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9063 results in Film

Page 230 of 454

  • 4 - Knowing the unknown beyond: ‘Italianate’ and ‘Italian’ horror cinema in the twenty-first century

  • Edited by Stefano Baschiera, Queen's University Belfast, Russ Hunter, Northumbria University, Newcastle
  • Book:
    Italian Horror Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    28 June 2016, pp 62-78

  • Summary

    Since the year 2000, European horror cinema has undergone a major revival. After the 1990s, which saw very few European horror films made, the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century witnessed a groundswell in production from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Serbia and the UK. Italy was also part of this ‘new wave’, though its horror films typically did not reach as wide an audience, nor experience the critical recognition, of its continental neighbours. Italian horror during this period also faced a great irony. Whereas several filmmakers from America and Europe pastiched the Italian horror boom of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s with films that were widely distributed and commercially well received, Italian directors shooting horror films either in Italy or elsewhere typically lacked access to ‘formal’ distribution (Lobato, 2012) and therefore their films were not as widely seen.

    It is the purpose of this chapter to explore what ‘Italian horror’ has meant in the twenty-first century as a historically grounded and transnational concept on the one hand, and a contemporaneous mode of production on the other. The chapter begins by considering those films that, while lacking the involvement of Italian resources and investors, set out explicitly to recall some of the most influential moments of Italian horror cinema's history. It will consider, specifically, how such films – what I will be collectively referring to as ‘Italianate’ horror – can be considered as both ‘art’ and ‘exploitation’. The chapter will then proceed to consider the shape of Italian horror production since 2000, and how it managed to stay buoyant in a marketplace crowded with high-profile international production.

    ITALIANATE HORROR

    The term ‘Italianate’ is often used to refer to ‘Italian-style’ architecture dating back to the 1840s, which was popular in both America and England and drew inspiration from ‘Tuscan late-Medieval farmhouses’ (Hopkins, Jr, 2009: 102). The use of the term can also be found in various books dealing with early nineteenth-century English fashion (Brand, 2011: ix), and late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century works of art (Jaffe, 1992). However, in spite of its implied lack of currency in the twenty-first century, the presence of what C. P. Brand in 1957 dubbed ‘Italo-mania’ (2011: ix) has been widely felt across international film production in recent years: firstly, across the field of horror and exploitation cinema; and secondly, in the realm of art cinema.

  • 7 - Scrap metal, stains, clogged drains: Argento's refuse and its refusals

  • Edited by Stefano Baschiera, Queen's University Belfast, Russ Hunter, Northumbria University, Newcastle
  • Book:
    Italian Horror Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    28 June 2016, pp 111-126

  • Summary

    It is a cliché to title a critical account of horror with a list of things. Things such as those that precede the colon in my title announce the uncanny role given to them and the expressive hyperbole granted objects by horror diegesis. What I find interesting about this titular evocation of horror's things is that the books and essays they announce rarely address these objects themselves. Instead, horror's things are pretexts for a discussion of the unique affective registers of horror or its exuberant corporeality. This essay will attempt to account for things in the giallo and horror films made by Dario Argento during the first decade of his directorial career, widely regarded as his canonical period. In what follows, I largely bracket the infamously wasted bodies of those iconic films in order to allow the matter that populates Argento's miseen- scène to come to the fore. I argue that this imagery in Argento is ecological, if by ecology we mean the study of the interplay of organisms, things and the world, or – as the Garzanti dictionary puts it – ‘science that studies the relations between living beings and the surroundings in which they live’.

    Is there not something ecological in Argento's camera lingering on still spaces marked by the presence of their former occupant? Objects describe the past life of these places, like the ground level close-up of a cigarette butt in an abandoned city square in Argento's 1971 slasher thriller Quattro mosche di velluto grigio/Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Or the limp streamers and confetti in a theatre trashed by a party that has just ended in the same film. The camera discovers this latter detritus only moments before fixing on a dead body strewn among it. So then a sense of the ecological emerges not just in the actual image of waste but also in its treatment, in the camera's refusal to treat it as refuse. This ecological awareness is signalled in the discussion of polluted waters in the film's scene at the fishing shack, and moreover in the seemingly odd prominence given to the shack's patchy walls, which come to dominate the frame for a few seconds and which are later echoed in the grime-stained city wall.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Stefano Baschiera, Queen's University Belfast, Russ Hunter, Northumbria University, Newcastle
  • Book:
    Italian Horror Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    28 June 2016, pp 1-14

