by unfolding in reverse evitably positive resolutions; underlying social chronological order. On-screen events begin problems that are tidily surveyed and usually with a gory killing in a gay nightclub, carried out surmounted—can be undermined or else aban- by Pierre (Albert Dupontel) in frenzied but mis- doned entirely. Further, the techniques of film directed retribution for the rape and apparent style routinely used to gratify—attractive set- murder of Alex (Monica Bellucci). Later (earlier) tings and appealing mise-en-scène; a lively yet scenes, by contrast, are beatific: Alex sleep- reassuring soundtrack; smooth, logical editing ing with her lover, Marcus (Vincent Cassel), and elegantly omniscient cinematography—can the father of her unborn and presumably lost

Photo 1: David (David Wissak) and Katia (Katia Golubeva) in Twentynine Palms (2003).

28 journal of film and video 58.3 / fall 2006 ©2006 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois child; and finally, for the film’s hugely incon- increasingly imbued with a sense of threat. The gruous climax, a scene of her alone, content, strategy is underlined by Dumont himself, who in a sunny park surrounded by joyful families. has asserted that in films like these, “nothing Twentynine Palms, which in its deliberate pace happens, and this nothingness creates sus- and compositions outdoes Antonioni’s art pense” (qtd. in Arpajour). cinema of the 1960s—a cited influence on Du- Elements of style, furthermore, grate on our mont—recounts the picaresque journey of Katia comprehension of these desolate events. One (Katia Golubeva) and David (David Wissak), daring aspect of what becomes an assault on the latter of whom, it is implied, is married to our senses is these filmmakers’ oppressive someone else (he has a tattooed band on his use of sound. For if soundtracks can be used to wedding finger). In extended sequences brack- situate, to accompany, and to familiarize, they eted by fades, the couple drive his increasingly can also be used to disturb. Most strikingly, Ir- battered red Hummer through California scrub- reversible uses, for sixty minutes of its running lands. They wander, intermittently having sex, time, a barely perceptible but aggravating bass arguing heatedly, and then falling victim, in rumble that was recorded for Noé’s purposes the film’s final segment, to a series of sudden at 27 hertz, the frequency used by riot police attacks: David is savagely beaten and raped, to quell mobs by inducing unease and, after and in inarticulate rage he kills both Katia and prolonged exposure, physical nausea. Noé himself. The final shot, a distantly framed long also hired Thomas Bangalter, a member of the take, shows his body lying face down in the electronic band Daft Punk, to dub-in sound desert next to the abandoned Hummer, while a designs—beats, drones, riffs, and pitch slides— frustrated cop calls for backup. Uncompromis- many of which were performed live on DJ decks ing conclusions all. as the shoot went on. Throughout the film there A defining feature of these films is their is often slippage in acoustic fidelity, a wavering systematic distortion of the diegetic space, the connection between image and sound. Along- confused worlds on-screen. While the actual side, under, and over scenes—as the density, acts of violence and sex are represented as in- mix, and volume of the soundtrack abruptly trusive and alarming, even nondescript events shifts—a subterranean barrage of off-screen and settings manifest a brooding, unspecified and nondiegetic sound peaks and ebbs in aural malaise. In part this builds from measured nar- waves, an arresting but dislocated clamor that rative pacing, an insidious form of storytelling, interrogates the events we see. The total ef- with plots pared down to the point of simplicity, fect, as Robin Wood argues, is an ingeniously attenuated to relentlessness. The most shock- crafted soundscape of pure noise, registered ing and unflinching of sexual interactions are by the audience as “ominous, ugly, threaten- situated, in effect, within narratives that oscil- ing” (5), a queasy range of pulsing textures that late between experiential extremes: drawn-out intensify our malaise over events on the imag- sequences of passive meditation, inscrutable etrack. Especially in the opening scenes set in character interactions, even, at times, an abid- and around a tenement building and outside ing sense of boredom, and contrasting bursts the Rectum nightclub, where the opening mur- of sudden, overwhelmingly abrupt movement der takes place, we approach sensory overload, and action. Graphic and/or violent sexual en- sheer aural chaos. counters are repeatedly prefaced, connected, In different but related ways, Denis and and even sometimes intercut with banalities: Dumont also use the soundtrack as the means Shane in a café sipping gently from a coffee for challenging viewers, making them acutely mug (in Trouble Every Day), a long take of a conscious that they are also listeners. In both deserted main street (Twentynine Palms), Alex’s Trouble Every Day and Twentynine Palms, dia- lengthy attempts to find a cab (Irreversible). logue is removed for extended stretches, some The everyday and ordinary, by consequence, is as long as twenty minutes. Silence often pre-

