Extreme cinema: the transgressive rhetoric of today's art film culture 2015021892, 9780813576510, 0813576512, 9780813576527, 0813576520

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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

vii 1

1

Transgression and Distinction: Filmmaker Discourses

16

2

The Aesthetic Embrace and the Cynicism Criticism: Reception Discourses

30

3

The Rhetoric and Role of Film Festivals

46

4

Discourses and Modes of Distribution

69

5

The Interpretations of Regulation

94

6

The Added Value of International Distribution

122

7

Sex, Violence, and Self-Exoticization

137

8

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

159

A Discursive Approach to Hardcore Art Cinema

178

Afterword

206

Notes Select Bibliography Index

213 255 265

9

v

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, vii

viii • Acknowledgments

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 1

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.

Introduction • 3

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. 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

4 • Extreme Cinema

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

Introduction • 5

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

6 • Extreme Cinema

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 highestgrossing 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

Introduction • 7

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.

8 • Extreme Cinema

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

Introduction • 9

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 selfsatisfaction 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

10 • Extreme Cinema

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

Introduction • 11

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.

12 • Extreme Cinema

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

Introduction • 13

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

14 • Extreme Cinema

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. Original interviews inform case studies of contemporary practitioners, including Artsploitation Films and Invincible Pictures, two US specialty extreme cinema distributors. The examples furthermore illuminate how institutional diversification and integration as well as new distribution platforms have spurred on the mode’s expansion. Extreme cinema allows for distributors and exhibitors to access a niche, hybrid audience in light of increasing competition over leisure time. Chapter 5 comparatively examines the regulation of explicit arthouse fare. The US Motion Picture Association of America has demanded heavy cuts to achieve a R-rating; NC-17 failed to introduce a modern, adult approach to extreme cinema. By analyzing public statements, press releases, declassified examiners’ reports, correspondence, and internal memos, this chapter demonstrates, in contrast, how the British Board of Film Classification has adopted a liberal stance toward foreign-language extreme cinema. Having passed most exemplars without cuts since 1998, the BBFC justifies ratings decisions with recourse to the interpretive rhetoric examined in previous chapters. These discourses help define, structure, perpetuate, and legitimate the mode as well as distinguish it from horror or pornography. Extreme cinema represents a global phenomenon. That does not mean, however, that exemplars evince no national specificities or that cultural origin plays no role. Indeed, audiences largely watch films with national perceptions in mind, reactions that producers anticipate well before shooting begins. As Chapters 6 and 7 demonstrate, this fact incentivizes filmmakers and distributors to “exoticize” extreme cinema. Specifically, chapter 6 details how Anglophone distributors foreground exotic appeal by conflating transgressive content with foreign origins. Tartan Films’ Asia Extreme label serves as a case

Introduction • 15

study to inquire into why “orientalism” remains a persistent strategy among extreme cinema distributors. Through stereotyping, Tartan’s marketing of Asian films as aberrant succeeded in creating a recognizable brand that in turn guided the reception idioms of critics, fans, film festival series, and other distributors alike. Conventionally, scholars have criticized Anglophone distributors for orientalizing extreme cinema. In fact, extreme filmmakers often exaggerate their works’ own foreignness as a conscious strategy. Chapter 7 examines how nonAnglophone filmmakers and small national cinemas actively produce explicit arthouse fare in conjunction with negative national self-representation. Using recent Austrian cinema as an example, industry analysis shows how and why material limitations, a lack of self-sufficiency in the domestic market, and international perceptions of national history and “characteristics” have incentivized local filmmakers to partake of this trend. Although the structure of Austrian film culture and other analogous small cinemas does not necessitate the extreme-exotic approach, this position encourages such a strategy. In light of the preceding findings, chapters 8 and 9 reconsider one of the most prominent subgroups of contemporary extreme cinema and its historical precursors: the sexually explicit art film. Romance (1999), The Brown Bunny (2003), Shortbus (2006), Shame (2011), and Blue Is the Warmest Color (La vie d’Adèle, 2013) are a small sampling of this substantial international trend. Chapter 8 classifies the films’ predictable narrative designs and illuminates how “aesthetic embracers” have foregrounded radical stylistic or formal designs, dark or self-reflexive tones, and, in particular, graphic, non-simulated, “real” sex. Scrutinizing the academic discourse in detail exposes the limitations of these accounts and suggests a more productive engagement with realism and reality in extreme cinema. Chapter 9 undertakes a discursive approach to hardcore art films and reveals the tension between artistic aspirations and marketing. Filmmakers’ statements distance their projects from pornography and emphasize realism, authenticity, and artistic freedom; nevertheless, distributors’ posters, trailers, DVD cases, or advertisements downplay artistic merit and attempt to titillate with putatively salacious content. Complicating the “aesthetic embrace,” this chapter argues that only by putting institutional, economic determinants and the distribution and reception discourses into dialogue can we truly assess the trend for sexually explicit arthouse fare in particular and extreme cinema in general. Finally, the Afterword locates the extreme cinema boom in the context of internet culture and increased leisure options, and as a result of product differentiation. In its conclusion it gestures toward the potential benefits of a comprehensive, institutional approach to film study and to apprehending art cinema as a media industry.

1 Transgression and Distinction

Filmmaker Discourses Approaching extreme cinema discursively through its institutions is neither an arbitrary nor a simply contrarian position. It can help classify and put pressure on the art cinema’s traditional claims to uniqueness. To understand what I mean, let us return briefly to Steve Neale’s seminal institutional film theory, in which he details how art cinema has appropriated the rhetoric of transgressing “social, sexual, political and aesthetic boundaries” in order to differentiate its product from Hollywood and other popular cinema codes. Somewhat paradoxically, then, the spirit of transgression and distinction that marks art cinema is systematized: “variety is contained both by the economic infrastructure of Art Cinema, its basis in commodity-dominated modes of production, distribution and exhibition, and by the repetitions that tend to mark cultural discourses in general and the discourses of high art and culture in particular.” Neale continues: “Even where the marks of enunciation themselves are heterogeneous, they tend to be unified and stabilised within the space of an institution which reads and locates them in a homogenous way (each mark serving equally as a sign of the author) and which mobilises that meaning in accordance with commodity-based practices of production, distribution and exhibition.”1 Art cinema, in other words, follows a normalized cycle of transgression; it produces a predictable variety, a regularized originality. In this aside, Neale 16

Transgression and Distinction • 17

broaches a key feature of extreme cinema: the institutionalized rhetoric of transgression and distinction. There are both cultural and economic incentives for social actors in the film world to use such rhetoric. This chapter and chapter 2 examine how filmmakers and critics shape the meaning of extreme cinema in the way that they speak and write. I begin with filmmakers because of the weight that their pronouncements bear in popular, critical, and scholarly understandings of this corpus. Although artworks—and especially film—demand a “division of labor among a large number of people,” Howard Becker has noted that both “participants in the creation of art works and members of society generally believe that the making of art requires special talents, gifts, or abilities, which few have.” Auteurism, although repeatedly deconstructed and dismissed in theory, stubbornly persists in film culture and especially in the art cinema milieu. At film festivals, press junkets, or on the set, directors interpret themselves and their work in the context of artistic value, novelty, and boundary-breaking transgression. “At the extreme,” Becker suggests, “the romantic myth of the artist suggests that people with such gifts cannot be subjected to the constraints imposed on other members of society; we must allow them to violate rules of decorum, propriety, and common sense everyone else must follow or risk being punished.”2 This and the following chapter demonstrate how extreme filmmakers’ rhetorical tropes pitch potentially exploitative or prurient representations as artistic and ethical and how critics and scholars largely evaluate these filmmakers by either accepting or dismissing these claims. These norms structure and reproduce extreme cinema as an institution. Such discourses have rarely come under detailed scrutiny. Like the de rigueur mentions of incursions into sexual explicitness, however, commentators have acknowledged how art cinema is ontologically connected to, or has legitimated and “reclaimed,” subversive or controversial content.3 David Andrews lists the “downbeat materials” that the mode habitually examines: “mental cruelty and abuse; misogyny and rape; violence and torture; substance abuse and sex addiction; carnage and gore; racism or the ‘exotic’; homophobia; profanity; pedophilia, incest, and bestiality; drug use; and existential despair.” In the context of art cinema, Andrews submits, these motifs “act as signs of the seriousness that is high art’s rationale.” Furthermore, the mode’s “high-art status is dependent on consistent myths that are circulated through equally consistent intellectual discourses. By highlighting the anticommercialism or the auteurism of a given cinema, these discourses lend that cinema an air of disinterested seriousness crucial to it being perceived as high art.”4 Joan Hawkins has further demonstrated that some fan communities elide boundaries between high and low in their reception of what she labels “arthorror.”5 Hawkins’s insights are valuable. They help show how, for example, Salò (1976) or Funny Games (1997), which are usually considered as “works”

18 • Extreme Cinema

by the “artists” Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michael Haneke, might be received in practice also by individuals who watch Saw (2004) or Hostel (2005) or any popular or cult horror film. In other words, these spectators do not discern absolute margins between the categories of “high-culture” cinema and lowbrow trash. In common sites of reception—such as Times Square, arthouse cinemas, and peep shows—these productions commingled. In 1990s fanzines and video-order catalogs, Zontar, the Thing from Venus (1966) was listed alongside Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) or Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Eyes (1972).6 Such points are well-taken, but we need to explore these avenues further. Writing at the tail end of the debates over the modern and postmodern, Hawkins sought to blur high culture and pop culture to show how porous and arbitrary these categories are. My inquiry pursues the opposite avenue in the debate and extends the discussion to recent extreme cinema. If these “high-art” works are different from horror or pornography often times only in artistic intension or pretension, we need to consider which strategies enact and police this discussion. Why and by which means do filmmakers and opinion leaders consider these productions to be artistic at all and thereby different (from genre fare, horror, pornography, and so on)? How are such responses codified into discourses? I agree with Andrews’s comments on the “consistent myths” and “consistent intellectual discourses” that distinguish apparently perverse or grotesque representations as art. But what precisely are these myths and discourses and, more importantly, how are they formed and perpetuated? How does this rhetoric anticipate and feature in extreme films’ marketing, consumption, and reproduction? I propose, in other words, to examine the institutionalized rhetoric behind why these filmmakers purport to engage graphically with violence or sex and why certain critics and audiences—who might otherwise criticize “excessive” violence and “exploitative” sexuality—often sanction these works. As a form of social practice, discourse analysts David Machin and Andrea Mayr note, language “is part of the way that people seek to promote particular views of the world and naturalise them, that is, make them appear natural and commonsensical. Through language, certain kinds of practices, ideas, values and identities are promoted and naturalised.”7 By asking “who is speaking?” and “who is qualified to do so?” and, furthermore, by establishing and critically analyzing rhetorical patterns, discourse analysis can demonstrate how extreme cinema functions as an institution within the film world and decipher the incentives that perpetuate its existence today.8 Investigating how social actors conceive of and distinguish their practice allows us to determine the underlying institutional structures: common vocabularies, shared professional values and behaviors, and collective assumptions and understandings that shape how people in the film world interpret and respond to their activities.

Transgression and Distinction • 19

Film festivals, distribution and exhibition networks, universities, classification boards, and funding committees provide incentives and impose restrictions that shape the forms and values of art cinema. A “central logic”—in the form of “material practices and symbolic constructions”—arises as a principle of organization and marker of identity.9 Such a logic characterizes the rhetoric of extreme filmmakers, their audiences, and their critics; this legitimation—such as the type that Andrews refers to vis-à-vis the art film and controversial or “lowbrow” content—generally takes place through language and other forms of communication.10

Transgression and Distinction Transgression underpins extreme cinema discourse, perhaps more so than any other concept. In his monograph on the history of thought on the subject, sociologist Chris Jenks defines transgression as the willingness “to go beyond the bounds or limits set by a commandment or law or convention, it is to violate or infringe. . . . Transgression, then, is that conduct which breaks rules or exceeds boundaries.”11 These boundaries, according to Jenks and other thinkers who precede him, often take the form of taboos, that is, prohibitions set by social codes “around a whole range of possible phenomena from specific things, through places, to people and, most significantly, to courses of action.”12 In many ways taboos and transgressions are inseparable phenomena: “the transgression detabilises the taboo but in doing so ensures its effectiveness.”13 A whole history of thought revolves around notions of the “sacred” and the (transgressive) “profane.” “The sacred thing” is in the minds of many, according to Émile Durkheim, “par excellence that which the profane should not touch, and cannot touch with impunity.”14 These metaphors and related ones—such as those of contagion and infection by the taboo—are common tropes in the rhetoric surrounding extreme cinema culture. Georges Bataille’s notions of transgression, by which erotic and violent representation serves a subversive potential, seem to resonate especially with today’s arthouse taboo-breakers.15 Transgression shares conceptual affinities with novelty: transgressive rhetoric always presents itself as “a step into the unknown and a step that is without precedent.” Nevertheless, even within the often radical designs of transgression, which for Jenks include both artists’ stunts and serial killers’ deeds, a certain stability and rational order preside. “Transgressive behaviour therefore does not deny limits or boundaries, rather it exceeds them and thus completes them.” It “ensures stability by reaffirming the rule. Transgression is not the same as disorder; it opens up chaos and reminds us of the necessity of order.” The paradoxical regularity of novelty gestures again toward its institutional function in extreme film culture and in the art world in general. After all, as

20 • Extreme Cinema

Jenks submits, “these kinds of questions have always been raised but in liminal zones within the culture such as the avant-garde, radical political movements (anarchism and situationism) and counter cultural traditions in creative practices (Surrealism).”16 The notion of transgression—with its emphasis on innovation, taboobreaking, and infection—anticipates extreme cinema culture’s rhetorical tropes and artistic habitus. Filmmakers continually project and confirm their identity as a boundary-breaking, radical artist in interviews and media performances. In general, institutions incentivize routine behaviors to reproduce and persist, in order for that institution to survive.17 This fact also pertains to art worlds, which “routinely create and use reputations, because they have an interest in individuals and what they have done and can do.”18 Specifically, as Becker has further observed, artists have motivations to exhibit behavior inimical to accepted social norms. It is here that we recognize the carefully cultivated reputations— whether deserved or not—of Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, and others, as eccentric, exotic, volatile, or as “particularly difficult” to work with. The preprogrammed provocation and outrage over Lars von Trier’s “I’m a Nazi” comment at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival resound with art sociologists’ findings.19 Artists need to differentiate themselves from mainstream values and social norms. Indeed, it is essential to their identity; in our culture, it is a good part of what makes artists “artists,” rather than craftsmen or decorators.20 Save those fortunate enough to be independently wealthy, artists—like other professionals— are materially dependent, whether on private finance or public subsidies. Nevertheless, they—unlike, say, lawyers or clockmakers—entertain the fantasy of disinterestedness: they project a distance from economic and social necessity, promote art for art’s sake, or interpret artistic creation as their self-expression rather than a commercial output. Above and beyond, the art itself expresses this identity and encompasses eccentric, abject, or other transgressive representations, forms, and attitudes opposed to bourgeois respectability, restraint, or normality. As art historian John A. Walker has demonstrated, “provocation and outrage” have been crucial components of visual art since at least the nineteenth century.21 Pierre Bourdieu predicted that the film world would become increasingly and especially prone to such positionings and behaviors, because of its relative novelty as an art and concomitant need to compete for cultural legitimacy. According to Bourdieu, as “the intellectual field gains in autonomy, the artist declares more and more firmly his claim to independence and his indifference to the public.”22 These ideas will be borne out in the comments of Gaspar Noé, Haneke, and other extreme filmmakers that we shall examine in this chapter. Besides transgression, distinction is the most important conceptual framework for extreme cinema rhetoric. At its core, distinction is a matter of taste; like transgression, it hinges on oppositions, borderlines, and subversions.

