From Spectacle to Affect: Contextualizing Transgression in French Cinema at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century
Adrienne Angelo
French cinema at the dawn of the twenty-first century will perhaps be most remembered for a vast number of productions that pushed the boundaries of cultural taste. The release of what are now considered landmark films such as Seul contre tous (1998), Sombre (1998), L’Humanité (1999), Baise-moi (2000), À ma sœur! (2001), Trouble Every Day (2001), Dans ma peau (2002), Irréversible (2002), La Vie nouvelle (2002), Anatomie de l’enfer (2003), Haute tension (2003) and Twentynine Palms (2003) charged critics and scholars with the task of defining and classifying this array of artfully horrific and horrifically artful films. Born in the late 1990s, this spectacular corpus would continue to taunt, tantalize and affectively tyrannize throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century. While these films elicited polarized responses — ranging from critical acclaim to outrage — and although a number of them differ greatly with regard to theme, form and the amount of abject gore contained therein, one word has continually resurfaced in critical dialogue: transgressive. This article, first, contextualizes the concept of transgression at this juncture of French filmmaking to suggest that the move from cinematic spectacle to spectatorial affect finds its roots in modernist aesthetics from the early twentieth century. Second, through an analysis of Gaspar Noé’s Seul contre tous, this article extends the notion of transgression to consider the changing modalities of spectatorship as they are enacted in his film. If, generally speaking, transgression means to rebel against existing norms in an assertion of liberation, these transgressive films (and filmmakers) in fact impose a more authoritative hold on the spectator, thereby altering the spectator’s position and expectations of his or her role in the cinema.
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The labels that have since been attached to this cinematic trend — from New Extremity, to Ginette Vincendeau’s 2007 definition of the New Extremism, Tim Palmer’s cinéma du corps, brutal intimacy and ‘cinema of the flesh’, Martine Beugnet’s notion of Cinema of Sensation, Dominique Russell’s cinéma brut, James Williams’s Extreme Realism or contemporary shock cinema — connote corporeality but also and especially the body’s sensorial world.1 However, the weight given to graphic, on-screen physical and sensorial depictions of sexuality and gore bleeds out to other considerations of spectatorial reactions. This crossing of limits between spectacle and spectator, which is always centred on shock, sensation and the visceral, is already by nature transgressive and plays at the limits of representation at this fin-de-siècle period. As Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall write in their introduction to The New Extremism in Cinema, one of the only book-length studies on this topic:
In their concerted practice of provocation as a mode of address, the films of the new extremism bring the notion of response to the fore, interrogating, challenging and often destroying the notion of a passive or disinterested spectator in ways that are productive for film theorising today.2
In addition to the daring thematic preoccupations of these films — including taboo subjects such as murder, incest, the monstrous and
1. James Quandt, ‘Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema’, Artforum, 42.6 (2004), 24–27; Ginette Vincendeau, ‘The New French Extremism’, in The Cinema Book, ed. by Pam Cook (London: BFI, 2007), pp. 204–06 (p. 205); Tim Palmer, Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011); Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007); Dominique Russell, ‘Introduction: Why Rape?’, in Rape in Art Cinema, ed. by Dominique Russell (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 1–12; James Williams, ‘His Life to Film: The Extreme Art of Jacques Nolot’, Studies in French Cinema, 9.2 (2009), 177–90. 2. Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall, ‘Introduction’, in The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, ed. by Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 1–17 (p. 2). FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 159
cannibalism — I contend that the destabilizing formal elements of these films equally serve as the hallmark of contemporary cinematic transgression. Broadly speaking, it seems that what makes a number of these films particularly shocking, provocative or otherwise difficult to watch lies in the polarized display of seemingly incommensurate senses: that is, the ostensibly incompatible link between the possibility of representation — that which can be shown, hence seen — and affect — that which must be experienced, or felt. But is this ‘new extremism’ particularly new? As Horeck and Kendall point out:
[The] extremity evinced by these films is often as much a matter of asserting particular filiations with artistic, cinematic, literary and philosophical forebears as it is of breaking new taboos. […] The term the new extremism, then, reflects this bridging position between newness and indebtedness to the past, to a history of transgression and provocation that is renewed and given a visceral immediacy for the present.3
In light of these comments, I claim that one of the main representatives of this ‘new’ extremity, Gaspar Noé, has recourse to an earlier generation of filmmakers for whom the concept of pure representation became the mechanism on which a number of avant- garde manifestos were based. By exploring several formal cinematic echoes of horror and avant-garde film aesthetics in Noé’s Seul contre tous, I will situate this contemporary example of transgressive cinema alongside previous forms of representation — namely, Surrealist art and avant-garde theatre — and earlier theoretical paradigms which stress the performative aspect of these experimental examples as they relate to the spectator. This article thus places Noé, as one of the founding fathers of the New French Extreme, on a continuum of transgression, to support an argument in relation to key theoretical essays and manifestos from the early twentieth century, especially the writings of Breton, Artaud and Eisenstein.
