“A Shock to Thought” The Value of Extremism in Cinema

Cecilia Terenzoni

Cecilia Terenzoni – 12284300 Supervisor: Dr. Tarja Laine Second Reader: Dr. Charles Forceville MA in Film Studies (Media Studies) Graduate School of Humanities Universi ty of Amsterdam 28 June 2019

“A Shock to Thought”: The Value of Extremism in Cinema

Table of contents

Introduction ...... 3

CHAPTER 1: Cinéma du Corps ...... 6 1.1 New French Extremity: a Visual Transgression ...... 6 1.2 Cinematic Perception as Embodied Experience ...... 10

CHAPTER 2: Affective Operations of Extreme Cinema ...... 13 2.1 Affect in Cinema ...... 13 2.2 Violent Images and Images of Violence ...... 14 2.3 The Ethics of Shock ...... 17

CHAPTER 3: The Haptic Cinema of Gaspar Noé ...... 20 3.1 I Stand Alone : Choose your Morality ...... 20 3.2 Irréversible : Assaulting Perception ...... 28 3.3 Imaging Trauma: The Shock to Thought ...... 36

Conclusion ...... 42 References ...... 44

2 Introd uction

“The common view of Deleuze claims that he sees the images as attempting to open up ‘a new process of creation’, that it ‘awakens new potentials’ and ‘breaks into new processes’. The image must be ‘opposed’ to ‘pervasive mediocrity’, and its seeing must be ‘liberated’ from the everyday actions of the sensory - motor system. The liberated image would ‘tear a true image out of clichés’ and possess ‘intensive characteristics from reality’” (Barker 133).

The thesis focuses on the affective operations of extreme cinema and its function as a form of reflective repercussion, a visual mode that elicits a moral response through a reverberating impact that forces the spectator “to do something” with a shocking experience. To illustrate this, I will offer a clos e reading of the movies I Stand Alone (1998) and Irrevérsible (2002) both written and directed by the French - Argentinian director Gaspar Noé , and I will unpack the aesthetic composition of meaning within. In fact, my aim is show the interplay between aesth etics and ethics in Noé’s poetics, and particularly the way in which meaning comes from the contact between spectator and image, arguing that the meaning itself is not composed solely within the film itself, but rather comes about from the “ shock ” . In part icular I intend to address the direct perception and affect triggered by the movies through the visceral attack they subject us to, as a new mode of contestation and communication with the audience. I will argue that a moral impact can be achieved by means of powerful transactions of affects, specifically through violence, the form of affect par excellence . For as Deleuze writes “[…] it is the locus of the ‘intolerable’, that which prompts the shift from movement and action to time and thought” (Sinnerbrink 54). I will start in the first chapter by analyzing cinematic perception as embodied experience, referring to the interconnection between film and phenomenology through the lens of Maurice Merleau - Ponty and Vivian Sobchack, in relation to New French Extre mity as a cinema that focuses on the body as subject matter and on the actual stimulation of the viewer’s body during the filmic fruition. Subsequently from the film - phenomenology and the stress on the corporeal, I will consider in the second chapter the a ffective operations of extreme cinema in general, to finally use these theories, affect and phenomenology, to frame the close reading of the two films. The realisation of direct affect in the Extremity is perpetrated through specific cinematographic techni ques able to invest the spectator physically and mentally in order to elicit, through an embodied perception, a personal, creative, reflective re action. The work of Gaspar Noé stems from a particular social milieu ( the one from the France of the late 1990s whose ruling class is becoming increas ingly conservative) that inevitably brings with it a specific narrative and aesthetics, together with a specific artistic formation and sensibility. Therefore, even though I will

3 argue that it is relevant to understan d what factors catalysed the advent of the New French Extremity to contextualize the artistic expression and urgency of the director’s films, I will focus more on the positive stimuli and productive consequences of the negative affect the audience experien ces in watching his movies. In France cinema has always been used as a tool for talking about some social issues and controversies, and Gaspar Noé, in drawing from his predecessors from the 1950s and 1960s such as Jean - Luc Godard and provocateurs like as R ainer Werner Fassbinder and Pier Paolo Pasolini, follows in this tradition by using forms of negative affect in ethical, individually transformative way. The French Extremity , and Gaspar Noé in particu lar, have often been criticized, in primis from the fil m critic James Quandt, for celebrating a form of grandiose passivity, an emptiness hidden behind an overabundance of aesthetics expedients, such as a hyper - active editing and the use of a nauseating cinematography and camera movements, which seem to forego an actually challenging narrative and any possible moral deliberation. Therefore, to support my argument I will stress the Deleuzian concept of shock to thought , an expression which refers to affect as energetic intensity, able to prompt the viewers into reflections through the prism of their personal life - story and sensibility. The experience of movies such as I Stand Alone and Irréversible demands from the audience to abstract from the contents presented, and try to contextualize them in our own narratio n: perhaps the movies themselves do not evoke any values per se but they do stimulate us towards examining our individual ones. In this sense, we may not see in the movies a total allegory and the national references behind, but we feel a strong affective power which push es us into thinking beyond the boundaries of everyday normativity, showing how cinema can actually be the “liberated image” Deleuze writes about. I will analyse cinematic techniques through concepts of haptic visuality and haptic sound coin ed by Laura Marks, focusing on the materiality and the corporeality present in the movies that undoubtedly challenge our ability to endure and encounter images of the tortured body. Gaspar Noé’s films invoke a strong affective state of captivation and inte rest, and the aesthetization of violence and revulsion in his movies has a constant element of fascination, due to his dexterity in manipulating experimental sound, images and editing: t he visual devices blend to the point that they feel as though they are they feel like painful punches in the stomach for spectators as a result from the hypnotic filmic structure; nonetheless, the impact is simultaneously softened by aesthetic ecstasy. Spectators, inevitably, are led to deal with their unpreparedness for une xpected moral dilemmas that come to directly touch one’s own ethical sphere , as they are presented as relatable and through a strong connotation of realism. This is emphasized by Noé’s choice of protagonists: the heroes the director wants the audience to a lign and side with are often anti - heroes; tormented

4 personalities who take aggravating or maybe even loathsome actions in their own life, but often inside a social context even more brutish and repulsive than them. The New French Extremity has been defined by Tim Palmer in his work Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema as the cinéma du corps , a body - genre that focuses on the depiction of often physical torture and excruciation that at the same time stresses and heightens the reaction of the spectator and his bodily experience. I will argue that this integral event of bodying coincides with the movement of thought. The direct perception of violence expresses and transmits an affective power that exceeds cognitive apprehension; it shapes a mode of awareness definable as thinking - feeling . The Society of Spectacle , written by the French philosopher and director Guy Debord in 1 967, serves my analysis as a theoretical bridge towards addressing the function of extreme and unfiltered images in our con temporary filmic realm and social enviro nment. As Debord famously asserted, we live in world where images have superseded experience, or rather become medium of experience themse lves: “ The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung 1 which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has be come objectified”. The universe of the crude images that makes up the Extremit y aims at dissipating this relation with images that has become asphyxiating and saturated with familiarity, opening up space for new reflections. And the morally crippling effect this status quo has on us underlines the importance of extreme images as a m eans of “ shaking off ” elements of passivity in the spectator . Therefore I argue that “ the sh ock to thought ” does not release itself solely through the representation of violence, but through the violent representation of violence. The French definition of shock, which I will consider in the paragraph “Ethics of Shock”, has a positive and proactive connotative connotation, because it involves an equal collision between two charging forces: the power of cinematic images engaged through a challenging phenomeno logical encounter, and the spectator’s triggered mind which replies back with a similarly impactful movement. For this reason, within the wave of French Extremi ty , Gaspar Noé synthesizes best this aesthetic propensity to combine violent and morally challen ging issues with a lysergic manipulation of sound, cinematography and editing in order to bodily stress the viewer towards active thinking. The ethical and reflective encounter between what is depicted on the s creen and the spectator does not provoke dicho tomy but rather a synergy, able to release creative and unhindered lines of thought.

1 The German expression means literally world v iew; it refers to a collective or individual knowledge and point of view. 5 CHAPTER 1: Cinéma du C orps

1.1 New French Extremity: a Visual Tran s gression

The New French Extremity , or New French Extremism is a pejorative denomination coined by the cr itic James Quandt on Artforum , referring to a clutch of transgress ive French films from the beginning of the 21 st century. The unifying factor of the filmmakers of the New Extremism is a new expression of cinematic transgression and an emphasis on corporea lity , obtained through the filterless use of sex, violence, nihilism, brutal realism and depravity . Directors like Gaspar Noé, Bruno Dumont , François Ozon , Catherine Breillat and Leos Carax seek to build, through forms of reflexive filmmaking, new relation s betwee n the spectator and the screen, by dismantling the praxis of a cinema safe and detached with the substitution of a more corporeal cinematic experience, more shocking and more abject to the cinematographic palate of the viewers . But since the direct ors of the Extremity possess their own personal themes and aesthetic formulas, we might say that they do not have a number of distinctive characteristics, but rather exhibits an interest that characterized their overall attitude: the transgressive intent i n trespassing borders, by experimenting with aesthetic techniques and provoking their audience both bodily and spiritually. I argue that elements of the French socio - political landscape, such as the resurgence of the far right in politics and the increasin g climate of racism and social inequality, catalyzed the development of the movement: in fact, the transgressive propensity of the Extremity reflects peculiar social mores of their contemporary France that the directors try to depict in order to exorcize t heir own political discontent and social frustrations, in a country where even the film industry had been afflicted by a narrow - minded conservatism. Therefore, in order to illustrate the transgressive nature and ideological engine of the French Extremi sm , I believe it is significant to delineate an a parallelism between the advent of the extreme cinematic wave in France and its contemporary social and political climate, since this new wave of extreme cinema mirrors a transgressive attitude analogous and par adigmatic of the rio ts and strikes occurred in 1995 2 in France, when also this cinematographic temperament arose. The wri ter John P. Murphy in his analysis around how “the French distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable collective displays of disrup tive behaviour” ( 979) states that “ the word ‘transgression’ implies a violation, the breach of some collectively understood limit or boundary ”

2 The riots of 1995 correspond to a period in France where several general strikes occurred in the public sector, with significant popular attendance that caused the paralysis of inf rastructures of the country. The riots were organized against the reforms of the Prime Minister Alain Juppé, constituting one of the biggest contestations since the student protest in May 1968. 6 ( Ibid ) . Murphy’s inquiry about how to read collective acts in the contemporary France illuminates how the strikes of 1995 “were considered transgressive because they somehow overstepped the boundaries of what the French deem acceptable acts of contestation” ( Ibid ). Therefore, even though the directors from the Extremity do not create an explicit ideological manifesto , they still embody a cinematic attitude that can be understood in analogy with the same attitude of the protesters from the late 1990s that were in street , as they both show a dissent against the sanctimonious and intolerant ruling class in France and its belief system .