Transgression and Distinction • 21

Extreme cinema often defines itself against other genres or production trends with which it shares affinities. Defenders of art films with explicit sexual content, such as Romance (1999) or 9 Songs (2004), stress their differences from pornography. Other extreme films, such as Funny Games (1997), The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael (2005), or Leap Year (Año bisiesto, 2010), thematize violence, imprisonment, and torture. In turn, their commentators interpret them in opposition to what has been termed “torture porn,” that is, a cycle of lowbrow films that “construct scenes of torture as elaborate set pieces, or ‘numbers,’ intended to serve as focal points for the viewer’s visual pleasure, and (in critics’ view) for which the narrative is merely a flimsy pretext.”23 These include the Saw franchise, Hostel and its 2007 follow-up, The Devil’s Rejects (2005), Turistas (2006), Captivity (2007), The Human Centipede (2009) and its sequels, and others.24 Many extreme filmmakers avail themselves of art cinematic discourses of product differentiation from Hollywood and rail against “commercial” filmmaking or the prevailing cinema in their home country or region. Although extreme cinema shares substantial narrative and aesthetic devices with (torture) porn, both its creators and many critics attempt to differentiate the projects. In order to distinguish itself from the popular mainstream and cult, extreme cinema trades on appeals to distinction and alternative taste that have long been endemic to arthouse cinema. Despite the consolidation of the circuit, this phenomenon is a common marketing technique even today. Extreme cinema, a subset of art cinema that uses and exaggerates strategies of popular, cult, and exploitation movies, depends on this image of difference in order to be seen as legitimate and distinguish itself from these other forms.25 Specifically, the institutional integrity of extreme cinema depends on two distinctions: (1) the creators’ intentions (or pretensions) to produce something more sophisticated than horror or pornography; and (2) critics’ and consumers’ belief to have the rarefied taste to appreciate larger, deeper meanings beyond the obvious or graphic violence or sex. Understanding these exaggerations as such—that is, recognizing irony, excess, allegory, self-reflexivity, and other tactics that these films employ to assert their status as extreme cinema— distinguishes the consumer or critic as being a member of this special group. This applies whether this understanding takes the form of a redemptive review or even the alternative positioning that one likes or enjoys watching the gory representations. Bourdieu describes such an aesthetic positioning as the “pure gaze” or “pure taste,” a “quasi-creative power which sets the aesthete apart from the common herd.”26 The pure taste rejects easy, facile, bland, common, accessible aesthetic forms that allow for simple and sensual identification and pleasures. While the popular taste is intimately and primarily interested in the immediately and clearly beautiful, the pure taste indulges “indifference and distance” toward

22 • Extreme Cinema

the very question of content (or, indeed, praises the “ugly”) in favor of matters of intricate, challenging, or innovative form. Bourdieu’s categories help explain the apparent paradox of extreme cinema as an artistic, ethical sanctioning of the vulgar. On the one hand, this recuperation of the prurient, ugly, or disgusting—a key characteristic of extreme cinema culture—deemphasizes or overturns the idea of the aesthetic and adheres to Bourdieu’s formulation of the “pure gaze.” On the other hand, of course, the indulgence of the animalistic, the violent, and the sexual by itself constitutes an engagement of the profane; in common parlance, extreme cinema is slumming: “secure opportunities for intellectuals to sample the emotional charge of popular culture while guaranteeing their immunity from its power to constitute social identities that are in some way marked as subordinate.”27 Artists’ and critics’ recuperation of “ugly” or “downbeat materials” has a long tradition. It depends on its own meta-distinction: the aesthete-critic’s intellectual perception of the base or dangerous object. Andrew Ross has demonstrated how, time and again, artists and intellectuals have laid claim to the ability to separate their appreciation of sexually explicit art from a visceral, emotional response typical of Bourdieu’s popular taste.28 Ross offers the example of Susan Sontag’s recuperation of French erotic writing, “The Pornographic Imagination,” in which she argued that Georges Bataille and others produced not pornography in its contemporary patriarchal, lowbrow understanding, but rather genuine literature.29 Speaking of a sublime, intellectual genealogy of pornography, Sontag redeemed a tradition of (French, avantgarde) sex literature as “the pornographic imagination.” Later addressing an interviewer’s question as to what distinguishes “the pornographic imagination” from other iterations of erotic culture, Sontag claimed that the former “treats sexuality as an extreme situation,” meaning that “what pornography depicts is in one obvious sense, quite unrealistic.”30 This rhetorical gesture retrieves Bourdieu’s insistence on the “pure taste” as focusing on the stylized and defamiliarized. Sontag’s recuperation of pornography clearly relies on a very important distinction between, simply stated, “good” intellectual eroticism and “bad” lowbrow exploitation. In Ross’s terms, Sontag’s “pornographic imagination” is “a realm of radical chic pleasure, far removed from the semen-stained squalor of the peep show, the strip joint, the video arcade, and other sites of popular pornotopian fantasy.”31 Sontag’s case for pornography as serious belles lettres is an act of distinction that celebrates a literature of extremity which is transgressive in production and liberating in consumption—that is, for those privileged consumers, who because of “subtle and extensive psychic preparation,”32 are able to understand its subversion. As we shall see, the interpretation of transgression as artistic or moral and the supposed cognitive capability to “distinguish” and “appreciate” on an

Transgression and Distinction • 23

aesthetic level (the distinction discourse) are important for both the critics and the makers of extreme cinema. This putative disinterestedness enables an ethical stance toward, and aesthetic embrace of, the work. Distinction becomes the source of status for both the artist and the critic; enforcing differences perpetuates extreme cinema as an institution. Just as consuming art and foreign-language films constitutes one way to distinguish oneself from others in middle-class society, the ability to “appreciate” sex and violence on an aesthetic rather than physiological level becomes a means to establish oneself as part of a discerning taste culture. Stated simply, it is the ability to handle a hot object without being burned, to be exposed to illness without becoming infected. Bourdieu calls this “moral agnosticism”: the special ability that some profess to have to appreciate art for art’s sake and apart from moral quandaries.33

The Rhetoric of Extreme Filmmakers: Artistic Identity, Aesthetic Value, and Moral Agnosticism Time and again in statements and interviews, extreme cinema’s directors claim the capacity to distinguish between exploitative representations of violence and sexuality and a higher, critical appropriation. In theoretical declarations or sophisticated interpretations of their work, the filmmakers actively create a distance to their object of inquiry that makes them immune to its potential for titillation. Here we will begin to see the first benefits of studying social phenomena via socially situated, naturally occurring language use; contextspecific focus on texts and interviews; nonverbal, visual, and multimodal communication; and an expansive analysis that includes metaphors, coherence, recurring topics, argumentation, and rhetoric.34 Examining discourse illuminates extreme cinema culture; the language deployed in this social sphere influences it as an institutional form. In particular, scrutinizing extreme filmmakers’ public statements reveals a persistent feature: a “moral agnosticism” toward sexuality, violence, and violent sexuality, but one developed in a higher service of morality and art. It is vital to understand the context of these ex post facto interventions. Whether disseminated as published production notes, DVD commentaries, public addresses in cinemas or museums, essays in journalistic or scholarly publications, answers in newspaper or magazine interviews, or statements on websites, these pronouncements and performances seek to shape the reception of graphically violent or sexual film as a higher form of art. The sophistication and very existence of these statements distinguish extreme cinema from Saw or Hostel or a YouPorn or PornHub video, whose makers assert no great claims to artistic intentions, nor deny their primary function as emotional—rather than intellectual—experiences.

24 • Extreme Cinema

The ethical, artistic imperative of extreme cinema, in other words, derives from the very articulation of a potentially aesthetic, moral, or intellectual objective. The expression of artistic or ethical intention distinguishes these films as “extreme” by gesturing toward a transcendent purpose. If pornography aims for arousal or sexual gratification and conventional horror delivers a tactical disgust (that is, moments of repulsion that ultimately serve the narrative’s larger, strategic goal of entertainment), the media performances of extreme filmmakers animate altogether different claims: a transgressive realism, a commitment to disturb, a pedagogical instruction to self-reflection, or, even, an invitation to end the screening.35 Let us recall the Nymphomaniac (2014) filmmakers’ hijinks and public statements. The actors differentiated the film from pornography and posited that the director had artistic, rather than misogynistic, intentions. Von Trier adopted a radical chic at the Berlinale: his non-appearance at the press conference and t-shirt (referring to his persona non grata status at Cannes) at the photo call foregrounded his rebellious, artistic habitus. Even Shia LaBeouf ’s public rant about birds and the paper bag he wore over his head to the gala premiere contributed to the press’s transgressive characterization of the film and its creators. Such commentary and stunts are par for the course in contemporary extreme cinema. Regularized and institutionalized, they are perennial and widespread, regardless of the filmmakers’ age, creed, or country of origin. Another common tactic is the defense of explicit projects as allegorical and thus intellectually, politically, and artistically worthwhile. Bruno Dumont, whose Twentynine Palms (2003) depicts graphic sex and rape, alleged in an interview that his road movie horror was in fact a critique of the United States and modern civilization and a “terrorist attack” on American cinema.36 The makers of A Serbian Film (Srpski film, 2010), in which a former porn actor is deceived into raping his own son, claimed likewise that the proceedings represented a political fable. “This is a diary of our own molestation by the Serbian government,” director, writer, and producer Srdjan Spasojevic told an audience in a post-screening question-and-answer session at the South by Southwest Film Festival. “It’s about the monolithic power of leaders who hypnotize you to do things you don’t want to do.”37 Even Miike Takashi, called the “bad boy of Japanese cinema”38 for projects such as the incest-themed splatterfest Visitor Q (Bijitā Q, 2001), has cued cultural interpretations in interviews. Asked why he depicts violence so often and graphically, Miike responded that “film takes up the slack of what is not expressed in society. Obviously it is good that Japan is a safe place, but I wonder if there is something unnatural about the placidity of Japanese society.”39 The logic of Miike’s statement implies that the extreme violence in his films intends to symptomatically reveal and criticize the repressed aggressions in the domestic landscape. He, Dumont, and

Transgression and Distinction • 25

Spasojevic steer discussions away from the surface-level gore and prurience and gesture toward hidden, deeper purposes. Gaspar Noé evinces another key example of an alternative discursive strategy. His films are regularly abandoned in festival screenings; he provokes critics and audiences with literal appeals to leave. I Stand Alone (Seul contre tous, 1998) opens with the message: “ATTENTION/YOU HAVE 30 SECONDS TO LEAVE THE SCREENING OF THIS FILM.” Flashing on the screen, the 30 seconds count down in real time to 29, 28, 27, and so on. Noé’s later production Irreversible (Irréversible, 2002) not only depicts graphic and gruesome violence and rape, it includes strobe lights engineered to induce epileptic seizures and sounds at frequencies designed to cause headaches. In an article he wrote for The Guardian entitled “I’m Happy Some People Walk Out during My Film,” Noé programmatically expresses extreme cinema culture’s enduring rhetoric. Addressing the aims of I Stand Alone, Noé recalls Jenks’s sketch of transgression and refers to the basic human need to “feel free.” This is “hard to fulfil because of all the barriers preventing us from feeling free,” so “You have to destroy barriers along your way.”40 Part of this artistic freedom requires the challenge of censorship: “In the event of a revolution I would give the British Board of Film Classification address to the madding crowd and offer them some axes.” His purported ultimate ambition is to breach boundaries: the director asserted that “if you want the show to have any emotional impact, then you had better push [graphic violence] further than you yourself have seen in other movies.” Shock, according to Noé, “is not a goal, it’s a medium.” Comparing himself to Alan Clarke, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Luis Buñuel—a frequent tactic that demonstrates aesthetic commitment and value by referencing legitimate artists or artworks—Noé claimed that film is a “weapon” and that his enemies are “concepts or social structures” as well as the “rancid collaborationist French.” For his part, Michael Haneke has claimed in statements and interviews that the purpose of his filmmaking is to “rape” the viewer into a critical spectatorship. When told by an interviewer that his theoretical comments make the experience of watching his films seem stressful rather than entertaining, Haneke replied, “I am merely trying to provoke you into independence. Furthermore, you can walk out of the film. I have nothing against that.” Commenting on an American focus group that abandoned a Funny Games U.S. (2007) test screening, the director said: “To that I say: the film worked, it spoiled the fun of the consumer of violence.” In the interview he revealed that he feels “confirmed” when viewers leave the theater.41 The comparison to Noé is striking here: the director of Irreversible claimed he enjoys when viewers leave screenings of his films. His reasoning—“It makes the ones who stay feel strong”42—betrays the macho alternative-culture consumer identity that extreme filmmakers encourage.

26 • Extreme Cinema

In this context it is useful to consider further examples, such as Michael Winterbottom and his The Killer Inside Me (2010). The Times critic Demetrios Matheou deemed it to be “the most disturbing film of the year” on account of its graphic representations of sex and violence against women.43 Responding to this criticism (and charges of misogyny), Winterbottom, asked: “Surely what would be immoral would be for the violence to be entertaining or acceptable?”44 In Winterbottom’s idiom, disturbing violence is moral violence; moral violence is artistic, rather than exploitative. Remarkable also are comments by another prominent director of the “new extremity,” Catherine Breillat, whose productions are notorious for their

FIG. 3 Catherine Breillat positions herself as an artist-scientist who engages with base themes

and representations for the supposed benefit of others. ©Everett/REX Shutterstock. Reproduced by permission.

Transgression and Distinction • 27

explicit treatments of sexuality. In interviews she has referred to herself as a sort of sex “entomologist,” who examines the microdynamics of sexual relations and desire.45 Typical of the public comments of several extreme filmmakers, Breillat positions herself using the language of science; her “experiments” are meant for the “benefit” of others. These attempts to establish a clinical, ethical distance from the subject’s titillating potential recall the statements of American politicians who “experimented” with drugs as young men—as if their pleasure-seeking was somehow a laboratory-based, controlled scientific attempt to discover the appeal to “others,” rather than self-serving or patently hedonistic. These directors imply that their extreme cinema, in contrast to mere horror, (torture) porn, and related popular genres, contains its own analysis. These filmmakers “know better.” Haneke’s rhetoric offers especially rich examples of this phenomenon. Speaking about the difficulties of adapting The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin, 2001), which depicts public urination, voyeurism, genital self-harm, and sado-masochistic sex acts, the director revealed in interview that the main challenge was one of distinction: “to make an obscene film but not a pornographic one.”46 Much in the manner of the consumer or critic of extreme cinema, the extreme filmmaker distinguishes himself by claiming the ability to separate himself from the physiological effects of extreme representation; it is also a measure of differentiation from other directors. Whereas Oliver Stone (in Natural Born Killers, 1994) or Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange, 1971) were unable to depict the titillating without titillating the audience, according to Haneke—in response to an interviewer’s question about Funny Games— he was.47 Furthermore, Haneke has gone so far as to outline an instruction manual for filmmakers to represent violence ethically: a public statement, originally delivered before a screening of Benny’s Video (1992) at a Munich cinema in 1995, and later published under the title “Violence and the Media.”48 Noting that violence has been part and parcel of narrative filmmaking since its beginnings, the essay makes a medium-specific argument for the special bearing of violence and cinema. Because of celluloid’s traditional indexical connection to reality, according to Haneke, the filmic representation of violence is judged by other criteria than are literature and painting. Furthermore, whereas painting and even photography show the results of violence, film depicts violence in action. This—together with cinema’s larger-than-life format and its simultaneous appeal to both eye and ear—produces a unique engagement with the viewer; if the still picture encourages identification between the spectator and victim, the motion picture creates an alignment between the spectator and the perpetrator. Technological developments have made these connections ever stronger: Violence has increased in quality because of advances in special effects and new media have enabled violent representations to proliferate.

28 • Extreme Cinema

FIG. 4 Michael Haneke’s didactic forays into media theory serve to underscore his stated

ability to depict violence from the perspective of victims and to represent “the obscene” without being “pornographic.” ©Agencia EFE/REX Shutterstock. Reproduced by permission.

