Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today's Art Film Culture

By Mattias Frey

Honorable mention, 2017 Best Monograph Award from the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS)​

From Shortbus to Shame and from Oldboy to Irreversible, film festival premieres regularly make international headlines for their shockingly graphic depictions of sex and violence. Film critics and scholars alike often regard these movies as the work of visionary auteurs, hailing directors like Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier as heirs to a tradition of transgressive art. In this provocative new book, Mattias Frey offers a very different perspective on these films, exposing how they are also calculated products, designed to achieve global notoriety in a competitive marketplace.    Paying close attention to the discourses employed by film critics, distributors, and filmmakers themselves, Extreme Cinema examines the various tightropes that must be walked when selling transgressive art films to discerning audiences, distinguishing them from generic horror, pornography, and Hollywood product while simultaneously hyping their salacious content. Deftly tracing the links between the local and the global, Frey also shows how the directors and distributors of extreme art house fare from both Europe and East Asia have significant incentives to exaggerate the exotic elements that would differentiate them from Anglo-American product.    Extreme Cinema also includes original interviews with the programmers of several leading international film festivals and with niche distributors and exhibitors, giving readers a revealing look at how these institutions enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the “taboo-breakers” of art house cinema. Frey also demonstrates how these apparently transgressive films actually operate within a strict set of codes and conventions, carefully calibrated to perpetuate a media industry that fuels itself on provocation.   

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780813576510

Mattias Frey

Mattias Frey is Professor of Film, Media, and Culture at the University of Kent and the author or coeditor of seven books, including The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism and Film Criticism in the Digital Age.

Book preview

Extreme Cinema

Extreme Cinema

The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today’s Art Film Culture

MATTIAS FREY

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Frey, Mattias.

Extreme cinema : the transgressive rhetoric of today’s art film culture / Mattias Frey.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8135–7650–3 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7649–7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7651–0 (e-book (epub)) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7652–7 (e-book (web pdf))

1. Motion pictures—Production and direction.   2. Art in motion pictures.   3. Experimental films.   4. Motion picture industry—Marketing.   I. Title.

PN1995.9.P7F735   2016

791.4302'32—dc23

2015021892

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2016 by Mattias Frey

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Transgression and Distinction: Filmmaker Discourses

2. The Aesthetic Embrace and the Cynicism Criticism: Reception Discourses

3. The Rhetoric and Role of Film Festivals

4. Discourses and Modes of Distribution

5. The Interpretations of Regulation

6. The Added Value of International Distribution

7. Sex, Violence, and Self-Exoticization

8. Aesthetic Innovation and the Real: Academic Debate over Sexually Graphic Art Films

9. A Discursive Approach to Hardcore Art Cinema

Afterword

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the early career fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) that funded the thinking, writing, and travel behind this book. I extend my gratitude to those who opened archives or otherwise provided key research assistance: the librarians of the BFI Reuben Library and the British Library, Fiona Liddell at the BBFC, and Nick Maine of the BFI Statistics Unit.

The staff at Rutgers University Press—including Leslie Mitchner and Marilyn Campbell—were as smart and efficient as ever. It inspires a scholar to know that his manuscript is in safe and capable hands. Many thanks are due to the anonymous reviewers for their belief in this project and their excellent suggestions.

Interviewing passionate and intelligent distributors, exhibitors, journalists, and festival personnel was pure joy. I thank especially the following busy individuals for answering long and complex questions via e-mail or for taking the time to discuss their experiences in person: Thomas Ashley, Beth Barrett, Xan Brooks, Michelle Carey, Noah Cowan, Mike Maggiore, Raymond Murray, and Rachel Rosen.

I tested various portions of my draft manuscript at the Screen, NECS, and SCMS conferences and invited speaking engagements at Cambridge University, King’s College London, CITY 46 Bremen, Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt, and the University of Birmingham. My warm appreciation goes to the organizers of those events and to the audiences for their helpful queries and comments.

Jinhee Choi, Hans Maes, and Maria-Paz Peirano-Olate kindly shared expertise or tips. I thank them and my colleagues at the Universität Bremen and the University of Kent, including and especially Lynne Bennett, Delia González de Reufels, Rasmus Greiner, Stefano Odorico, Winfried Pauleit, Aidan Power, Christine Rüffert, Cecilia Sayad, Karl-Heinz Schmid, Dennis Smith, Peter Stanfield, Alfred Tews, the Centre for Film and Media Research, and my Film Studies co-editors.