“In the end, tracing out what gets classified as transgressive (or not) and why, as well as how people draw that line, should help to illuminate how they organize their social world. This can, in turn, throw light on shared as well as conf licting values within French society and help define the contours and constituents of power differentials. More generally, this approach should demonstrate the value of using comparison to interpret acts of dissent defined as transgressive in any setting. ” (980)

Moreover, Murphy states that this approach makes the constitutional French mores and values emerge in relation to how the citizen should conform to them. Following this perspective, the cinematic rebellion at the end of the 1990s in France can be c onsidered as the consequence and the ideological adhesion those militant movements in France against the dissolution of an in tolerant socio - political force. I believe that it is useful to offer an overview on the concept of “transgression” per se and what a transgressive action means, in order to employ and understand correctly the term in relation to the New French Extremity . Anthony Julius wrote that the first use of transgression was employed in the 16 th century, referring to the “[violation] of “any rul e or principle, and then to eventually embrace any departure from correct behaviour” (17 - 8). At the end of the 17 th century Julius outlines how the term transgression incorporates also the concept of “divergence”, declaring that “deviations from the rule o f one’s discourse thus reaching up to the most serious of misdeed and is the name of the worst offences and of any offence” (18). Julius further characterizes transgression as a “kind of assault, a provocation violating the person thus acquiring this meani ng: an act of aggression that causes injury” (Ibid). In this sense, the definition of transgression as the violation of and the damage to an individual serves to illustrate that the New French Extremity not only aims at transgressing against normative Fre nch values but also against the viewers individually. The Extremity certainly owes to the Nouvelle Vague the intent to upend the viewer’s relation to the film; both are aimed at engendering self - reflection in the viewer by building new forms of interactio n. The post war Nouvelle Vague cinema was characterised by auteurs ; the director’s subjectivity was the dominant force behind the films. The aesthetics of long takes and jump cuts

7 helped shed the classical studio generated aesthetics of “shot counter shot” and “continuity editing”; the definitive characterist ics of the text gave way to ambiguity. However the films of the New French Extremity exhibit an aesthetic that is derived from both the classical norms and the “new wave” sensibilities. Films like I Sta nd Alone and Irréversible , which employ experimental cinematography, offer a definitive story following “cause and effect” aesthetics. Thus originates the discourse of the new extreme. Their adhesion and conformation to the c onventions of production and di stribution and the sensationalism of their reception, propagated through online media and film theatre s , arrests the possibility of labelling them as avant - garde or experimental films . A t the same time these films offer an experience that is considered tab oo in the popular and mainstream cinema; i t defies the limits of the previous forms of transgression by exploring beyond the moral horizon. As a result the famous designation New French Extremity incorporates the historical and the orthodox as well as the beyond and the taboo, resulting in a synthesis of the different aesthetics that was unprecedented in French cinema. Martine Beugnet describes the New French Extremity with an analogous sentiment :

“ A specific sense of momentum emanates from the work of a n umber of contemporary French filmmakers, evidenced by the release, in close succession, of a batch of films which betray a characteristic sensi bility to and awareness of cinema’s sensuous impact and transgressive nature ” . (14) “I n the majority of feature f ilms, even critical approaches operat e primarily as mirrors of reality’s appearance, captured from an ‘ objective ’ , detached stand - point. The films concerned here offer an alternative vision, an affecting and thought - provoking way of questioning our status as observers and ‘ consumers ’ of the pro - filmic reality” . ( 16 )

Tanya Horeck and Kendall concur with Beugnet in analysing many extreme movies from the Extremity and other countries in Europe challenging in their raw p ortrayal of aggression and sex:

“ Report s of fainting, vomiting and mass walkouts have consistently characterised the reception of this group of […] films, whose brutal and visceral images appear designed deliberately to shock or provoke the spectator. […] t he films of the new extremi sm and the controversies they engender are indispensable to the critical task of rethinking the terms of contemporary spectatorship” . (1)

Moreover, Tim Palmer in Brutal Intimacy speaks of the New French Extremity ’s movies as a cinéma du corps , which he defines as a cinematic inquiry into corporeality in a manner both stark and hostile but simultaneou sly revolutionary and profound:

8 “ […] f ew have recognized its collective ambitions for the medium itself, as the means to generate profound, often c hallenging sensory exp eriences. In the age of the jaded spectator, the cynical cinephile, this brutal intimacy model is a test case for film’s continued potential to inspire bewilderment – raw, unmediated reaction. For these narratives of the flesh, the projects of Denis, Dumon t, Noé, and their peers, are rendered via a radical, innovative use of film style. […] the texts that result […] engage forcefully at both an intellectual and visceral level.” (58 - 59)

This cinema of the body of the Extremity , defined by Martine Beugnet al so as cinema of sensation involves “an approach to filmmaking (and, by extension, to the analysis of film) that gives precedence to the corporeal, mat erial dimension of the medium” (32) . Beugnet examined the films from the Extremity as perceptual objects , arguing for a stylistic recurrence of transgressive leitmotiv and extremes of feelings perpetrated by depiction of crude sexuality, depravity and tortured bodies . Movies such as I Stand Alone and Irréversible ( I will analyse in the last chapter) are indeed distinguished by their “graphic violence or sex, of a violently disjointed relationship between subject and object that quickly brings the cinematic into the realm of the abject” (Ibid) . However, at the same time, the body is involved and led to “ a celebr ation of the sensual, reflexive bond of subjective body to objective world” ( Ibid ). In this passage, t he subjectivity of the body in dialogue with the objectivity of the surrounding reality forewarns the phenomenological implications of the films that I wi ll consider in the next paragraph. Very often the movies are believed to produce an aversion to immediate reading due to a lack of fleshed - out motivations, straightforward narratives and moral justifications, resisting clear interpretation and overt politi cal instrumentation. Nevertheless, this superficial aversion does not mean that the movies are deprived of ethical content or social context: instead it is in this very attitude of the Extremity that such content and context lie. In fact the reflective pur pose is rooted in the engagement with the unwatchable and the repellent, which produces an affective, aesthetic and intellectual experience. In this sense, according to Beugnet, the underlying critical aspect should be interpreted in a new fashion, through a newly corporeal and intimate connection between the screen and the viewer, which must be felt before it is comprehended. On the other hand, James Quandt, who named it, refers to New Extremism as a “growing vogue for s hock tactics” (Horeck, Kendall 2) as a pompous and pretension form of passivity . According to the film critic, such movies besides being amoral and apolitical they even contain immoral elements, such as the homophobic accusations moved to Irrevérsible , who se pitiless rapist happens to be a homosexual man . Their fundamental cruelty has nothing to do with prompting the audience to engage in moral reflections , making a cinematic act of audacity , or encouraging a cultural change ; rather their violence is so lely gratuitous and sensational, as a glamorous vogue.

9 On the contrary , it is my goal in this thesis to dismantle the accusation of passivity of the Extremity supporting instead the value of a cinema that emphasise s the sensorial experience and that stimulates an intimate dialogue between perception and moral reflection, due to his challenging topics as well. The powerful and provocative images of extreme movies subvert the very notion of passivity of the cinema spectator : “[…] rather than spectators passively deprived of their bodies and held in thra ll to an ideological apparatus [the directors from the Extremity ] gave rise to the possibility of spectators who engaged their bodies and senses” (Rushton 45). If passivity is the mark of the Hollywood audience, wha t instead characterized the idealized audience for whom transgressive cinema is addressed to is the actively engaged spectator. Following this approach, I intend to support the c inema a la Gaspar Noé which involves a full bodily immersion and intoxication, a cinema which finds its ability and value to “uncover the unthough t in though t (to think that which is unthinkable) ” (Rushton 49).

1.2 Cinematic Perception as Embodied Experience

In relation to the cinema of the body of the Extremity , characterized by its obsession with corporeality and physical repercussion (obtained through specific cinematographic techniques that I will take into account in the next chapter ), I believe it is relevant to discuss the relation Maurice Merl e au - Ponty establishes between f ilm and phenomenology. According to the French philosopher, the embodied experience serves to become aware of “something”; the experience is a synonym of knowledge and it represents a tool to contextualize the subject matter of the movies. Merl e au - Ponty re flects on the possibilities and the symbolic form of cinema to which it gave life, as an interlocutor of the contemporary thought. In this framework, what we see in extreme cinema is not a form of grandiose passivity or sensationalism but it represents the expression of a conscience that can s hape the one of the viewer too. In the conference Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie held at the IDHEC in Paris in March 1945, Merla e u - Ponty draws an analogy between phenomenological philosophy and cinematographic ar t, as both aim to show the relationship between subject and world, between subject and others, instead of explaining it: they both represent the conscience in action and the man throw n into the world. The French philosopher sees in cinema the visible insta ntiation of an incarnated consciousness, the renewed interplay between body and spirit. Cinema, like phenomenology, makes us grapple with man in his relationship with the world, and with the ambiguity and carnal intertwining of being. Cinema and contempora ry philosophy share a common vocation: the philosopher and the filmmaker have in common a certain mode of being, a certain

10 vision of the world, which is that of a generation; my claim is that the filmmakers of the Extremity share a generational paradigm in this way. This convergence between cinema and philosophy has been reflected generally in the cinema theory that has developed in France since the 1940s and 1950s , but can particularly be seen in the work of the filmmakers of the aforementioned generation of the Nouvelle Vague . However the interest shown by film theory for the Merl e au - pontian phenomenology does not remain bound to a generational event or to the atmosphere of an age of cultural and artistic renewal; the dialogue between phenomenology and cin ema has not ceased to be fruitful and productive, and it is precisely the renewed novelty of this convergence that I seek to outline. In the early 1990s , the film and media theorist Vivian Sobchak undertook a reading of the filmic experience starting from the philosophy of Merl e au - Ponty, in a work that became a reference point for film theory and beyond: The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience . The phenomenology and in particular the aesthetics and Merl e au - pontian ontology is proposed as a starting point for the theory of cinema and filmic experience, which overcomes the insufficiencies of the psychoanalytic and Marxist approaches, then dominant. The discipline of film studies is ultimately incapable of capturing the cinematic and specta torial experience in its dynamism and carnality . From this point of view, the Merl e au - pontian phenomenology is therefore followed as a viable way to overcome the limits of a cinematographic theory that has become recursive and asphyxiated, but above all as a new way of questioning vision in general, and in particular its own vision of the experienced film: “I must interrogate vision – vision as it is embodied, vision as it performed, vision as it signifies, vision as it radically entails a world of subjects and objects to make sense of them and of itself as it is lived” (Sobchak XVII). “What else is a film if not ‘an expression of experience by experience’? And what else is the primary task of film theory if not to restore to us through reflection upon that experience and its expression, the original power of motion picture to signify?” (Sobchak 3). According to Sobchak, cinema, more than any other means of communication, shows, or stages, the reversibility of perception and expression that so characterizes t he moving image: “The cinema makes visible and audible the primordial origins of language in the reversibility of embodied and enworlded perception and expression”. ( Sobchak 4). Cinema is called to express life through life itself. The moving image manifes ts itself and becomes sensible as an “expression of experience through experience” , it situates our experience: “ a film is an act of seeing that makes itself seen, and an act of hearing that makes itself heard, and an act of physical and reflective movemen t that makes itself reflexively felt and understood ” (Ibid 3 - 4). Sobchak divides film theory between the formalists (reading for meanings and allegory) and the realists ( film as direct

11 representation). Sobchak transcends the argument by defining a third th eory, the contemporary one, where she fuses perception and expression through a synthesis operated by reflection, from which the metaphor of cinema as a “mirror” is born. The cinema (the film) is therefore intense (from psychoanalysis, neomarxist and femin ist theories) as an illusory, coercive and ideological projection of experience: in cinema are reflected on the one hand the social apparatus and the dominant ideology, and on the other the distortions of the collective mentality and its predetermined psyc hic structures. Sobchak maintains that both classical and contemporary theories fail to take into account the correlative nature of the filmic experience; they have not thematized the act of vision: the movement of vision, meaning “the vision as a movement of the sighted in its opening to a world and as a solicitation of vision by the visible”. The cinematographic vision in this view is the encounter between an incarnate and seeing subject and a visible one, which presents an intentional and perceptive stru cture analogous to it. At the cinema there is no point of view, but rather participation. The filmic experience questions our view of the world, mobilizes the perceiving subject in his relationship with the world and with others and offers us a vision onto which to graft our gaze on the world. The cinema “lends us a body” with which we perceive the world in a way that our body, immersed in the prosaic, has unlearned to see, perhaps or does not want to see and reflect on.

