Style and Sensation in the Contemporary French Cinema of the Body Tim Palmer
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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).