As ever, my family and friends provided the essential sustenance to see me through. On this project, I benefitted especially from Joe and Lila’s entertainment in the Bay Area and from まり子’s nourishment and good cheer in London.

The first chapters include a few paragraphs revised and recycled from the following essay: Mattias Frey, The Ethics of Extreme Cinema, in Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship, edited by Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey (New York: Routledge, 2014), 145–162. In this book, translations from other languages are mine unless otherwise indicated. Japanese, Korean, and Chinese forenames and surnames appear in the order most common in Western texts.

Extreme Cinema

Introduction

On February 9, 2014, Nymphomaniac: Volume I screened at the Berlin International Film Festival. The first part of a 5-hour double feature—which narrates a woman’s sexual odyssey in explicit detail including shots of penetration and scenes of sado-masochism—prompted a deluge of media attention. In reviews, critics disagreed about the film’s aesthetic achievements. Overall, however, press focused on the titillating subject matter and the personalities, including the eccentric Lars von Trier, legendary as an artistic but equally difficult auteur and stunt-master: just three years earlier he had to leave the Cannes International Film Festival after joking that he was a Nazi. Von Trier appeared at the Berlin post-screening photo call wearing a t-shirt with the Cannes logo and the words persona non grata emblazoned beneath.¹

The many articles fixated also on American star Shia LaBeouf, who walked out of a press conference after an incoherent rant about seagulls; he later attended the evening premiere wearing over his head a paper bag that read I am not famous anymore. Jaime Bell revealed in interview that at the beginning of the shoot he had to hit Charlotte Gainsbourg in the face before he had even been introduced to her. In turn, Gainsbourg mused about the prosthetic vulva she wore in the course of production; the sex scenes were performed by body doubles, she assured. Co-star Stacy Martin attempted to distinguish the real sex scenes in the film from pornography. When asked about the director’s attitude she opined that she didn’t think he’s a misogynist.²

Beyond interviews and protocols of red-carpet antics, the premiere inspired various think pieces, round-ups of recent graphic art films, and commentaries about how cinema today is too realistic and visceral in its depictions of sex and violence.³ Reports revealed that Romanian censors would classify Nymphomaniac: Volume II at IM 18 XXX, thus banning its theatrical release and banishing the DVD to share shelf space with sex shop smut.⁴ Xan Brooks, a regular chronicler of edgy arthouse fare, also produced a story on the Berlin gala, not his first on the film. In May 2013 he had filed a Guardian notice detailing how Nymphomaniac would not debut at Cannes.⁵ Britain’s leading liberal broadsheet—hardly a film specialist publication—had printed no less than thirty-four articles, reviews, and other items on the subject (e.g., the poll: "The 10 Best Nymphomaniac Orgasm Posters: Vote for Your Favourite") less than a month after the world premiere.

FIGS. 1 and 2    Lars von Trier’s and Shia LaBeouf’s stunts at the Berlin International Film Festival premiere of Nymphomaniac in 2014 represent the eternal return of transgressive rhetoric in art cinema culture. ©Jens Hartmann/REX Shutterstock and Action Press/REX Shutterstock, respectively. Reproduced by permission.

The tone of the Nymphomaniac reportage was of shock, outrage, or at least news. Nevertheless, the procedure is perennial. Hardly a season—and certainly no major festival—passes without headlines about a controversial art film. A right-wing religious group sued Ulrich Seidl after his Paradise: Faith (Paradies: Glaube), which depicts a woman masturbating with a crucifix, premiered at the 2012 Venice International Film Festival.⁶ At Cannes in 2009 the furor concerned von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), in which Willem Defoe’s penis is made to ejaculate blood; in 2004 Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs became the most explicit British film ever for its depictions of live coitus; and two years earlier the premiere of Irréversible (2002), featuring the 12-minute rape of Monica Bellucci’s character, caused 250 viewers, some needing medical attention, to leave the screening prematurely.⁷ Featuring graphic scenes of sexual violence, Baise-moi (2000) perplexed censors and audiences after filmmakers Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, who had a background in pornography, pitched their film as an artistic, feminist statement.⁸ Whether it is the installments of the Eastern Edge or Asia Extreme DVD series, fare from niche distributors Artsploitation or Invincible Pictures, or Korean or Austrian filmmakers’ latest provocations about rape or pedophilia: these films have become ubiquitous on the festival circuit and appear reliably in the media cycle, often accompanied by a critic, politician, or lobby group’s consternation at how these productions might deform our brains or our impressionable children, or how they dumb-down and devalue artistic cinema.⁹