  • Summary

    THE UNEXPECTED CONTEXTS OF ITALIAN HORROR CINEMA

    When the esteemed English actor David Hemmings passed away at the end of 2003 his obituary quickly appeared in numerous newspapers. Naturally his long and varied career was widely celebrated. Few newspapers, however, gave much attention to his starring role in Italian horror film director Dario Argento's Profondo rosso /Deep Red (1975). One of the few exceptions here was The Guardian, which rather enigmatically noted that Hemmings sometimes turned up in ‘unexpected contexts’ (Pulleine, 2003). Over the course of its history from the late 1950s until at least the early 1980s, Italian horror was unique enough, strange enough and distinctive enough to be considered an ‘unusual context’. The nature of Italian horror films varied greatly depending upon the director involved and the budget available. But a typical Italian horror might ‘star’ a partly or mildly well-known British or American actor, be directed by an Italian using an Anglo-Saxon pseudonym operating on a low budget, ape at least some of the central features of a previously successful film (perhaps copying the formula of its title), contain a large smattering of gore, and nudity, be scored with a pulsating (possibly synth-based) soundtrack and receive little or no critical praise.

    In many ways Profondo rosso was atypical, as Dario Argento had access to higher budgets than his contemporaries, better distribution channels and was arguably the first Italian horror director with ‘auteur’ ambitions. Instead, most Italian horror directors, working with low budgets and constricted schedules, were viewed more as popular cinema specialists rather than formally esteemed craftsmen. Regardless, David Hemmings’ appearance in one of the most iconic of all Italian horror films was not really all that unexpected, at least not within the context of how Italian horror cinema functioned as a whole. The dynamics of how such films were conceived, produced, marketed and exhibited are exemplary of the way Italian low-budget genre production of the time worked. However, it is precisely these features that mean Italian horror cinema has, for most of its history, been viewed as a particularly lowbrow manifestation of genre cinema. As Leon Hunt (2000: 326) has noted, there is a long-standing orthodoxy among critics of the horror film that suggests ‘“good” horror movies do not show much actual horror (Universal, Lewton, Tourneur), but “bad” ones do (Hammer, the Italians) because they lack imagination, taste and restraint’.

  • 4 - Travelling Beyond the National: Mobile Citizenship and Flexible Identities in French-language Return Road Movies

  • Michael Gott, University of Cincinnati
  • Book:
    French-language Road Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    21 June 2016, pp 118-147

  • Summary

    Films covered: Voyage en Arménie/Armenia (Robert Guédiguian, 2006, France), Ten'ja/Testament (Hassan Legzouli, 2004, France/Morocco), Comme des voleurs (à l'est)/Stealth (Lionel Baier, 2006, Switzerland)

    In 2011 Cahiers du Cinéma devoted an entire issue to the recent tendency in French cinema to view France itself as an object of interest. From regionalism to immigration, from the colonial heritage to contemporary citizenship, Stéphane Delorme identifies the rise in the past ten years of a veritable obsession with France and its inhabitants, in and beyond cinema (2011). Over the same period, and looking back a bit further to the mid-1990s, the road movies that this book is concerned with have been plying similar terrain. As I have argued in previous chapters road cinema has become an increasingly popular vehicle for filmmakers attempting to come to terms with the complexities of contemporary identity within France and Belgium – both particularly rich case studies – but also within ‘New Europe’ and a postcolonial world. A close look at the corpus of French-language road cinema of the past twenty years reveals a genre that actively reformulates the limits of national and European identity by (often literally) redrawing the map. As is common in road cinema, this concern for home – whether it be France, Belgium or Switzerland – is translated into voyages beyond the boundaries of protagonists’ home nations. Hitting the road has allowed directors of diverse origins and backgrounds to re-imagine boundaries and transcend the typical spatial signifiers that dominate political, cultural and media debates. Within the context of ‘return’ films in in particular, what is called into questions are binary distinctions between local and global, home and away, and cultural identities linked to ‘home’ and ‘host’.

    If Cahiers de Cinéma opted for a white silhouette of France on a black back-ground for the cover of its issue, I will argue here that the return road movie opens the door to a reading of contemporary national identity as a flexible concept not strictly delimited by the geographic boundaries of the nation-state. At the same time, nor are identities aligned with the ethnic or cultural origins of the protagonists. Put differently, ‘return’ films complicate simplistic notions of home that would align that concept uniquely with origins or be defined by assimilation.