journal of film and video 58.3 / fall 2006 29 ©2006 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois vails, which in and of itself makes audiences insisted upon, by these films. As with the restless. Particularly in places where the con- soundtrack, any comfortable grasp of events is vention is for exposition and backstory, as, for blocked; raw or symbolic sensation is routinely example, during the opening sections of a nar- preferred to narrative synthesis. For Trouble rative, these films are startlingly unforthcom- Every Day, Denis and her long-term director of ing. Coré herself, played by Dalle, whose acting photography, Agnès Godard, chose to shoot usually depends on volubility, is given just two pivotal sequences either at dusk, at night, lines to say, or rather, whisper. She murmurs, with virtually no illumination, or, conversely, “I don’t want to wait any more . . . I want to in garish, blood-red and orange pools of light. die.” The minimal spoken exchanges between Characters come and go, move and interact in Katia and David in Twentynine Palms, barely gloom or complete obscurity. The motif is high- comprehensible in her halting English and his lighted in the film’s extended opening scene of broken French—Dumont’s casting cultivates a couple kissing in darkness, images that are the absurdity of a couple that cannot commu- nearly illegible even when freeze-framed on nicate—become even more muted through the DVD. In their cinematography, moreover, both actors’ uncertain, mumbled delivery. French Denis and Dumont (who began his directorial cinema, historically noted for its dense, witty, career as an industrial documentarian) often scripted dialogue, here takes a disconcertingly favor framings that show transitory spaces, different turn. details, props, or abstract symmetrical patterns All three filmmakers, in fact, use an inverted rather than the actors themselves. Twentynine sound hierarchy to dissipate the impact of Palms endlessly, obsessively cuts away to speech. As orchestrated by Denis, Dumont, extreme long shots of desert landscapes and Noé, and their postproduction technicians, the modern minutiae that litters them: wind beautifully designed sound mixes deaden turbines, distant roads, crumbling buildings, or excise human voices and disproportion- railway tracks. Both films and both filmmakers ately privilege denser, ambient textures. The often eschew figures and figure movement alto- soundtracks build from auditory claustropho- gether, focusing repeatedly instead on physical bia rather than structured, vocal interactions. aspects of the setting, directing us to contem- Alone, silent, and (we infer only much later) on plate opaque or (increasingly) vaguely menac- the hunt for victims, Coré’s nocturnal prowls ing objects of contemporary urban scenery, in Trouble Every Day are set to sweeping gusts such as blank walls, hotel fixtures, electricity of wind and nonspecific rumbles, as are the pylons, or piles of garbage and city detritus. repeated establishing shots of industrial and While aesthetic design can make us strain to city skylines. Throughout Twentynine Palms, catch meaningful glimpses, it can also make us Dumont heightens the clamor of distant towns, avert our eyes. Originally trained as a cinema- passing police sirens, clattering traffic moving tographer at the Institut Lumière in Paris, and a at speed, scraps of noise from passersby, and self-described “image fetishist” (Willis and Vil- ubiquitous blasts of wind. For most of Irrevers- land 7), Noé shot much of Irreversible himself. ible—in and outside two nightclubs, on Paris His crucial technical decision was to use pre- streets—fragments of voices collide and com- dominantly a tiny, lightweight Minima camera pete with a cacophony of sound fragments both to capture 360–degree regions of space around diegetic and nondiegetic: shouts, footsteps, his characters, in vertiginous swoops, whirls, cries, urban and abstract noise. The audience and gyroscopic spins. The effect recalls Michael is left struggling to relate what is heard to what Snow’s Back and Forth (1969), a pioneering is seen, reconciling the two only intermittently experiment in mapping zones of filmed space. It into a meaningful, coherent whole. also upsets, sometimes violently, viewers used Visual style also intervenes to amplify the to analytical editing and stable compositions. disorienting experience offered, or rather Alert always to newer technologies, Noé used