A number of idioms describe the current trend and its subsets and genealogies, from subversive cinema or savage cinema to the new extremism, the new brutality, or the cinéma du corps. For others the pictures represent the art of cruelty, the cinema of sensation, the auteur’s sex movie, hardcore art films, artcore jollies, artsploitation, post-porn, or the sexually explicit art film. Still others categorize the phenomenon as the new French extremity, Asia(n) extreme, or the cinema of excess, or label the productions as unwatchable films or feel-bad movies.¹⁰ These vocabularies emerge and exude from recirculating and recycled ways of speaking, critics’ reportage of commercial discourses, and programmers’ or distributors’ appropriations of critical thought. Some fans self-identify with them as terms of endearment and detractors deploy them as epithets of derision. Despite the many names: these films, the incentives that motivate their circulation, and how key personnel in film culture understand them, are the focus of my inquiry.

Prehistory

For reasons that this book details and clarifies, there has been a proliferation and increased notice of extreme cinema since the late 1990s. Nevertheless, it follows a longer tradition, one which I need to introduce. Sexuality and violence were part and parcel of the earliest cinema history and prehistory and codetermined aesthetic idioms; even then, moral panic animated press discourses in North America and Europe. From Eadweard Muybridge’s first exhibitions of nude motion photography experiments in 1877 to the 1897 kinetoscope Dorolita’s Passion Dance, removed from viewing in Atlantic City because of political pressure, Dirty movies, as film scholar Jon Lewis has observed, have had a long history in the United States.¹¹ In 1911, British concerns about working-class audiences watching controversial films led to requests for local authorities to prohibit exhibitions and, in the following year, the advent of the British Board of Film Censors.¹²

From the early Thomas Edison shorts The Kiss (1896) and Electrocuting an Elephant (1903) to Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929), Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Oshima Nagisa’s In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korīda, 1976), film art has portrayed violence and, in particular, sexuality with an indulgent affinity: these projects are part of contemporary extreme cinema’s genealogy. In the early 1930s, distributors marketed films with canny conflations of art, foreignness, and the obscene. Americans imported foreign productions such as the French Girls’ Club (Club de femmes, 1936) and the Czech-Austrian Ecstasy (Ekstase, 1933), tarting them up with lurid advertising campaigns and calculated media provocations. Distributor Arthur Mayer recalled that contemporary exploitation exhibitors pitched the former film to audiences as a spicy Lesbian tale with intimations of indelicate relations between the adorable young women, a tactic that made it one of his most profitable importations. The line between art and exploitation, Eric Schaefer instructs us with this episode, has long been fine, subjective, and mutable: the rise of art cinema following World War II partly explains the demise of the classical exploitation film.¹³

Once the modern arthouse circuit consolidated in the 1940s, Anglophone distributors and exhibitors began to foreground art cinema’s taboo-breaking content in a more or less systematic way. Barbara Wilinsky has shown how upscale US cinemas emphasized liberal sexual representations when promoting foreign fare. Naughty posters advertised productions that in retrospect can hardly be called salacious, such as Rome, Open City (Roma, città aperta, 1945) or Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948), as a savage orgy of lust! for adults only.¹⁴ Local distributors borrowed tactics from the exploitation circuit to sex up titles and titillate with risqué advertising so that, as Tino Balio and Mark Betz have detailed, female sexuality became the iconic marker of European films’ putative content.¹⁵