  • 2 - Remapping the European Road

  • Michael Gott, University of Cincinnati
  • Book:
    French-language Road Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    21 June 2016, pp 51-85

  • Summary

    Films covered: Le grand voyage (Ismael Ferroukhi, 2004, France/Morocco/ Bulgaria/Turkey), Rendez-vous à Kiruna (Anna Novion, 2012, France), Saint- Jacques … la Mecque (Colline Serreau, 2005, France), Torpedo (Matthieu Donck, 2012, Belgium/France) and La vraie vie est ailleurs (Frédéric Choffat, 2006, Switzerland)

    This chapter moves on to contemporary cinema to examine a representative sample of films made since 2004 that introduce the geographic range, key thematic and cultural issues, and most typical modes of transport employed in French-language European road cinema. As I argued in the introduction, road movies – a breed of travel cinema more traditionally associated with the vast open spaces of North America – are presently flourishing in Europe because they articulate a desire to come to terms with new relationships to space and identity. In this chapter I will return once again to the question of the road movie's geographic particularities. Unlike in Chapter 1, which explored inter-connected points of influence and exchange, this chapter will aim to delineate the cultural and artistic specificity of contemporary European road cinema. This exploration of the characteristics of French-language European road films encompasses two overlapping angles of approach: one that considers a number of key thematic issues and the other that investigates the rich variety of modes of conveyance or travel harnessed in European road cinema. In other words, I will use the following case studies to examine the primary motivations for being on the road in French-language Europe (and Europe in general) and the ways in which the various modes of transit involved are represented and how the techniques and practicalities affect the issue of representation.

    In the following I will assess five diverse films that employ the road format to respond to the Europeanisation of economies and identity formulations: Rendez-vous à Kiruna (Anna Novion, 2012, France), Le grand voyage (Ismael Ferroukhi, 2004, France/Morocco/Bulgaria/Turkey), Torpedo (Matthieu Donck, 2012, Belgium/France), Saint-Jacques … la Mecque (Colline Serreau, 2005, France) and La vraie vie est ailleurs (Frédéric Choffat, 2006, Switzerland). The process that Randall Halle calls ‘Europeanization’ (2014) has led to new ways of conceiving of identities outside and in complement to the nation.

  • Traditions in World Cinema

  • Michael Gott, University of Cincinnati
  • Book:
    French-language Road Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    21 June 2016, pp ix-x

  • Summary

    Traditions in World Cinema is a series of textbooks and monographs devoted to the analysis of currently popular and previously underexamined or undervalued film movements from around the globe. Also intended for general interest readers, the textbooks in this series offer undergraduate- and graduate-level film students accessible and comprehensive introductions to diverse traditions in world cinema. The monographs open up for advanced academic study more specialised groups of films, including those that require theoretically oriented approaches. Both textbooks and monographs provide thorough examinations of the industrial, cultural, and socio-historical conditions of production and reception.

    The flagship textbook for the series includes chapters by noted scholars on traditions of acknowledged importance (the French New Wave, German Expressionism), recent and emergent traditions (New Iranian, post-Cinema Novo), and those whose rightful claim to recognition has yet to be established (the Israeli persecution film, global found footage cinema). Other volumes concentrate on individual national, regional or global cinema traditions. As the introductory chapter to each volume makes clear, the films under discussion form a coherent group on the basis of substantive and relatively transparent, if not always obvious, commonalities. These commonalities may be formal, stylistic or thematic, and the groupings may, although they need not, be popularly identified as genres, cycles or movements (Japanese horror, Chinese martial arts cinema, Italian Neorealism). Indeed, in cases in which a group of films is not already commonly identified as a tradition, one purpose of the volume is to establish its claim to importance and make it visible (East Central European Magical Realist cinema, Palestinian cinema).

    Textbooks and monographs include:

  • • An introduction that clarifies the rationale for the grouping of films under examination

  • • A concise history of the regional, national, or transnational cinema in question

  • • A summary of previous published work on the tradition

  • • Contextual analysis of industrial, cultural and socio-historical conditions of production and reception

  • • Textual analysis of specific and notable films, with clear and judicious application of relevant film theoretical approaches

  • • Bibliograph(ies)/filmograph(ies)

    • Monographs may additionally include:

  • • Discussion of the dynamics of cross-cultural exchange in light of current research and thinking about cultural imperialism and globalisation, as well as issues of regional/national cinema or political/ aesthetic movements (such as new waves, postmodernism, or identity politics)

  • • Interview(s) with key filmmakers working within the tradition.