Moreover, the new media landscape has leveled verisimilitude between real (e.g., news reports of war) and fictional violence to such an extent that children growing up in this era may be unable to distinguish the two. According to Haneke, an ethical representation of violence must avoid the typical problems of mainstream media violence, which “de-realizes, exaggerates, aestheticizes or ironizes” violence. These conventional tactics make violence palatable by three means: First, by locating violence in a setting or era far away from the spectator’s normal life (e.g., Western, science fiction, or horror); second, by providing exceptional, “morally justifiable” narrative situations in which violence is

Transgression and Distinction • 29

the only logical choice (war, rape-revenge, or vigilante films); or, third, by contextualizing violence in comedy or satire (slapstick, spaghetti Western, postmodern cynicism). The only ethical alternative, Haneke claims, is to deliver forms to represent violence in a way that respects victims, returns pain (rather than aesthetic pleasure) to the representation of violence, and allows viewers to identify with the victims rather than the perpetrators. This is not the place to critique Haneke’s pronouncements on media and violence, scrutinize assumptions he makes about middle-class European audiences, comment on links to André Bazin’s medium-specificity, nor locate such critiques within the tradition of Jean Baudrillard’s or Paul Virilio’s postmodernist dystopias.49 His and other filmmakers’ statements are important above all as part of a discourse that serves to demarcate arthouse taboobreakers as an autonomous, identifiable, and distinctive subset of cinema. The interventions of Breillat, Dumont, Haneke, Miike, Noé, Spasojevic, von Trier, and Winterbottom are surely authorial gestures, media stunts, and, in their parlance, “experiments” with darker areas of society and the human mind. By positioning themselves as artists (but also, somehow, as scientists), they claim a certain immunity from the subjects they examine. Their rhetoric serves to morally and artistically sanction the apparently exploitative representations of violence and sexuality. In various shades of gray and to various extents (Haneke perhaps the most overtly didactic, Noé perhaps the most explicitly provocative), extreme filmmakers assume a moral agnosticism to broach moral questions. Indeed, compared with other film trends and genres, extreme cinema resounds particularly with the paradox of the artistic habitus—the disavowed clash between aesthetic disinterestedness and economic necessity. On the one hand it engages themes, forms, and representations associated with commercial genres and which encourage publicity and controversy; on the other hand, filmmaker statements ascribe these “works” (not “movies”) artistic motivation and purpose, as well as intellectual worth. This type of distinctive, subjective perspective on the world becomes the key to the artist’s self-construction and positioning—despite the fact that every other filmmaker in the institutional framework assumes a similar stance. To differentiate himself or herself, the filmmaker must indulge in some extremity of sex or violence and thus conform to what other colleagues do. Such notions of distinction and transgression anticipate the central questions that also choreograph consumers’ and critics’ reactions, to which I now turn.

2 The Aesthetic Embrace and the Cynicism Criticism

Reception Discourses Commentators on extreme cinema have made many claims about its audiences. Filmmakers maintain active, and often polemical, ambitions: they intend to do something to viewers, experiment with them, educate or enlighten them, shock or “rape” them, or induce them to leave. Critics and scholars furnish other accounts of the audience, wondering who might voluntarily watch these films and detailing spectators’ wild reactions.1 “Reports of fainting, vomiting and mass walkouts have consistently characterised the reception of this group of art-house films, whose brutal and visceral images appear designed deliberately to shock or provoke the spectator,” Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall explain in defining the corpus.2 “Responses to this strain of cinema have been predictably combative,” Tim Palmer submits, citing the “volatile audience feedback” and “mass walk-outs that greeted Trouble Every Day and Irreversible at their Cannes premieres in 2001 and 2002,” among other exemplars.3 Demetrios Matheou described his first encounter with Twentynine Palms (2003) thus: “I was standing in the foyer of a cinema in London’s Leicester Square when someone inside the auditorium screamed. It was a woman’s scream, high-pitched and spine-tingling, a scream that might have emanated from the screen itself. Moments later a woman was carried out, unconscious, and laid 30

The Aesthetic Embrace and the Cynicism Criticism • 31

on the floor.”4 Moreover, academics have focused primarily on the effects that arthouse taboo-breakers have on “the spectator.” This represents the requisite feature for commentators such as Horeck and Kendall, who argue that these films are unique and worthy of study for “interrogating, challenging and often destroying the notion of a passive spectator.”5 These protocols of punishing representations and feral reactions beg an obvious question: Who would willingly subject themselves to these films? There have been many speculations about what might attract viewers to extreme cinema. Extrapolating from studies of transgression, Bataillean or Freudian interpretations focus on the simultaneous attractions and repulsions of the taboo and note the close associations and intersections of violence and sexuality in these films.6 The evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller describes the behavior of those who choose to get body piercings or watch graphically violent or sexual films to be a “high-risk, last-ditch tactic for boosting one’s social salience to parents or mates, or one’s status among peers.” Miller refers to “conspicuous displays of openness” to death metal music or extreme cinema as “a reliable display of immune system strength” and guarantees of the subject’s mental fitness. “Young people take great pride in being able to withstand bizarre music, mind-bending books, intense movies, ultraviolent computer games, and powerful hallucinogens,” Miller claims.7 Furthermore, sociological theories link viewing extreme cinema with other types of “excessive conduct,” such as bungee jumping, binge drinking, rock climbing, skydiving, off-piste skiing, and motor racing.8 The distributors of arthouse taboo-breakers have often invoked connections to an exhilarating lifestyle in their marketing (e.g., Tartan’s Asia Extreme label). To sum up these ideas in simple terms: people choose to watch these films—and stay glued to cinema and television screens to the bitter end—to show off and act tough.9 These theories no doubt have merit. In the material context of extreme cinema’s exhibition and reception, however, they are too broad and largely speculative. A recent empirical examination of extreme cinema’s audiences—the most detailed hitherto—is more productive. Led by Martin Barker, the study used quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate responses to The House on the Edge of the Park (La casa sperduta nel parco, 1980), Fat Girl (À ma soeur!, 2001), Baise-moi (2000), Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1, 2001), and Irreversible— which all feature sexual violence and presented the BBFC difficulties in its classification decisions. Barker’s team surveyed 243 websites, solicited 760 web questionnaires, and conducted 20 UK focus groups. The researchers found that there was a minority who watched these films primarily for their sexual violence and irrespective of its context. They divided this audience into three groups. First, there is the bad-taste orientation. Found mostly among young men, this group “is characterised by bravado, by being provocative and offensive, and with degrees of public daring.” These qualities were indicated, for

32 • Extreme Cinema

example, in uploading the Irreversible’s protracted rape scene onto YouTube or forum and web questionnaire comments such as “I like rape are you happy . . . Ass raping is good.” The second faction is the anti-censorship orientation. These viewers “insist on the individual’s right to see, and on a refusal to allow others to decide on what is appropriate.” Cinephile in nature and preoccupied with having seen uncut or “authentic” versions, these spectators often make lists of challenging scenes or banned films, such as “The Top 50 Most Disturbing Movies Ever Made” or “Films with Unsimulated Sex.” The third grouping is the BDSM orientation, a community that derives pleasure from a structured, rule-bound encounter between sex and violence.10 We could categorize all three of these groups under the rubric of transgression: resounding with the research of the evolutionary psychologists and sociologists, in each case viewing extreme cinema intends to affirm an anti-Establishment self-image and identity and convey that identity to others. In particular, the “bad-taste” orientation seems to confirm the work by Miller and Chris Jenks about “bravado” thrill-seeking and signaling. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that Barker’s team found such groups to be a minority of the total viewers. Audiences did not typically watch these films for sexual violence; we can extrapolate this fact to assume that people do not watch extreme cinema in general only for its violence, sex, or sexual violence. Rather, this explicit material factors into (and may well weigh against) consumers’ primary decision-making factors, including the film’s marketing materials, critical reception and “controversy,” location of exhibition, national origin, director, and overall subject matter. Even if extreme cinema follows a clearly definable institutional system, each exemplar also maintains some specificity in terms of style, emphasis, and cultural background that will likewise appeal to specific consumers. Each film, Barker and his collaborators write, “appears to have its own ‘clientele,’ responding with different particular criteria and judgement-sets.”11 Despite the fact that some journalists and scholars concentrate above all else on sex, violence, sexual violence, provocation, and outrage, there are many complex reasons for seeking out and watching these productions. In any given screening of Funny Games (1997) or Nymphomaniac (2014) there were, for example, followers of Michael Haneke or Lars von Trier, viewers looking for a German-language film, Charlotte Gainsbourg or Uma Thurman fans, spectators wanting to see something challenging or different (or be perceived as someone who does), punters up for whatever was showing in the local cinema on that given Wednesday at 9 p.m.—in addition to those seeking out axe-wielding executioners or a sex addict’s lurid confessions. Therefore, broad generalizations about the audiences of extreme cinema should be made carefully; assessments of any film’s effects on “the spectator” are best avoided. For this reason, this book engages with extreme cinema audiences primarily through the empirical studies of

The Aesthetic Embrace and the Cynicism Criticism • 33

Martin Barker, Melanie Selfe, and their collaborators. Critical discourse, as we shall see in the remainder of this chapter, is more easily classified.

Distinction and the Aesthetic Embrace The cinematic spectacle of sex, violence, or sexual violence often produces controversy and publicity, lures audiences, and maximizes box office returns. The prospect of censorship can support claims of artistic value.12 Scandal can, in the words of Linda Ruth Williams, “rebrand a film as prime ‘watercooler’ fodder.”13 And while most extreme cinema is economically successful only when measured against the highly circumscribed expectations of art cinema, these films attract substantial press coverage and scholarly notice. Critical responses to extreme cinema have not only proliferated over the years; they have coalesced around regular topics and ways of speaking, predictable systems of reportage and analysis, and familiar categories of praise and rejection. There are clearly a number of explanations for this coverage. In interview, Xan Brooks—The Guardian editor who has filed perhaps the most notices on arthouse taboo-breakers in the Anglophone world—revealed that personal taste determines much of his journalistic attention. As both an editor and writer, he has the luxury to decide what and when he will write, even if vagaries of distribution and exhibition factor into these choices. “The aspects of the year I most enjoy are attending festivals like Cannes or Venice, where there is more chance of seeing films that are out of the ordinary, from different parts of the world. That always feels like a great time of discovery for me. Summer season, with its homogenised blockbusters, always feels a little more like work.”14 Nevertheless, it is clear that professional motivations and above all institutional-economic factors have a significant role to play in the quantity and kind of consideration the films will enjoy in the publication: “on a more cynical level—few editors have a problem with the ‘arty yet titillating’ angle. It’s the contract that we are all party to (editors, critics, film-makers alike). The sex and the art are often indivisible and one helps sell the other. ’Twas ever thus, from Sunrise [1927] through Summer with Monika [Sommaren med Monika, 1953] to Blue Is the Warmest Colour” (La vie d’Adèle, 2013). Brooks denied that there was ever an editorial meeting at The Guardian to push Nymphomaniac (2014) and coordinate the thirty-four articles and other items that were published on the film within one month of its release. Rather, the coverage occurred in stages and came from various editors working in different sections of the organization. The articles, however, did build upon each other so that, for example, editors commissioned “Comment” pieces to in essence report on The Guardian’s own reportage. “I guess the coverage can be explained in personal and a professional terms, but again these are sometimes indivisible.

34 • Extreme Cinema

Personally, both myself and Catherine Shoard (the overall Guardian film editor) are huge fans of Lars von Trier’s work and were fascinated by this film. But obviously you can’t entirely discount the cold-eyed trafficgrabbing potential of the story as well. Sex sells and the traffic surrounding The Guardian’s Nymphomaniac content was, shall we say, tumescent.” In general, critical discourse on extreme cinema generally hinges on one key distinction: Art or exploitation? Journalists often broach this question explicitly and programmatically. “Is the violent Baise-moi an issue drama or pure exploitation,” asks the subheading of a Sight and Sound feature.15 A 1999 interview with von Trier was called “A Joke or the Most Brilliant Film-maker in Europe?”16 Brooks (or his subeditor) titled his notice on an earlier work thus: “Antichrist: A Work of Genius or the Sickest Film in the History of Cinema?” (The article solicits the response to this question from prominent British feminists, actresses, and female academics.17) Sometimes editors use a debate format to articulate the dissenting perspectives on arthouse taboo-breakers. Such a question animates Mark Cousins’s and Jonathan Romney’s contrasting writeups on Bruno Dumont’s then latest: “L’Humanité: Rapture or Ridicule?”18 The release of Irreversible inspired two competing articles by Nick James and Mark Kermode in the February 2003 issue of Sight and Sound, summarized by the following abstract: “Is Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible a voyeuristic, pointlessly puerile exercise or does it achieve artistic honesty? Two perspectives on the film are given.”19 The contemporary journalistic and scholarly debate on extreme cinema can be divided along two rough lines, which represent two different answers to the question of aesthetic and cultural value. It should be stated from the outset that these two discourses exist on a spectrum of pure and commingling forms; each can be practiced irresponsibly or with nuance. Much like a linguist’s reconstructions of Indo-European, my account of these two rubrics highlights their unique features to make their emphases, vocabularies, and deep structures readily apparent. The examples are nonetheless representative, not idiosyncratic. The term “aesthetic embrace” describes the first discourse. Often applying complex academic theories and attending above all to textual and formal characteristics, it explains the productions’ difference from putatively lowbrow genres such as horror or pornography. This interpretative method aims to defend and ultimately rescue extreme cinema from accusations of exploitation; its approach revolves around marking and reinforcing distinction. For example, in a reckoning with what he calls the “mischievous appetite for the unwatchable,” one commentator differentiates the extreme cinema trend from torture porn’s “prosaic desire to shock.” According to the scholar, the “unwatchability of the films by someone like Noé, Haneke, or Breillat lies not so much on an experiential level as on a philosophical one”; these filmmakers

The Aesthetic Embrace and the Cynicism Criticism • 35

are “motivated by a need to introduce other ways of seeing and to transcend the threshold of the visible world.” He maintains that such projects can be usefully regarded “as an antidote to the numbing complacencies and stock humanity of much mainstream cinema.” The productions “defy the processes of representational homogenization” and “are really preoccupied with deeply humanist issues even as they at times seem disturbingly misanthropic.”20 The ascriptions of grand and altruistic ambitions (“motivated by a need to introduce other ways of seeing and to transcend the threshold of the visible world”) are typical of the aesthetic embrace. So too are claims to innovation (“defy the processes of representational homogenization”) and against-the-grain conclusions: even

FIG. 5 Aesthetic embracers redeem even the most brutal extreme cinema, such as Ichi the

Killer, as allegorical, “self-reflexive,” or “deeply humanist.” ©Everett/REX Shutterstock. Reproduced by permission.

36 • Extreme Cinema

though these films seem (to the naked eye, to the lay viewer) “disturbingly misanthropic,” they are in fact deliberating on “deeply humanist issues.” Tom Mes analyzes Ichi the Killer in similarly symptomatic terms. He suggests that Miike’s brutal portrait of a yakuza underworld—often dismissed as a misogynistic, comic-book shocker—is in fact a sophisticated assessment of violence and media that self-reflexively implicates the audience’s complicity in this constellation. “It’s a paradox, but Ichi the Killer, a film that sets new boundaries in the portrayal of violence and bloodshed, takes a strongly critical stance towards the portrayal and the consumption of the violent image,” Mes writes. Moreover, he continues, “it does so without ever taking a moral stance towards either the portrayal or the consumption, thus circumventing any accusations of hypocrisy on the part of the director. Miike does not moralise or chastise, but provokes the audience into questioning their own attitudes towards viewing images of violence. He steers them into a direction but leaves it up to them to draw their own conclusion.”21 Note here how Mes invokes irony, paradox, and a morally agnostic pure taste. Miike, the author implies, stands above ethical quandaries and is able to represent violence explicitly yet with transgressive innovation (“sets new boundaries”) and nonetheless criticize media violence without a schoolmarm’s impunity (setting Miike apart from, and superior to, Haneke and others). Furthermore, the emphasis in identifying (self-)reflexivity and engagement with “the audience” is characteristic of the aesthetic embrace. The quasi-Brechtian argument—that a certain mode of representation “provokes the audience into questioning their own attitudes” to violence (or sex or pornography)—prevails in this critical mode. Robert Hyland entertains another common trope in his investigation of extreme Asian cinema: he argues that these controversial films legitimately contemplate and reflect national or regional characteristics, political developments, or other cultural values. He argues that “extreme cinema is a contemporary radical cinema movement engaging in a political discourse that subverts the conventions and expectations of a cinema audience inured to conservative studio fare.” It uses “an extreme aesthetic as a political reaction” to socioeconomic developments in Japan, Hong Kong, and Korea. The roots of Pieta (2012), Cold Fish (Tsumetai nettaigyo, 2010), or The Eye (Gin gwai, 2002) lie in “a specific temporal geographical locus that stems from an auteur-driven independent film culture which is directly opposed to the formerly restrictive cinema industries of the Pacific Rim.” This reaction “resulted in a series of overtly politicized films which are political through their challenging of mainstream ideologies of aesthetics (violence/sexuality) and also ideologies of economics: not only an aesthetic confrontationalism, but also ideological confrontationalism.” Hyland here conflates representation, systems of industrial production, economics, and ideology to mount an aesthetic defense of graphic sex and violence in Asian cinema based on a symptomatic evaluation of culture