3. Horeck and Kendall, The New Extremism in Cinema, pp. 5–6. 160 ANGELO
Categorizing these fin-de-siècle films, two critics in particular offered differing though equally important considerations of the emergent trend of New Extremism in 2004. James Quandt, in his Artforum article, was the first to attempt a definition of this corpus. This article has curried most favour with critics looking for a term on which to hang their analyses; as Quandt puts it ‘[the] critic truffle- snuffing for trends might call it the New French Extremity, this recent tendency to the willfully transgressive’. Quandt’s piece solidified the New Extremity specifically within the art-house French cinematic tradition.4 Quandt refers to the ‘shock tactics’ of these films within the context of national cinema and ultimately concludes that such visual ‘aggression’ actually marks a ‘grandiose form of passivity’ in the wake of a ‘collapse of ideology in a society traditionally defined by political parity and theoretical certitude’.5 In his response to Quandt’s article, the film critic Jonathan Romney goes a step further than Quandt in his own attempts to trace the genealogy of such transgressive films. Both Quandt and Romney have articulated the French specificity of transgression and transgressive art. Romney, in particular refers not only to Surrealism (specifically Bunuel’s and Dalí’s 1929 film Un chien andalou) but also to Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du monde as well as to more literary examples of extremism ranging historically from Sade to Lautréamont through to Bataille’s philosophical writings. Romney, moreover, contests Quandt’s claim that the New Extremism is a result of some kind of political apathy in the face of what Quandt suspects to be a ‘collapsed ideology’.6 For Romney, ‘the new films can hardly be accused of lacking a political drive’ but respond in fact ‘to a professional numbness in France, where a regimentation of workplace practices […] creates a tightly gridded society that gives rise to violent responses’.7
4. Quandt, ‘Flesh and Blood’, 24–27 (p. 24). 5. Quandt, ‘Flesh and Blood’, 24–27 (p. 25) 6. Quandt, ‘Flesh and Blood’, 24–27 (p. 26). Quandt writes, ‘[One] begins to suspect a deeper impulse at work: a narcissistic response to the collapse of ideology in a society traditionally defined by political parity and theoretical certitude.’ 7. Jonathan Romney, ‘Le Sex and Violence’, The Independent, 12 September (2004). FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 161
What has stayed with me, and what I would like to consider at greater length in the article that follows, is an association that Romney has made between the filmmakers of the New Extreme and a theatrical manifesto by Antonin Artaud, in which Artaud outlined a concept of the theatre wherein the audience would be engaged with (and provoked by) a performance on an affective level. According to Artaud:
Le Théâtre de la Cruauté a été créé pour ramener au théâtre la notion de vie passionnée et convulsive; et c’est dans ce sens de rigueur violente, de condensation extrême des éléments scéniques qu’il faut entendre la cruauté sur laquelle il veut s’appuyer. Cette cruauté, qui sera, quand il le faut, sanglante, mais qui ne le sera pas systématiquement, se confond donc avec la notion d’une sorte d’aride pureté morale qui ne craint pas de payer la vie le prix qu’il faut la payer.8
Although Romney does not delve further into this association between Artaud’s provocative manifesto and this period of French cinematic production, Artaud’s concept of Cinema of Cruelty seems particularly appropriate as a springboard for a discussion of cinematic transgression and spectatorship, particularly regarding the affective appeal to spectators. While the coining of the term ‘cinema of cruelty’ is often attributed to André Bazin, Brent Strang takes both Bazin and Truffaut to task for their ‘indiscriminate’ application of the term in relation to Artaudian theory.9 Strang notes, for instance, that Bazin’s text lacks any specific reference to Artaud. For this reason, Strang reasons that Bazin’s work instead ‘coheres more to a loose conception of “cruelty in cinema” than anything resembling Artaud’s theories’
(BGL 30). In his rearticulation of a specific Cinema of Cruelty, Strang argues that cinematic ‘cruelty’ can only be termed ‘cruel’ in Artaud’s sense if it ‘severs our connection to rational dominion […] [and] stirs up sensations in our bodies that have not yet been harnessed and assimilated under thought’ (BGL 30). In this specific usage of a Cinema of Cruelty, then, cruelty hinges foremost on its powers to rouse the spectator. In Strang’s comments below, the discomfort afforded by viewing such ‘cruel’ cinema lies precisely in the transgressive nature of an Artaudian-based filmmaking practice. Strang writes:
As normalised and logocentric viewers, we bring to the cinema our ideological filters, consumptive proclivities, and habits of receiving, decoding, and interpreting narrative. What makes Artaud’s theory so compelling, and at the same time so challenging in practice [sic], is that it recognises the weight of these forces that bind and narcotise in the film/viewer inter-relationship. A radical counterforce is then required to break through and seize spectators in their utmost vulnerability, where pre-conditioning offers no refuge and rational dominion cannot compute. (BGL 30)