30 journal of film and video 58.3 / fall 2006 ©2006 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois a lengthy postproduction period and digital sitions, typically extreme close-ups, dwell and editing facilities to merge seamlessly dispa- linger on abstracted static shots or pans over rate visual chunks, raw footage, into extended goose bumps, writhing body parts, clumps kaleidoscopic arcs of jarring motion. By conse- of hair and naked skin. On one hand, we see quence, the visual design of scenes already dis- bodies displayed in emphatically nonsexual turbing, such as when the unconscious Marcus, ways, repeatedly in the context of cleaning beaten and apparently close to death, is driven and hygiene: under flat fluorescent lighting in off in an ambulance, is conveyed via a radical bathrooms, vigorously scrubbed in bathtubs, cinematography that, like the soundtrack, as- bathed in sprays from showers, reflected serts its stylistic presence independent of the in washroom mirrors. But conversely—once events being shown. Vital sequences—some again these films exploit stylistic and narrative shot upside down, most unbalanced or arbitrary contrasts via unpredictable reversals—these in their framing, many canted drastically—segue same bodies are then abruptly and graphically into episodes in which the camera is propelled rendered visceral, or unconventionally sexual- through space in extravagant loops and twirls. ized. Denis jars us visually throughout Trouble Melding digital and celluloid technologies, Every Day, cutting early on, for example, from Noé’s aesthetic design invokes avant-garde a sterile aircraft-cabin interior to an abstract pioneer Brakhage’s efforts to create a cinema series of disjointed, wobbling handheld shots of raw and unmediated perceptual intuitions. At that seem to convey Shane’s fantasy of a dying times the impression is of free-form experiential woman’s corpse (his wife’s?), caked in gore, data, wild and wandering visual patterns of light with shallow focus blurring her smeared blood and darkness. In every sense of the phrase, into a crimson haze. In the same way, from Irreversible is hard to watch. Katia and David’s extended stroll down a street For all three filmmakers, however, the logic in Twentynine Palms, Dumont without preamble of such visual and aural schemes is highlighted cuts suddenly to a close-up of their violent, during sexual encounters designed specifically frantic sex in a motel room. As such protracted to confront. Almost unbearable elements of sequences unfold, moreover, the mix of the proximity, scrutiny, and, above all, duration are soundtracks, in contrast with elsewhere, sud- fundamental to these films’ more graphic mo- denly becomes sparse, stark, and emphatically ments of sex-as-violation. During the underpass attuned to intimate bodily functions. The physi- rape scene in Irreversible, for example, Noé’s cal brutality is jarringly underscored by excla- kinetic camera becomes suddenly and cruelly mations from the actors’ vocal cords, which we static. Instead of roaming flamboyantly and arbi- hear pushed to grotesque breaking point: in trarily, it observes the struggling bodies of Alex ragged gasps, harsh sobs, and broken shrieks and her attacker without moving, or pausing, or of pain. Human copulation, aggrandized and intervening, for an excruciating, nearly nine-min- made primal by the style of all three films, ute single shot—which may prove to be the most reaches a brutish and guttural crescendo, more controversial long take in film history. And this a shattering release or explosion of energy than motif of the extended take, typically framed in a sexual climax. The act of sex itself, in physi- oppressively tight shot scales and set-ups with- cal and cinematic form, is devoid of pleasure out camera motion, is also the device of choice for both diegetic protagonists and their audi- for Denis’s sexual cannibalism scenes—such as ence—an especially acute irony. when the imprisoned Coré wordlessly seduces This new French brutal intimacy cinema is and then slowly devours her would-be rescuer— undoubtedly a vein of filmmaking that is dif- as well as for Dumont’s climactic depiction of ficult to appreciate objectively because it is so sadistic male rape in a deserted desert gully. deliberately hard to watch, so deliberately hard Flesh, in all three films, is exposed to us to like. Far outside the mainstream, beyond within arresting, corporeal aesthetics. Compo- the pale even of most art cinema made today,