The Aesthetic Embrace and the Cynicism Criticism • 37

and politics. Extreme cinema, Hyland concludes, “is more than simply extreme in ‘look,’ it is also extreme through its overt radical politics.”22 Tim Palmer’s analysis of new French shockers invokes rhetoric similar to Mes and Hyland: despite the blood, guts, and semen, extreme cinema meditates on contemporary (national) debates and, through certain aesthetic modes, invites spectatorial reflection. These “extraordinary films form the core of what we will define here as the cinéma du corps, whose basic agenda is an on-screen interrogation of physicality in brutally intimate terms.” Defending these productions against claims of cynical attention-seeking, Palmer argues that they in fact propose complex intellectual and artistic solutions to social problems: “the cinéma du corps has been controversial yet misunderstood, its stylistic conception and execution overlooked, as have the bravura means by which defamiliarization occurs.” Rather than offering visual pleasures to audiences greedy for cheap thrills, Palmer maintains, “crucially, it overhauls the role of the film viewer, rejecting the traditionally passive, entertained onlooker to demand instead a viscerally engaged experiential participant. In essence, filmmakers like Denis, Noé, Dumont, and their contemporaries, have engineered a profoundly empirical cinema.” This trio especially “offers incisive social critiques, portraying contemporary society as isolating, unpredictably horrific and threatening, a nightmarish series of encounters in which personal relationships—families, couples, friendships, partnerships—disintegrate and fall.”23 The rhetorical gesture of a “misunderstood” cinema whose stylistic innovation and “bravura” transgression are overlooked—and which the perceptive scholar will respectively correct and supplement with a redemptive reading—abounds in the secondary literature. Note the way in which the argument builds on the opposition of popular and pure: rather than indulging passive sensual needs and popular tastes, the corporeal cinema in fact activates the pure gaze of the “engaged experiential participant.”24 These are but a few examples of this institutionalized regard. It prevails not only among critics, but also among censors, programmers, and other members of the film world. In sum, the aesthetic embrace takes extreme cinema culture seriously at its word. It ascribes to these films complex regimes of representation and spectatorship positioning, often deriving these insights from the filmmakers’ stated intentions in interviews or public performances. (As we have seen, the directors often analyze their own work in similar terms.) In this mode of criticism, a broad auteurism is implied and accepted, the films are decoded for their significance in their domestic cinema (rather than considering how these cultures translate in their international reception), a fictional “spectator” stands in for the critic’s claims about the film’s effects and modes of address, and little attention is paid to the industrial and commercial determinants of this implied positioning: funding structures, marketing, means and locations of consumption. In its least responsible form, the aesthetic embrace

38 • Extreme Cinema

finds subversion in even the most exploitative representations and amoral scenarios, reads rape and torture fully against the grain, interprets each frame as a statement of the nation, and imagines a viewer subjected to the most exhausting battery of provocation, reflection, interrogation, complication, defamiliarization, scathing irony, and philosophical riddles.

Dumbing-Down and the Cynicism Criticism The aesthetic embrace responds in crucial ways to the second approach, what I call the “cynicism criticism.” The latter loathes art directors’ recourse to supposedly lowbrow genres, subjects, and modes of representation as dumbing-down, press-baiting, or nihilistic. Unlike the aesthetic embrace, which extols authorship at the expense of materialist analysis, the cynicism criticism regards artistic intentions as failed or absent; it hones in on underlying commercial interests. If the aesthetic embrace seeks to look beyond the “obvious” horror or smut to find transcendent artistic purposes and political messages, for the latter critics a cigar is a cigar and a penis is a penis. In its laziest iteration, this critical mode disavows any formal, stylistic, or thematic difference between extreme cinema and the worst splatter or pornography. The Daily Mail’s Christopher Tookey, a notorious critic of extreme representations of sex and violence, comments in this rabid vein. For him the distinction between arthouse taboo-breakers and brutal pornography is imperceptible, if not nonexistent. Writing on the occasion of a murder committed by a Dutch-born engineer in Bristol, Tookey took the opportunity to comment on the “latest work by another Dutchman,” Tom Six’s The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) (2011). In Tookey’s mind the film is part of a “vicious pornography” wave that includes Crash (1996), A Serbian Film (Srpski film, 2010), internet snuff films, torture porn, “abstruse foreign language art-house films”—namely I Stand Alone, Baise-moi, Irreversible, and Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer, 2004)—and “equally sadistic and degrading films . . . mostly made in Japan.”25 Indeed, Irreversible is the “most pointlessly nasty film” Tookey claims to have seen; it offers “nothing entertaining, illuminating or profound.” Entertaining the potential for harm, Tookey speculates that “Sadists will be longing for the video release” of Irreversible, at which point they can run its scenes of rape and violence “again and again for the pleasure, titillation and inspiration that they will doubtless bring to those who are that way inclined.” For Tookey, extreme filmmakers like Gaspar Noé are shameless attention-seekers; the director’s cameo (in which he “appears wearing only a black leather bondage outfit and massages his genitals”) epitomizes “everything you need to know” about their debased and self-congratulatory aims and value.26

The Aesthetic Embrace and the Cynicism Criticism • 39

Tookey’s tirades exemplify the most fanatical cynicism criticism to be found in the mainstream press: he discounts any aesthetic value, erases any distinction between extreme cinema and the most sordid exploitation, claims to know the filmmakers’ worst intentions, and implies that any viewers willing to watch such material are brainwashed, at best, but more likely perverse. He even rhetorically links Human Centipede director Tom Six with Vincent Tabak, the real-life murderer of Bristol architect Joanna Yates. For Tookey, extreme cinema is symptomatic of a dumbed-down culture and classification bodies unwilling, or unable, to protect naïve viewers from certain and lasting emotional damage. Even if Tookey represents the radical end of the cynicism criticism spectrum, however, mainstream and specialist film publications regularly partake of its basic procedures. Commentators criticize shallow shock tactics and debased artistic value. “Although the aim is to gob on what Noé sees as the social and cultural complacency of mainstream French cinema and television” and “to ‘shock’ the viewer with a not-very-metaphorical barrage of visual and verbal provocations,” Tony Rayns writes about I Stand Alone, “there’s a typically punk hollowness at the core of Noé’s rhetoric.”27 For others, the trend is an empty logo, a branding that preys on and perpetuates clichés. The extreme cinema label, Ginette Vincendeau pronounces, “helps the export of French cinema, reinforcing cultural stereotypes of Frenchness, while fitting with the global rising tide of sex and violence and appealing to younger audiences.”28

FIG. 6 The cynicism critics write off productions such as Irreversible as exploitative exercises

in self-promotion and the result of art cinema’s dumbing-down. ©Everett/REX Shutterstock. Reproduced by permission.

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Often the cynicism criticism implies that arthouse taboo-breakers are even worse than exploitation because of their pretentions to artistic worth. In this vein, a set of contemporary commentators mourns extreme films’ “infection” of art cinema and pit them as poor copies of old vanguard designs. “Pushing the boundaries of taste in art used to be about more than moral transgression of post-Victorian mores,” Nick James writes in Sight and Sound, referring to Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, and the avant-garde slogan épater le bourgeois. “In film it now seems more like a grinding chorus than a brave venture. Shock is the first resort of European (especially French) film-makers trying to capture the world’s attention away from Hollywood. . . . Why? Because it’s one sure way to get noticed.”29 Richard Falcon notes how European extreme cinema “mimics a revolutionary stance that pretends to want to revive modernist transgressive cinema within a sceptical post-modern climate.” Falcon briefly entertains the idea that films such as Sitcom (1998) and The Idiots (Idioterne, 1998) could be the contemporary equivalent of the sexually candid midtwentieth-century precursors. He ultimately dismisses this possibility, however. The new trend pursues a “pastiche retro transgression” and is “naïve” to believe that “pushing the boundaries of notional good taste, liberating sexual representation or declaring a modernist disdain of bourgeois hypocrisy could rock the status quo.”30 Writing on Oldboy (Oldeuboi, 2003) and its receipt of the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis bemoaned the jury’s choice of an “arty exploitation flick.” Park Chan-wook’s win represented “a dubious development in recent cinema: the mainstreaming of exploitation.” Her article declares war against arthouse taboo-breakers and responds to these as hybrid intrusions into elite taste; Dargis laments Oldboy’s “integration into the upper tier of the festival circuit” and its acclaim among cinephiles. She also criticizes the distributor Tartan Films, “which puts out works of undisputed artistic worth, genre classics, and pure schlock under the rubric Asia Extreme.” In contradistinction to “the great provocations, like the French theater director Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty,” the critic concludes, echoing James’s nostalgia, “most of what falls under the aegis of extreme cinema is devised just to distract and reaffirm the audience’s existing worldview.”31 Although Tookey, James, Falcon, and Dargis are markedly different critics writing to disparate audiences, they all present a form of the dumbing-down thesis. According to sociologist Herbert J. Gans, this familiar trope “can suggest that the culture being supplied is less sophisticated or complicated, or tasteful, or thoughtful, or statusful than a past one,” although sometimes it is also employed to describe the audience being addressed, “who are thought to have declined in taste, intelligence, and status.”32 The dumbing-down thesis abounds in the cynicism criticism of extreme cinema. In one form of this argument, extreme cinema serves simply as titillation for highbrow sophisticates.

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Another claim suggests that although films may deploy the textual codes and marketing strategies of auteurism and world cinema, the filmmakers are, as Ginette Vincendeau suspects about Breillat, ultimately “aimed at attracting the attention of festivals and critics with more nudity, more erections, more violence and more outré sexual practices.”33 The dumbing-down argument extends to the origin of the term extreme cinema, which came into critical fashion after James Quandt’s 2004 Artforum article on the “New French Extremity.” The piece examines responses to Dumont’s Twentynine Palms after his restrained, more Bressonian efforts, Life of Jesus (La vie de Jésus, 1997) and L’Humanité (1999). The anxiety, Quandt perceives, surely revolves around Dumont’s “borrowing the codes of Hollywood horror films.” Even more troubling, however, is that the auteur, “once impervious to fashion, has succumbed to the growing vogue for shock tactics in French cinema over the past decade.” Quandt outlines a series of filmmakers—among them François Ozon, Phillippe Grandrieux, Noé, and Breillat—“suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement,” thereby appropriating the stuff “once the provenance of splatter films, exploitation flicks, and porn.”34 Quandt’s take on these “absurd, false, and self-important” films is colorful, caustic, and above all nostalgic. Whereas French cinema previously provoked with innovative forms, politics, or philosophies, the new French extremity is merely “a narcissistic response to the collapse of ideology in a society traditionally defined by political polarity and theoretical certitude.” His comments almost always imply the trend to be limited to France, although in closing he admits that it might be “symptomatic of an international vogue for ‘porno chic,’ widely apparent in art-house films from Austria to Korea.” Most tellingly, Quandt speculates that the “drastic tactics of these directors could be an attempt to meet (and perchance defeat) Hollywood and Asian filmmaking on their own Kill Bill terms or to secure distributors and audiences in a market disinclined toward foreign films; and in fact many of these works have been bought in North America, while far worthier French films have gone wanting.”35 Quandt’s piece is the prototype and, in many ways, the archetype of the cynicism criticism. A rose-tinted cinephilia inflects his dumbing-down argument, in this case a love and perceived loss of the “innovative” and “philosophical” French nouvelle vague and late 1960s political cinema. As Gans writes, “dumbing down requires a comparison, which is always made from the perspective of a more statusful past culture as well as a more intelligent public.”36 A false dichotomy between yesterday’s smartly innovative art films and today’s dumb provocations structures much of the reportage. In an article on the production trend, Peter Brunette describes contemporary art cinema’s

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“unflinching look” and in particular how directors “push the envelope with realistic-seeming violence” and sex.37 A sidebar accompanies the article and opposes sets of productions according to two rubrics: “Art” and “Agony.” Charting a supposed trajectory from “innocent to in-your-face” art films, Last Year in Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad, 1961) contrasts with Memento (2000); Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960) with David Cronenberg’s Crash; A Man and a Woman (Un homme et une femme, 1966) with Baise-moi; and The Piano (1993) with The Piano Teacher. The comparisons rest on incidental plot points (the car accident in Breathless, for instance) or coincidental overlaps in titles (e.g., between the Jane Campion and Michael Haneke productions) to make sweeping generalizations about art cinema’s supposed (downward) trajectory. The dumbing-down nostalgia abounds in journalistic notices and ultimately functions to preserve distinction. By lamenting contemporary art films’ similarity to exploitation and by claiming that they represent a tainted or impure form of New Wave-style cinema, critics imply that there are and should be rigid, impenetrable binaries of commercial versus arthouse, lowbrow versus highbrow. Curiously, despite their retrospection these assessments almost always selectively elide the prehistory of today’s extreme cinema. Indeed, Quandt, Dargis, and the Boston Globe sidebar unironically pit the philosophical, revolutionary Jean-Luc Godard against the hollow, cynical provocateurs Dumont, Noé, Park, or Kim Ki-duk. In so doing they fail to acknowledge that Godard, the nouvelle vague, and indeed 1950s and 1960s art cinema attracted audiences with frank displays of (especially female) bodies and sexuality. Revolutionary politics were hardly the only, or even principal, motivation for such representations. If not the direct forerunners, they are certainly complicit in forming today’s trend. Furthermore, it should be noted briefly that the modes of criticism I have outlined and dissected here—although they have proliferated along with extreme cinema itself—are also not without precedent. The Susan Sontag essay on Bataille and the French “pornographic imagination,” for example, is a critical paradigm for the aesthetic embracers’ recuperative procedures. In a 1969 piece for New York Magazine, moreover, Judith Crist deployed the cynicism criticism to deflate the artistic hype surrounding I Am Curious—Yellow (Jag är nyfiken—gult, 1967). “A couple of movies have come out that aren’t primarily concerned with s-e-x,” Crist remarks, alluding to the then topical zenith of both arthouse and hardcore erotica. She ultimately condemns I Am Curious as a “pretentious film that exploits sexual intercourse in all its varieties to very small point.” Decades before Dargis and Quandt, Crist wrote that she is “tired of movies that grind out the nudity and voyeurisms and intersperse them with simple-minded statements about Vietnam or pacifism and thus make claim to being ‘art’ rather than ‘exploitation’ films.” In the end, it “all boils down to that

The Aesthetic Embrace and the Cynicism Criticism • 43

old identity-search and ya-gotta-be-committed bag—and fornication über alles, both movie clichés of our time.”38 To provide a further example, Pauline Kael wrote both in the aesthetic embrace and cynicism criticism modes about extreme cinema precursors. Notoriously, Kael lauded Last Tango in Paris (Ultimo tango a Parigi, 1972) in terms that compare it to the highest art: “Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris was presented for the first time on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, October 14, 1972: that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913—the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed—in music history.” Contrasting Bertolucci’s effort to contemporaneous exploitation films that “have been supplying mechanized sex—sex as physical stimulant but without any passion or emotional violence,” Kael distinguishes Last Tango in Paris as a novel, boundary-breaking triumph: “The movie breakthrough has finally come. . . . Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form.”39 Writing elsewhere and earlier in a decidedly less rhapsodic tone, Kael calculated an altogether depreciated estimation of sophisticated graphic fare. Her 1961 essay “Fantasies of the Art-House Audience” denounces art cinema as a hypocritical and amoral circuit of production. It reproaches middle-class American cultural elitists who watch “foreign films, or ‘adult’ or unusual or experimental American films.” They may watch different directors and national cinemas than the “mass audience” does, but their attitude toward cinema is in effect the same: “the educated audience often uses ‘art’ films in much the same self-indulgent way as the mass audience uses Hollywood ‘product,’ finding wish-fulfilment in the form of cheap and easy congratulation on their sensitivities and their liberalism.” Kael explains the arthouse success of Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) among “audiences of social workers, scientists, doctors, architects, [and] professors” by gesturing to the “nude bodies” upon which the first shot opens, the inserted footage from a “Japanese atrocity movie,” and the conceit of a woman subjected to violence because of her affair with a German soldier. The appeal represents “an elaborate, masochistic fantasy for intellectuals”; art film culture, Kael concludes, often resembles little more than a glossed-up nudie mag. Examining the reactions of Crist and Kael but also the current cynicism criticism reveals that the supposed hypocrisy of extreme cinema—the perceived emptiness of filmmakers’ gestures toward higher intentions—provokes the most heated attacks. If conventional horror films receive easy dismissal or camp enjoyment, critics reserve their most pointed diatribes for those who claim to experiment artistically with the genre. The often furious, ad hominem reactions against Michael Haneke, for example, bear this out. When Haneke’s Funny Games premiered at Cannes, according to a Variety reviewer, it “appealed to some Euro highbrows but turned off nearly everyone else.”40 Wolfram Schütte has written that “no other director—with the possible