To Strang’s clarification of this concept, I would add that if these films shock, they also undoubtedly possess the power to rile the film viewer and thereby (to rephrase Artaud’s above comments) ‘ramènent au [cinéma] la notion de vie passionnée et convulsive’. Moreover, as Artaud specifies above, this ‘cruelty’ shall only be ‘extreme’ (‘sanglante’) ‘quand il le faut’. Hence, we ought additionally to ponder the cultural specificity of these cinematic transgressions that are directed first and foremost at the spectator. Of course, as Martine Beugnet has noted, and as Strang’s aforementioned comments above illustrate, one can only attempt to make sense of the body of the film by experiencing the film as an embodied spectator. Beugnet writes that ‘to open oneself to sensory awareness and let oneself be physically affected by an art work or a spectacle is to relinquish the will to gain full mastery over it, FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 163
choosing intensity and chaos over rational detachment’.10 In Transgressions: The Offences of Art, Anthony Julius proposes a re-contextualization of the notion of transgression in visual arts dating from 1860 to the present. While Julius does not specifically refer to this French cinematic trend, he raises important issues that these films, too, have resurrected. First, after exploring the different valences attached to this very term from its first entry in the English language during the sixteenth century until the present day, Julius finds four distinct significations: ‘the denying of doctrinal truths; rule-breaking, including the violating of principles, conventions, pieties or taboos; the giving of serious offence; and the exceeding, erasing or disordering of physical or conceptual boundaries’.11 It is clear that these types of films and this type of filmmaking practice are concerned above all with violating conventions and expectations precisely in order to disturb, and hence offend, the spectator. Moreover, given the graphic nature of any number of these films, their transgressive forms and themes also remind us that cinema, like any art, is liable to policing measures (e.g. censorship) by structures of social order. Second, Julius reminds us of the celebratory nature of transgression promoted as a utopian ideal by Bataille, an ideal that is nonetheless unattainable in its re-inscription of borders that are crossed.12 What we might take from this second point, then, is the potential of transgressive cinema to represent a similarly transgressive utopia for the turn of the twenty-first century. As a whole, Julius’s work recasts the visual arts in the light of transgression and indirectly raises the question of the relationship between transgression and aesthetics. While I consider this point in greater detail below, in my analysis of Noé’s film, another aspect of this ‘offensive’ art lies in the dichotomous blend of high- and low-brow categorizations that are fused together in any number of films from this period. Take, for instance, the case of Bruno Dumont. Commenting on the 10. Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), p. 3. 11. Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 19. 12. Julius, Transgressions, p. 23. 164 ANGELO
curious mélange of institutionalized accolades and public disapproval following Dumont’s triple win at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival for L’Humanité, Caroline Verner writes that ‘Dumont had committed the ultimate in cinematic transgressions: he had mingled art-house prestige with sensationalist trash, and been commended for it.’13 Verner suggests that the films of the New Extreme were born out of ‘the radical restructuring of France’s film industry’ during Mitterrand’s socialist government (B 31). In other words, the shock value of these films was meant to draw box-office appeal to boost France’s waning film industry during the 1990s. Further, these films have elicited a ‘paradigm shift within the French horror genre’, a shift that has paved the way for ‘a more corporeal, transgressive, and confrontational cinema’ (B 31). For Verner, ‘the character of transgression has been re-inscribed by the noted paradigm shift, and works to amplify these codes through a more intellectualized system of meaning’ which, in turn, signals, ‘the increasing interchangeability of high and low culture codes’ (B 31). Verner’s comments attest to our (spectator’s and critic’s) need to make sense of these often unpleasurable films; however, to some extent at least, this move to order or to compartmentalize these affective films on an intellectual level also speaks to a normative recuperation of the films themselves. Another aspect of this cinematic tendency concerns the historical specificity of these transgressive productions. Certainly, a number of up and coming auteurs at this time (Gaspar Noé, François Ozon, Philippe Grandrieux and Bruno Dumont among others) gained notoriety for their first films made during this period of cinematic unrest. However, it should be noted that not every filmmaker who contributed one or even several films to this trend necessarily continued to do so. This is certainly the case for Claire Denis and her bloody, quasi-vampire tale Trouble Every Day. At the other extreme, we might cite the case of Catherine Breillat, an auteur who has on numerous occasions been
13. Caroline Verner, ‘Beyond the Guillotine: Theorizing the New Extremism in Contemporary French Cinema’, Cinephile, 6.2 (2010), 31–34 (p. 31), hereafter B in the text. FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 165