12 CHAPTER 2: Affective Operations of Extreme Cinema

2.1 Affect in Cinema

I argue that t he power and potential of the visual and sensorial experience, able to enlighten the reflexive relation between the individual and the external world , are synergically connected to the power and the pote ntial of violent and extreme images which emanate a poignant discharge of affect . “Reason without affect would be impotent, affect without reason would be blind” (Van Alphen 27). In this passage I intend to lay the groundwork for illustrating how the irrat ional and chaotic affective participation works in unison with the more rational and meditative side of ourselves, achieving a harmony between this apparent dichotomy. The psychologist Silvan Tompkins studies the multidirectional characteristic of affect, claiming that affect is present in our voice, in our skin, in our hands, in our nervous system and more broadly in our face, in our gaze. In terms of affect through vision, Tomkins defines faces as the crucial sensorial and permeable receiver for the trans mission of “messages” and that those are mostly infused by forms of powerful affect. At the same time, he advocates for the supportive role of the brain, which serves as a lenitive and anaesthetic for the overwhelming load of affect received (Tompkins 188) . However, a ffect theory forms the basis of my analysis because of the use made by the Extremity of the bodily reaction of the audience. The movies spur the spectators to reflect on the affective intensity that unfolds on the bodies and what evokes this co rporeal impact. This attention on the carnal and visceral aspects of film consumption is significant to the moral underpinnings of extreme cinema and to the dialogue they establish with the viewers. Affect is a kind of bodily response, a reaction which is just felt. It is an embodied experience, which is compelling, instinctive, involuntary and free from content or meaning that the spectator experiences through the fruition of the movie. The affective investment in the audience is intrinsic in the film - phen omenology, as a way, I argue, to fully understand the film’s poetics, rhetoric and ethics within. In terms of ety mology, affect ( affection ) does not refer to a personal feeling, but to the ability to affect and being affected: it is a pre - personal and pre - reflexive intensity provoked by an experience that elicits an alteration of the body. Affect is that encounter between the affected body and the agent responsible of this affective transfer and investment. I will take in considerat ion later on the definiti on of shock , crucial concept to my analysis, illustrating the nature of the relation and interaction b etween the agent (the one who acts) and the recipient ( the one who receive the flux of affective energy ).

13 I intend to discuss the films of the New Extremi ty as powerful in generating affect, mostly negative affect, and how we can extract values from it. Since affect is a form of a - subjectivity (or pre - subjectivity) still a - signifying and non - qualified element in the process of our perception, I want to clai m that from extreme films the audience can derive something personal, social, and ethical at the same time, giving to a traumatic experience a meaning, a content, qualifying it, and to finally build a subjectivity. This is why my discussion about the role of the agent that causes the effect is crucial, because I want to claim the “activity” (to be active) of the body being affected from the unexpected intensity of the moving - images. We do not look for this visceral attack, but I argue that it is possible to transform and make the negative affect into something meaningful and even didactic . In this sense, there is no a pre - packaged form of affect, but I argue that there are meaningful post - cinematic effects and I am interested in exploring what can we learn o f ourselves and the context we live in, of the sociality and morality, through affective narratives in relation to extreme cinema.

2.2 Violent Images and Images of Violence

Referring to changes in the artistic lan dscape, the scholar Van Alphen, claims th at recent socio - political developments necessitate new “modes of contestation” (28) and communication with ones audience, which cannot be formalistic and composed only of didactic meanings and me ssages; i nstead, these new ways of contestation consist of an affective dialogue, engaging the audience transformationally. Van Alphen maintains that despite the ebbing of artistic meaning which accompanied that of socio - political meaning, cinema can nevertheless have a significant political effect: “their political impact is rather established by means of powerful transactions of affects” (Van Alphen 28). In this sense I argue the manipulation of sound and cinematography represents Gaspar Noé’s personal way to contest: his cinematic techniques and aesthetic expedien t are able to immerse and to modulate the body producing direct affect . In my view the shocking wave of (negative) affect presents in his movie is able to provoke reflections, as a cinematic way of contesting established hierarchies and gain ing the attenti on on a certain theme. Th e crystallizing expression shock to thought was coined by Gilles Deleuze, who went on to illustrate and name this symbiotic relationship between affect and thought, as the encountered si gn . “The encountered sign is felt rather than recognized, or perceived through cognition or throu gh familiarity with the ‘code’” (Van Alphen 22 ). Since the uncensored brutality of the Extremity evokes a feeling of estrangement and uncomfortable authenticity, very often it causes aversive reactions fr om the audience, who is maybe unfamiliar, not with the content itself, but with the way

14 in which it is represented. But according to Deleuze, this feeling of uneasiness and shock does not end in itself, but rather represents the engine for an intellectual and analytical reflection. Thanks to its way to invest the individual in a spontaneous and involuntary way, affect is more powerful in engaging with profound thought , than a rational and lucid analysis.

“More important than thought there is ‘what leads to thought’ […] impressions which force us to look, encounters which force us to interpret, expressions which force us to think”. Deleuze quotes Proust himself to illustrate the nature of the encountered sign: “The truths which intelligence grasps directly i n the open light of day have something less profound, less necessary about them than those which life has communicated to us in spite of ourselves in an impression, a material impression because it has reached us through our senses” ( Van Alphen 22 ).

Throu gh the approach of Proust and Deleuze, Van Alphen refers to art and cinema as the incarnation of a feeling which vitalizes and encourages the mind to think: cinema does not explain or incarnate a rational preposition, but rather it is made of affective int ensities able to provoke a critical and creative thought. According to Deleuze, “it does us violence: it mobilizes the memory, it sets the soul in motion; but the soul in its turn excites thought, transmits to it the constraint of the sensibility, forces i t to conceive essence, as the only thing which must be conceived” (Deleuze 166). Gill es Deleuze refers to affect as energetic intensities whose effects impact physiolo gically the individual who has to do something with it in order to exorcize and channel t he affective investment through expressing judgements. “Affects are related to judgements in the sense that they are the physiological shifts accompanying a judgement” (Van Alphen 23). This view of affect as energetic intensity conceptualizes it as somethi ng arising from the interplay between a work and its audience, and not simply from the work itself. In particular, moving images, as active agents, not only aim at the presentation of events, but also at the evocation of emotions and their transformation t hrough the engagement and the commitment of the viewer: they possess a concreteness that rational thoughts or propositions lack. And it is this very materiality of moving images, bursting with affect, which corroborates ethical thoughts. Nevertheless, in t he cinematic realm, most of the images and the contents represented are not able to produce any changes into the spectator’s consciousness since they have become standardized and internalized, part of our visual diet, loosing then their affective property. In this framework, the extreme cinema plays a crucial and active role with its viewers, because of the use of sound and cinematographic manipulations and because of their shocking subject matters, such as sex and violence. The aesthetic of the French Extr emity aims at dismantling the familiarity we have with those conventionalized images and to challenge the audience in losing the habitual ways of reading and judging . 15 Guy Debord, French Marxist philosopher and filmmaker , presents in 1967 his work The Socie ty of Spectacle . He re, he expresses his concern and disenchantment for his society, asphyxiated and immersed in an era in wh ich fiction , or rather the representation of reality , supplanted reality itself . Debord prophetically denounces the process of trans formation of the populace (specifically the workers) into mere passive consumers of the spectacles of the capital. Therefo re, the images of the spectacle represent the reality of the experiences, now spectacularized and faithful mirror s of everyone’s pecul iar life.

“The concept of spectacle unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena. The diversity and the contrasts are appearances of a socially organized appearance, the general truth of which must itself be recognized. Considered in its o wn terms, the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance. But the critique which reaches the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, as a negation of life whic h has become visible” (Debord 10).

This very overlapping of the fiction al space with reality flattened the people ’s awareness, reduced them to passive and apathetic spectators, sedated from ima ges that have pervasively entered their social life and the ex periential dimension. I argue that the perpetual immersion in images, as extension of our existence, has catalyzed a process of “ anaesthetization ” from the images, compromising and sacrificing their transformative power . Moreover, especially n owadays, w e a re so bombarded and saturated with images that even the imagery of violence has lost its affective properties. In this framework, the New French Extremism stands out, as it follows the logic of imaging violence to its logical conclusion, by creating images of such extreme violence that they b reak and dissipate this sort of distance and i ndifference of the spectator , demanding a visceral response and malaise, ergo promp ting him to question the moral dimension behind it . I would like to emphasize how the aff ective investment of French Extremity leads to a descriptive “how” instead of a prescriptive “what” of the contents the films bring within. They do not propose a way of living, a precise morality or vision of the world, but they give you an opportunity to build it autonomously. The political situation in the France of the late 1990s and early 2000s is only a variabl e where an individual experience can be materialized , even though the meanings, as the cou nterpart of the experience, are inescapable since the experience per se possesses a subject that refers to. One can argues that the affective reading of I Stand Alone and Irréversible should not be separated from a symptomatic and allegorical lens of the socio - political context, in which Gaspar Noè is inserte d, but instead it is the synergy and the interplay of the two that substantiate one another. Surely the sensorial, affective aspect of the interpretation is central:

16 “You will have missed everything when you don’t pay attention to it. But without the alleg orical dimension of meaning, affective reading is not really, or better yet, not seriously experienced” (Van Alphen 30). In this framework, meaning is then a potential result, but not the aim of the embodied experience of these movies. In this sense, to re ad for a meaning needs the affective investment and in this process generates an ethical response from the audience. “When we agree that affective operations and our discernment of them play a vital role in our negotiations between morality and ethics, the n there is an extra reason to consider affects as social and not as personal; this time not because of how they originate, but because of how they work and what they do” (Van Alphen 30).