journal of film and video 58.3 / fall 2006 31 ©2006 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois the work of Denis, Dumont, and Noé acquires written by Dumont (who never adheres to the conven- such force and emphasis that it can leave us tional screenwriting format) as a forty-page outline, and expanded on location as the shoot went on. Only stunned, affronted, and ultimately wary. The Trouble Every Day began life as a completed script, by impact of such films, typically, is divisive. As Denis and Jean-Pol Burgeau. Jean Bréhat, producer of Twentynine Palms, has observed: “When someone is drawn to the film, references it’s in an excessive way—either people hate it Arpajour, Roger, dir. Twentynine Palms . . . off. 2003. and decry it, or they become fanatics. There’s Documentary included with Twentynine Palms. something really strong about it, it’s never in DVD. Blaq Out, 2004. between” (qtd. in Arpajour). We must, however, Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film History: An Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw, 2003. move beyond such polarizing evaluation to Brottman, Mikita and David Sterritt. “Irreversible.” understand the efforts—and ambitions—of this Film Quarterly 57:2 (2003): 37–42. confrontational filmmaking to engage us, both Conway, Kelley. “Sexuality in Recent French Cinema.” in style and subject material. A hybrid cinema, Department of Communication Arts colloquium. University of Wisconsin-Madison. 29 Nov. 2001. merging high-art intellectualism with low-art Creton, Laurent and Anne Jäckel. “Business 1960– body horror, these films exploit the cinematic 2004: A Certain Idea of the Film Industry.” The medium in dazzling, coherent, and often un- French Cinema Book. Ed. Michael Temple and Mi- precedented ways. Exploring sexuality and chael Witt. London: BFI, 2004. 209–20. physicality at fascinating extremes, this contro- De Van, Marina. Personal interviews. 25 Aug. 2004; 3 Apr. 2005. versial strand of contemporary French cinema Kermode, Mark and Nick James. “Horror Movie.” Sight has a rigorous, committed intensity akin to the and Sound 13:2 (2003): 20–24. avant-garde at its most dynamic and compel- Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave ling—troubling every day, indeed. Cinema. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002. Pardo, Carlos. “Crime, pornographie et mépris du notes people: Des films français fascinés par le sordide.” Le Monde DiplomatiqueFeb. 2000: 28. I would like to thank Liza Palmer for her help and sup- Prédal, Réné. Le Jeune cinéma français. Paris: Nathan, port with this article, most of all by sharing her exten- 2002. sive and eye-opening research in avant-garde cinema. Quandt, James. “Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence My thanks also go to Marina de Van for allowing me to in Recent French Cinema.” Artforum 42.6 (2004): interview her. 24–27. 1. Denis, Dumont, and Noé, like most contemporary Rouyer, Philippe. “Irreversible: Bonheur perdu.” Posi- French art-house filmmakers, are very well versed in tif 497–498 (2002): 113–14. cinema history, and in interview routinely cite more ———. “Entretien: Marina de Van, le corps-objet.” esoteric or experimental directors whose work com- Positif 502 (2003): 28–31. bines abstraction with narrative. See, for example, Scatton-Tessier, Michelle. “Le Petisme: Flirting with Dumont’s impromptu remarks about film art in Tance- the Sordid in Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain.” lin, Ors, and Jouve 46. Studies in French Cinema 4.3 (2005): 197–207. 2. The economic filmmaking climate in France Tancelin, Philippe, Sébastien Ors, and Valérie Jouve. remains relatively fraught in the wake of the ongoing Bruno Dumont. Paris: Éditions Dis Voir, 2001. financial fallout from the Vivendi/Canal + debacle. Truffaut, François. “Une certain tendance du cinéma Though made in a country where not every film makes français.” Cahiers du cinéma 31 (1954): 15–29. Rpt. it onto DVD, brutal intimacy films have, it is worth not- in Movies and Methods. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: ing, been consistently programmed at international U of California P, 1976. 224–37. film festivals, and many have gone on to receive dis- Valens, Grégory. “Irréversible: Irresponsible.” Positif tribution domestically and abroad to solid box office. 497–498 (2002): 111–12. 3. A key related point is that Irreversible was Williams, Linda. “Cinema and the Sex Act.” Cineaste shot not from a completed script but from a treat- 27:1 (2001): 21–28. ment, which divided the shoot into its constituent Willis, Holly and Kiino Villand. “Brutal Genius: Gaspar sequences and summarized the gist of their content Noé Talks about his Latest Film.” Res 3.3 (2003): and dialogue. The scenes were expanded through 5–9. improvisation and on-set rehearsal, but the structure Wood, Robin. “Irreversible for and Against.” Film remained the same. Twentynine Palms, similarly, was International 5.3 (2003): 4–9.

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