From Spectacle to Affect: Contextualizing Transgression in French Cinema at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century Adrienne Angelo French cinema at the dawn of the twenty-first century will perhaps be most remembered for a vast number of productions that pushed the boundaries of cultural taste. The release of what are now considered landmark films such as Seul contre tous (1998), Sombre (1998), L’Humanité (1999), Baise-moi (2000), À ma sœur! (2001), Trouble Every Day (2001), Dans ma peau (2002), Irréversible (2002), La Vie nouvelle (2002), Anatomie de l’enfer (2003), Haute tension (2003) and Twentynine Palms (2003) charged critics and scholars with the task of defining and classifying this array of artfully horrific and horrifically artful films. Born in the late 1990s, this spectacular corpus would continue to taunt, tantalize and affectively tyrannize throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century. While these films elicited polarized responses — ranging from critical acclaim to outrage — and although a number of them differ greatly with regard to theme, form and the amount of abject gore contained therein, one word has continually resurfaced in critical dialogue: transgressive. This article, first, contextualizes the concept of transgression at this juncture of French filmmaking to suggest that the move from cinematic spectacle to spectatorial affect finds its roots in modernist aesthetics from the early twentieth century. Second, through an analysis of Gaspar Noé’s Seul contre tous, this article extends the notion of transgression to consider the changing modalities of spectatorship as they are enacted in his film. If, generally speaking, transgression means to rebel against existing norms in an assertion of liberation, these transgressive films (and filmmakers) in fact impose a more authoritative hold on the spectator, thereby altering the spectator’s position and expectations of his or her role in the cinema. IJFrS 12 (2012) 158 ANGELO The labels that have since been attached to this cinematic trend — from New Extremity, to Ginette Vincendeau’s 2007 definition of the New Extremism, Tim Palmer’s cinéma du corps, brutal intimacy and ‘cinema of the flesh’, Martine Beugnet’s notion of Cinema of Sensation, Dominique Russell’s cinéma brut, James Williams’s Extreme Realism or contemporary shock cinema — connote corporeality but also and especially the body’s sensorial world.1 However, the weight given to graphic, on-screen physical and sensorial depictions of sexuality and gore bleeds out to other considerations of spectatorial reactions. This crossing of limits between spectacle and spectator, which is always centred on shock, sensation and the visceral, is already by nature transgressive and plays at the limits of representation at this fin-de-siècle period. As Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall write in their introduction to The New Extremism in Cinema, one of the only book-length studies on this topic: In their concerted practice of provocation as a mode of address, the films of the new extremism bring the notion of response to the fore, interrogating, challenging and often destroying the notion of a passive or disinterested spectator in ways that are productive for film theorising today.2 In addition to the daring thematic preoccupations of these films — including taboo subjects such as murder, incest, the monstrous and 1. James Quandt, ‘Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema’, Artforum, 42.6 (2004), 24–27; Ginette Vincendeau, ‘The New French Extremism’, in The Cinema Book, ed. by Pam Cook (London: BFI, 2007), pp. 204–06 (p. 205); Tim Palmer, Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011); Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007); Dominique Russell, ‘Introduction: Why Rape?’, in Rape in Art Cinema, ed. by Dominique Russell (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 1–12; James Williams, ‘His Life to Film: The Extreme Art of Jacques Nolot’, Studies in French Cinema, 9.2 (2009), 177–90. 2. Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall, ‘Introduction’, in The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, ed. by Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 1–17 (p. 2). FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 159 cannibalism — I contend that the destabilizing formal elements of these films equally serve as the hallmark of contemporary cinematic transgression. Broadly speaking, it seems that what makes a number of these films particularly shocking, provocative or otherwise difficult to watch lies in the polarized display of seemingly incommensurate senses: that is, the ostensibly incompatible link between the possibility of representation — that which can be shown, hence seen — and affect — that which must be experienced, or felt. But is this ‘new extremism’ particularly new? As Horeck and Kendall point out: [The] extremity evinced by these films is often as much a matter of asserting particular filiations with