2.3 The Ethics of Shock

Since I have been men tioning the word “shoc k” and that all my reflection revolves around the positive engagement with the shocking experience, I believe it is useful to explore its etymology to subsequently try to “build” an ethics within. First and foremost, t he most common definition of shock, t h e medical one, is offered as “ an acute […] condition associated with a fall in blood pressure, caused b y such events as loss of blood […] sudden emotional stress, and marked by cold, pallid skin, irregular breathing, rapid pulse, and dilated pupils ”. This scientific definition highlights the concept of shock in which is necessarily involved a body in pain: a damaged and passive body subjugated to a flux of negative and detrimental energy and stimulus . Nevertheless, when consulting more thoroughly the Oxford English Dictionary , one can observe that the term shock derived from the French verb chequer ( to shock) which corresponds to an en counter between charging forces . In this framework, i t was employed for the first time in its large use during the 16 th centu ry the within a military context, as the meeting, the crash of two armed force, as the collision between two equal strengths. I find this interesting since it does not refer to shock as an agent impacting on a passive counterpart , but rather it shows the e quality of the encounter, where none of the force is subaltern to another. And it is exactly the meaning I want to attribute to shock in the context of an affective investment able to produce a reflexive response. In the context of the New Extremity the sh ock is visually presented by the heinous violence, a s a radical form of affect, as what I argue is the form of affect par excellence , the most impetuous and immediate. In literature the term shock was largely employed in the wor k of Walter Benjamin; in his essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire published in 1939, the German philosopher draws from Charles Baudelaire the idea of shock in relation to the advent of modernity and technological development: “the price for which the sensation of the modern could be ha d: the disintegration of

17 the aura in shock experience”. (Osborne and Charles, SW 4, 343, translation amended; GS 1.2, 653). Modernity itself generates a duel between the new shocking external reality and the individual’s sensibility and awareness . At the s ame time, the encounter between them, originated from the collision, is from the creative process originates as well : the individual’s conscience functions as a pugnacious and proactive shied , blocking and protecting itself from the over - stimulation of mod ernity. Therefore, this movement per se coincides with the generation and proliferation of creativity too . Benjamin in particular states that the artist, profoundly stimulated by the shock of the new chaotic world , in order to find his subjectivity and sti ll generating authentic creativity, has to make an alliance with his conscience. Moreover , even in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Benjamin discusses the shocking the acceleration of modernity, this time in relation to cinema as well. The philosopher explains how the quick sequence of images intrinsic in the cinematic praxis shapes a new sensibility in experiencing images themselves. If a still image permits the spectator’s gaze to gradually normalizing the visual incentive, cinema ins tead “shockingly” forces the viewer to adapt to a new fast movement, invoking strongly the consciousness: “ This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind ” (238 , my Italics ). Certain ly nowadays the debate is not anymore about the innovation of cinema and montage, but it is still about challenging and “shaking” the viewer’s consciousness through new and unfamiliar forms of visual provocation , where moral reflection becomes integral par t of the film practice and experience . In extreme cinema, the tendency to present the unwatchable and the intolerable captures and grabs more intensely the spectator, provoking affective reaction and demanding critical inquiry; films from the Extremity do seek to defy and challenge the audience and its habitual and consolidated imagery in their being apparently immoral, cruel and nihilistic; extreme films generate a debate between moral and ethical spectatorship. “Moral response is largely involuntary and u ncritical, whereas ethics is all about thinking through one’s relationship to morality rather than just adhering to it” ( Horeck and Kendall 8 ). In this respect, the emphasis on violent excess, negativity and heightened moments of displeasure may be constru cted as a n indispensable facet of its ethical appeal. In this sense, New Extremity wreaks havoc on moral certainties and established value systems. The vociferous debate and discussion around extreme movies spur to unfold a process of ethical reflection. “ Ethical meaning does not reside purely in the flow of images but emerges more urgently in the course of the reception and the circulation of these images - in the mul tifarious encounters between audience s and films” (Ibid 9) .

18 Martin Baker focuses on the re ception of uncensored images and their way to provoke moral inquiries in their being located in peculiar conditions and contexts of experience: “Audience research means […] focusing on the social and individual conditions under which films are accessed, wa tched, appreciated, and digested, and how cultural values and worldviews are used as active points of reference in these processes ” (Ibid 9) . Extreme films position spectators affectively and ethi cally:

“ The film is really all about the spectator. It is a film that seeks to manipulate the spectator, and the aim of these manipulations is to bring out the beast in us. […] Aggression and manipulation not only sa ve the films from facile moralis ing, but also allow the spectator to engage with the inner bastard in a way more intimate than otherwise possible […] The films themselves generate theories of spectatorship and they open up space for reflections even more vital than the film itself ” (Ibid 14 - 16 ) .

The movies do not impose a prescriptive morality to inter nalize, but instead t hey put the spectators in connection with themes of challenging reflections. And if the consciousness becomes the “shield”, they very violence can be transformed into r eflection: the shock can become consciousness.

19 CHAPTER 3: The Haptic Cinema of Gaspar Noé

3.1 I Stand Alon e : Choose your Morality

I Stand Alone is the English translation of the original French title Seul contre tous , which literally means “alone against everybody”. The movie open s with the abrupt and blunt line: “The tragedy of a jobless butcher struggling to survive in the bowels of his country ”. The film is the sequel to the directorial debut of Gaspar Noé: the short movie Carne (1991), which is a repugnant story about a horse b utcher who takes revenge on a man he suspects of sexually assaulted his teen daughter . The Butcher ( played by Phillipe Nahon ) will reappear seven years later jobless and nihilistic in I Stand Alone , the story of a contemporary anti - hero who, through his so rdid thoughts , ejects acrimony towards social minorities such as queer community, immigrant s and the female universe. The director described his film as anti - French stating that, through its baleful representation in the movie, he wanted to dishonour Franc e and its cinema industry (like the movie’s poster suggests, by showing The Butcher pointing a gun at his temple in the background of the French flag ( Figure 1 ). Noé accused ‘ the French film industry is very conservative like the 19th century salons, a pri vate club where six people decide which movi es should and shouldn’t be made’ (Smith 154).

Figure 1 . Poster of I Stand Alone , sequel of the short movie Carne , written and directed by Gaspar Noé and released in France in 1998.

I Stand Alone begins with a blazing red map of France emblazoned with a huge F and then, in the middle of the frame, the words morality and justice appears on the screen (at the beginning

20 Gaspar Noé w anted to name the movie simply France ). After this, we see a scene of a man, ‘evange lising’ in a bar, claiming ‘ Do yo u know what morality is?’ and then, showing his gun as the answer: ‘Here is my justice’ . The protagonist then begins narrating in third person, over a sequence of photographs illustrating his story (which is the plot of Car ne ) up to the present: he was born in Paris in 1939 to a mother who abandoned him two year later and a French communist father murdered by Germans. He learns his trade at 14 and set s up a shop in Aubervilliers at 30, selling horse meat. Two years later at the “H otel of the Future” he conceives a girl named Cynthia, whose mother abandons them soon afterward. Cynthia grows up mute and intellectually challenged and her father becomes sexually attracted to her when she reaches puberty. Confused by her first per iod, she heads to her father ’s shop; en route a worker tries to seduce her, but a neighbour intervenes . Spotting blood o n her skirt, the butcher assumes that she had been raped, runs out in a blind rage, and stabs an innocent man in the face. Cynthia is co nsequently places in an i nstitution and by the time he ge t s out of jail, The Butcher had lost his shop. Therefore, he goes to work at a bar, becoming the matron’s lover and getting her pregnant. At this point, in the early 1980 s , the film shifts from past to present tense for the remainder of the story. However, I will discuss in this chapter what I consider to be the two most violent sequences of the movie (where two women are the victims in both : The Butcher’s wife and his daughter Cynthia ), analysing the affective assault upon the spectator and the potential reflections and thoughts that can arise from that shock. Nevertheless, the feeling of violence is almost omnipresent, due to the way in which the narrative is constructed: The Butcher’s stream of cons ciousness is perpetually violent, with a misogynist and xenophobic virulence that returns a feeling of obscenity to language. Moreover, violence is suggested by the interrupting off - screen gunshots, always juxtaposed with an abrupt and harsh cut or camera movement. The bursts of violence present merely in The Butcher’s mind are presented in the same way as the violent actions we actually see committed. Every time we hear a gunshot our reflexes suggest a threat of imminent violence, until we understand that is has only been imagined by the protagonist and, as a consequence by us, the spectators. These bodily stimuli and aesthetic expedients have the result that the narrative and our perception of it are as vulnerable to the director’s transgressive tactics as human flesh is to a bullet. In my view this is the continuing flesh motif which the viewer experiences both in the stomach and in the mind, since most of the Noé’s poetics dwell on the meaning of this metaphor and on the interplay between the body and min d. What is being represented is the perverse and controversial way in which the director’s vision coincides with that of his anti - hero. In fact, using the figure of The Butcher, the director depicts a world - as - abattoir metaphor staging a psychological prog ression that follows a path

21 towards depression and oblivion, towards a brutal animal instinct and the loss of reason. The static images alternating with long - takes try to depict how a man can fall so far: the director strives to stage a descent to a person al defeat, and to keep it credible for the duration of the whole film. This also means making the protagonist’s reflections an engine driven by hatred, repression, a sense of powerle ssness, disgust and blind rage. The Gaspar Noé ’s choice to set his narrati ve in 1980 is connected to the socio - political landscape of that period, when for instance the elder Le Pen burst s into French politics. Most of the film’s speech is composed of the protagonist’s internal monologues, and the spectator is confronted with vi cious and abhorrent invectives, as I mentioned, often towards wealthy people, women , immigrants and homosexuals , but also at French society i n its entirety . T he irascible and sordid thoughts of The Butcher are aesthetically evoked by the notion of haptic v isuality and haptic sound as theorized by Laura Marks in The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses . Marks focuses on the ways in which movies can evoke meanings and feelings through their “material” dimension, establishing a co nnection between the perceptive viewer and the subject represented: the vision can be “ tactile ” , the spectator actually touches a film through his eyes. Moreover she claims the value of phenomenology as a “tool to be attentive to films’ subtleties, silence s and visceral effects, through which we can analyze the embodied response to moving - images” (Marks XVII). Therefore, t he notion of haptic or tactile visuality refers to those images which invite the viewer to respond in an intimate, embodied way. In this way, the film does not aim merely at a narration around a contemporary collective anguish and torment, but rather it formulates the discontent through a visual and sonorous composition. “ One of Noé’s key methods of affecting the viewer’s body is through “ s hock cuts ” : the camera abruptly focuses on a specific subject through a fast track - in, sharply p unctuated with a gunshot sound ” (Nicodemo 44). The director attempts to implement an aesthetic formula which tries to influence the spectator’s perceptions evok ing the feeling of an aesthetic “ epileptic seizure ” , whose aim is to make the viewer feel the images , depriving him the possibility to immediately digest or to experience moments of contemplative stasis within the film. W hile The Butcher , moved by a blind rage, is beating the belly of his wife , the camera alternates, accompanied by unsettling gunshots between his nihilistic and hostile expression and the woman’s body being brutalized; in addition, the scene is even made more painful since the woman is carry ing his child. The traumatizing element of this scene is the triple violence committed on three different bodies : the one of the viewer, assaulted by the violent images, the abrupt camera movements and the sound, the one of the wife, totally subjugated to the inflexible delirium of the