44 • Extreme Cinema

exception of the Straubs—has been so persistently persecuted by German critics with more hate and spite than Michael Haneke.”41 We can understand these reactions if we look, not merely to the actual content of Funny Games, but to its pretentions: Haneke has outlined a serious aesthetic program according to how he believes violence should or should not be represented in media. These aspirations and, in particular, these statements in public and in interviews, these very attempts to transcend the usual boundaries of representing violence blur the lines between the popular and the pure, the sacred and the profane: this disturbs the purveyors of the cynicism criticism. The aesthetecritic, as Bourdieu writes, “prefers naivety to ‘pretentiousness’” and often evaluates “in opposition to the choices of the groups closest in social space, with whom the competition is most direct and most immediate.”42 If popular horror poses no threat, transgressive and hybrid forms that mix and “infect” create significant anxiety. Both the aesthetic embrace and the cynicism criticism depend on, and attempt to maintain, clearly defined borders and fronts. Indeed, although the two critical paradigms maintain opposing evaluations, they hinge on structural similarities. Whereas the aesthetic embrace accepts the auteur’s words but reads textually against the grain, the cynicism critic takes representations at face value and doubts the artist’s sincerity. Neither the aesthetic embrace nor the cynicism criticism is absolute or mutually exclusive in scholarly and journalistic practice. Besides Kael, there are several examples where both modes coexist in a writer’s work or even in a single article.43 At the extremes and expressed in the simplest terms, these are opposing ways to evaluate aesthetic and cultural value, the two chief means to articulate an answer to a, if not the, central question of extreme cinema, i.e., whether the mode is art or exploitation. These approaches confirm Bourdieu’s comments on intellectual fields such as film in which legitimacy is being sought and has increased. There the “declaration of the autonomy of the creative intention leads to a morality of conviction which tends to judge works of art by the purity of the artist’s intention and which can end in a kind of terrorism of taste.” Further, “the exclusion of the public and the declared refusal to meet popular demand which encourages the cult of form for itself,” of art for art’s sake, can lead to an “esotericism” and, in the aesthetic embrace, a “solidarity between the artists and the critic or journalist.”44 As an addendum to this meta-critical analysis, I should reveal my own intellectual investment in and position on extreme cinema. Like the aesthetic embracers, I consider it essential to pay attention to extreme films’ artistic intentions: real people—some of whom have desires to innovate and challenge—make these films and want audiences to see them. Nevertheless, I submit that these claims must be first identified as discursive aesthetic, moral, political, intellectual, and cultural aspirations enacted within material contexts of production, distribution, and exhibition. In the vein of the cynicism

The Aesthetic Embrace and the Cynicism Criticism • 45

criticism, furthermore, this book takes a skeptical stance to wholly “disinterested” textual and formal appraisals; it critically analyzes the filmmakers’ statements and media performances and the real value of the “extreme” label for distributors and exhibitors. Yet there is no need to dismiss the productions wholesale and out of hand, in the manner of many such critics, from Tookey to Dargis. Longing for the good old days of a supposedly pure art cinema is not only futile. It is a false memory, filtered through the blurred prism of time.

3 The Rhetoric and Role of Film Festivals

2013: Blue Is the Warmest Color (La vie d’Adèle) 2012: Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe) 2011: Melancholia; Michael 2009: Enter the Void; Dogtooth (Kynodontas); Antichrist; The Execution of P (Kinatay) 2007: Import/Export 2006: Taxidermia 2005: Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo); A History of Violence 2004: 9 Songs; Oldboy (Oldeuboi) 2003: The Brown Bunny 2002: Irreversible (Irréversible) The previous list could represent a tidy canon of archetypal extreme cinema. A narrower principle organizes the films, however: all premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival. “If you go to Cannes these days,” Sight and Sound editor Nick James has warned, “you know you will see at least one 46

The Rhetoric and Role of Film Festivals • 47

film designed to shake the complacency of the festival habitués.”1 Every year a regularized form of this reportage claims that one film or another is “the most shocking” ever; some journalists even file articles about which productions are supposedly too controversial for inclusion.2 Cannes is not exceptional in this regard. Venice premieres could generate a similar list. It would include, from the last few years, Attenberg (2010), Shame (2011), Paradise: Faith (Paradies: Glaube, 2012), Spring Breakers (2012), and Miss Violence (2013). A compilation of recent extreme films at Berlin would not miss Caterpillar (2010), The Killer Inside Me (2010), The Brownian Movement (2011), Hemel (2012), Paradise: Hope (Paradies: Hoffnung, 2013), and Nymphomaniac (2014). Nor is extreme cinema an exclusive domain of A-list festivals. Toronto, Rotterdam, Seattle, Buenos Aires, Pusan, and in fact almost all non-thematic international film festivals (with important exceptions for cultural reasons, such as the Dubai International Film Festival3) regularly feature controversial art films. As a rule, festivals legitimate extreme cinema as an aesthetic form beyond exploitation. They turn taboo-breakers into art and serve as its launching pad par excellence. In turn, extreme cinema has become a systematic, constitutive element of both festival programming and business models. It adds value to a film festival, attracting media attention and affirming the event’s reputation for the provision of innovative, artistic, and unconventional work. In justifying extreme cinema, festival organizers replicate some filmmaker rhetoric and attempt to challenge and concomitantly “educate” audiences. In addition, however, they assert notions of access and variety and make mitigating distinctions based on aesthetic quality and personal taste. With festivals intimately involved in developing filmmakers’ careers and in the exhibition, distribution, and co-production of today’s art films, they provide major incentives for the proliferation of extreme cinema.

The Scandal Film Historically, film festivals have earned a reputation for artistic, but also controversial, offerings and an experience unlike that available at a neighborhood cinema or anonymous multiplex. “The purpose of a festival,” Vanessa Schwartz writes, “is to commercialize that which is aesthetic and aestheticize the commercial.”4 Shyon Baumann attributes film’s acceptance as an art form to a number of mid-twentieth-century phenomena. These included the postwar expansion of an educated middle class and its leisure time, the advent of television (which helped to distinguish cinema), and film critics who increasingly commented on artistic value. The proliferation of film festivals was another crucial development. “Because they are competitive and because prizes are awarded by juries who have some claim to expert status in their field,” Baumann writes, “film festivals bestow artistic merit on films.”5 Indeed, David

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Andrews ascribes film festivals with the highest importance in this regard: “the most crucial factor in the long-term success of the art-film format has been the expansion of the festival circuit since the Second World War. Festivals have acted as value generators, testing grounds, marketing points, and sources of legal protections for art films.”6 Furthermore, controversial films have become enduring elements of a balanced festival program. The presence of extreme cinema—and reportage of its shocking aspects or of the controversy it generates—has become so ubiquitous on the festival circuit that Marijke de Valck proposes the “scandal film” as one of four framings that arts reporters use to categorize festival films and “set agendas” for their reception.7 Over the years, stable and predictable agenda-setting and media-exposure patterns have emerged in festival reportage, so much so that journalists comment self-reflexively on the subject. “The first day of the New York Film Festival I asked director Richard Roud if a festival was complete without a scandal,” Atlanta Journal Constitution critic Eleanor Ringel wrote in 1985 about Jean-Luc Godard’s then latest. “This year’s scandal is Hail Mary.”8 According to James’s assessment of Irreversible at Cannes in 2002, Noé’s feature was inevitably “designed to provoke this year’s moral panic and sadly it succeeded.”9 Such reports often partake of the skeptical cynicism criticism. See, for example, Ringel’s observation that the “fuss could only call attention to a bad movie that deserves none. . . . It was just more drivel from Godard, whose ongoing excuse for making such pretentiously opaque movies is that they are all personal statements.”10 The scandal framing, according to de Valck, can help festival films generate added value, in terms of increased box office, cultural status, award wins, cult followings, and so on. It is important to note in this context that notices and reviews do not help a film based on the degree of positive attention or—contrary to popular folklore regarding the influence of Pauline Kael and other supposedly make-orbreak critics—on whether an especially prominent writer has recommended a film. Much more decisive is the sheer amount of coverage: the more exposure, whether positive or negative, the more value a film accrues.11 Media coverage benefits films because it puts them on the agenda and galvanizes word-of-mouth publicity. Codified festival reportage processes productions into “fixed markers or rubrics” such as novelty, topicality, national achievements, a prominent director or star, and “scandals.” At festivals, a scandal film obtains recognition that “can be of value outside the festival network” and in its wider theatrical or home-video release.12 As a case study of the scandal film de Valck cites the reception of Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms at the 2003 Venice International Film Festival. The project’s rejection from Cannes became a news item, but above all the journalistic conversation revolved around its pretensions to shock (with violence, homosexual rape, and other graphic depictions of sexuality). De Valck describes journalists’ frame of reference for Twentynine Palms to have been “a festival genre of films that contains explicit and unglamorous sex, usually depicting

The Rhetoric and Role of Film Festivals • 49

inner frustrations, destructive relationships, or sheer sexual violence” that are evaluated by the extent to which these depictions partake of “intellectual complexity and strong iconic visual representation,” that is, extreme cinema.13 Although almost all critics deemed Dumont’s film to have failed to achieve these goals (or, in cynicism criticism, asserted that the filmmakers only produced such representations to shock and gain attention), the widespread media exposure predictably translated into relatively successful subsequent festival appearances and arthouse distribution. Many examples of extreme-cinema media coverage conform to the scandalfilm template. We have already seen the remarkable, extensive attention that Nymphomaniac enjoyed in The Guardian and other news media after its Berlinale premiere. A similar brand of reportage accompanied the debuts of Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise: Faith at Venice and Blue Is the Warmest Color at Cannes. Beyond de Valck’s general categories, a number of institutionalized subpatterns structure this coverage. Blue Is the Warmest Color or Battle in Heaven are examples of what we might call the “flirtation with the real” and depend on journalists’ curiosity about apparent titillation and pornographic affinities: such films purport to show a “real” (rather than “faked” or “staged”) sex act. Other scandal films, from Oldboy to Michael, are written about as reflecting certain (negative) national characteristics. Later chapters will examine these perennial features of extreme cinema culture in depth. The production and reception of extreme cinema maintain an inextricably circuitous relationship. Journalists write in discursive categories such as the scandal film largely because festivals select and exhibit such productions and because they differ from standard multiplex fare. In turn, programmers choose them partly because filmmakers create them. Other cause–effect constellations of intention and agency are likely valid. Aspiring filmmakers hope to make their mark with the press attention that extreme cinema has traditionally elicited; festival scouts and subsidy bodies seek or even solicit these films.14 Journalists may likewise anticipate or project a scandal onto a film that is in fact tame. Indeed, researchers have found how “similar patterns” to reporters’ discursive categories seep into festival’s programming practices, categories, and ways of speaking.15 Tim Palmer has noted how, in “today’s film marketplace, a transgressive cinema carries obvious commercial risks, yet also the prospect of a raised artistic profile, as well as, more pragmatically, an increased visibility in the crowded schedules of arthouse cinemas and international film festivals.” In his investigation of new French extremity, Palmer asserts that it “offers the prospect of widespread attention, and intensive public engagement” and points to “such filmmaking and its concomitant creation of scandal at Cannes” and its “foundational” role in “the fledgling careers of both Dumont and Noé: the former derived from the interest and backlash inspired by Humanity (L’Humanité) in 1999, and the latter provoked by Irreversible, in 2002.”16

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Palmer is partially correct. A vicious circle of attention-seeking surely factors into extreme cinema’s festival presence. Nevertheless, monolithic, schematic explanations ignore the complex structuration of institutional imperatives and individual agencies. Examining discursive patterns among festival artistic directors and programmers reveals a more nuanced picture of the stakes, incentives, and motivations at work.

Programming Discourses: Variety Two central discourses that are fundamental to festival identity explain much extreme-cinema programming. The first has to do with notions of variety: difficult productions with graphic sex or violence provide a balance to other modes and formats. Julian Stringer, in a seminal article on the international film festival economy, maintains that this logic especially informs larger, more established film festivals. Whereas “little festivals handle specialized audiences and create new opportunities,” the larger festivals such as Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam, or Pusan represent “universal survey festivals,” which attempt to provide a diverse cinema that fulfills wider criteria and addresses a wider audience by providing an overview.17 To be sure, the exact composition of the program’s variety must correspond to the festival’s reputation and the image that the organizers wish to project. This means, according to de Valck, “ensuring that there are enough established auteurs participating, enough premieres of big commercial movies out of competition, and a strong national presence, as well as maintaining more elusive identity markers,” which include awareness of political or social issues or artistic innovation.18 Cindy Wong comes to similar conclusions regarding the delicate balance of festival programming. “Major competitive festivals depend on the glamour of stars and spectacles as well as cutting-edge art.” The aim is to “showcase diverse forms of cinema.”19 Festival workers’ statements reveal how variety motivates their work. Christoph Terhechte, who leads film selection for the Berlinale’s Forum category, submits that a program should have a basic theme or red thread, but above all should maintain a sense of balance. Ideally series should have a wide geographic spread and festivals go to great lengths to achieve such diversity.20 Rather than seeking out “the type of international festival film that could be made anywhere,” programmers should adopt films that “speak about their place of origin and the culture that the filmmakers grew up in.”21 Chris Fell, director of the Leeds International Film Festival, maintains that his festival’s aim is to “try to be as diverse as possible.”22 Hussain Currimbhoy, programmer for the Sheffield Doc/Fest, explains that he achieves variety via series and subcategories within the festival. “We have strands: films about music, films about art, gay and lesbian issues, sports. It’s always led by all the films.” The festival often organizes a strand “around resistance, around protest, being subversive.”23 San Francisco International Film

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Festival executive director Noah Cowan and head programmer Rachel Rosen agree. They define their task in part as reflecting the wide range of contemporary cinema. “Film festivals by their nature tend to be pretty general,” Cowan said. “You tend to draw films from throughout the pantheon of cinematic experience, from the market of current cinematic experience.”24 According to Rosen, “although in many ways the identity of the festival has changed many times in its fifty-seven years,” it “is somewhat similar to when it first began: which is to bring a great spectrum of international cinema to the city of San Francisco.”25

FIG. 7 For personnel such as Christoph Terhechte, programmer of the Forum category at

the Berlin International Film Festival, the emphasis on artistic freedom and the imperative to deliver variety make extreme cinema a festival mainstay. ©Action Press/REX Shutterstock. Reproduced by permission.