  • Conclusion

  • Michael Gott, University of Cincinnati
  • Book:
    French-language Road Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    21 June 2016, pp 178-181

  • Summary

    In the first four chapters of this book I characterised road films as a cinematic gesture that in narrative and production terms transcends boundaries and avoids containment. If European road films generally retain some national specificity and have something profound to say about the place that the protagonists call home, they are by their very definition defined by the traversal of frontiers both figurative and literal. Contemporary French-language road cinema traces a web of interconnections and constant border-crossings that transcend national spaces and linguistic categories. Some of these demonstrate that language is more important than national identity in European cinematic production, as is the case with the French–Belgian space of cooperation and co-production that involves a constant back and forth of actors, directors, crews and films. Yet ‘French-language Europe’ is also an imperfect designation because in contemporary Europe films are apt to be multilingual. In the course of their voyages protagonists are often forced into contact with other languages: Swedish, Arabic, Spanish and Inuktitut to name just a few. While this tendency is not limited to road cinema, travelling films are particularly well suited to explore interactions between various spaces, places and cultures. The films I have covered employ travelling shots to film identities as fundamentally malleable and places as inherently unbounded, to return to Doreen Massey's (1994) assertion that I cited in the introduction. Road cinema therefore compels viewers and academics who study it to rethink categories of national or linguistic containment. ‘French-language Europe’ cannot be mapped exclusively along the lines of French-speaking nations, regions or zones. Rather, it is a fluid sphere of cinematic inspiration and production. It would also be inaccurate to label it as exclusively European. The films I consider are ‘based’ in Europe in various ways, with different places on the continent serving as starting points and funding sources. Yet many of them explore links between Europe and places on its fringes: Turkey, Armenia, Morocco and even the Arctic, demonstrating Randall Halle's contention that ‘Europe is not bound by clear borders’ (2014: 12). At its full potential, the road cinema of French-language Europe offers a compelling conception of a continent that while not entirely borderless is characterised by fluid boundaries both within and on its frontiers.

French-language Road Cinema
  • Borders, Diasporas, Migration and 'New Europe'
  • Michael Gott
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    21 June 2016
  • Focusing on a corpus of films from France, Belgium and Switzerland, French-language Road Cinema contends that nowhere is the impulse to remap the spaces and identities of 'New Europe' more evident than in French-language cinema.

  • 3 - Cowboys, Icebergs, Anarchists and Toreadors: The Paradoxes and Possibilities of the Francophone Belgian Road Cinema

  • Michael Gott, University of Cincinnati
  • Book:
    French-language Road Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    21 June 2016, pp 86-117

  • Summary

    Films covered: Quand la mer monte (Yolande Moreau and Gilles Porte, 2004), L'iceberg (Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy, 2005), Eldorado (Bouli Lanners, 2008), Les folles aventures de Simon Konianski/ Simon Konianski (Micha Wald, 2008) and Aaltra (Gustave de Kervern and Benoît Delépine, 2004, France/Belgium)

    ‘Where are we?’ Thus is the question posed by one of a motley pair of travellers in Bouli Lanner's acclaimed 2008 Eldorado (Belgium/France) after both passenger and driver drift into sleep on the road, causing their car to careen into seemingly uncharted wilderness. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the road movie has increasingly become a privileged mode of expression for contemporary European directors attempting to answer this very question. Filmmakers have hit the road in order to come to terms with a protean European landscape marked by shifting conceptions of identity and citizenship in the wake of events such as the collapse of communism, EU expansion, the Schengen Agreements and various ‘new migrations’ (Mazierska and Rascaroli 2006: 139–41) that have ensued. In short, road movies have experienced what Wendy Everett terms a ‘boom’ in Europe precisely because they are uniquely suited to represent ‘postmodern identity as essentially fluid and migratory (2009: 165–6). This chapter will consider this broadly European issue from the vantage point of the Belgian cinema industry, in the process bringing to the fore questions of how national specificity asserts itself within what is in many ways a fundamentally transnational cinematic category and to what extent this specificity is representative of ‘Belgian-ness’. This chapter takes a cue from the travellers in Eldorado and attempts to answer the questions: ‘what, and where, is Belgian road cinema?’ Doing so involves considering the European-ness of Belgian film as well as its national specificity and connection to wider French-language cultural categories and industries.