22 man, and of the one of the foetus, unjustly attacked. The director here is perhaps presenting a dystopian and disillusioned vision of his contemporary society and wondering whether a baby deserve s or desires to be born into i t a France afflicted by desperation, social inequality and economic malaise. From this point onwards a narrative of increasing violence unfolds, through its subsequent brutal themes, verbal expressions and aggressive aesthetics; and the intensity of The Bu tcher’s disembodied monolo gue is such that it requires an “ extra narrator ”, an anonymous voice - over to articulate the confused and fragmented nature of his sordid thoughts. The film’s false ending is preceded by a countdown and an exhortation for the viewe r to leave the cinema within 30 seconds that is peppered with shock cuts and violent imagery; the hapticity here is obtained by rapidly switching between red and black backgrounds and through the flickering of the titles. Those who have not heeded the call to evacuate are confronted with the image of The Butcher shooting first his innocent and delicate daughter and then himself. The gunshot effect reappears to accompany the continuing shock cuts, as the camera lurches uncertainly toward its subjects. As in the scene where The Butcher brutalizes his pregnant wife, the intent is to draw attention to the vacuousness of the destiny of the coming generations through the expedient of a murder - suicide. The common thread is resistance to an unbearable life and an un liveable society: he refuses to allow his daughter to be put through the same existential anguish as himself. We will nevertheless soon discover that this excruciating finale was merely fantasized by The Butcher, since we return to the moment before the tragedy unfolded to see him staring silently at his daughter. We are then offered an alternative finale in which he decides to escape the cruelty of his country by consummating his “uncontaminated” love for her, and pontificating about how their love will never find acceptance in such a cruel and unforgiving world. Here the affective attack takes place both on the victim (the daughter) and on the spectator, through the violence itself and the shocking and controversial morality, and the uncomfortable juxtap osition with traditional romantic archetypes. This sequence represents an inversion of clichéd romantic finale, since now the happy ending arises from a perverted incest, and The Butcher is finally able to find his place in the world, but only by rejecting his place in society. In the final scene we see The Butcher going to visit his daughter Cynthia at the institution before heading to the place where she was conceived: the “Hotel of the Future”. The setting already places the spectator in a state of tens ion, where the threat of imminent violence is palpable, since at this point the protagonist is abundantly monstrous and frantic, and desperate enough to commit anything. Here, in its climatic moment, the violence suggested by the voiceover and the off - scre en

23 gunshots functions to make his imagination, and ours, powerful as an action that we can actually see. In terms of the film’s moral agenda, and the thoughts provoked by the physical shock, this finale to me is an opportunity to reflect about something. The space for subjectivity here is obtained through the violence and the finale is where we have somehow to choose a morality: I Stand Alone is a story that places the spectator in front of a juncture of two different endings. The most tragic (but only ima gined) is the one that culminates with The Butcher murdering his daughter and eventually committing suicide; and the less tragic (but real) one ends with the still very morally controversial conclusion of incestuous sex and romance. In my view the movie ai ms at challenging the audience to make a choice, which finale do you find more ethically compliant with the overall movie? The most interesting thing is that whichever finale you choice, the movie compels the viewer to anxiously reflect on the moral implic ations related to the decision. The second and actual finale, for example, stands as the “most redemptive” one, staging finally the acknowledgement of the love and sexual attraction of a former prisoner for his own daughter. Every movie can be open to ever y kind of reading and interpretation, but I Stand Alone spurs the spectator to morally engage with his narrative, since the finale proposes incest as a form of redemption. The fact that the protagonist has made this decision and that throughout the film on e tries to identify with him and feels this perverse allegiance , makes the film an unsettling but reflexive experience: it can function to pose moral dilemmas that we have not, or not yet, faced in our life, especially those that we do not wish to explore. The concept of perverse allegiance employed by Murray Smith illustrates “those aspects of the text that pertain our evaluations and emotional response to the character” (220 ); it refers to a form of pleasure and redemption caused by an understanding of wh at provoked malaise and suffering to the characters in the movie. The logic of the perverse allegiance leads the viewer to go beyond the simple cinematic alignment, once again defined by Murray Smith as “all those aspects of textual structure that pertain to our access to the actions, thoughts and f eeling of the characters” (219). I argue that the structural element that allows the transition from the level of mere alignment to the level of allegiance, even if perverse, is the sensorial provocations and eli citation of the movie intertwined with a moral ly challenging storyline and subject matter . Therefore, t hrough the affective assault and the film’s aesthetic composition , the audience is brought into a fully immersive experience that generate s the aforement ioned Deleuzian shock to though t . The metaphor of the meat is a crucial haptic element through which the movie signifies its unsettling materiality and carnality. Meat is indeed a recurring leitmotiv , appearing most obviously in the trade of The Butcher , b ut also in the cuts to shots of meat standing in for human flesh. At

24 dinner with his mother - in - law, we find her slicing meat in a way which is not uncomfortable per se, but whose “squishy” sound nevertheless evokes a disturbing metaphor for the constant ca rnal attacks upon human bodies . The recurrence of the wounded and lacerated meat is perpetrated again in another analogously composed sequence, in which the focus is on the protagonist delving into crude horse meat ( Figure 2 ). The parallelism between horse flesh and human flesh reveals a disquieting sexual tinge: the stratified carne recalls the feminine sexual organs since the shot, through a parallel editing, juxtaposed to The Butcher’s hands going in the director of her daughter’s genitalia ( Figure 3 ). A t the same time, the scene conjures an abject idea of deterioration, of a body being eviscerated by a brutal annihilation and carnage.

Figure 2 . Close - up of The Butcher ’s hands touching and dissecting slices of crude horse meat. Film still from I Stand Alone (1998) by Gaspar Noé

Figure 3 . Close - up of The B utcher’s hands moving down to his daughter’s genitalia in a parallel editing with Figure 2 . Film still from I Stand Alone (1998) by Gaspar Noé

The centrality of the meat functions primarily to illus trate the protagonist’s trade but at the same time it unfolds a subtle and horrific scenario around his sordid and silent reflections. His disenchanted approach to his relational sphere and the society is its entirety enlightens the ongoing metaphor in the film of people - as - meat : his manipulative attitude aims merely to the triumph of his own survival and personal profit. For instance, his relationship with his wife is merely instrumental

25 to economically support his butcher’s trade, or when (after he abando ns the wife) he calls in despair an old colleague only for pecuniary help. Moreover, the insistence of The Butcher’s close - ups handling and cutting massive pieces of raw meat accentuates a savage and animalistic vision of the world and humanity.

“ His job as a butcher refers to his relationship wit h the world. Not only can the word “ butcher ” be associated to blood, killing and a lack of delicacy, but meat and flesh are omnipresent in the movie. Everything around him, except for his daughter, is in his eyes assimilated to meat whose only purpose is nutritive. Beyond the obvious steaks from his shop, his girlfriend is a piece of financial meat, sex is only flesh, and the other humans are only pieces of meat that he can kill like vulgar animals”. (Nicodemo 48 )

The metaphor of the body as decadent meat and the society as social abattoir structures a diegetic space whose obsessive attention is primarily on the body but, at the same time, on the protagonist’s existential discomfort and on his conduct throughout th e movie. These shots play a pivotal role, since the parallelism between the animalistic and the human is perpetrated through its material and tactile effect: the hapticity of the images and of the fleshy noises (The Butcher constantly touching the meat) fi nds its immediate grip on the spectator’s sensorial level, provoking a synaesthetic repulsion in the body. Another shocking aesthetic expedient, very often employs by Noé in his films, which evokes the materiality of the images investing emotionally the sp ectator, is the unexpected and abrupt appearance on the screen of inter - titles, often fluorescent, on a black background. The reference to Godard’s typography and inter - titles in films such as Masculin feminine (1966) and La Chinoise (1967) is intuitive, r epresenting an homage to or a parody of the director’s aesthetic from the Nouvelle Vague . Nevertheless, once again, Noé’s goal is to agitate and perturb the viewer, since the inter - titles are all accompanied by a boisterous shot, which recalls the one of a gun, and of which the human flesh is very vulnerable. The inter - titles work narratively, dragging the spectator’s mind and body in the film’s dynamic, rising a greater cognition of the situation. For instance, before the closing scene, suddenly the viewer is placed in front of an eye - catching warning: “ Attention: vous avez 30 secondes pour abandonner la projection de ce film ”, literally: “ Warning: You have 30 Seconds to Leave the Screening of this F ilm” ( Figure 4 ) . In I Stand Alone the aesthetic usage of a brupt statements elicits anxiety and, at the same time, self - reflexive movement where the viewer wonders what will happen after and if the warning is actually justified or if it is a mere parodist and joyful attempt. The ultimatum is presented right before the already analysed two - pronged finale. The profusion of tactile elements in the scene succeeds in viscerally assaulting the spectator’s body and to raise tension, curiosity and suspense of staying in the cinema room, at the same time

26 increasingly develo ping with the countdown the last and conclusive bodily attack, that of the murder - suicide committed by The Butcher, followed by the surreal happy ending with the father - daughter incest.

Figure 4 . Minute 1:09:06. In the sequence , after the pulsating red inter - title “attention”, begins an actual countdown on the screen juxtaposed to The Butcher’s inner suicidal thoughts while staring at her daughter. Film still from I Stand Alone (1998) by Gaspar Noé

It seems that the film is constructed to purposely modu late the viewer’s bodily processes through haptic visuality and, to a lesser extent, haptic sound (which will be much more significant and clearly - defined in Noé’s second feature film, Irréversible ). While the variety of aesthetic techniques, from the shoc k cuts to the meat cuts to the usage of inter - titles, work in unison with images of excessive violence and sexual perversion to assault the viewer’s senses (thus making one feel physically shocked and without motor control), this sensorial attack further w orks to make clear Noé’s transformative approach to the use of direct affect and perception. As we listen to The Butcher’s musings via internal monologue, the film’s representation of the nation’s socioeconomic malaise is accentuated through the visual and aural attacks on the viewer: the brusqueness and volatility of the nation’s lower - class citizens is physically transferred to the viewer, the film’s themes doubly inscribed through narrative context and aesthetic manipulation. This film is thus representa tive of the New French Extremity ’s focus on the body (relating back to Tim Palmer’s conception of the cinéma du corps ), and its model of not just representing violent images on screen, but establishing a direct, bodily relationship between image and viewer . And as soon as one surrenders to the bodily stimuli and provocations, is when I argue that consciousness plays its role. The only way to escape and redeem from this shock in a narrative where the morality seems to be hopeless, in the triumph of a callous nihilism, is when our morality and our subjectivity emerge. I Stand Alone does not pretend to give its audience a morality, but it does offer two different final, both radical with the goal to make the spectator stand for one or

27 another. The movie through its affective punishment prompts the spectator to find his own ethical escape: it could be through a perverse allegiance with The Butcher in his socio - economic trap, or it could be through the distance from it, but it forces to choose a redemptive moralit y.