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In interview, Seattle International Film Festival’s director of programming Beth Barrett explained how the institutional division of labor at film festivals works to ensure variety.26 In 2014, the festival employed eighteen programmers. Some of these were tasked with prescreening submissions, which included 2,500 features vying for 260 slots, against the number of films discovered at other festivals or solicited through development programs and other professional relationships. In addition there are a number of programmers with more “specialized areas of focus,” such as Central and Eastern European cinema. Other programmers devote their energies to the festival’s African Pictures fund, family films, youth films, Face the Music, and other niche series. An additional employee coordinates forums, classes, and panels and— crucially, for the extreme-cinema sector—there is a “year-round programmer who works on our midnight films.” Barrett and artistic director Carl Spence “are completely generalists” albeit with some predilections: “I like Australian films, he likes French films. A little bit of a balance. So we’re looking at that entire spectrum of films.” As Terhechte’s, Rosen’s, and Barrett’s statements indicate, one very prominent form and indicator of this “variety” comes in the form of national cinemas. Historians have recorded in detail how the first festivals functioned as “showcases of national cinemas.” Rather than programmed in today’s sense of open calls and active scouting, most major festivals (until the late 1960s) were venues for and competitions between films submitted by individual nations.27 Festival leaders’ statements make clear that this idea persists. “We want international films,” Currimbhoy said, “an international flavor.” According to David Gillam, director of the Wales One World Film Festival, “internationalism is in our DNA.” Concentrating on Asian, African, and Latin American film, he stated that “this is the reason why we set the festival up, really, to show underrepresented [national cinemas].”28 Andrew Simpson, programmer for London’s East End Film Festival and the Pan Asia Film Festival, stressed the country-specific focus, including Argentina and Romania, and cited the mission to promote East Asian film by his work for the latter event.29 Among European festivals, African, Latin American, but particularly Asian films enjoy high regard as signs of a diverse and thus successful program. In interview, Terhechte boasted of many Asian productions in his section and detailed his pursuit of appropriate films from sundry world locations. When asked about his recent discoveries, he couched his language so much in the quantities and variety of regions and countries—“five from Latin America. Another focus is the Czech Republic and Slovakia . . . former Yugoslavia”—that the interviewer wondered whether he is able to categorize in terms other than those of national cinemas.30 The promotion of internationalism allows festivals to reassert a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and artistic legitimacy. Identity and reputation are not

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the only concerns in achieving a balanced program: economic factors, including subsidies, incentivize this diversity. Many European festivals, such as Leeds, receive subsidies from the European Union’s MEDIA. This program carries a requirement to devote 70 percent of the program to European cinema, with specific support targeted for smaller countries such as Lithuania and Greece. In addition, national-cultural institutions such as the Goethe Institut or the Korean Cultural Center subsidize screening fees, pay for filmmakers’ attendance, or sponsor receptions or parties. This is especially true for nonA-list festivals without substantial corporate backing. Simpson reported that the East End Film Festival’s “very small budget” makes it “very reliant” on cultural subsidies. “We have a longstanding relationship with the French Cultural Institute, Romanian Cultural Institute, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and now the Japan Foundation.” These partnerships have allowed the festival to “take risks” and expand. In Currimbhoy’s frank assessment, internationalism is “often a question of money, that’s all it is. If I get some great film from China, I’ve got to fly the schmuck over all the way to Britain. I’ve got to put him up; it’s expensive.” Singling out Canadian, Japanese, and Swedish subsidies in particular, he elaborated on how national-cultural organizations enable and encourage variety of this nature. “Every single film that we put on we look for a sponsor or an embassy or foundation. . . . Otherwise we can’t show these things.” To be sure, internationalism is not the only means by which festival organizers can claim to achieve a diverse program. Simon Field, long-time artistic director of the Rotterdam International Film Festival and then subsequently the Dubai International Film Festival, dubbed the desired type of variety to be a “sandwich process.” He defined this as how you use bigger films to get audiences to support your festival and its smaller—but equally important—films. They become not an alibi so much as a support system. You need the profile in the press, which comes with the big films and the films that are being sold to local distributors. They become a rationale that drives the festival, at all sorts of levels: they are the films the audiences often want to see, they represent the interests of the studios and the independents; they are, sadly, what the press wants to cover. . . . The noise of the “upper” part of the festival drowns out other areas. . . . I always defended making that kind of mixture—following that sandwich formula—a polyphonic festival.31

In other words, variety occurs in different ways and for a whole host of purposes. A wide array of international cinema with diverse topics, but also films addressed to various demographics and interest groups, maximizes the potential audience, encourages corporate sponsorship, invites press attention, and solidifies the festival’s position in the city or local region as well as

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its reputation among filmmakers and other stakeholders worldwide. When interviewed, festival workers such as Barrett confirmed that a sandwich process guided the overall composition of their program.32 Extreme cinema functions as an integral part of this variety: challenging fare to balance other, more accessible programming. Field’s notion of a sandwich process implies, moreover, a normative strategy beyond a mere pick-and-mix smorgasbord, a simple reflection of “whatever’s out there.” It supposes that some films in this delicate mixture are qualitatively more important than others and indeed are the true gems, which the larger, more visible films (star vehicles, Hollywood) ultimately serve as prominent beacons. In addition, it implies that festivals should act as gatekeepers to determine precisely which (aesthetically or politically ambitious) films should find audiences and set into motion a process by which edgy material can challenge, and perhaps even change, viewers’ beliefs and tastes.

Transgressive Themes and Representations Field’s comments gesture toward the second principle of programming which, besides variety, makes taboo-breaking themes and representations an enduring ingredient of festival programs: films that defy conventional tastes and inspire controversy. This discourse resounds strikingly with filmmakers’ transgressive rhetoric. Gilles Jacob, the venerable former Cannes director, cited among the film festival’s cardinal functions to “showcase striking and difficult works that wouldn’t otherwise get the attention they deserve. . . . To generate miles of free publicity.” For Wong, “festivals invite and savor films that tackle controversial subject matters.” Programs are arranged “in calculated opposition to mainstream tastes.” Indeed, in her characterization of the festival film, she cites— beyond aspects of form and style including minimalistic soundscapes, open and demanding narrative structures, and intertextuality—novelty in subject matter, “including controversy and freedom.” Although festivals partake of distinctions and selection processes, “precisely because of the exclusivity that distances film festivals from industrial mass cinema, they have the freedom to represent and debate marginal, sensitive, and difficult subject matters.” They “welcome films that transcend and challenge the boundaries of everyday sensitivities and norms,” and, in particular, extreme cinema such as Antichrist or The Execution of P. This purpose follows a longer tradition of alternative “artistic” distribution networks—such as film societies and film clubs—which function as “free spaces where films of all subject matters are welcome, be they taboo and politically sensitive subjects or excessive in their portrayals of sex and violence—bulwarks against censorship real or implicit.” At Cannes in 2009, media reports charged Antichrist and The Execution of P with misogyny or

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conflated them with pornography. At the same time, Cannes and subsequent festivals ultimately rescued them from these charges and validated them as serious works in the long term by screening them at all, by awarding them prizes, and by casting them as non-mainstream contributions to the “unbounded quality of art.” Likewise, Antichrist and The Execution of P reaffirmed Cannes’s and the other festivals’ liberal identity as homes for such material.33 US and UK festivals typically bypass MPAA and BBFC classification. This status allows them greater opportunity to show taboo-breaking material. To be sure, the potential for local censorship remains in the United Kingdom, and Simpson reported that Tower Hamlets council restricted funding for the East End Film Festival’s controversial offerings. Nevertheless, other festivals (Leeds, Sheffield Doc/Fest) conduct only very brief meetings with ethics committees at local councils, which have been become increasingly liberal, especially as their relationships with festival organizers have developed and the economic benefits to the community have become increasingly tangible. Barrett reported no problems with the authorities in Seattle, although she added that “there have been a handful of films in the last forty years where we actually have carded people at the door and said this is inappropriate for people under eighteen.” Nevertheless, the festival relies on attendees’ judgment; beyond programming “the darker, more violent, or more sexual films at nine o’clock as opposed to four o’clock in the afternoon and tak[ing] out one level of accessibility for younger people,” Seattle does not self-censor its selections. This is a common approach: Melbourne International Film Festival screens edgy arthouse material in its Night Shift (i.e., late-night) series slot; San Sebastián has had a similar policy.34 According to Cowan, because of San Francisco’s activism and its status as being “among the most hyper-tolerant places on Earth,” any appearance of censorship on the part of city officials “would actually create more political problems for them.” Some festivals show more extreme cinema than others. Nevertheless, many festival workers emphasize their transgressive defiance of conventional tastes when describing their programming. Simpson looks for films that “we consider to take bold, artistic risks. . . . Quite punky, quite urban quality, quite challenging, quite political: that’s the kind of programming we favor.” When asked about Irreversible, The Brown Bunny, 9 Songs, Oldboy, Battle in Heaven, Taxidermia, Dogtooth, Antichrist, and Clip (Klip, 2012), Melbourne International Film Festival artistic director Michelle Carey replied that this “sort of cinema has a natural home at MIFF. We have screened nearly all of these films at our festival. The films that tend to be our ‘festival blockbuster’ titles are exactly these sorts of films. If they are combined with a big-name director ([e.g.,] Lars von Trier), we know they will be big films.”35 In fact, “MIFF was known for its extreme programming for a while,” a reputation that put it on a collision course with the conservative Australian Classification Board. In

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2010 Bruce LaBruce’s La Zombie was banned “just a few weeks before the festival started. The Classification Board were concerned about the coupling of extreme sex and violence (separately they are OK, but not occurring together) and requested to see the film. We thought there wouldn’t be problems if they saw the film.” Carey continued: “it is pretty arty and almost cartoonish and is about a lonely zombie trawling LA looking for love. But they gave it a RC meaning we couldn’t screen the film. It was a huge media story (controversyhungry journalists love this sort of thing) and everyone was talking about [it]. Some people said we should screen it. But being a big festival, we couldn’t, and didn’t, of course.” Similar to, but perhaps even more so than Seattle and the other US and UK festivals, Melbourne’s organizers are “very careful to ensure due warnings and context are provided in the program guide text, website and other marketing outlets. This can be as simple as ‘Warning: This film contains scenes that may offend some audiences,’ to occasionally providing a bit more detail.” Carey said that if organizers “feel a film may be particularly sensitive, we will also put up a sign at the entrance to the session and sometimes do a verbal warning at the start of the session also. It’s about finding a balance between making sure the viewer is sufficiently informed and over-warning them. We feel this can protect us against complaints.” In sum, Carey felt that extreme cinema is “a great thing to screen and we are very willing to go through the classification/media hassle or controversy if we feel strongly about a film. So long as there are sufficient warnings.”

Engaging the Audience, Personal Taste, and Quality Controversial art films efficiently manifest key features of festivals’ desired identities: that they are liberal, cosmopolitan spaces where productions that may otherwise be subject to censorship enjoy a forum. Vanessa Schwartz has shown how discourses of liberalism and cosmopolitanism have historically been Cannes’s “driving cultural value.” These ideas have underwritten the spirit of the festivals founded in the postwar period.36 More recently and in general, de Valck asserts, today’s film festivals seek to create an atmosphere of the “out-of-the-ordinary.” One part of this strategy is to “programme films or draw attention to matters that are unconventional, unfamiliar, break taboos or thwart expectations.” This serves “programming practices that challenge the audiences to sample, experiment and be open to new experiences.”37 Cindy Wong has written about how festivals have traditionally “favored a special kind of film: dark, serious, challenging, and linked to classic or emerging auteurs. . . . Festival films often stimulate conversation on controversial topics.”38 Although research on festivals has noted extensively how these events aspire to eschew conventional taste, programmers frequently claim that they aspire to go even further: they mean to actively challenge tastes, to do something to

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attendees, and thereby serve a pedagogical function. Again, this rhetoric resonates with the ways in which extreme filmmakers speak. So, for example, Field claimed that his strategy at Rotterdam was “putting a wide range of cinema into the main programme, to take people places that they normally would not go: to a gallery or make them look at Catherine Breillat.”39 Extreme cinema—here in the form of Breillat—is like medicine for the audience; the festival’s function is to expose audiences to themes, types of representation, and tastes that they would not otherwise consume in other venues and forms of film selection. As a rule, organizers emphasize this pedagogical-aesthetic purpose as a way to counterbalance festivals’ other (commercial, touristic) roles as events. For example, according to Terhechte, “for us it’s not about throwing a glamorous event; we want the films to have an influence, an echo. We want the audience to start talking.”40 Such language is pervasive among organizers. Sheffield Doc/Fest’s Currimbhoy tasks festivals with the need to “lead the audience into something,” whether a political or social issue, an innovative form or style, or a moral dilemma. For Gillam, “it’s always about . . . building up trust with an audience to show them films to think about . . . to show them a Cuban film: they don’t know the director, they don’t know any of the people.” The duty, in short, is to “take the audience on a journey where they’ve never been before.” Regarding Seattle, “one of the world’s largest audience festivals” that presented 455 films from 84 countries to an audience of over 155,000 in 2013, Barrett said, “by and large we serve the Northwest [US residents] and their access to international films that they may not get to see anywhere else.” Cognizant of the cosmopolitanism that local multinationals Microsoft and Amazon have brought to the area, the festival, now over forty years old, sees its mission as “to create experiences that bring people together. To experience cinema together. . . . One of the things that we believe is that by bringing people together you create a community, if only for that two hours.” According to Mark Peranson, who has programmed for Vancouver and Locarno, festivals’ “most significant purpose is providing audiences with opportunities to enjoy commercially unviable films projected in a communal space—films that most communities, even the most cosmopolitan, otherwise would not have the opportunity to see.” They set up a “lively interplay between filmmaker and audience, or between film professionals.”41 The dialogue with the audience is important and not uncomplicated for festival directors and programmers. They must simultaneously respond to but also lead and shape taste. Most cannot rely solely on corporate sponsorship or government subsidies and need to sell passes and tickets in order for the events to succeed. According to head programmer Rosen, San Francisco—the United States’ oldest major festival—is “not a market-driven festival; we’re more of an audience-facing festival, which is sort of what I meant about bringing films for the city and so we don’t need to seek premieres.” Executive director Cowan added that “the festival programming team is extremely sensitive

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to the passionate concerns that dominate discourse in the Bay Area. I’d say roughly 50 percent of the program directly reflects things that are under discussion, under serious discussion, within the community.” Because festivals “tend to occur in locations that are deeply associated with the nature and the personality of the festival,” there is an “odd disjunction and constant need to avoid the entropy between festivals as civic events and artistic champions.” Some festival cities like Toronto, according to Cowan, “benefit civically of being kind of about nothing . . . an open vessel for people coming to it.” In contrast, “when you’re in a city like San Francisco which has a very high opinion of itself civically . . . you’re always having a push–pull” to have to respond to that self-identity. In the contemporary moment, this includes the specter of San Francisco’s bohemian past as well as today’s technology labor force and wealth emanating from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Silicon Valley. The topics of community-building and audience dialogue set the agenda for festivals and inflect programming decisions—including whether or not to show extreme cinema. According to Simpson, for example, selecting bold and challenging films “makes them sexy for audiences.” According to him, “it’s a point in raising interest” in the East End Film Festival. For Carey, getting back to extreme cinema, there is certainly an audience for it at our festival. . . . Extreme horror films such as Inside [À l’intérieur, 2007] and Maniac [2012] have played terrifically here (yes with the odd written complaint). And films like Antichrist, Dogtooth and 9 Songs have even screened to very general audiences, without too much controversy. Interestingly, it does seem that if an extreme film is directed by a big name auteur and/or has played Cannes it will be treated with some respect more so than something that has played at a smaller festival or is low budget.

Nevertheless, these organizers and others defer to quality and personal taste when discussing programming in general and answering questions about extreme cinema in particular. Although few are as succinct and direct as Gillam (“I basically choose films that I like”), most imply that selections—although made to adhere to the central ideal of variety—are quotients of individuals’ taste. In explaining Melbourne’s reputation for edgy programming, for example, Carey mentioned that her “predecessor had a predilection for such cinema.” According to Carey, “of course we pursue [arthouse taboo-breakers]. We do draw a line though (for instance my predecessor deemed A Serbian Film [Srpski film, 2010] as unscreenable), but if we feel a film has artistic merit, we pursue it enthusiastically.” When I asked Rosen why San Francisco—beyond Airdoll (2009), Attenberg (2010), and a few Catherine Breillat and Bruno Dumont efforts— had screened comparatively few controversial art films in the past years, she similarly explained these programming decisions as vectors of personal taste and measures of artistic quality.

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I mean honestly I have to say the way I approach it, and the answer is, it really depends on the film. I mean I don’t think we go out saying like, you know, we need our two films that are going to make people ask for their money back or we need to stir up controversy. That’s definitely something that we’re not looking for for its own sake. I don’t think we’re shying away from controversy but we’re very, you know, maybe I’m less eager to show things that are trying to be controversial that I don’t think have anything more than that behind them. Maybe I’m more sensitive to that than other programmers. It is largely a matter of personal taste.

FIG. 8 According to San Francisco International Film Festival executive director Noah

Cowan (pictured here) and head programmer Rachel Rosen, personal taste, local audiences, festival funds, and corporate sponsorship codetermine how extreme cinema features in programming and even what it means. ©ddp USA/REX Shutterstock. Reproduced by permission.