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, venues with low admission prices featured mixed programs of domestic exploitation films and foreign art fare. Indeed, based on evidence that—as a contemporaneous trade paper put it—Sexacious Sellin’ Best B.O. Slant for Foreign Language Films in U.S., so-called experts suggested that European cinema could only attract audiences by appealing to the biological lure.¹⁶ Sometimes in hot and cold versions (i.e., reedited and renamed to appeal to different markets), art films ran in different cinemas for different clientele: self-understood urban sophisticates in upscale locales and the less discriminating, cold-beer-and-greaseburger gang in downtown grindhouses and other downscale joints beyond major cities. Both audiences, as exploitation producer David Friedman recalled, were intent, oddly enough, on viewing pictures in which human female epidermis was exposed.¹⁷ Such a marketing strategy, according to Variety statistics, could earn distributors a 35 percent increase in their profits outside of New York.¹⁸ Enjoying these commercial advantages, the distributors of European films stoked controversy with provocative designs. Roberto Rossellini’s The Miracle (part of L’Amore, 1948)—packaged together with Jean Renoir’s Day in the Country (Partie de campagne, 1946) and Marcel Pagnol’s Jofroi (1934) under the title Ways of Love—incited protests from US Catholic groups and the moral lobby. The outcry boosted box office receipts and prompted a ban in the state of New York.¹⁹ With Hollywood filmmaking and its restrictive Hays Code increasingly out of step with public mores, European and other national industries—themselves often subsidized by their respective governments to produce edgy art cinema—fulfilled the aspirational middle class’s growing leisure needs.²⁰

With the flowering of the nouvelle vague and the distribution of key Scandinavian productions, the association of arthouse and art cinema with the exotic and risqué solidified.²¹ Film historian Peter Lev writes that audiences expected titillation in imports to such an extent that ‘foreign film,’ ‘art film,’ ‘adult film,’ and ‘sex film’ were for several years almost synonymous; Stephen Garrett calls 1960s imports erudite skin flicks.²² In Anglophone markets, the now-landmarks of cinema history such as La dolce vita (1960), or, indeed, much of imported Swedish cinema, achieved relative commercial success not (only) from aesthetic innovation or authorial signatures, but rather from liberal representations of nudity, sex, and other taboos.²³ Press stills and advertisements for New Wave filmmaking revolved around women in skimpy dress; where onscreen nudity seemed insufficient, exploitation distributors added inserts to make good on titillating promises.²⁴ Only after the sensationalistic dynamics of foreign-film marketing took hold could the arthouse circuit and, later, niche art-film video and DVD labels function on a worldwide scale.²⁵ Art cinema as an institution, in other words, relates intimately to the provocative.

In turn, seminal theories of art cinema have taken its controversial (and especially sexually frank) nature into account as quasi-ontological features. In the landmark 1981 essay Art Cinema as Institution, Steve Neale writes that historically, censorship and sexuality have figured as crucial elements in the emergence and consolidation of Art Cinema. This phenomenon stems from the realities of art cinema as an institutional discourse: fundamentally, according to Neale, it is a mechanism of discrimination. Because of the need to compete with Hollywood commercially, art cinemas create the appearance of a niche product. One means of differentiation from the mainstream is to turn to high art and to the cultural traditions specific to the country involved. Another consequence, however, was that continental films differed—or were able to differ—from those of Hollywood with respect to representations of sexuality and the cultural status that those representations were able to draw upon.²⁶ Over time, the transgressive art film manifested itself as both a genre and a reception aesthetic. With the opening of a market in America, Neale writes, European films were able to trade more stably and commercially both upon their status as ‘adult’ art and upon their reputation for ‘explicit’ representations of sexuality. The aforementioned films, along with others such as La Ronde (1950), Les Amants (1958), and later Belle de Jour (1967), Performance (1970), The Devils (1971), WR: Mysteries of the Organism (W.R.—Misterije organizma, 1971), Last Tango in Paris (Ultimo tango a Parigi, 1972), The Night Porter (Il portiere di notte, 1973), Salò (1976), and Crimes of Passion (1984), established a relatively permanent genre. From the mid-1960s onward Art Cinema has stabilised itself around a new genre: the soft-core art film.²⁷ Box office figures seem to support Neale’s claims. Until 2000, I Am Curious (Yellow) (Jag är nyfiken—en film i gult, 1967) was the real-terms highest-grossing foreign-language film in North America.²⁸

What Is Extreme Cinema?

Despite frequently observing the connection between arthouse cinema and provocative content, much scholarship stops at this point, regarding the 1960s and 1970s taboo-breakers as curious anomalies of a bygone, halcyon cinema culture.²⁹ In turn, assessments of today’s iteration divorce themselves from the prehistory ("the new extremity") and come piecemeal in studies devoted to other subjects. Commentators most often consider these films in terms of auteurs (Catherine Breillat, Bruno Dumont, Michael Haneke, Miike Takashi, von Trier) or as expressions of various national or regional cinemas (new French extremity, Asia Extreme, Austria’s feel-bad movies). Extreme cinema’s precursors suggest, however, that especially explicit sex has long been an important factor in the production and reception of European and other cinemas. Upon sustained scrutiny of today’s scene, a global phenomenon emerges.