3.2 Irréversible : Assaulting Perception

I Stand Alone succeeds in perpetrating a corporeal and spiritual alignment between the spectators and the characters through the director’s manipulati on of sound and cinematography; however, Noé’s next film, Ir réversible , makes this connection even more direct and visceral. Even though both films triggered uproar among the critics, it was the presentation in 2002 of Irréversible at the Festival de Cannes which “went a ferocious step farther, reportedly inducing physical illness among film - festival spectators and leading a normally unshockable Village Voice reviewer to denounce it for aiming to inflict ‘nausea, moral indignation and…epilepsy’ on its viewers”. (B rottman and Sterritt 37). Irréversible was harshly c riticized for being gratuitous with violence , but nevertheless was released uncensored in by the UK’s BBFC, despite pressure.

“ Irréversible was even more of an assault on audience sensibilities. A story told back - wards about rape and revenge, it starts wi th the revenge – a man battered to death with a fire extinguisher in a gay S&M club – followed by the rape , in an unforgiving nine - minute single take. Irréversible brutally divided critics – understandably, since it arguably embodies an oppressive, dominat ing form of cinema that allows the viewer no possible reaction other than to submit to its virtuoso brutality or reject it out of hand. Irréversible sealed the reputation of Noé’s work as the ne plus ultra of cinematic provocation, and as a sort of macho e ndurance test designed to test the viewer’s mettle. ” (Russell 162)

In contrast to I Stand Alone , which evokes a bodily experience mostly indirectly through images of sex and violence, through the use of visual metaphors, such as people - as - meat and the abr upt cuts framing the protagonist’s restless thoughts, Irréversible attempts to establish a more embodied, carna l and pervasive experience, in order to have as a consequence a more ponderously negative affect. It is constructed to intentionally affect and v iscerally attack the spectator’s body in the most unsettling possible way. Irréversible is the synthesis of a brutally realist narration but constructed with experimental dexterity. And it is exactly the combination of violence emphasized through the exper imental manipulation, such as the confusing flashing images, the noise with a low frequency and the nauseous camera angles that consecrates the movie as p roblematic to watch and digest. However, the movie was acknowledged and acclaimed by the critics preci sely for its tactile qualities which 28 establish a feeling of body’s pervasiveness . Starting from the analysis of this very effective pervasivity and bodily stimulations, I will move to the controversies and the moral implications of including such scene in the movie and the insights provoked by this visual and thematic shock. Irréversible is constructed as rape - revenge story in reverse that begins (but chronologically ends) with an atrocious murder committed by Pierre (Albert Duponte l), one of the main chara cters. The film follows in reverse Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre as they desperately look for a man called La Tenia, who raped Marcus’s girlfriend Alex (Monica Bellucci), who is found totally brutalized and comatose, having left a party by herself, un aware of what was in store for her in the underpass. What it is interesting to notice is that Irréversible , in contrast to I Stand Alone , begins unexpectedly by showing the end credits that traditionally are shown only after the closing act, when the narra tive ends. I believe that this strategic choice, within the logic of a movie whose aim is to physically and mentally capture the spectator ’s attention , serves to dissipate to its maximum extent the distance between the screen and the viewer . The practice o f reading in the credits the names of the actors and contributors of the film , functions for the spectator as a sort of “catharsis”, as a sort of “exorcization” of the pain one suffered, since it helps to reacquire that fictional distance from the events d epicted on the screen and from the immersion in the character s’ universe. Therefore, the experience of Irréversible without a final “decompression” where one can empty his own mind from the pervasiveness of the images, results to be even more embodied and penetra ting. Th e viewer , after the abrupt end of Irréversible , that I will analyse later on, is then led to leave the screening room with the images and the feeling still alive and pulsating in his mind and body. Nevertheless, t he first element of the film ’s aesthetic technique that I will consider is the use of sound manipulation , especially in the first thirty minutes. Although Marks’ theory of haptic sound is less developed than her notion of haptic visuality , I consider it a theoretical and stylistic el ement pertinent to Noé’s cinematic aesthetic:

“ We listen for specific things, while we hear ambient sound as an undifferentiated whole. One might call ‘ haptic hearing ’ that usually brief moment when all sounds present themselves to us undifferentiated, be fore we make the choice of which sounds are most important to attend to. In some environments the experience of haptic hearing can be sustained for longer, before specific sounds focus our attention: quiet environments like walking in the woods and lying i n bed in the morning, or overwhelmingly loud ones like a nightclub dance floor or a construction site. In these settings the aural boundaries between body an d world may feel indistinct: the rustle of the trees may mingle with the sound of my breathing, or conversely the booming music may inhabit my chest cavity and move my body from the inside ” (Marks 183).

29 Marks’s definition of haptic sound can be explained on two levels in the S&M (sadism and masochism) nightclub sc ene ( Figure 5 ).

Figure 5 . Still of t he Rectum ’s entrance, the S&M nightclub where Pierre and Marcus go looking for La Tenia, culprit of having raped Alex. Film still from Irréversible (2002) by Gaspar Noé

The first aspect, in which sound is perceived as an unclear non - distinguishable mass , is exemplifying in the nightclub scene: the cacophonic and disquieting use of music, dialogues and the multifarious sound effects contrasting one another are able to catch the attention of the victim: the spectator. In fact, the Marks’s description of an i ntensely and disturbingly loud ambiance, like the one of the Rectum nightclub, pushes the spectator to concentrate on the singular sounds, like the conversation between the characters, the painfully screams from the sadomasochistic practices carried out in the backdrop, the deafening jeers of the mass attending the assault of Pierre on the innocent man accused of having raped and beaten Alex, his friend. This sound amalgamation is mostly obtained by the work of Thomas Bangalter who, through the use of elect ronic music, immersed the viewer’s ears in a sensorial experience far from musical sonorities and rhythms and more of an inte rrupted attack. “Sounds can be uncanny, moving the listener in ways that cannot easily described or contained” (XV). We ear unstabl e alarms sounds systematically fluctuating in volume within diegetic space where the embodiment of the viewer is more intense as it is directly transferred from the protagonist to ourselves: in fact, both the soundtrack and cinematography function to clear ly confuse Pierre and Marcus to then activate in the viewer a similar sensorial and affective investment. The second aspect is that, through the presence of a volatile and hammering soundtrack, even the image t urn out to be affected from it, to such an ext ent that the existing confines between the body and the surrounding reality end up to be blurred and not distinguishable anymore, and the noise of Rectum made of random volume and sounds function to make the spectator physically

30 unsettled. While Pierre and Marcus are loosing the coordinates because of the pulsating noises of the nightclub, walking through the red dungeon interior of Rectum, the viewer is physically anguished as well: the music abruptly rears up in attack (how rapidly the sound starts and re aches it stable level) and then suddenly falls as rapidly (the duration in which the sound di minishes to silence) . In fact, the volatile shift between loud and quiet generates a disquieting and unreliable accompaniment to the events happening in the film. Nevertheless, in Noé’s film, I try to focus on the study of sound as an actual individual: in this sense sound, instead of being a property, a background of a specific event , transmits sensorial properties as loudness , and rhythm , positive or negative perc eptions. Irréversible contains two instances of sound that can be examined as they both affect the viewer physiologically in their being separated and independent from the images, but still able to evoke a sense of nausea, unease, and annihilation in the s pectato r. The first example occurs at the Rectum nightclub, where the Bangalter’s electronic music works to cause an uncomfortable experience for the spectator, since the soundtrack, as I already mentioned, is made of quick vacillating tone, creatin g a son ority similar to a civil - siren, also emblematic sound of warning for an imminent danger. During his research about sound design in French Extremism cinema, Palmer outlines the notion of low - frequency sound, or what it can be defined as infra - sound, stating that “ Irréversible uses for sixty minutes of its running time a barely perceptible but aggravating bass rumble that was recorded for Noé’s purposes at twenty - seven hertz, the frequency used by riot police to quell mobs by inducing unease and, after prolon ged exposure, physical nausea” ( 73). Therefore, the overall effect for the audience is an ugly and threatening music , made of erratic sonorities and abrupt shifts in tone and volume, obtained through the work of the French electronic musician Thomas Bangal ter, member of the band Daft Punk, involved many times in Noé’s works. Steve Goodman observes that the use of low - frequency infrasound can be “ especially effective in the arousal of fear or anxiety and “ bad vibes ”. In 2002, the brutal French film Irréversi ble […] was released, loaded with ultragraphic sexual violence. […] In addition to the intense visceral ity of the visuality of the film, its sonic dimension magnified the nauseous tone” (66). In this framework, the sickness of the body has been studied and supported by different sources; Goodman states that the physical symptoms caused by low - frequency noise can lead to an increment of the stress hormone cortisol and to a consequent high blood pressure, heart disease and reduction of immunity. Overall, to e xposure to acute low - frequency can lead to strong nausea and heart palpitations, provoking both physiological and psychological effects as great sense of unease, anxiety, exhaustion and fatigue (Ibidem). To my analysis, the significance of these researches is

31 connected to the sound aesthetics in Irrevésible , since the music desists to function as a mediator between the event and the spectator, aiming to generate specific emotions or to represent an idea of it as a sole signifier. Instead, the music in this film is used for the mere goal to evoke a bad physical and mental malaise in the audience. Therefore, e ven tough the image undoubtedly does accentuate the soundtrack’s composition in its being hostile with the viewer through aesthetic expedients like the u se dark, blurred and suffocating ambiance s , the efficacy of the movie relies also on the music itself as independent entity, allowing the spectator to still embodying these anguished symptoms. To sum up the discussion around the haptic sound in Irréversibl e , my analysis does not aim to solely investigate the psychology and the physiology of the film’s soundtrack and how it can elicit the viewer, but these findings are able to support how much Noé wanted to challenge and defy his audience through an exclusiv e bodily experience in relation to the characters. And this carnal experience is entirely obtained if we pay attention to the fictional structure of the soundtrack: it does not serve as a tool to trigger a specific feeling only for the audience, but rather it is an element that is heard and perceived both from the spectators and the protagonists in the movie. In fact, the viewers, through the emulation of Pierre and Marcus’ disorientation and their unpredictable acts in the Rectum nightclub with the cumbers ome noise that finds its source inside the club, the director is able to fully convey the hapitc , building direct connection and affect between audience and characters. This can thus exemplify that Noé does not make his movie by establishing a semiotic rel ation between viewers and screen, where the sound element interprets the events for the audience; on the contrary, the music itself transforms into a real feature, perceived both through the attributes of the sound itself and through that the audience is t otally aligned with the protagonists in experiencing the repercussions of it. In Irréversible , not only the haptic sound , as aesthetic technique for viscerally attacking the viewer, plays an important role in creating the bodily experience within the viewe r. In fact, the cinematography represents another function of the haptic feature in the movie, since it can elicit too mental and physical responses in the audience, running synergically with the music to stimulate sense of loss , derangement, uneasiness. A s I already mentioned, the very first visceral attack and body assault perceived from the viewers is the one take sequence in the Rectum nightclub. I find it an interesting choice because it shows how the director does not want to make the viewer accustome d to the environment on the screen: there are no shot that can help to have at least some initial coordinates, w e do not see any contextualization of the surrounding space . Irréve rsible deliberately starts with a disorientating imme rsion in the nightclub t ogether with Vincent Cassel and Alex Dupontel running adrenaline through the promiscuous subterranean place.