artistic, cinematic, literary and philosophical forebears as it is of breaking new taboos. […] The term the new extremism, then, reflects this bridging position between newness and indebtedness to the past, to a history of transgression and provocation that is renewed and given a visceral immediacy for the present.3 In light of these comments, I claim that one of the main representatives of this ‘new’ extremity, Gaspar Noé, has recourse to an earlier generation of filmmakers for whom the concept of pure representation became the mechanism on which a number of avant- garde manifestos were based. By exploring several formal cinematic echoes of horror and avant-garde film aesthetics in Noé’s Seul contre tous, I will situate this contemporary example of transgressive cinema alongside previous forms of representation — namely, Surrealist art and avant-garde theatre — and earlier theoretical paradigms which stress the performative aspect of these experimental examples as they relate to the spectator. This article thus places Noé, as one of the founding fathers of the New French Extreme, on a continuum of transgression, to support an argument in relation to key theoretical essays and manifestos from the early twentieth century, especially the writings of Breton, Artaud and Eisenstein. 3. Horeck and Kendall, The New Extremism in Cinema, pp. 5–6. 160 ANGELO Categorizing these fin-de-siècle films, two critics in particular offered differing though equally important considerations of the emergent trend of New Extremism in 2004. James Quandt, in his Artforum article, was the first to attempt a definition of this corpus. This article has curried most favour with critics looking for a term on which to hang their analyses; as Quandt puts it ‘[the] critic truffle- snuffing for trends might call it the New French Extremity, this recent tendency to the willfully transgressive’. Quandt’s piece solidified the New Extremity specifically within the art-house French cinematic tradition.4 Quandt refers to the ‘shock tactics’ of these films within the context of national cinema and ultimately concludes that such visual ‘aggression’ actually marks a ‘grandiose form of passivity’ in the wake of a ‘collapse of ideology in a society traditionally defined by political parity and theoretical certitude’.5 In his response to Quandt’s article, the film critic Jonathan Romney goes a step further than Quandt in his own attempts to trace the genealogy of such transgressive films. Both Quandt and Romney have articulated the French specificity of transgression and transgressive art. Romney, in particular refers not only to Surrealism (specifically Bunuel’s and Dalí’s 1929 film Un chien andalou) but also to Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du monde as well as to more literary examples of extremism ranging historically from Sade to Lautréamont through to Bataille’s philosophical writings. Romney, moreover, contests Quandt’s claim that the New Extremism is a result of some kind of political apathy in the face of what Quandt suspects to be a ‘collapsed ideology’.6 For Romney, ‘the new films can hardly be accused of lacking a political drive’ but respond in fact ‘to a professional numbness in France, where a regimentation of workplace practices […] creates a tightly gridded society that gives rise to violent responses’.7 4. Quandt, ‘Flesh and Blood’, 24–27 (p. 24). 5. Quandt, ‘Flesh and Blood’, 24–27 (p. 25) 6. Quandt, ‘Flesh and Blood’, 24–27 (p. 26). Quandt writes, ‘[One] begins to suspect a deeper impulse at work: a narcissistic response to the collapse of ideology in a society traditionally defined by political parity and theoretical certitude.’ 7. Jonathan Romney, ‘Le Sex and Violence’, The Independent, 12 September (2004). FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 161 What has stayed with me, and what I would like to consider at greater length in the article that follows, is an association that Romney has made between the filmmakers of the New Extreme and a theatrical manifesto by Antonin Artaud, in which Artaud outlined a concept of the theatre wherein the audience would be engaged with (and provoked by) a performance on an affective level. According to Artaud: Le Théâtre de la Cruauté a été créé pour ramener au théâtre la notion de vie passionnée et convulsive; et c’est dans ce sens de rigueur violente, de condensation extrême des éléments scéniques qu’il faut entendre la cruauté sur laquelle il veut s’appuyer. Cette cruauté, qui sera, quand il le faut, sanglante, mais qui ne le sera pas systématiquement, se confond donc avec la notion d’une sorte d’aride pureté morale qui ne craint pas de payer la vie le prix qu’il faut la payer.8 Although Romney does not delve further into this association between Artaud’s provocative manifesto and this period of French cinematic production, Artaud’s concept of Cinema of Cruelty seems particularly appropriate as a springboard for a discussion of cinematic transgression and spectatorship, particularly regarding the affective appeal to spectators.