    So far we have used Jason Wood's attempt to delineate road cinema as a starting point for a basic categorical definition for this protean and malleable category of filmmaking: ‘in archetypal terms, road movies commonly entail the undertaking of a journey by one or more protagonists as they seek out adventures, redemption or escape from the constricting norms of society and its laws’ (2007: xv).

  • Introduction

  • Michael Gott, University of Cincinnati
  • Book:
    French-language Road Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    21 June 2016, pp 1-18

  • Summary

    Somewhere in the Balkans a father-and-son travelling duo scrutinise a map and argue over the former's preference for back roads and the latter's predilection towards highways. A French man studies a map of Sweden as he exits a ferry in his car; unsure of which route to take he decides to pull over and pick up a young Swedish hitchhiker to help navigate. A Belgian man and his young son arrive in the purported birthplace of the man's father, a hamlet in Ukraine, only to learn from the hand gestures of a local that the place they seek is actually an indeterminate distance down the road. A francophone Belgian woman meets a Flemish man on the road in France; he unsuccessfully attempts to draw a map that will lead her home down a complex series of one-way streets. Getting lost is a virtually unavoidable aspect of cinematic travel. The inevitable failure by travellers to negotiate space – at least on their first attempt – is a necessary narrative ingredient. Voyagers squinting over dishevelled maps or struggling to comprehend directions given by locals are ubiquitous tropes in road movies. Yet within a contemporary European context such wayward travellers are more than a cliché. The voyagers from the aforementioned cases are all literally lost and also, to varying degrees, lost in life. In his influential work Cartographic Cinema, which theorises a number of links between mapmaking and cinema, Tom Conley has identified an ontological function in maps within films that encourages consideration of ‘where we come from and where we may be going’ (2007: 3). In her work on European cinematic mapping, Rosalind Galt observes that ‘in the early 1990s, Europe became, as if it had not been so before, a question of space’ (2006: 1). Various radical upheavals ‘made a collective demand on an idea of Europe as a psychic, cultural, or geopolitical location’ (2006: 1). It is increasingly clear that this renegotiation of space is an ongoing process that affects not only how Europeans experience mobility but also the ways in which travellers from beyond the continent experience roads to and through Europe.

  • 1 - Mapping the Hybrid European Road: French Connections, European Traditions and American Influence?

  • Michael Gott, University of Cincinnati
  • Book:
    French-language Road Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    21 June 2016, pp 19-50

  • Summary

    Films covered: Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi, 1962, Italy), Le corniaud/The Sucker (Gérard Oury, 1965, France/Italy) Les petits matins/Hitch-Hike (Jacqueline Audry, 1962, France), Im Lauf der Zeit/Kings of the Road (Wim Wenders, 1977, West Germany), Leningrad Cowboys Go America (Aki Kaurismäki,1989, Finland/Sweden) and Lisbon Story (1994, Germany/Portugal)

    Open spaces – perhaps deserts – and boundless horizons. Long roads redolent of burnt rubber and rock music that meet the sky at the horizon and then pursue their trajectories through landscapes peppered with wayside filling stations, scruffy diners and smoke-filled havens for road-weary lorry drivers. Assorted social outcasts, rebels and fugitives wreaking havoc, robbing, scheming and shooting their way through the country, or else fleeing the long arm of the law or evading other crooks. Adventurers in search of a better place. Iconic, high-powered automobiles from the post-war era like those that furnished what Laderman calls the road movie's ‘modernist engine’ (2002). Men in search of woman as well as escape or adventure and often – although not always – behind the wheel. Flight from the oppression of society, or at least away from the constraints of everyday domestic life and the drudgery of the workplace. For many European viewers, critics and filmmakers alike, road movies invariably evoke such images and sensations. All of the seemingly ‘American’ elements enumerated above are to be found in the European films analysed in this book. Also evident are a number of more distinctively European elements, spaces, outlooks and characters. This chapter aims to set the stage for an exploration of contemporary French-language European road movies by tracing the inter-woven lines of the tradition in its American and European iterations back to the 1960s, the period during which the template for contemporary road cinema crystallised. In the process it becomes evident that the contours of the road movie tradition sketched out in the above lines are not strictly the product of a direct lineage from seminal American films from the late 1960s such as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969, USA) or Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967, USA), but the result of complex transnational interactions within European cinemas and between European and American cultures.