32 The opening intentionally aims at making the viewers confused, d isoriented and nauseated : the intent of the movie is not represent a sense of narra tive stability and linearity that gives to the audience the right coordinates to properly understand and become aware about what is happening in the screen. Instead, the camera does abrupt movements within a claustrophobic and obscure space privileging the use of a violent and disturbing cinematography , clearly employed to haptically defy and assault the viewer’s perceptions. The consequence is a complete sense of general confusion expressed by the schizophrenic camera movements, by the loss of control and the alienation of Pierre and Marcus, and more importantly by the audience, completely harmless, dizzy and unable to find clarity in the sequence. Using again the notion by Laura Marks of hapticity , it is possible to illustrate how the director privileges t he materiality of the moving images fading away instead their mere representational value: in fact, the images in the movie are not built to be contemplated and be interpreted by the audience, but rather they aim at showing the “real” and a sense of cruel verisimilitude. The body element, in relation to the Palmer’s definion of cinéma du corps plays a role in the fictional space in representing violence on human bodies but also tries to reach the spectator’s body, dragging it in the filmic space in total ps ychological and physiological alignment with t he characters’ moods and pains. The last and most shockingly visceral attack that mercilessly afflicts both the spectator’s and the character’s body is the central tragedy that catalyzed the murder in La Rectum nightclub: the rape of Alex by Le Tenia. This powerful scene unfolds in an ostensibly endless nine minutes, taking the stillness of the camerawork to the next level: through a medium - long shot, it remains completely motionless, simply lying on the ground, focusing only on La Tenia and Alex, for the entire duration of the shot. In fact, a s a cruelly static shot with no breaks, temporality can be argued to play a punishing role in the scene. Many film critics had point out in the rape scene exactly its inelu ctability and its endless and excruciating duration obtained and emphasized through the stasis of the camera. For instance, a critic from USA Today explains, Gaspar Noé “ [ experiments ] both with time frame and audience tolerance” (Nicodemo 62) , an d the two elements necessarily foster each other . In terms of the relationship between spectator and screen, the scene establishes a voyeuristic sense of guilt , obtained through our total intrusion in the scene, from which position we can not help the victim or dis tract ourselves. It seems a purely negative affective assault; we are victims of the director, who violates both body and mind with the same visceral aggression. The nature of our powerlessness and of our useless intrusion is emphasized and represented whe n we see a passerby

33 in the background entering the tunnel from the opposite side to the characters, only to briefly stop, like us in a merely voyeuristic role, and then leave undisturbed without any attempt to intervene. The involuntary voyeurism of the ra pe scene shares with the sc ene in the Rectum a process of bodily alignment , that I would define as an indirect subjectivity contributing to the immersive experience: as we pursue Alex in the underpass (Figure 6 ) , the camera shot behind her establishes our alignment with her, we also pursue Pierre and Marcus in the nightclub with a sense of anguish and disorientation similar to theirs, evoked mostly through the previously discussed cinematic expedi ents. The viewer is brutally compel s t o align with the charac ters not through the violent images per se but rather through means of affective violence, through a violent representation of violence.

Figure 6 . Still of Alex (Monica Bellucci) entering the underpass, followed closely by the hand - held camera. Film sti ll from Irréversible (2002) by Gaspar Noé

The motionless long - shot represents a cinematic manipulation which constrains the spectators to fully observe a merciless assault on Alex’s body, and through a form of indirect subjectivity we are viscerally trans ported to that horrific scenery . The alignment with the victim and the temporality of the scene, unbroken and apparently never - ending, triggers in the audience a full awareness of and empathy for what is depicted on the screen. Moreover , the “ inexcusable ” impotence of the viewer is accentuated from the n egligence of the passerby , spectator like us, who remained witness of the horror, without changing the atrocious destiny of Alex. The last and “fatal” attack on the viewer’s conscience, which increases his s ense of guilty and offers a complete anguishing aware ness of the narrative constructed in reverse , is the last scene. In fact, at the end of the movie, which co incides with the chronological beginning of the story, we

34 see for the first time Alex finding ou t with joy about her pregnancy. We are then transported in to a parallel dimension, almost oneiric and idyllic, where Alex, who custodies the news for herself, fantasies about her pregnancy while watching children playing in a park ( Figure 7 ).

Figure 7. Still from the final long take in which Alex (Monica Bellucci) fantasizes about becoming a mother , while the camera starts doing a vertiginous 360° rotation around her . Film still from Irréversible (2002) by Gaspar Noé

The bucolic scene is accompanied by classical music and it is composed of vivid colours, conferring it an apparent connotation of visual and mental breath for the viewers. But suddenly the camera begins to vertiginously rotate around its focus, moving away from Alex, from the kids playing, from the hope for a new life, until the spectator, after an exhausting and nauseating flickering shot , is subjected to the last shocking assault with the last inter - title: Le temps detruit tout , literally “Time Destroys Everything” ( Figure 8 ). This incisiv e final statement represents the painful reminder that tears the spectator away from that dreamlike dimension , to then abruptly throw him again into the tragic reality: the irreversibility of time. Therefore, I argue that this further narrative contextuali zation around Alex’s pregnancy has a n affective function that consolidates in the viewer a greater alignment with the victim and the feeling of powerlessness in changing the cruel destiny of the woman and her future child, whose lives are irreversibly dest royed. Moreover, as previously mentioned, the inter - title closes completely the movie without end credits, depriving then the spectator from space to outdistance himself from the abysmal discomfort.

35

Figure 8. Minute 1:33:00. Conclusive inter - title of the movie, which refers to the irreversibility of the tragic story, appearing on the screen after a nauseating minute of flickering visuals. Film still from Irréversible (2002) by Gaspar Noé

3.3 Imaging Trauma: The Shock to Thought

I believe that Irréversib le wants to highlight something crucial about why rape happens rather than depicting it as a result of sexual impulses and desires. This point is relevant to the logic of sexual violation and harassment, as rape has to do with the logic of power 3 . The brut al violence committed by Le Tenia upon Alex is a result of his nihilism, his hatred and a horrible contingency and arbitrariness ( for he does not seek her out specifically, they happen to be in the same place at the same time in the underpass). Moreover, N oé stages the revenge scene in a night - club, where Pierre risks being victimized too, in an entirely m ale space, with the idea that having the male lead almost raped at the beginning, feminises the male audience to a deg ree that they find challenging and t he fact that Alex was raped anally suggest that this could have happened in the same way to an heterosexual male victim too. Noé’s goal here is extreme: to try to trigger empathy towards victims of rape in his heterosexual male audience, by depicting a con troversial and chaotic male sexuality which includes the fraught issues around male vulnerability and traditional heterosexual dynamics. As previously discussed, the rape sequence lasts almost nine minutes and is the only time that the camera stays motionl ess, trained on the ground on the victim’s face, and the audience is not

3 Noé claimed in an interview that those who walked out the c inema during the screening of Irréversible were mostly men, and that this was a sign of their inability to empathize with a woman who is being sexually violated. (Press Conference Cannes Film Festival 2002). 36 spared any detail, besides explicit depiction of penetration. Since the movie is organized in reverse, with a mechanism of premonition, and we already have seen that Alex’s body will be brutalized, we know that she will not have any chance to escape the atrocity, and that after the rape she will be beaten as well. Next comes the apparition of the passerby, who clearly becomes aware of what is happening before stepping back unnoticed. S o the question I would like to raise is of why we are exposed to all of that? What is the goal? What are the moral and cultural conditions that spur the director to believe that s uch cruel ty in a movie is necessary? In order to attempt an answer, I believe it is interesting to consider the embryonic forms of the representation of violence in Ancient Greek theatre, whose tragedies were very often explicit in their brutalities, but where the most violent parts of the stories were told off - stage . All the heino us murders, although extensively detailed in the written form, were simply narrated without visual representation; on the stage, the violence was only “verbalized” by an announcement and not visibly staged or acted . However the propensity in the Ancient Gr eece to refuse to focus on a straightforward and faithful representation of the horror does not reveal a cultural inheritance in relation to censorship, but rather but should rather be seen as a refusal to ‘spectatorialize’ the brutality; they focused inst ead more on the emotional impact of violence, making the spectators fantasized about it, in order to make them structuring more independently their subjectivity through the narration : the audience had to make the effort to think about it to properly engage with it, to structure autonomous reflections. In this way the spectators were not passive: the didactic intent of the tragedy was to penetrate in to the audience’s consciousness. Therefore I do not intend to focus on the fact that nowadays boundaries betwe en image and representation and between violence and audience are more labile and malleable: to me it is more interesting to consider that these c hanges in depicting obscenity, and the tension between theatrical and filmic illusion and visual reality, repr esent a c onsequence of how a culture has internalized the way in which one should ponder an ethics in relation to representation and imaging. Gaspar Noé’s deliberation to stage the uncensored scene of an uninterrupted rape in a movie that could be totally comprehensible and consistent even with the omission of the explicitness, shows that the director thinks that it is more moral to depict the exhaustive trauma of a sexual violation in most the detailed way , instead of leaving it to the spectator’s own fant asy and representation. This logic of the extreme storytelling is antithetic to the Greek code of tragic storytelling , where the use of written and verbal narration triumphed over the explicit representation of the horror, because it would prevent the enga gement and the autonomous reflection on the subject.