How are we to define or even delimit this body of filmmaking? Some extreme films are universally or mainly appraised as serious, high art; others predominantly feature in discussions of cult, horror, pornography, or exploitation and are largely dismissed as self-promotional pap. Further exemplars (such as the splatter horror of Miike Takashi or some Japanese pink films) are seen domestically as schlock but abroad more in terms of art or art-horror.³⁰ Audiences, censors, marketing executives, filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors, and critics make these explicit or implicit judgments everyday.³¹ Indeed, answering the question—of what extreme cinema is, precisely—poses some risks. In crucial ways, these have to do with traditional difficulties in coming to terms with art cinema itself. Recent theories of art cinema have attested or reaffirmed the mode’s mongrel and impure status and formulated it as a super-genre structurally akin to mainstream or cult rather than musical or sci-fi.³² Such flexibility can also help us understand extreme cinema and its institutional functions within film culture writ large.

Speaking roughly and simply, extreme cinema is an international production trend of graphically sexual or violent quality films that often stoke critical and popular controversy. Indeed, the trend is distinctive insofar as institutional incentives anticipate a controversial response. Premiering at glamorous film festivals among cultural sophisticates, playing at upmarket cinemas, and featuring in the world cinema, independent, or arthouse sections at video stores and online streaming services, these productions depend on (offending) culturally inscribed boundaries between art and exploitation.

Put more precisely, this book considers films as extreme cinema according to an inclusive, cluster account. This entails a list of criteria by which, if the film fulfills all the criteria, it can be identified as extreme; nevertheless, the object may still be classified as belonging to that corpus if it meets certain subsets or numbers of the criteria.³³ Not all of the following elements are necessary for a film to be called extreme cinema. Nevertheless, the more conditions the film fulfills and the greater degree to which it fulfills each criterion, the closer it will be to the archetypal center of the phenomenon. To my mind, such an account acknowledges that films exist on a spectrum and transcend facile and sometimes arbitrary boundaries of high and low; it also forecloses the tiresome game of in or out that plagues many groupings, genre studies, and canons in film studies. For a film to be considered as extreme cinema, I submit, it must:

• Explicitly depict and/or primarily thematize sex, violence, or sexual violence.

In addition, it must fulfill at least one and as many as possible of the following conditions:

• Deploy an art cinema form and/or style (as traditionally defined within film scholarship);³⁴

• Create controversy (because of explicit sex, violence, or perceived genre crossings) in its reception;

• Play at mainstream A-list, mid-level, other non-themed, extreme, or artsploitation-themed film festivals;

• Run theatrically at arthouse chains or independent cinemas;

• Be distributed in niche art or artsploitation DVD series and/or be marketed in these terms;

• Be positioned by the filmmakers in interviews or statements as intentionally artistic (or other equivalent terms, i.e., disturbing, challenging, and so on), or by provocative public appearances or stunts;

• Be discussed in internet forums and other fan cultural sites as art, artsploitation, controversial, arousing, or disturbing;

• Have been passed by regulators in the United States at R or NC-17 or in Britain at 18, uncut or cut (especially on the ground of perceived artistic value), banned (especially despite the censor’s perception of artistic intention), or left unclassified or unrated.

It should be noted that only two of these conditions immediately concern the film’s look, texture, or subject. Most pertain only indirectly to aesthetics and yet relate directly to institutional, business, functional, artistic, critical, regulatory, and popular discourses. By using these parameters I am taking a stand in the debates about whether we should examine art cinema as a genre, mode of film practice, institution, historically defined mode of exhibition, or otherwise.³⁵ My cluster definition joins up with scholars such as Neale, Betz, and Andrews: art cinema is most effectively understood as an institution. Nevertheless, in accordance with Galt and Schoonover and others, I think that aesthetics have a role to play: to cue institutions that legitimate works as such. The festival film aesthetic or also what Betz calls parametric narration are such examples.³⁶