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Gillam’s larger response was similar. The director (and programmer) of a small festival designed to bring world cinema to rural regions in Wales doubted the quality of much extreme cinema as well as the viability of such challenging fare with local audiences. “It’s not a particularly important part of my program because I don’t think we have the audience for it. . . . I’m good on hardcore horror and violence. It’s not something I’m interested in showing to people. And I think a lot of it is gratuitous and not very pleasant to watch.” In addition, Gillam noted economic pressures. “I looked at Clip and I thought it was a strong film and an interesting film and I was very happy to have seen it. But it didn’t seem to me to be something that I wanted to spend, in a sense, my hard-raised money on over some other things that I thought were more interesting movies.” For Fell, aesthetic taste is central in Leeds’s programming of edgy art cinema. “One of our biggest sections is called Phenomenon. We have shown some borderline extreme films. . . . There was one film called A Serbian Film, which a lot of other festivals in European countries really liked. . . . I thought it was an awful film. A lot of extreme films are terrible films. But some have some worth.” For Fell, assessing artistic quality and gauging possible problems with the local censor are paramount in deciding whether to exhibit extreme cinema. Ultimately, Leeds is much less likely to want to confront censorship than the case of Carey and Melbourne. “And whether it’s sexual or violent content,” Fell said, “we have a lot of debate in the festival team about whether we should show this or not. And we have a lot of opinions on it. And obviously it has to go through the licensing committee. We’re very careful about what we show.” In general, festival workers parse their words in explaining extreme cinema programming. They carefully insist on the right to free expression and explain that they do not avoid challenging material: rather, they evaluate the productions against artistic criteria. According to Simpson, the East End Film Festival “doesn’t shy away from films that take those kinds of risks, but they always have to have some sort of artistic value, have something to say. We don’t just program films that are tough to watch. They’re in the program because they have artistic relevance.” Seattle has often featured extreme cinema. In 2013, for example, the festival screened Fatal (Kashi-ggot, 2010), Dog Flesh (Carne de perro, 2012), Pieta (2012), Paradise: Love, Paradise: Faith, Paradise: Hope, and Interior. Leather Bar. (2013). Barrett explained these inclusions by referring to notions of variety and the mission to serve diverse audiences. The programmer’s evaluation of artistic quality, however, again served as a mitigating factor: Some audiences like to feel very good. They like to be complacent and like to go and be entertained. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with entertaining people. Other audiences really want to be challenged. They want a transformative experience at the cinema. And we want to

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be able to give that to the audience, to those specific different audiences. Again, we’re not going to shy away from something that’s controversial or that’s difficult, if it’s well made. If the story is there, if the story is good, and it has to have something to say. We’re not going to just show a controversial film just to be controversial.

Returning to Eleanor Ringel’s anecdote about Hail Mary and the New York Film Festival reveals that festival organizers have long used the quality discourse to rationalize the programming of extreme cinema and its precursors. When Ringel asked NYFF director Richard Roud about whether a festival is complete without a scandal film, she reports that Roud replied: “A scandal is fun, I suppose. But no. Good movies—that’s what it’s all about.”42

Incentives of the Extreme: Film Funds, the “Festival Film,” and Corporate Sponsorship Despite some organizers’ reservations about quality and personal taste, the central tenets of festival programming—1) to provide a polyphonic variety and a wide survey of world cinema and 2) to deliver content that is novel, breaks mainstream taboos, defies and even challenges conventional tastes, and thereby reinforce the festival identity as a free artistic zone—produce a need for certain types of films. Programming extreme cinema is one way to satisfy this need. It is tempting to take the cynical, unnuanced position that festivals program edgy fare solely to garner attention from the press. Ultimately, however, a complex set of motivations and limitations account for the existence of extreme cinema. These include corporate sponsorship, regimes of regulation and classification, and film funds that festivals elicit and disburse. Returning to the case of Melbourne and La Zombie shows how extreme cinema can help a festival gain recognition to solidify its artistic, liberal identity against institutional resistance from regulators, even without showing the film. According to Carey, the episode “gave us a lot of general media and a lot of people spoke out against the decision, saying the Classification Board was out of touch” with today’s tastes and moral sensibilities. “Australia’s Classification Board . . . [is] very conservative.” Nevertheless, it is clear that the dispute—however much it engendered a productive discussion at the festival and within Australian film culture—created considerable administrative work to appease the intervening institutions and inflected future decision-making and programming. The La Zombie incident has made me nervous with many films since. But [the Classification Board] haven’t banned anything at our festival since. Even with Stranger by the Lake

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[L’inconnu du lac, 2013], with its extreme nudity and real intercourse, they were comfortable with it as we demonstrated (across three pages) that the sex . . . was not gratuitous and was central to the story. It got through and screened to a terrific audience at our festival, without any controversy. The filmmaker Alain Guiraudie was invited as a guest and my opinion was that should the film be banned, we would still fly him over to partake in a panel about censorship and classification.

In general, programmers weigh the value that extreme cinema adds in terms of publicity and identity against the risks it poses for audiences, sponsors, and regulators. “Over the last ten to fifteen years that I’ve been programming,” Gillam said, “there are some interesting [productions with graphic sexual content] and showing those films you do get some more attention on the local radio. And some people kind of like that because it gets you some profile. But I don’t really think that’s what I want to do in life.” In contrast, according to Simpson, the “East End Film Festival is very willing to take those sorts of risks,” including screening the director’s cut of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), which Warner Bros. has not released in the United Kingdom after protracted battles with the BBFC and local authorities over the decades. Simpson also considered screening Clip, “which actually ended up at the [London Film Festival], which I was very surprised about, because we were worried about the legal implications of that because there is some very hardcore sexual content in it.” In the end, Simpson said, personal taste and programming principles must outweigh potential bureaucratic hurdles and legal dilemmas. “For me, I like films that are very bold and challenging and often quite graphic, quite shocking, and challenging the audience. I think that’s part of what the festival actually does. . . . But you’ve always got to think about the risks.” Just as every film festival has unique institutional features and remits, each festival city has its own cultural peculiarities and limitations. The value that extreme cinema can add—and indeed what is even considered taboo-breaking— varies from place to place. Films that might be considered transgressive in Dubai or Cannes may register no controversy in Berlin or Stockholm, and vice versa. The case of San Francisco clearly demonstrates this relativity. According to Cowan, the city is “among the most hyper-tolerant places on Earth. Having spent a lot of time over the years in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, this is actually a more tolerant society.” The particular type of liberalism— especially the city’s status on the forefront of sexual rights—in turn gives rise to different totems and taboos: “The contemporary polemics about controversy don’t actually function that well here, because people see a film like Nymphomaniac and [say] ‘Interesting, that actually fits in with some of the sexual politics that are around us here.’ That that’s not especially offensive.” For the Bay Area at least, some of the advantages and disadvantages of

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programming extreme cinema are not pertinent. In turn, this helps explain why the festival has screened comparatively few radically sexual or violent art productions over the years: that is, they are unlikely to produce a desirable audience reaction or publicity. For Cowan, this is especially true with sexual matters, which tend “to still be a titillating factor around the rest of the planet. It’s a bit ‘meh’ here. It’s a pretty open society in that respect. So stuff like Nymphomaniac or The Idiots [Idioterne, 1998] I think everyone’s kind of like, ‘Yeah, OK. Sunday in Berkeley.’” Cowan and Rosen reported that animal cruelty, the inner workings of tech companies like Google, political struggles, and the food industry are issues much more apt to elicit strong passions and serve the institutional function of extreme cinema. At a 2010 festival screening of Littlerock, a film about two Japanese tourists who become stranded in Antelope Valley, Rosen said, “completely independent of the microphone and any other type of control that was trying to be exerted, a fight broke out about Japanese internment camps during World War II in the audience. It’s about as apolitical of a movie as you could present, but San Francisco can make anything political and by the same token, the films that seem like they might be controversial” are not. Similarly, Old Dog (Khyi rgan, 2011), “the Tibetan movie in which the guy kills his dog in the end: that was the movie I needed the director here for. Because people were so upset about the dog, that they needed to process that with the filmmaker.” In addition to reckoning with exceptional cultural spheres, festivals must contend with the responsibilities of corporate sponsorship, which can inhibit but also encourage the existence of extreme cinema. In interview Rosen revealed that SFIFF has “had cases where sponsors have declined to renew in the following year because they haven’t wanted to support a particular film,” including a situation where a conservative company complained about a screening with sexual content to which they were attached and to which they brought their constituents. Organizers tend to interpret such incidents less as corporate censorship or censure than as a challenge to properly match sponsors with films that best fit the sponsor’s profile and clientele. According to Cowan, “corporate sponsorships in every field are among the most tactical relationships between a company and another organization” and ultimately serve specific needs: corporate entertaining and brand alignment. “For most film festivals the range of material being shown makes it extremely difficult to actually engage in those sorts of brand entanglements.” This means that festivals often must make tenuous alignments organized around “what are really the baselines of film culture: red carpets, celebrities, sparkly nights,” which “allow for a certain kind of corporate glamor or corporate entertaining glamor. . . . But we need to all be realistic about what it is. And even long-term relationships can be severed very quickly if the tactical needs aren’t being met. And this is true of any size of festival.”

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Nevertheless, festivals’ development departments are savvy about attaching sponsors to extreme cinema when their brands align, for example around ideas of freedom, alternative culture, sexuality, irreverence, or exhilaration. According to Barrett, the Seattle International Film Festival tries “to very carefully match sponsors to specific films that their constituency and the people they want to reach with their message.” This includes Scarecrow Video, the largest independent video store in the United States. It caters to cinephiles in the city’s University District. “Scarecrow Video sponsors our Midnight Adrenaline [late-night extreme cinema] series because that is their constituency. They are not going to shy away from the super violent, the super crazy, the super weird. We definitely wouldn’t give that series to a bank.” This example serves to show how niche corporate needs can encourage the programming of extreme cinema. Beyond corporate sponsorship, there are other material economic factors that motivate the existence of extreme cinema at festivals. Funding incentives have produced standardized potential career pathways for filmmakers— especially those from small nations or countries outside the circuit of Western capital. Cindy Wong has noted how “extreme violence and sexual portrayal have become associated with specific national cinemas and auteurs,” suggesting a link between the extreme films of Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk and the fact that they have garnered more nominations and prizes at Cannes, Venice, and Berlin than any other Korean directors. Moreover, despite the heavy emphasis on Continental and especially French extreme cinema in academic studies, it is very frequent that films “from outside Western Europe tackle taboo social and political issues—especially if these are issues that are less problematic within a Western audience framework.”43 Asian filmmaking in particular has gained attention at European festivals because of its extreme representations of violence and sexuality, a phenomenon that has been linked with a problematic circuit of Orientalist gaze (on the part of Western programmers) and attention-seeking (on the part of Eastern filmmakers). Malaysian filmmaker Mansor Bin Putech characterizes the phenomenon polemically, describing what he sees as cynical mutual exploitation: Why are the same film makers from Asia getting recognition at Cannes? The answer is that they are making the types of films which are liked in Cannes. Basically there are only five types of films; those that deal with, 1) poverty or illiteracy, 2) homosexuality or incest, 3) anti-government sentiments, 4) anticolonialism, 5) historical or costume epics. Asian film makers must make one of those types of films in order to win recognition at Cannes . . . Cannes has destroyed the very essence of cinema.44

Although he mentions “homosexuality or incest,” Mansor Bin Putech might have mentioned rape, bestiality, necrophilia, genital mutilation, or any other

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number of abject sexual and violent behaviors on display in recent festival films. The profiling that filmmakers perform in order to gain attention on the festival circuit—to cue media framings such as novelty, national achievement, or scandal—tends to dissipate in direct relation to their success. Indeed, scholars have suggested how, once filmmakers receive recognition at festivals, they tend to move to international realms of collaborators and funding and their films can become “less nationally distinctive.”45 But this is true not only in relation to national markers; levels of provocation and outrage often decrease in indirect relation to filmmakers’ prominence. As evidenced by directors once strongly connected to extreme cinema and inflammatory festival outings— such as Park or Michael Haneke—success with shocking, nationally specific films often yields international funding and perspectives, an auteur status, and easier access to recognized stars and crews. As a result, future films attract attention from established name recognition, rather than having to cue or rely on the “scandal” or “national achievement” media framings. Beyond programming, film festivals motivate the production of extreme cinema by functioning as key matchmakers. Larger festivals with markets serve as showcases for up-and-coming directors to sell distribution rights and to pitch future projects. They host networking events to pair funders with producers. These include Rotterdam’s CineMart, Berlin’s European Film Market (EFM) and Co-Production Market, the Hong Kong–Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF), Cannes’s L’Atelier du Festival, Locarno’s Open Doors, the Buenos Aires Lab (BAL), and the Pusan Promotion Plan (PPP).46 In the global age and especially for filmmakers who hail from countries where art films are not commercially viable on domestic release, this is a necessary step. Numerous commentators have observed this phenomenon. Wong has noted how “filmmakers learn to adapt their projects so that they can be funded,” quoting a Hong Kong filmmaker who told her that colleagues know what festivals want and “can’t help but be reminded of it,” thus implicitly or explicitly perpetuating certain regimes of representation. Indeed, festivals’ training programs for young filmmakers—such as Berlin’s Talent Campus or San Sebastian’s Film School Meeting—promote themes, styles, and handpicked (future) stars, who ultimately depend on (and must produce their work with the ultimate approval of ) festival organizers and their agents. As especially non-Western filmmakers need festival recognition outside of their home country or region in order build a viable career, Wong asks whether they “can be seen as ‘good’ if he or she is not picked up and ratified by the major European festivals.”47 Funding programs are the most direct means by which festivals incentivize daring art fare, among other types of institutionalized cinematic representation. Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund and Berlin’s World Cinema Fund are widely known; the former has subsidized filmmaking since 1989. But even so-called audience festivals such as Seattle and San Francisco have invested in

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such funds as a way to develop relationships with filmmakers and co-produce works that will eventually feature in their programming.48 To be sure, commentators have taken festival funding programs to task for being exploitative and producing reductive and repetitive modes of filmmaking. “Premiere-heavy festivals such as Berlin and Sundance,” Peranson has written, “do just as much harm as good to the world of cinema.” Funding schemes encourage specific styles and formulaic messages, packaged in predictable narrative tropes and dramaturgy. These include “emotionally damaged characters” and “costume design as characterization” typical of Sundance, but also the graphic and transgressive sex and violence that Mansor Bin Putech describes. Peranson is skeptical of “the sudden interest in colonizing the Third World through world cinema funds, which, though certainly valuable, often end up influencing the kind of film that is made.”49 Similarly, Randall Halle criticizes festivals’ and other multinational co-production regimes for the way in which they ultimately produce assuring, consensual portraits of Otherness for middle-class Western audiences. Such funding, Halle writes, “runs the risk of instituting a cycle of Orientalism, offering Euro-American audiences tales they want to hear, about people fundamentally different from themselves, keeping as distant strangers people who live around the corner or down the hall.”50 These commentators surely make a legitimate point. It would be hard to defend aesthetically the worst-offending hollow, trendy, moralizing, and self-important exemplars that year after year dominate Berlin’s competition and many other A-list and audience-festival categories. Nevertheless, this sort of critique misses the point. For however much we may want to condemn festivals’ supposedly gauche and heavy-handed interventions, these co-productions fulfill an essential role. They are a means for a festival to achieve its paramount goals: to provide annually a wide variety of films with important markers, including art, quality, scandal, and national characteristics. Actually co-producing the staples of what they themselves must package and resell reduces risk. By developing relationships with filmmakers and exerting influence on form, style, subject matter, atmosphere, political message, and so on, festivals increase their chances—otherwise left to the vagaries of internationally unstable and unregulated markets—of pleasing audiences, sponsors, and other stakeholders, and ultimately being able to maintain the event for another year. Festivals function as crucial locations for the institutionalization of extreme cinema. They are a nexus that links filmmakers, sales agents, distributors, and journalists; they provide artistic legitimation to films that might otherwise be deemed exploitative or prurient. The discourses of outrage and provocation that characterize the scandal film recur in subsequent distribution and reception cycles in theatrical and home-video release. Extreme cinema receives festivals’ aesthetic validation but also serves to reinforce the events’ liberal,