considered transgressive. It could be argued, perhaps, that the notion of ‘transgression’ comes to signify something more personal in their respective cinematic endeavours. While Denis’s films do consistently privilege the experiences of marginalized characters, Trouble Every Day stands out for its extreme focus on the abject female subject. It could be that this overarching trend in French cinema (with its predilection for graphic depictions of visceral corporeality) laid the groundwork for Denis to take on a specific portrait of female monstrosity in all its gory glory. Breillat’s films, on the other hand, have repeatedly been subject to controversy (and, in some cases, censorship) as much as twenty years before the New Extremism came to the fore. However, few would disagree that Anatomie de l’enfer, Breillat’s cinematic adaptation of her own novel, Pornocratie (which is itself a re-writing of Marguerite Duras’s La Maladie de la mort), has come to represent the apogee of her extreme endeavors.14 In Romney’s seminal article, he includes Breillat’s comments which foreground the transgressive freedom this particular film allowed her:
[Anatomie de l’enfer] was an attempt to go beyond accepted limits, Breillat says: ‘It’s about watching what is unwatchable. I wanted to make a film about obscenity. There are laws against obscenity, but I wanted to know what it was about from the point of view of an artist — not from the point of view of the law which forbids you to be an artist.’ In Anatomy, Breillat contends, ‘I’m trying to present people with something they can’t bear, so as to make them see how miserable it is to be able to bear so little.’ (SV 5)
14. Following a three-year hiatus from filmmaking, resulting from a stroke in 2004, Breillat’s return to cinema in 2007, with the release of Une vieille maîtresse, showed a new aspect of her otherwise autonomous and shocking cinema: a move toward adaptations of canonical literature. The year 2009 marked the beginning of yet another stage in her filmography — her fairy tale trilogy — which includes Barbe bleue, La Belle endormie (2010) and La Belle et la bête (currently under contract with ARTE). 166 ANGELO
Breillat’s most ‘shocking’ production, then, — Anatomie de l’enfer — coincides with the New Extremism, and her above comments evoke transgression — going ‘beyond accepted limits’ — specifically in terms of its effects on the spectator. Her remarks on ‘watching what is unwatchable’ resonate especially with the transgressive nature of the affecting cinematic spectacle in this trend in French cinema; moreover, our engagement (as viewers) with these ‘unwatchable’ films relies on a certain willful transgression. If one watches the unwatchable, one is not only bridging a divide but also, potentially, crossing the limits of what is acceptable or, in an extreme case, ethical. Asbjørn Grønstad’s Screening the Unwatchable is a key text in this regard. In this text, Grønstad focuses on ‘relational aesthetics’ in his consideration of these films, which ‘problematize new modes of social existence, and share in common an apprehension of a deepening rupture, existential and moral, between society and the individual, participation and isolation, politics and aesthetics’.15 The very ‘unwatchability’ of these films, in Grønstad’s view, re-directs modes of vision and expands our limits of thought. In Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde, Joan Hawkins recalls André Breton’s definition and example of the ‘simplest’ Surrealist act: ‘“The simplest Surrealist act”, André Breton once wrote, “consists of dashing into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd”.’16 Hawkins links Breton’s statement to the collapse of political action and art in the Surrealist tradition and posits that this statement is illustrative of the transgressive tendencies of avant-garde aesthetics in the twentieth century: ‘the breaking of taboos surrounding the depiction (and performance) of sex and violence, the desire to shock (épater) the bourgeoisie, and the willful blurring of the boundary lines traditionally separating life and art’.17
15. Asbjørn Grønstad, Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-Millenial Art Cinema (London: Palgrave, 2012), p. 5. 16. Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 117,, originally in André Breton, ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’ in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver and Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 125. 17. Hawkins, Cutting Edge, p. 117. FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 167
Breton’s statement suggests making a spectacle of random violence which removes this action from a logical context and renders the action motiveless and so, presumably, unanswerable to the law and useless. However, as Hawkins also notes, this call to Surrealist action especially illustrates a disregard for those in the crowd and in fact ‘demonstrates a certain willingness to sacrifice bystanders; it demonstrates a certain stated need for victims’.18 It is with these ideas, and the repercussions of this victimized spectatorship, that I turn to Noé’s Seul contre tous, a film that should be regarded as one of the first of this cinematic trend. As such, Noé’s work ought to be considered a paradigmatic exploration of this Cinema of Cruelty, particularly as it pertains to the spectator. To recall Strang’s aforementioned argument, in which he redefines an Artaudian-based Cinema of Cruelty, this type of cinema:
recognises the weight of these forces that bind and narcotise in the film/viewer inter-relationship. A radical counterforce is then required to break through and seize spectators in their utmost vulnerability, where pre-conditioning offers no refuge and rational dominion cannot compute.’ (BGL 30)
The ramifications for such an extreme filmmaking practice will undoubtedly need to go beyond conscious states of viewing. Thus, this consideration of a Cinema of Cruelty also finds validation in considering Artaud’s earlier conception of cinéma brut or ‘raw cinema’. As one of the earliest avant-garde critics who wrote in favour of mining the cinema for its potential to visualize dreams, thus to visually represent the dreamlike writings of l’écriture automatique, Artaud promoted the concept of cinéma brut — a term that by now will have assumed a slightly different definition with regard to more extremist tendencies in twenty-first-century film. However, in 1927, what was brut, bare or essential to cinema, Artaud urged, was not only the power of the image on screen but, perhaps more importantly, that the film- going experience should come to mimic the process of dreaming. 18. Hawkins, Cutting Edge, p. 117. 168 ANGELO
J’ai toujours distingué dans le cinéma une vertu propre au mouvement secret et à la matière des images. Il y a dans le cinéma toute une part d’imprévu et de mystère qu’on ne trouve pas dans les autres arts. […] Le cinéma brut, et pris tel qu’il est, dans l’abstrait, dégage un peu de cette atmosphère de transe éminemment favorable à certaines révélations. Le faire servir à raconter des histoires, une action extérieure, c’est se priver du meilleur de ses ressources, aller à l’encontre de son but le plus profond.19
The deeper function of this type of cinema, then, resided in the pure image devoid of narrative context or development, an emptying out of synchronous logic that would be not only unsettling to the average spectator but would perhaps serve as a type of visual assault. Consider, for instance, Artaud’s further comments regarding the ‘force’ of the image and the ensuing ‘shock’ that is sparked in the spectator:
On en est à rechercher un film à situations purement visuelles et dont le drame découlerait d’un heurt fait pour les yeux, pris, si l’on ose dire, dans la substance même du regard, et ne proviendrait provenant pas de circonlocutions psychologiques d’essence discursive et qui ne sont que du texte visuellement traduit.20
Noé’s reputation as a transgressive cinematic pariah was concretized with his second feature-length film Irréversible, a film which begins with an intense opening scene of a supposed rapist getting his head bashed in with a fire extinguisher. It also contains a nearly nine- minute rape sequence during which time the camera never cuts away from the action and essentially holds the spectator hostage. However, it is Noé’s first feature-length film, Seul contre tous, that I propose to discuss here on the grounds that it carries significant weight in terms of affective spectatorship and the Surrealist legacies Noé references and appropriates. Noé’s homage to avant-garde and Surrealist art of the early
19. Antonin Artaud, Œuvres complètes 26 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1956–1961), III, pp. 79–80. 20. Artaud, Œuvres complètes, III, p. 22. FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 169
twentieth century is reflected in various threads in this film: the dream- like sequence of murder, an often intense and seemingly irrational focus on specific objects, a juxtaposition of extraordinary — indeed extreme — realism with what Breton calls the ‘merveilleux’, and, of course, the antibourgeois morality espoused by the butcher — a protagonist whose cinematic lineage can be traced to a number of earlier ‘art’ films such as Artaud’s La Révolte du boucher (1930), Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (1949) and Chabrol’s Le Boucher (1970). Noé’s landmark film above all underscores what Grønstad regards as the unwatchable potential of this transgressive cinema. This unwatchability may be illuminated through a consideration of Martin Harries’s discussion of Artaud’s text, ‘La Mise en scène et la métaphysique’, which proposes a reading of Lucas van Leyden’s painting Lot and his Daughters (1530). Harries explores the history of what he has termed ‘destructive spectatorship’ in his examination of this painting and its place in theoretical concepts of the gaze in the twentieth century. For Harries, the subject of the painting remains the notion that the sight of historical catastrophe can destroy the spectator. Harries’s analysis centres on what he considers a blatant gap in Artaud’s consideration of the painting. He writes:
With a certain amnesia — whether symptomatic or strategic — Artaud actively forgets much of the biblical text that provides the viewer one [sic] way to decode the shipwreck and destruction of cities on the right. He represses what everyone remembers and remembers what most forget: he chooses to remember the incest and represses the fate of Lot’s wife.21
Harries’s comments are especially helpful when considering Seul contre tous in light of Artaud. Noé, too, not only remembers, but insists on the visualization of the memory of incest, the main taboo around which his film is constructed.