Looking ahead, this book argues that the transgressive representation of sex and violence, long a feature of art cinema, has over the last twenty years thrived, spread, and intensified into a steady stream and predictable pattern. A number of interrelated incentives have contributed to this phenomenon. They include the long-standing need and desire of filmmakers, festival programmers, niche distributors and exhibitors, and so on to transgress and thereby appear artistic; the widespread introduction of inexpensive digital cameras, which reduced start-up costs and allowed provocative material to go into production without the need to placate nervous funders; the proliferation of film festivals and the increased importance of this network for funding, distribution, and exhibition; new developments in distribution business models and consumption platforms; the loosening of censorship and ratings regimes and the publicity that resistance from classification bodies provides; the recognition of the added value of extremity as a brand, especially when presented in combination with the exotic or foreign; and the competition of extreme images of violence and sexuality on the internet. These cultural and institutional factors, my key objects of discussion, motivate the production, distribution, exhibition, and reception of these films and will foster their presence and proliferation for the foreseeable future.

Approaching Extreme Cinema: Methodological Considerations

Clearly, engaging with such questions and issues must involve examining loops of artistic positioning and critical discourses, supply and demand, production, distribution, exhibition, regulation, and reception. In film culture these concerns overlap, interlock, and feed into each other organically. Nevertheless, the few monographs and many articles on extreme cinema have precious little to say about these matters. Dismissed as dumbed-down, soul-sold artistic self-satisfaction or venerated as rarefied emanations of subversive genius, these daring, harrowing, and often self-indulgent productions have garnered many calls for attention and yet few comprehensive answers. Most scholarship on extreme cinema comes in the form of microscopic interpretations of individual films, essentially auteurist textual analyses that seek to show how extremity reflects a national culture or illuminates a psychoanalytic subconscious. Such readings dictate even book-length studies.³⁷

While such microstudies can be valuable and perhaps necessary in an initial stage of academic endeavor, they can by design only answer certain, circumscribed research questions, for example: How does the film in question help us understand the corpus of the artist or the culture from which it issues, or vice versa? A more panoramic view is now required to take stock of this phenomenon as a whole and to acknowledge that film production and consumption take place via multidirectional and sometimes asymmetrical transnational flows, rather than self-contained circulations. In order to comprehend extreme cinema properly and as a phenomenon, this book offers an approach that engages each of what Eric Smoodin has called the four categories of film study: industrial systems, regulatory systems, reception, and representation.³⁸ The last category has dominated previous scholarship; I will dwell especially on the first three as a way to correct the balance and shift the discussion.

In so doing, Extreme Cinema partakes of comprehensive new directions in media industry studies, cultural studies, political economy, sociology of culture, and institutionalist approaches, albeit never disallowing human agency at any level or area of film culture.³⁹ Such approaches to media, in the words of Vincent Mosco, are "characterized by an interest in examining the social whole or the totality of social relations that make up the economic, political, social, and cultural areas of life. To wit, there is a big picture of society and . . . we should try to understand it.⁴⁰ For this reason, I analyze extreme cinema through the discourses surrounding its production, dissemination, regulation, and reception, probing the mode through its personnel’s ways of communicating and interacting. The complex systems defining contemporary industries, as John T. Caldwell observes, demand more holistic, flexible, and aggregate methodologies on the part of Cinema and Media Studies scholars."⁴¹

Film is an institutional, collective activity pursued by many individuals: each person works to achieve his or her own interests and responds to the motivations of his or her group and others. Distributors may want to make a profit, rescue orphan films, or achieve the status associated with disseminating canonized works of art. Filmmakers may be groundbreaking creative geniuses, naïve metteurs-en-scène, money-grabbing self-promoters, honest craftsmen, or, more probably, something in between. The film world’s social actors—from festival programmers and the make-or-break New York Times critic, to the examiners and classification committees at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) or British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), to the viewer watching the film on-demand or in an independent or arthouse chain cinema—and their interests and actions are inflected by personal biographies, cultural specificities, local limitations, and individual ambitions. Nevertheless, as Howard S. Becker has demonstrated, these social actors form networks, whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that [the] art world is noted for.⁴² Fellow sociologist Pierre Bourdieu also investigated this question and concluded that the relationship between a creative artist and his work, and therefore his work itself, is affected by the system of social relations within which creation as an act of communication takes place, or to be more precise, by the position of the creative artist in the structure of the intellectual field.⁴³ These actors and their behavior form patterns that we can systematically estimate and analyze.