  • 5 - The End of the Road? Dark Routes and Urban Passageways

  • Michael Gott, University of Cincinnati
  • Book:
    French-language Road Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    21 June 2016, pp 148-177

  • Summary

    Films covered: Hope (Boris Lojkine, 2014, France), Illégal (Olivier Masset- Depasse, 2010, Belgium/France/Luxembourg), Marussia (Eva Pervolovici, 2013, France/Russia)

    This chapter changes direction in order to consider two related strands of cinema that are thematically and politically linked to road movies but are arguably less evidently classified as such. Previous chapters have considered road movies that engage primarily with open and soft iterations of borders. In those films, which I have labelled ‘positive’, it is only when European subjects venture beyond Schengen Europe that they face hard borders (explained most succinctly by Eder as police ordering travellers to stop), and in those cases the barriers generally prove to be only temporary. In this chapter I will consider two varieties of what I have more provisionally termed ‘negative’ films, in which subjects are confronted with hard borders, both on the way to and following their arrival in Europe. As Dominic Thomas contends, if ‘migration has emerged as a key geometric coordinate of globalization today, then so too has the concern with controlling the planetary circulation of human beings (labour forces, asylum seekers, refuges), particularly when it comes to the African continent’ (2012a: 157; original emphasis).

    Hope (Boris Lojkine, 2014, France) narrates a voyage to Europe, through Algeria and Morocco, by two Africans, the eponymous female Nigerian protagonist and Léonard, a Cameroonian man she encounters en route. While unquestionably a journey narrative, the film's focus on obstacles and the protagonists’ dramatic differences from typical road movie travellers result in a cinematic voyage that is unlike that of most road films. Hope reworks common road movie conventions that stage travel as a joyful platform for discovery and growth. Illégal (Olivier Masset-Depasse, 2010, Belgium/France/Luxembourg) and Marussia (Eva Pervolovici, 2013, France/Russia) both follow female (im) migrants from Russia as they attempt to secure footholds in Brussels and Paris, respectively. These two films would appear to be even more distant from the road movie template given the fact that the long voyages to Western Europe are already complete. The hero of Marussia is a relative newcomer to France whereas the narrative of Illégal picks up after the protagonist had already spent eight years in Belgium.

  • 5 - Arousal: Graphic Encounters

  • Aaron Kerner, Jonathan L. Knapp
  • Book:
    Extreme Cinema
    Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    12 September 2017
    Print publication:
    17 June 2016, pp 101-129

  • Summary

    Understanding fleshly languages as languages—structured systems of intelligent communication whose matter is intrinsic to their form— enhances the likelihood that science will identify more of them.

    INTRODUCTION: SEDUCTION

    Taken on their own, sounds such as grunts, sighs, heavy breathing, or screaming might just as easily signify pain as sexual excitation. Similarly, divorced of any establishing shot, a tight close-up of a face forcefully pinched up, mouth agape, might very well be difficult to read. Recall, for instance, Stan Brakhage's silent short film Window Water Baby Moving (1959), which documents Jane Brakhage's birthing of the couple's first daughter. Individual shots, particularly close-ups of Jane's face, are easily confused for ecstatic frenzy, but given the situation clearly register the pain of childbirth. And it is precisely this confusion, which Brakhage obviously “plays with,” that prompted Carolee Schneemann to make her frank erotic experimental film Fuses (1965).

    Tsai Ming-liang's 2005 film The Wayward Cloud is not an extreme film in the way that Hostel is, for example. Nonetheless, these films are comparable in their manipulation of (aural) signifiers of pain and ecstasy (recall Josh's misrecognition of the sounds of a consensual BDSM encounter as those of violation). Structurally, though, The Wayward Cloud approaches extreme cinema, as its conventional dramatic narrative hosts ruptures—seemingly LSD-inspired Busby Berkeley song-and-dance numbers as well as fairly frank sex scenes. Like Window Water Baby Moving, Tsai's film conflates sexual ecstasy with childbirth. Shiang-chyi, the central female character, mounts the stairs of her apartment block with a large watermelon under her shirt, making it appear she is pregnant. Suddenly she collapses, evidently overwhelmed with contractions. She pants and grunts, and as much as the act reflects the birthing process, it is mildly erotic insofar as the semiotic utterances, the supposed paroxysmal collapse due to pain (or is it ecstasy?), the splaying of her legs, her prone posture, her pursed lips, heavy breathing which climaxes with orgasmic wailing as the melon emerges from under her shirt—all these bodily expressions might be confused with signifiers of arousal. The slippage of signifiers is not an accident; clearly this is what Tsai intends, because the very next shot cuts to a Japanese porn actress—completely naked—masturbating on a kitchen counter with a water-bottle.

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