“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 University 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
Introduction
“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 close 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 aesthetics 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 particular 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 Extremity 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 affective 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 techniques able to invest the spectator physically and mentally in order to elicit, through an embodied perception, a personal, creative, reflective reaction. 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 increasingly conservative) that inevitably brings with it a specific narrative and aesthetics, together with a specific artistic formation and sensibility. Therefore, even though I will
argue that it is relevant to understand 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 experiences 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 Rainer 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 particular, have often been criticized, in primis from the film 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 narration: 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 pushes 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 coined 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 interest, 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: the 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 unexpected 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 align and side with are often anti-heroes; tormented
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
1967, serves my analysis as a theoretical bridge towards addressing the function of extreme and unfiltered images in our contemporary filmic realm and social environment. As Debord famously asserted, we live in world where images have superseded experience, or rather become medium of experience themselves: “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 Weltanschauung1 which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified”. The universe of the crude images that makes up the Extremity 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 means of “shaking off” elements of passivity in the spectator.
Therefore I argue that “the shock 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 phenomenological encounter, and the spectator’s triggered mind which replies back with a similarly impactful movement.
For this reason, within the wave of French Extremity, Gaspar Noé synthesizes best this aesthetic propensity to combine violent and morally challenging 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 screen and the spectator does not provoke dichotomy but rather a synergy, able to release creative and unhindered lines of thought.
CHAPTER 1: Cinéma du Corps 1.1 New French Extremity: a Visual Transgression
The New French Extremity, or New French Extremism is a pejorative denomination coined by the critic James Quandt on Artforum, referring to a clutch of transgressive French films from the beginning of the 21st century.
The unifying factor of the filmmakers of the New Extremism is a new expression of cinematic transgression and an emphasis on corporeality, 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 relations between 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 directors 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 in 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 increasing 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 their 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 Extremism, 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 paradigmatic of the riots and strikes occurred in 19952 in France, when also this cinematographic temperament arose.
The writer John P. Murphy in his analysis around how “the French distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable collective displays of disruptive 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 infrastructures 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.
(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 conflicting 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 considered as the consequence and the ideological adhesion those militant movements in France against the dissolution of an intolerant 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 16th century, referring to the “[violation] of “any rule or principle, and then to eventually embrace any departure from correct behaviour” (17-8). At the end of the 17th century Julius outlines how the term transgression incorporates also the concept of “divergence”, declaring that “deviations from the rule of 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 meaning: 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 French 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 interaction. 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
helped shed the classical studio generated aesthetics of “shot counter shot” and “continuity editing”; the definitive characteristics 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 Stand 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 conventions of production and distribution and the sensationalism of their reception, propagated through online media and film theatres, arrests the possibility of labelling them as avant-garde or experimental films. At the same time these films offer an experience that is considered taboo in the popular and mainstream cinema; it 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 number of contemporary French filmmakers, evidenced by the release, in close succession, of a batch of films which betray a characteristic sensibility to and awareness of cinema’s sensuous impact and transgressive nature”. (14)
“In the majority of feature films, even critical approaches operate 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 portrayal of aggression and sex:
“Reports 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. […] the films of the new extremism 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
“[…] few have recognized its collective ambitions for the medium itself, as the means to generate profound, often challenging sensory experiences. 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, Dumont, 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 also as cinema of
sensation involves “an approach to filmmaking (and, by extension, to the analysis of film) that
gives precedence to the corporeal, material 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 celebration of the sensual, reflexive bond of subjective body to objective world” (Ibid). In this passage, the subjectivity of the body in dialogue with the objectivity of the surrounding reality forewarns the phenomenological implications of the films that I will 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 political 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 purpose 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 shock 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, whose 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 solely gratuitous and sensational, as a glamorous vogue.
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 emphasises 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 thrall 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, what 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 cinema a la Gaspar Noé which involves a full bodily immersion and intoxication, a cinema which finds its ability and value to “uncover the unthought in thought (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 Merleau-Ponty establishes between film 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.
Merleau-Ponty reflects 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 shape the one of the viewer too.
In the conference Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie held at the IDHEC in Paris in March 1945, Merlaeu-Ponty draws an analogy between phenomenological philosophy and cinematographic art, 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 thrown into the world. The French philosopher sees in cinema the visible instantiation 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 contemporary philosophy share a common vocation: the philosopher and the filmmaker have in common a certain mode of being, a certain
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 Merleau-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 cinema 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 Merleau-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 Merleau-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 spectatorial experience in its dynamism and
carnality. From this point of view, the Merleau-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 the 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 manifests 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 movement 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
representation). Sobchak transcends the argument by defining a third theory, 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 feminist 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 psychic 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 structure 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.
CHAPTER 2: Affective Operations of Extreme Cinema 2.1 Affect in Cinema
I argue that the 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 potential 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 irrational 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 transmission 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, affect 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 corporeal 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-phenomenology, as a way, I argue, to fully understand the film’s poetics, rhetoric and ethics within. In terms of etymology, 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 consideration later on the definition of shock, crucial concept to my analysis, illustrating the nature of the relation and interaction between the agent (the one who acts) and the recipient (the one who receive the flux of affective energy).