The organization of my analysis, outlined next, reflects this perspective. Rather than an exclusive aesthetics or hermeneutics of extreme cinema (of which there are already many microexamples), this work inclusively accounts for the broader cultural activities that enable such films to be made, sold, and consumed, and that lead critics and consumers to perceive them to be extreme at all. This book follows the fact—even today all too often neglected—that artistic work (and especially the production and consumption of film), requires collective action. Bearing in mind Becker’s observation that art work always shows signs of that cooperation,⁴⁴ I proceed on the assumption that only through a study of these networks can we truly understand the works themselves. Institutional analysis, W. Richard Scott writes, recognizes the value of attending to the larger drama rather than to the individual player; indeed, even innovative actions make use of preexisting materials and enter into existing contexts which affect them and to which they must adjust.⁴⁵ In order to comprehend extreme cinema as a holistic, institutional, global phenomenon, and following Caldwell’s call mentioned earlier, I employ a comprehensive range of appropriate methodologies. These include industry analysis, ethnography, testing cultural theories of taste and transnationalism, assessing historical reception, and critically assimilating empirical audience studies.

One of the most fascinating aspects of contemporary arthouse cinema in general and extreme cinema in particular is the competition over interpretation. Filmmakers attempt to justify their works as art. Marketers flirt with the prurient in their advertisements and packaging. Censors adjudicate aesthetic value, interpret obscenity laws, and abrogate potential harm. Critics, scholars, and audiences evaluate the films based on their own institutional criteria. One important facet of a sociological analysis of any social world, Becker reminds us, is to see when, where, and how participants draw the lines that distinguish what they want to be taken as characteristic from what is not to be so taken. He continues: Art worlds typically devote considerable attention to trying to decide what is and what isn’t art, what is and what isn’t their kind of art, and who is and isn’t an artist; by observing how an art world makes those distinctions rather than trying to make them ourselves we can understand much of what goes on in that world.⁴⁶

With these perceptions and lessons in mind and wanting to move beyond past approaches, my most important method of inquiry—as already anticipated in the opening ambit of Nymphomaniac—is discourse analysis. Critically evaluating the rhetoric and communication of individual filmmakers, funders, distributors, exhibitors, censors, critics, and audiences helps illuminate the institutional motivations and incentives that create and perpetuate extreme cinema—more so than only assessing the stylistic surfaces or narrative structures of the films themselves. Questions that guide my endeavor include: How do filmmakers present their work in interviews and other public statements? How do distributors position their products in advertising and packaging? Which types of films do festival programmers and arthouse cinema exhibitors select and why? How and in what categories do journalists, scholars, and consumers assess and evaluate? In order to answer these queries conclusively, this book identifies, classifies, and critically analyzes industrial, critical, and popular discourses (including visual communication in posters, DVD box designs, websites, and so on) about extreme cinema over the last twenty years. I demonstrate how such institutionalized schemas reproduce themselves, in effect creating the relative boom in explicit art cinema.

Extreme Cinema

This book, the first macrostudy of contemporary controversial art filmmaking, is perhaps most importantly the first attempt to assess comprehensively this much-discussed cinema not only in textual and cultural terms, but also in relation to its circulation as a commodity with commercial costs and values. That is to say: art cinema is also a media industry. Proceeding in this way, I submit, also provides us with a better grasp of overall aesthetic meanings and cultural functions.

Previous criticism and scholarship have tended to view the contemporary proliferation of extreme cinema as a kind of new wave (e.g., new French extremity), without considering how similar productions, artistic motivations, financial incentives, and commercial imperatives have arisen worldwide. Unsatisfied with these partial surveys and theoretical cubbyholes, I offer here the first book-length examination that acknowledges this cinema’s global, rather than exclusively national, status.