37 The philosopher Jean - François Lyotard argues that postmodernism is characterized by a sort of “incredulity” towards the meta - narratives. This incredulity is strongly present in Noé’s belief that it is mo re ethical to depict violence than to omit it in ord er to confront controversial moral dilemmas and violent scenatios , and to create new ways to interact with the wider public through a new relationship between screen and audience . But the unsolved questio n and one th at makes the audience sceptical remains: why should we watch it? What can we learn from witnessing the sequence of a woman being raped? Since I argue that the ineludible and disenchanted vision of Debord’s arguments is still valid and authorit ative today, I believe that , that according to the moral of our everyday “ spectacle ” and to the directors of the Extremity , we are immersed in a cultural milieu in which encouraging the audience to watch the representation of a traumatic and macabre event is considered more ethical than solely thinking through a traumatic event, for the reason that it is the very shock itself the catalyst to make our conscience reactivated. In Guy Debord’s The Society of The Spectacle (1967), the philosopher and director hi ghlights that “everything that has been lived directly has withdrawn into a representation” (1), and states in reference to the society of the 20th century, highly influenced and impacted by television and film: “ the spectacle is not a collection of images ; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images […] The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass - media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, a view of a world that has become objective ” (4 - 5). In my view this formula is perfectly applicable to nowadays, where even though we do accept the hegemony of the images, the pervasiveness of the spectacle, we do not want to (or cannot) do anything to escape it. According to Debord our d ependence on our images (as our experiences) and our control of them (through technological development), democratizes them, dissipating their authority. Therefore, in relation to a movie like Irréversible and to understanding how it assumes didactic val ue, the depiction of a trauma, so accurately and uncensored, underpins a logic that the ethics of this extreme movie is connected to the logic of modernity, of a society regulated by images. The reason for pushing boundaries to their extreme with the visua l representation of taboos such as rape is not a matter of breaking the limits of censorship, but of getting extremely and visually violent to break thro ugh the apathy of the spectacle and t o adopt the logic of the spectacle as a means to pierce through it , in a social and cultural milieu that is increasingly strengthening our dependence and addiction to images as the medium that shapes our lives. So in this sense the director is using the conditions of contemporary lived experience to encourage us to rethi nk ours .

38 We can find ethical value in the extreme images (and in Irréversible specifically), for as Debord would claim, brutalities are impossible to understand without the actual experience of brutal images. Consider the logic of the spectacle: if social relationships are mediated by images, we therefore need extreme images to talk about extreme violence, rather than engaging in a merely verbal debate. To effect moral and political transformation, we need to engage with the spectacle, and seek to make it e thical and emancipatory. For instance, Irréversible itself contains challenging implications in relation to gender and power dynamics in relation to rape discourse. I argue that for the section of the male audience who walked out during a screening at the Cannes Film Festival, uncensored visual exposure to a reality of what they are feeling estranged , because far from their hierarchy of everyday concerns , could function as a didactic practice, a sort of deconstruction of the normalization of the expression ‘rape’ in humour and in broader cultural conversation. The rape of Alex in Irréversible is extremely faithful to a tragic situation that could happen in real life. It does not simply represent a trauma, but goes a step further: it emulates the trauma, and viewing the scene is itself traumatic for the spectator. Moreover, Noé makes the scene last more than necessary to the point the mere practice of cinematic representation is already exhausted. The cinematic techniques that generate its tactility and haptic ity (through sound and cinematography) function to emphasize the representative power of the violent image in the triumph of their agonizing and pervasive materiality. Nevertheless, in the rape sequence, these haptic expedients work in a subtle manner , sin ce the camera is static and there is no soundtrack, just the rapist and his victim, and this of course adds emphasis to the trauma. Noé works to eliminate any kind of distractions, portraying the scene in the most realistic way, breaking our awareness of b eing a spectator in the cinema while being at the same time a witness to the rape itself, therefore simultaneously a victim of the film’s affective assault . The film spurs us to face and confront a traumatic reality that we want to repress, and presents an opportunity to choose our morality , to bring it and bear outside in real life , which here is off ered more as a choice between two moral s : the choice between repression and confrontation , and not betwe en being horrified or not towards the rape itself . Debo rd argues that proclaiming a naked truth is not enough to become aware of political and social issues , and that those who want to commit to a militant artistic purpose should not wait for the truth to reveal itself: it must be told, and in an uncensored wa y, to make the audience face situations they have not, or have not yet, experienced in real life. Therefore, advocating for a crude truth requires new modes of communication and narration if their affective and visual investment aims to be politically and morally transformative and detached from that pragmatism and aseptic

39 strand of mainstream cinema that only nourishes the expectations of its audience. The value of such explicit films is exactly to spread with efficacy an explicit message and truth, with a ll its painful attributes instead of a visual communication that is safe and detached. This I believe should be the goal of the “moral spectacle”; the work of Noé in Irréversible is painfully uncompromising and unmediated, but it carries a more direct and deep - seated message of a truth (even the one of a rape) in its integral rawness of manner, and aims at advocating for a moral introspection on the issue. “In a world which really is topsy - turvy, the true is a moment of the false” (Debord 9 ). This statement recalls the potential and the value of the false, of the fiction that, perhaps sadly and inexorably, shapes and reflects anguishing and frightful realities.

“Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle while simultaneously a bsorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no other basis than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real . This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the ex isting society” (Debord 8).

Since we can not escape the perverse authority of the spectacle that generates a society characterized by an overlapping between false and true, fiction and r eality, representation and existence, in order to be politically and ethically incisive, we should simply engage with those images, mirror and “prosthetics” of our lived experience. We should follow the logic of the spectacle to its very conclusion, with t hat apparent unavoidable logic that regulates our relationships, that shapes our thoughts and our interaction with the external world. In this framework, it is relevant to stress that the “false” does not refers to a universal “untruth” but rather to the f ictional dimension; therefore, the image coincides with a reflection of the reality of the experience, ergo it prompt our engagement with it. Following Deleuze and Debord, trauma, in order to be understood and internalized, has to be “experienced”. And if the experiences correspond to images, the only way raise moral engagements is to receive a pitiless, vicious, non - metaphorized truth, brutal as it could be. Here is the didactic intent of the extreme; the “shock” that is the element of collision between th e two “charging forces” (the spectator’s consciousness and the screen) which gives life to a third dimension, the dimension of subjectivity, of moral reflection. Directors such as Gaspar Noè, through their stylistic techniques in sound and cinematography, are able to produce direct affect and perception, dragging the viewer into a haptic experience made of provocations, moral controversies and aggression. But if we decide to accept the “challenge” to let our body be stressed and immersed in the violent hapt icity created by extreme movies, we will find out that there is space for our subjectivity emerge. A metamorphic subjectivity,

40 that is “indirect” at the beginning, for the fact the audience’s body is constrained by a total alignment with the character’s bo dies, but which can be transformed into a “direct” and participant subjectivity that allows us to choose a redemptive morality (as in I Stand Alone ) or to reflect on what it means to watch a form of uncensored violence (like Alex’s rape in Irréversible ). A ll in all, this analysis reveals an anti - psychoanalytic approach, since according to psychoanalysis trauma (from the Greek “ break ” ) represents the consequence of an event that bursts into one’s life, producing of an extremely serious form of stress which t hreatens the very integrity of the conscience . Conversely, my point here supports the understanding and realization (becoming aware) of a trauma through a trauma. The traumatic shock does not make the viewer move away from the “object” of the experience, b ut instead it puts the viewer in contact with the thought. The work of Debord is useful here for investigating this constant pushing of boundaries by the Extremity . The movies go beyond breaking some visual taboos and censorship: they are becoming increasi ngly extreme because society itself it getting increasingly dependent on the power of images to shape experience.

41 Conclusion

“There are films that evoke what we might call ‘ethical’ forms of emotional or intellectual estrangement: confronting us with wo rds in which morally ambiguous, ethically intolerable, or politically extreme situations prompt conflicting forms of affective, emotional and critical responses in viewers” (Sinnerbrink 20).

This thesis has attempted to address the complex tension that su bsists between the spectator and the image, specifically though the prism of the violent image and the transgressive and provocative cinema of the New French Extremity. Specifically, I have focused on the two features I Stand Alone and Irrevérsible by the French - Argentinian director Gaspar Noé, as the examples par excellence of a cinema that aims at immersing the spectator’s body, through means of affective blows, within an experience that reactivates a moral and reflective engagement. Therefore, starting w ith a socio - political contextualization of the cinematic praxis of the new extreme wave in France, it was my aim to explore the cinematic mode of perception that those movies elicit, as an embodied experience that opens us up to an intimate dialogue with t he external world, through a phenomenological framework inspired by Merleau - Ponty and Vivian Sobchack. The crystalline expression of a “shock to thought”, coined by Gilles Deleuze and crucial to my inquiry, refers to an appalling experience that is channel led into consciousness and self - reflexivity. The shock to thought is a violent bodily immersion, yet able to transcend agitated and perturbed thought into something enlightening and morally edifying. However, the transition from this disorienting and amorp hous blow of shock to reflective normalisation requires a synergic effort from its affected subject: his intrinsic nature as an active force. In this framework, the shocking force is the extreme cinema is in its “violent reproduction of violence”, while th e responsive counterpart is the spectator, psychologically and physiologically affected and assaulted by the crude images, initially prey and victim to the director, and then an active and mentally prolific subject. In this framework, the synergy between t he value of corporeal and visual experience and the potential of images instilled with an affective load is sustained by the director privileging the tactile and haptic assault on the spectator, prompting a communication between body and mind, which functi on as shield to digest and normalize the shock and give a spark to the creative and reflective process. The cinéma du corps of the Extremity focuses on establishing a corporeal alignment between the characters and the spectator, whose is constrained in fee ling the pain, the anguishes and the defeat of his fictional protagonists. Moreover, it is also the ethical ambiguity of the characters that confers to the movies the absence of a prescripti ve morality and that instead spur s the individual to take a positi on and to explore his own ethical sphere , protecting himself from the haptic assault while simultaneously producing a creative line of thought. T he pervasiveness of the

42 images is perpetrated through a violent emph asis on the ir tactile properties such as th e meat leitmotiv in I Stand Alone and the direct representation of tortured body in Irréversible , within a lysergic audio - visual space, where the body and the mind establish a dialogue with each other in order to process the over - stimulation from the image s they are subject ed to . The inexorable melding of appearances with experiences leads me to the conclusion that it is precisely this blurring of being with perception that makes an unfiltered and crude representation of reality ethical. As stated in The So ciety of Spectacle : “The spectacle […] is not a mere decoration added to the real world. […] In all of its particular manifestations […] the spectacle represents the dominant model of life” (Debord 6). Therefore it is more ethical to be faithful (and perha ps too faithful ) to this reality in order to have a pervading impact, and to awaken a public consciousness anesthetized by the incessant flux of images that have lost their impact and affective power. The poetics of Gaspar Noé are constructed through an ag gressive and violent representation of morally ambiguous images that break through and stimulate the frozen and passive conscience, nowadays much too saturated with the familiarity of comfortable visual imagery, to challenge and defy the spectators. In con clusion , my reflection achieved the valorisation of the images of the Extremity , impregnated of intense reality and of “ liberating force ”, able to awaken new potentials Deleuze writes about, able to break through new creative and reflective space s, dissipa ting that mediocre and passive dialogue with the aseptic images of the surrounding reality. I suggest that a future challenging research question could be done around other forms of affective images in cinema in relation to their liberating and transformat ive effect as violence does and whether and how they could pierce through the saturated “ spectacle ” . Is the extreme a necessary property for evoking an emancipatory and moral response within the audience? Which other forms of affect are able to shock , as t he violence of the Extremity does with its haptic ity , with the aim to re - think and re - evaluate the “comfort zone” of the moral, social and political orthodoxy? And through which effects they could perpet rate that on the viewer’s body? Therefore, I believe that the conclusive questions I formulated are relevant in opening up a possible further inquiry , as my research undertook only one path of the broader issue, focusing on the value of extreme violence in cinema through its peculiar experiential dimension i n eliciting autonomous reflective engagements.

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