I intend to discuss the films of the New Extremity 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 claim 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 of 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 landscape, the scholar Van Alphen, claims that 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 messages; instead, 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 expedient 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 gaining the attention on a certain theme.
The 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 sign. “The encountered sign is felt rather than recognized, or perceived through cognition or through 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 from the audience, who is maybe unfamiliar, not with the content itself, but with the way
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 in 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).
Through 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 intensities 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 it to conceive essence, as the only thing which must be conceived” (Deleuze 166). Gilles Deleuze refers to affect as energetic intensities whose effects impact physiologically the individual who has to do something with it in order to exorcize and channel the 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 something 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 through 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 the 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 Extremity 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.
Guy Debord, French Marxist philosopher and filmmaker, presents in 1967 his work The
Society of Spectacle. Here, he expresses his concern and disenchantment for his society,
asphyxiated and immersed in an era in which fiction, or rather the representation of reality,
supplanted reality itself. Debord prophetically denounces the process of transformation of the
populace (specifically the workers) into mere passive consumers of the spectacles of the capital. Therefore, the images of the spectacle represent the reality of the experiences, now spectacularized and faithful mirrors of everyone’s peculiar 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 own 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 which has become visible” (Debord 10).
This very overlapping of the fictional space with reality flattened the people’s awareness, reduced them to passive and apathetic spectators, sedated from images that have pervasively entered their social life and the experiential 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 nowadays, we are 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 break and
dissipate this sort of distance and indifference of the spectator, demanding a visceral response and malaise, ergo prompting him to question the moral dimension behind it.
I would like to emphasize how the affective 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 variable where an individual experience can be materialized, even though the meanings, as the counterpart 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 inserted, 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:
“You will have missed everything when you don’t pay attention to it. But without the allegorical 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 read 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, then 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 mentioning the word “shock” 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, the most common definition of shock, the medical one, is offered as “an acute […] condition associated with a fall in blood pressure, caused by 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 encounter between charging forces. In this framework, it was employed for the first time in its
large use during the 16th century 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 equality 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 shock is visually presented by the heinous violence, as 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 work 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 had: the disintegration of
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 same 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 modernity. 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 still 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 instead “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).
Certainly 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 part 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 uncritical, 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 constructed as an 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 multifarious encounters between audiences and films” (Ibid 9).
Martin Baker focuses on the reception 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, watched, 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 ethically:
“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 save the films from facile moralising, 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 internalize, but instead they put the spectators in connection with themes of challenging reflections. And if the consciousness becomes the “shield”, they very violence can be transformed into reflection: the shock can become
CHAPTER 3: The Haptic Cinema of Gaspar Noé 3.1 I Stand Alone: 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 opens 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 butcher 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 sordid thoughts, ejects acrimony towards social minorities such as queer community, immigrants 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 France 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 private club where six people decide which movies 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,
Gaspar Noé wanted to name the movie simply France). After this, we see a scene of a man, ‘evangelising’ in a bar, claiming ‘Do you 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 Carne) 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 sets up a shop in Aubervilliers at 30, selling horse meat. Two years later at the “Hotel 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 period, she heads to her father’s shop; en route a worker tries to seduce her, but a neighbour intervenes. Spotting blood on 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 consequently places in an institution and by the time he gets 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 1980s, 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 consciousness 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 mind.
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 progression that follows a path
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 personal 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 powerlessness, disgust and blind rage. The Gaspar Noé’s choice to set his narrative in 1980 is connected to the socio-political landscape of that period, when for instance the elder Le Pen bursts into French politics.
Most of the film’s speech is composed of the protagonist’s internal monologues, and the spectator is confronted with vicious and abhorrent invectives, as I mentioned, often towards wealthy people, women, immigrants and homosexuals, but also at French society in its entirety. The irascible and sordid thoughts of The Butcher are aesthetically evoked by the notion of haptic
visuality 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 connection 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, silences and visceral effects, through which we can analyze the embodied response to moving-images” (Marks XVII). Therefore, the 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 “shock cuts”: the camera abruptly focuses on a specific subject through a fast track-in, sharply punctuated with a gunshot sound” (Nicodemo 44).
The director attempts to implement an aesthetic formula which tries to influence the spectator’s perceptions evoking 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.
While 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 carrying 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
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 deserves or desires to be born into it 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 Butcher’s disembodied monologue 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 viewer 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 unliveable 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 juxtaposition 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 tension, 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-screen
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 imagined) 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 aims 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 implications 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 every 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 one 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 what 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 feeling 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 elicitation of the movie intertwined with a morally challenging storyline and subject matter. Therefore, through the affective assault and the film’s aesthetic composition, the audience is brought into a fully immersive experience that generates the aforementioned Deleuzian shock to
thought.
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, but also in the cuts to shots of meat standing in for human flesh. At
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 carnal 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). At 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 Butcher’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 illustrate 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
to economically support his butcher’s trade, or when (after he abandons 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 with 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 the 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) finds 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 spectator, 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, representing 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 Film” (Figure 4). In I Stand Alone the aesthetic usage of abrupt 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