Indeed, this study examines international productions but, in order to limit this broad field of inquiry, focuses on these films’ reception in the Anglophone world, and in particular in the United States and the United Kingdom. I select the American and British receptions because this book is written in English, nonetheless seeks a comparative approach that can yield insights unavailable to monocultural studies (the vast majority of film scholarship), and wants to understand how ideas of the exotic add value particularly in the Anglophone reception, where certain traditions regarding subtitling and the exhibition (and indeed labeling) of the foreign film have coalesced. In addition, there is evidence—particularly in relation to extreme cinema’s typical launching pad, film festivals, but also in terms of MPAA and BBFC agenda-setting regulation—that confirms Charles Acland’s contentions that because North America and Western Europe account for a clear majority of world box-office revenue, the tastes of those markets steer production even elsewhere.⁴⁷

For much of film studies’ existence, scholars have written about foreign arthouse cinema almost exclusively in terms of auteurism, culture, and aesthetic history. Hollywood, to cite the monolithic counterexample, has often been theorized in terms of genre, technology, and economics. Despite Neale’s 1981 demand for art cinema to be studied as an institution and Andrew Higson’s 1989 agitation for more economic and exhibition-led approaches to national cinemas, rigorous scholarship that actually took up and answered these theoretical calls was exceptional and rare.⁴⁸ While economic and industrial approaches to the history of Hollywood cinema are a matter of course in Anglo-American film studies, Betz wrote in 2001, such approaches remain rare in the historiography of European art cinema.⁴⁹ As recently as 2007 Ingrid Stigsdotter and Tim Bergfelder argued that the study of art cinema, or indeed of most other non-English-language modes of film-making, appears to have been bypassed by the methodology of the New Film History, and remains dominated by approaches intent on identifying a determinate meaning that can be traced back either to the director’s artistic intentions or alternatively to perceived national characteristics of the country the film comes from.⁵⁰ In the last fifteen years, a growing body of scholarship has begun to redress this imbalance. The present book thus contributes to the recent work by Marijke de Valck, Mark Betz, Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt, Barbara Wilinsky, Haidee Wasson, Cindy Wong, Tino Balio, David Andrews, Joan Hawkins, and Eric Schaefer.

Of course, a number of disciplinary reasons explain this bias and its persistence. They include the traditional study of art cinema in literature, art, and area studies departments and film scholars’ longstanding need to justify their activity to fellow humanists and the broader public by advocating moving images as vessels of aesthetic analysis and narrative interpretation. Nevertheless, now that film has belonged to the academy for over fifty years and entered a self-reflexive phase,⁵¹ it should be clear to all what Douglas Gomery noted in 1985: even so-called ‘alternative’ practices, be they labeled amateur, independent, documentary, or avant-garde, have their economic component.⁵² Both cultural and economic factors need to be addressed in relation to art cinema, yes, especially art cinema.

This book is divided into two parts. The first half investigates the major institutions that shape the production, reception, distribution, exhibition, and regulation of extreme cinema. The second half presents case studies that reveal how certain cultural and aesthetic factors inflect, incentivize, exemplify, and derive from the processes investigated in the first half.

Chapter 1 and chapter 2 analyze how filmmakers and audiences (in particular: critics) discursively approach and shape the meanings of contemporary arthouse taboo-breakers. In particular, chapter 1 proceeds by examining theoretical concepts of cultural taste and distinction. These are essential to the identity of extreme filmmakers, whose rhetoric reframes potentially exploitative representations as artistic and demarcates extreme cinema from horror, pornography, Hollywood, and other genres and modes. Chapter 2 demonstrates how critics and scholars receive extreme cinema by either accepting or dismissing filmmakers’ claims; it sets up these two paradigms as the aesthetic embrace and the cynicism criticism. This circular logic has become entrenched: filmmakers, the press, and scholars rehearse these familiar ways of seeing, thus adding value to their respective projects and extending the productions’ distribution and exhibition itineraries. Moreover, these chapters introduce the vocabularies and categories that subsequently function to explicate other aspects of the film world.

Using original interviews with and published statements by the organizers of Berlin, Cannes, Leeds, Melbourne, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and other film festivals, chapter 3 shows how extreme cinema is endemic to film festivals and how film festivals institutionalize extreme cinema. Festivals benefit from the media attention that accompanies arthouse taboo-breakers; the unconventional productions contribute to festivals’ image as liberal loci of uncensored art pour l’art. In addition, festival funding, markets, and distribution schemes encourage young filmmakers to develop unconventional, transgressive work.

Since the late 1990s, several distributors have specialized in extreme cinema. They are the subject of chapter 4. Often misapprehended or simply ignored, art cinema distributors’ acquisition decisions and promotional campaigns have a key role in shaping what films audiences see and in what forms. This chapter probes their interests, including the role of controversy in acquisitions and marketing.