21. Martin Harries, Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 26. 170 ANGELO
This film provides insight into the bleak existence of one man: a jobless (and nameless) butcher whose anger and violence drive him to assault his wife, kill their unborn child and move back to Paris in the hopes of finding work and his institutionalized daughter, Cynthia, whom he murders in a fantasy sequence and with whom he carries out an incestuous relationship. Seul contre tous was constructed as a feature-length sequel to Noé’s short film Carne (1991), a film which introduced us to the protagonist, a figure that can be read a sort of anti- Everyman in Noé’s cinema. Noé conceived of his film mainly as a provocation made, he has said, to ‘dishonour France’.22 Considering that this Argentinean-born director chose to make an anti-French movie in the French language, thus presumably for the French public, it is rather obvious that this film lies on the margins of any concept of unified nationhood whilst depending on the notion of a fixed national identity for its scandalizing effects. Noé, as Tim Palmer has noted, like a number of transgressive contemporary filmmakers, has relied on ‘an ingeniously crafted barrage of visual and aural techniques’.23 This ‘barrage’, via an unrelenting quasi-military percussion soundtrack in this film, further offsets the notion of nationhood against which Noé projects his narrative. The soundtrack, as well as the animated mapped image of France at the film’s opening, and the two intertitles, ‘Moralité’ and ‘Justice’, call to mind nationhood, political action and, in light of the narrative events of the film, a redefinition of these ethical terms. Noé’s I Stand Alone (the English-language translation of the title) or One Against All (a more direct translation) might be read, then, as another manifesto of sorts, one that foregrounds an isolationist view of humanity — the title hinging as it does on the term ‘against’. Noé’s insistence on the force of exclusion and abjection is one that can be read in extremity both thematically and formally as we enter the (hi)story of one’s man journey into hell. From 22. Liese Spencer, ‘Cinema to Dishonour France’, The Independent, 14 January 1999
the very beginning of the film, the spectator is asked to identify with an individual who places himself outside and against social norms — a fugitive on the run, a misanthropic racist who bemoans the current state of society, a transgressive loner. Yet we remain trapped as it were within his twisted psyche — via his interior paranoid rants in voiceover. Noé’s (de)construction of sound is one that aggressively addresses the spectator and is most evident with his inclusion of gunshots that disrupt the soundtrack, an aural reminder, I would suggest, of Breton’s aforementioned act of arbitrary and shocking violence. Moreover, the sound/image disjunction between scenes, as Matt Bailey has noted, seems to hark back to Godard’s more politicized cinema.24 Godard’s anti-establishment filmmaking practices of course began with a À Bout de souffle (1959), hailed by many as the founding film of the French New Wave, an anti-movement that began in response to high-budget studio productions with resounding appeal and formulaic story lines. In À Bout de souffle, Godard, too, relied on similar distancing effects, especially jump cuts and post-synchronized sound manipulations. As his career proceeded, however, and undoubtedly fuelled by the demonstrations of May 1968, Godard removed himself further from the New Wave and explored experimental filmmaking practices in films that were more political in nature. Ici et ailleurs (1976), for example, directed by Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, made during his video period in the Dziga Vertov group, eschewed narrative cohesion altogether in favour of showcasing diegetical film viewing. In this case, Godard focused on two families (one French and one Palestinian) watching footage from Godard’s equally political Jusqu’à la victoire (1970). Another Godardian echo of formal manipulation found in Noé’s film is the intertitle. Although an in-depth analysis of the changing form and use of intertitles in Godard’s cinema lies outside the scope of this article, it is nonetheless important to mention that their evolution could be said to mirror the political drive of these later films, and thus these intertitles serve first and foremost as Godard’s engagement with his contemporary
24. Matt Bailey, ‘Gaspar Noé’, Senses of Cinema, 28 (2003)
public in promoting his radical ideas. Weekend (1967), though, perhaps best represents a clear parallel between Godard’s films and the experimental practices incorporated into Noé’s film. As discussed above in the example of Seul contre tous, Weekend too begins with a warning that the film is not ‘appropriate’ for general viewing: ‘Interdit aux moins de 18 ans’. Moreover, the film declares itself — via the intertitle — to be ‘égaré dans le cosmos’. Indeed, as Shana Macdonald observes, Weekend ‘critically [engages] the spectator through a politically invested formal approach [and uses] rape as a means of critiquing oppressive social systems developed under capitalism’.25 I will argue, however, that Noé’s film goes a step further than Weekend not only in its embrace of antagonism and in its conflation of rape and incest but also and especially in its ‘cruel’ address to the viewer. As discussed above, Noé similarly includes intertitles at various points in the film: in the opening sequence in which ‘Moralité’ and ‘Justice’ are projected, to be defined by an anonymous man in a café ashe brandishes a handgun; while two other titles, ‘Vivre est un acte égoïste’ and ‘Survivre est une loi génétique’, are projected before the butcher goes to the asylum to pick up his daughter. Clearly these intertitles have no bearing on the narrative and are directed at the spectator. The most significant visual and narrative break in the film, however, comes in the form of a direct (and timed) address to the spectator: a real-time warning to leave the screening of the film, a forewarning that what will follow — in story-time — might be too much for one’s senses. Noé provides the spectator with a chance to leave before it is too late, before it becomes too much. This visual and narrative break collapses story and spectacle while working in tandem with Artaud’s theoretical conception of cruelty and the spectator’s visceral reactions. Formally, this device can be read in theatrical terms as Brechtian distantiation but it also has an interesting role to play in the spectator’s choice to stay and watch. At the same time that we are warned about what we are about to see,
25. Shana Macdonald, ‘Materiality and Metaphor: Rape in Anne Claire Poirier’s Mourir à tue-tête and Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend’, Rape in Art Cinema, ed. by Dominique Russell, pp. 55–68 (p. 56). FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 173
and are thus cautioned to turn away, an implicit (and yet patently false) appeal is made to our free will. As the seconds elapse, we are asked to make a hasty decision about our participation in watching or refusal to watch what will most probably be ‘extreme’ cinema. However, if we did not continue to watch, we could never confirm the accuracy or veracity of the on-screen warning. This spectatorial conundrum, which Noé has built into his film, functions to attract rather than to deter the viewer. The curious blend of repulsion and attraction is particularly characteristic of the experience of viewing his cinema and suggests an opening towards the spectator, or a break in the fourth wall, wherein the extreme thematic elements at the heart of his films — murder, rape, incest — serve as a visualization of the repressed and one explicitly linked to affect. To return to the idea of a Cinema of Cruelty, Lee Jamieson identifies several ways in which Artaud had used the term ‘cruelty’, two of which, I think are specifically suitable to Noé’s cinema: cruelty as a device for describing a nihilistic view of the universe that mirrors the essence of human existence, and cruelty as theatrical presentation.26 In the first instance, associated with a grim and pessimistic view of life, we can understand cruelty as the dominant narrative theme of Noé’s Seul contre tous. It is, however, it is the second instance, cruelty as spectacle, that has the greatest implications for spectators. As Jamieson writes, ‘Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exploded rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.’27 And so, too, Noé commits similar acts of cruelty on his spectator through a relentless gunshot that runs across the soundtrack and camera work that Dion Tubrett has termed Noé’s ‘assault on the viewer’.28
26. Lee Jamieson, Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2007), pp. 28–31. 27. Jamieson, Artaud, p. 37. 28. Dion Tubrett, ‘Love Hurts: Redemption within the Bowels of Seul contre tous and the Cinema of Aggression’, CineAction, 62 (2003), 34–40 (p. 36). 174 ANGELO
With Un chien andalou, Buñuel and Dalí deliberately planned their film to provoke and shock in order to transport the spirit of the Surrealist Revolution into the world of cinema. The provocations and multiple symbolic meanings were targeted at disrupting the accustomed, rational logic implicated in traditional spectatorship. In what will be remembered as one of the earliest images of cinematic violence directed at the spectator, we watch what we think is the cutting of a woman’s eye. This now iconic scene is one that has no narrative context (even given the Surrealist nature of the film) and so it is especially unexpected, hence shocking. While I do not wish to enter directly into the multiple critical readings of this well-cited image, I am particularly struck by the visual echo and formal construction of the close-up image of the eye in Noé’s film that both opens and closes what is arguably the most shocking moment of his film — the butcher’s imagined murder and actual molestation of his daughter. The framing of this scene, as I have suggested, immediately calls to mind the tendency among Surrealist filmmakers to focus on objects and dreamlike states — here, in fact, the close-up image of the man’s eye — suggesting our entry into his taboo fantasy world. In this scene, the butcher has just picked up his daughter from the institution with the ultimate goal of killing her and himself. They enter the aptly and ironically named Hôtel de l’Avenir, where they go to the very room in which his daughter was conceived. The spectator’s claustrophobia, evoked by the spatial construction, is reinforced by the paranoid cacophony of the butcher’s mad rants, wherein he provides a litany of reasons for not wanting to live and that justify murder. Our understanding of what is real and imagined becomes equally distorted. This blurring of violent fantasy and equally grim reality is visually underscored in a Surrealist manner as we see clear (and disorienting) cuts between time and space. At the moment when the butcher’s fantasy dominates the narrative, the camera cuts to a semi-undressed (and off-camera) Cynthia getting up from the floor (and returning to the screen space) while the voiceover proclaims: ‘C’est fait.’ In this way, the spectacle of sex (incest) is here eclipsed in favour of the spectacle FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 175
of violence with a close-up of the butcher shooting his daughter as blood and brains spatter on the screen. The knock on the door and the proprietor’s calls to the butcher seem to address only the spectator who is now placed in a difficult position between passive witness to the crime and active observer of the butcher’s suicidal diatribe. The concept of embodied spectatorship necessarily depends on a visual representation of affect, or, alternatively, elements that would provoke a primal reaction from the spectator. Linda Williams notably categorizes ‘body genre’ films as those with an intense focus on the body and its on-screen visceral response to various stimuli. According to Williams, ‘what seems to bracket these particular genres from others is an apparent lack of proper esthetic distance, a sense of over involvement in sensation and emotion’.29 In both Carne and Seul contre tous, Noé certainly insists on flesh in a number of ways. For example, Noé’s protagonist is in fact a butcher (by definition a personage whose tactile proximity to meat invests him with sensation); we briefly see images of meat on a cutting board; Noé includes snippets of a pornographic film (a body genre par excellence) that the butcher watches without emotion; finally, and most graphically, we see violence enacted on the human body. Additionally, there are several cinematic jolts formally evidenced through the use of sound and camera movements, which function to create the sense (for the spectator) of ‘being electrified, like an epileptic seizure’; Gavin Smith’s comment emphasizes the corporeality and visceral response that Noé seeks to provoke.30 Matt Bailey, in his biographical entry on Gaspar Noé for Senses of Cinema, rightly evokes both Sergei Eisenstein and Tom Gunning to explore the ‘cinema of attractions’.31 Bailey’s evocation of earlier film theory is, of course, on target with this contextualization of transgression in contemporary French cinema and, especially, this move from pure spectacle to affective spectatorship. To build on Bailey’s ideas, then, it is
29. Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess’, Film Quarterly, 44.4 (1991), 2–13 (p. 5). 30. Gavin Smith, ‘Live Flesh’, Film Comment, 34.4 (1998), 6–7 (p. 6). 31. Bailey, ‘Gaspar Noé’. 176 ANGELO
important to revisit the notion of ‘cinema of attractions’ as Tom Gunning has considered it in his analysis of pre-1906 cinema. For Gunning, the ‘cinema of attractions’ is one wherein the ‘harnessing of visibility […] directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle and recreations of shocking or curious incidents’.32 Undoubtedly, part of the novelty of these early films stemmed from the experience of watching a medium so unlike anything seen before; hence, the spectator’s primal response to the image was not necessarily tied to the narrative. Indeed, before the advent of sound and for reasons of technical limitations, early films contained a relative paucity of narrative by today’s standards. Bailey draws, then, on Gunning’s cinematic theory and links it to Eisenstein’s application of the term ‘attractions’ in relation to the performing arts, specifically, in Eisenstein’s consideration of theatre:
In his 1923 essay on theatre, ‘The Montage of Attractions’, Eisenstein proposed a system of ‘attractions’ — aggressive actions in the presentation of a theatrical work — that subjected the audience ‘to emotional or psychological influence … calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator’.33
The idea came from the presentational performances of the Grand Guignol and the traditional circus — low forms of entertainment in opposition to the high art of realist representational theatre.34 The concept of attractions in theatre was motivated out of a desire to make the political message of the theatrical piece clearer, more direct, and without the trappings of narrative including melodrama, allegory and audience identification with the characters or their situation.
32. Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant- Garde’, in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. by Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 56–62 (p. 58). 33. Matt Bailey, ‘Gaspar Noé’. Bailey is citing from the following work, Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Attractions’ in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. by Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1998), pp. 29–34 (p. 30). 34. Eisenstein, ‘Montage’, p. 30. FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 177
Both Gunning’s and Eisenstein’s comments on spectacle and spectatorship — though applied in a different context to be sure — continue to hold sway in this particular example of a Cinema of Cruelty. What is perhaps also striking in any contextualization of these transgressive films, and what is implicit in Eisenstein’s comments on the divide between low and high art forms — specifically European art films or avant-garde cinema — are the disparate qualities evoked by, and the extreme divide between, high-brow authored films and what others have termed the ‘trash aesthetics’ of low-brow art. Joan Hawkins perhaps most thoroughly makes the case for the collapse of these boundaries.35 Specifically in the context of New Extremism, however, it is precisely the all-too-real depiction of contemporary reality (high art realism) that in these films obliges the contemporary spectator to identify with the bodies (and bodily experiences) on screen. Thus, the merging of more ‘base’ forms of entertainment (which would normally provide a form of distraction for the spectator) with high art (an art meant to be discussed and intellectualized) creates a harrowing experience for the spectator. While Noé’s films do not belong to the horror genre, although they undoubtedly showcase horrific elements, the critical reception of Seul contre tous, like so many contemporary transgressive films, remains similarly split and extreme. Some hail the artistic achievements, or focus on the obvious ‘high brow’ qualities of a film ‘signed’ by the auteur Gaspar Noé. Others reject the graphic display of visceral corporeality (including sexuality, violence, and other visual manifestations of the abject in relation to the physical) in extreme terms: it is unbearable, unwatchable and, quite simply, too much. This acute divide among critics reflects the multiple layers of division in Noé’s film that allow us to consider the transgressive force of his cinema: the division between the conscious and the unconscious, life and survival, love and hate. He thus provokes and shapes our viewing experience, allowing theoretical paradigms to be brought to bear on his work by responding to and engaging with previous cinematic and avant-garde
35. The collapse of boudaries forms the basis of Hawkins’s thesis. See Hawkins, Cutting Edge. 178 ANGELO
legacies in a contemporary take on the role of ‘cruelty’ and its place in transgressive cinema at the turn of the twenty-first century. The New Extremism, as exemplified in Noé’s work, illustrates the importance of the use of transgressive form as well as transgressive content and an engagement with the legacies of Surrealism, the Theatre of Cruelty and the Cinema of Attractions. Auburn University, USA