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tolerant, artistic, and cosmopolitan identities by challenging audiences’ tastes with unconventional and potentially offensive representations. Examining edgy art films via the institutional field of festivals, rather than as texts, yields several benefits. Relocating the discussion of extreme cinema to festivals allows us to take stock of the media appearances and publicity stunts that color our understanding of these films more so than others. The various activities and social actors (organizers, filmmakers, sales agents, press) are not extra to, or separate from, festivals. They are, as de Valck notes, the “necessary links that make up the event,” during which “a multitude of performances are competing for attention. There are abundant pre-planned ceremonies and rituals, but at the same time, there are also more uncontrolled expressions of spectacle and outright distortions of existing formats.”51 Indeed, as in the cases of Nymphomaniac, Irreversible, and Twentynine Palms, journalistic and scholarly assessments often record and deliberate on such planned or spontaneous performances more than the films’ plot lines or stylistic features.52 Scandals can break, but much more often, make festivals. Telluride Film Festival co-founder Bill Pence remembers how the appearance of Leni Riefenstahl at the inaugural 1974 event “generated a lot of controversy and got us on the map immediately.”53 Over time, with stunts and daring, artistic subject matter, festival filmmakers “transmute novelty and controversy into a canon,” thus incentivizing the cycle to continue.54 The institutional function of extreme cinema exists in a continuum with panels on the state of cinema at Venice and glamor shoots and pin-ups on the Croisette: to provide a mysterious, enigmatic, taboo-breaking, liberal, intellectual, artistic, but nonetheless sexy atmosphere. Just as arthouse cinema has gravitated toward the titillating, film festivals have long attempted to provide a similar potential on a physical and symbolic level. As Schwarz observes in her cultural history of Cannes, the “beach setting offered a seemingly legitimate reason for [starlets’] state of relative undress. Fairly lax censorship laws and a long tradition of nudes and erotica in France encouraged risqué photos.” At Cannes, “the French reinforced their reputation as a sexually open society, and the photographers at the Festival used the occasion to sell these sexy photos around the world under the veneer of legitimate reporting.”55 Furthermore, approaching extreme cinema through film festivals allows us to understand how the latter not only provide a physical location for exhibition. They also provide a marketplace for distribution and a breeding ground for their production: festivals increasingly not only incentivize but actually guide and help shape films. These annual “events” have transformed thereby into organic institutions, swallowing the traditional domains of studios, production companies, national governments, and arthouse exhibition circuits. Organizers recognize these new roles as a potential but also a pressure. In Cowan’s opinion, for example, festivals have

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been both co-opted and marginalized by contemporary cinema practice. Often very happily co-opted! We feel as though it’s benefitting emergent voices that are sort of meaningful to us in an artistic context. And a little nervous about it when there are other responsibilities that are meant to be shouldered by us as well. Teasing out these now conjoined fates which are largely not-for-profits with often quite lofty aims with an aggressive, mercurial business, show business is becoming increasingly problematic, I think. We’re in a very complicated time for cinema in general and what it means to see a film in the cinema. Increasingly what it means to see a film in the cinema involves is going to a film festival, not going to a movie theater. But that places a burden on festivals which is enormous. Suddenly we’re carrying the weight of all cinema in its true and original form while everybody else gets to deal with computers and mobile phones and streaming and episodic television and everything else. I think you’ll see many of us chafing against that and actually saying “hold on, we’re just going to assume the burdens that we think we’re responsible for.”

Because of festivals’ increasing function as marketplaces and gateways for any sort of distribution, attention and recognition at these events—whether as an award-winner or as a scandal film—is now, according to Thomas Elsaesser, a matter of “life or death” for independent and art cinema: a “film comes to a festival, in order to be catapulted beyond the festival.”56 Extreme cinema is one response to these institutional realities. The next chapter turns its attention to the locations and circuits to where festival films want to be catapulted. It examines the rhetoric and new forms of theatrical and home-viewing distribution and how they further contribute to the proliferation of the mode.

4 Discourses and Modes of Distribution

A number of specialty divisions or boutique labels have disseminated extreme cinema in the United States and United Kingdom over the last twenty years. They include Artificial Eye, the UK distributor of L’ennui (1998), Antichrist (2009), Blue Is the Warmest Color (La vie d’Adèle, 2013), and Nymphomaniac (2014) and Axiom Films, which released À l’aventure (2008), Leap Year (Año bisiesto, 2010), The Housemaid (Hanyo, 2010), and Q (2011). Magnolia Pictures is the US distributor of Bronson (2008), 13 Assassins ( Jūsan-nin no shikaku, 2010), and Nymphomaniac. Momentum Pictures issued Shame (2011) and Optimum Releasing put out 9 Songs (2004) and Room in Rome (Habitación en Roma, 2010). Tartan Films was the distributor of Audition (Ōdishon, 1999), Irreversible (2002), and Oldboy (Oldeuboi, 2003). Third Window Films has released Love Exposure (Ai no mukidashi, 2008) and Lalapipo (2009) and rereleased Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) and Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992) in 2012. The US-based Kino Lorber or its predecessor companies released or rereleased Funny Games (1997), 9 Songs, Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo, 2005), Tony Manero (2008), Dogtooth (Kynodontas, 2009), and Elles (2009). Film Movement has been responsible for Antares (2004), A Call Girl (Slovenka, 2009), and Les apaches (2013) on the North American market. In addition, some foreign outfits sell to Anglophone territories online, often to bypass and profit on local censorship. These include the Netherlands-based A-Film, which offers uncut versions of Ken Park (2002) and Shortbus (2006). 69

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Independent distribution companies are not typically known for their longevity. Lifespans threaten to shrink further in the transition to digital technologies. These are “paradoxical times” for art film distributors, according to trade writer Geoffrey Macnab. “On the one hand there are dozens of companies handling what might be loosely referred to as arthouse fare. On the other there is a contracting market. Distributors feel they are caught in a transitional period between old-style theatrical releasing and a brave new world of digital distribution and video on demand that doesn’t seem to have arrived.” With ever-rising numbers of productions, competition is vicious and there are fears of market cannibalization, a zero-sum game by which ultimately no one survives.1 Art cinema distributors regularly receive new names or owners; they often merge with other labels or companies. Some are part of large, publicly traded corporations and deal with a large variety of films (for instance, Lionsgate Films is part of Lionsgate Entertainment) or with extreme cinema as part of a regional niche (e.g., the Asian focus of Third Window Films). Others diversify vertically with production and distribution arms (e.g., Axiom Films) or with distribution and exhibition subsidiaries (e.g., Artificial Eye). Despite the high risks and truncated company histories, arthouse distribution (when compared to production or mainstream distribution) has relatively low barriers to entry; new social media publicity options have reduced these barriers further.2 For this reason, many are small or even virtually one-person operations. As the key channel between production and exhibition and/or consumption, distributors exist to sell films for more than their acquisition price: they aim to add value during this transaction via publicity and other means. Film scholarship has traditionally paid scant attention to distribution. In fact, it has become de rigueur to preface pronouncements on the subject by commenting, as Alisa Perren summarizes, that “first, scholars have examined distribution far less frequently than either production or consumption; and second, the digital age has fueled dramatic changes in distribution processes and practices that necessitate greater interrogation.”3 Even pioneering institutionalsociological studies have downplayed the sector’s significance, subordinating the activity to artists’ imperatives and reducing distributors’ agency to that of a functional intermediary.4 The lack of serious research risks overlooking how acquisitions, list-building, marketing strategies, advertising campaigns, and exhibition agreements have had a significant effect on which filmmakers enjoy substantial careers and which films audiences may see and when, where, and in what form they see them.5 Some new research has advanced our knowledge into how international art cinema circulates and undertaken more nuanced studies of practitioners’ many roles.6 Their responsibilities often begin before production, in arranging or supplying finance. Generating the proper packaging and publicity involves liaising with graphic designers, IT

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developers, suppliers, and manufacturers, in addition to furnishing advertising, from traditional newspapers and specialist publications to websites, blogs, and social media. Distributors must also venture into complex legal spheres in their duties to acquire and license rights on VoD platforms, such as Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes. Moreover, they sell rights or form joint ventures in order to broadcast films in various international markets and media (theatrical, television, cable, satellite, and so on).7 These sundry tasks and complex divisions of labor explain—but do not justify—the relative ignorance of the sector in film scholarship. Perren identifies “top-down” and “bottom-up” academic approaches to distribution. The former examine corporate power and control via an examination of internal reports and correspondence, trade papers, and mainstream press; the latter investigate cultural dimensions by interviewing practitioners to understand distribution decisions and how they shape our understanding of individual films or media history as a whole.8 Using a comprehensive, but primarily bottom-up, procedure, this chapter considers exhibitors’ and distributors’ interests and motivations to be as important as the producers of extreme cinema. How does the mode fit into contemporary distribution and programming practices and how do new technologies and business models shape the institutional field? I seek to understand these sometimes low-profile, yet essential contemporary practitioners partly via interviews, mostly those I conducted at their workplaces. Here the analysis concerns how these distributors and exhibitors conceive of their (and their organization’s) aims and duties, the ambivalent role of controversy in acquisitions and marketing, how they form tactical relationships with filmmakers, sales agents, and audiences, and how their rhetoric in turn facilitates the dissemination of extreme cinema. Furthermore, the final sections reveal how institutional diversification and integration as well as new distribution platforms have contributed to the spread of edgy arthouse fare.

Invincible Pictures Thomas Ashley, CEO of Invincible Pictures, began his career as a production assistant on a Chevrolet commercial at the age of thirteen and has been working in the film industry since. He and business partner Brad Heffler founded Invincible Pictures, which produces some films, but for the last five or six years up to 2014 has been “80 percent” devoted to distribution.9 Many acquisitions take place at festivals, especially Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, Tribeca, South by Southwest, and the Fantasia International Film Festival. Although Invincible Pictures distributes a range of productions, the company specializes in edgy art-genre border-crossings that feature graphic depictions of violence and sex, including Sex Drugs Guns (2009), The Burnt House (2009),

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Sennentuntschi (2010), and its most successful feature, A Serbian Film (Srpski film, 2010). Invincible Pictures’ commercial rhetoric stresses the films’ liminal existence: “Half art flick, half exploitation pic, SEX DRUGS GUNS entertains in three segments,” according to the company website.10 In interview, Ashley underlined this independent, transgressive, art-exploitation focus as the company’s guiding acquisition principle: We look for ground-breaking, independent cinema that is going to make people think. . . . You’ve got to sit down and watch it and say ‘wow, that was intense’ or ‘that made me think.’ Something that does what film is supposed to do which is evoke a human response and give you some sort of powerful emotion, whether you love it or you hate it. Some of these cookie-cutter . . . formula Hollywood films. . . . You know, Hollywood does that really well. So we focus on the things that . . . love it or hate it, you’re going to be thinking about it for a while after you see it.

Howard Becker has written that “artists (and the distributors who handle their work) construct an imaginary audience out of fragments of information they assemble by various means.”11 When I asked Ashley about how the company envisions its audience, he replied that the “Invincible audience is a true cinephile. People who are really into movies, that are going to look beyond the controversy and really look at the message, the content, like, a great film . . . whether it’s hard to watch.” Although Ashley maintained that Invincible

FIG. 9 A Serbian Film became a bestseller for Invincible Pictures and its VoD service,

Flixfling. ©Everett/REX Shutterstock. Reproduced by permission.

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Pictures did not seek out controversy as a publicity stunt or corporate strategy, he emphasized the positive qualities of controversy: the production of a dialogue among consumers in particular and in film culture in general. “Controversy,” Ashley said, “is what makes things great, that sparks a debate.” Partaking of familiar discourses of quality and challenging audiences, he revealed that when he is interviewed about a film that has produced critical or popular debate he knows that “it’s a worthwhile film and that’s what we care about, that’s the kind of content we like to put out there.” The distribution history of A Serbian Film exemplifies the rhetorical role of personal taste and quality to extreme cinema distribution as well as the ambivalent function of controversy and audience debate. Emphasizing aesthetics and spectatorial effects, Ashley admitted he became “hooked” on the film during a market screening at Cannes, after the Jinga Films sales agent made the “odd pitch” of claiming that Ashley should not see it: “The rhythm, the way it opened. Methodic. The music. It was just so well constructed. And just, the way it builds. . . . The fury that it has at the end. . . . It was crazy.” In an interview with Screen Daily, Ashley even more explicitly partook of the aesthetic embrace, distinguishing A Serbian Film from torture porn and exploitation. “Everybody likes to say it’s an exploitation film. I really don’t say that, especially after talking to the film-makers. Shocking and disturbing as it is, this is really a well-made film. Everything that happens in the movie, happens for a reason,” Ashley submitted. He continued: “I just thought it was a really good movie. It definitely sets itself apart from the [Hostel franchise] and some of the other torture porn.”12 Several distributors, including the Weinstein Company and Magnolia Pictures, demonstrated interest in acquiring the film at Cannes. According to Ashley, however, they were nervous about the potential bad press and controversy. Jinga Films “just wanted to unload it and they were happy that someone was willing to take it. . . . We were able to go in and grab it.” When the company purchased the rights to distribute it theatrically and on home video in North America, however, Ashley and his business partner Heffler did not “think at the time we realized how controversial . . . a lot of the controversy that ended up coming out from the film was not even things that we were even thinking about when we made the acquisition.” In fact, a scandal framing dogged the film and its distribution from the start; according to Ashley, it made the process “very painful.” Ashlely reported that Invincible Pictures did not anticipate the full legal ramifications, which culminated when Spanish authorities arrested Sitges Film Festival director Ángel Sala on child pornography charges for screening A Serbian Film.13 “We never looked at it as being any kind of child pornography. It was definitely on the edge of being risqué and a little out there. But it was obvious that this was all perfectly legit stuff.” Although the lurid sexual themes and violence piqued interest and provided some publicity

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for the film, they also created commercial problems. “The bad press really hurt the film from a distribution standpoint, because there was a lot of outlets that simply wouldn’t cover it. A lot of our distributors would not carry it. And we had a hard time finding a home for it. We had no on-demand. We kept all the streaming rights for ourselves.” Ashley continued: “We purposely withheld it from Netflix. They didn’t take the DVD at all.” The furor made A Serbian Film Invincible Pictures’ bestseller hitherto, but also posed difficult legal and commercial dilemmas. In this example key differences between distributors and festivals become apparent. Despite the exceptional Sala incident, festivals are traditionally accepted as free, artistic zones and their films generally play at most a few times at a single auditorium in a discrete, physical location, to a circumscribed, often middle-class, public. Although festivals have clear commercial interests, most exist as nonprofit organizations and opinion leaders deem them not unlike cultural charities, a perception that festival discourse encourages. In contrast, niche distributors, whatever reputation they may build with their lists and marketing, do not automatically enjoy this regard. DVDs and downloads exist as material objects or as files on computers, spread out across an amorphous geographical space, and can be seized according to the norms (or whims) of local authorities. The professional relationships that, for example, the Leeds and East End festivals have carefully and over time forged with councils, and which have resulted in a laissez-faire approach to censorship and regulation, do not pertain to distributors with the license and duty to sell to niche audiences across large territories (e.g., North America; United Kingdom and Ireland). Labels’ clear profit motives leave them open to charges of cynical business practices and dumbingdown audiences (such as those leveled by Manohla Dargis, examined earlier). Ashley’s statements reveal how extreme cinema distributors struggle between the ideals of art and transgression, the imperatives of commerce and conformity, and their identities as cinephiles and businessmen. This is particularly evident in the company’s initial decision to cut more than a minute from A Serbian Film in order to avoid a “potential legal issue.” We were afraid of [major legal problems] so we got it, we cut it, which is something I morally object to. I don’t believe that a film should ever be cut or altered from the filmmaker’s original vision. But in this case, we acquired the film and then the risk of . . . considered being child pornography, what was happening in Spain was too risky. I mean, there’s no way I was going to risk being a little blue dot on a Google Map for a movie. And I knew that people wanted to see it. I caught a lot of slack for editing a film and I didn’t want to do that, but once that whole Sala issue was resolved and the court said ‘no, this is not child pornography’ then there was a legal precedent out there. So then we were comfortable. We then did the uncut release. Which kind of chopped up the release. There’s a

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whole bunch of different versions out there and people didn’t know what they were getting and it wasn’t the best experience for the moviegoer, but we really didn’t have a choice.

Artsploitation Films Raymond Murray, CEO of distributor Artsploitation Films, started his career as a projectionist and then manager of a “hippie movie theater,” TLA (Theater of the Living Arts), in Philadelphia.14 A year after it shut down in 1980, Murray and business partners reopened it as a repertory cinema and the first branch of their media company, TLA Entertainment Group. In the mid-1980s, as repertory cinemas faced pressure from the widespread availability of VCRs, Murray established four TLA Video stores in Philadelphia and on West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, which he operated for over twenty-five years. In 1984, TLA Entertainment Group operated a first-run art movie theater, the Roxy Screening Rooms.15 In those days, the company’s raison d’être revolved around filling a local cultural gap: showing cutting-edge films that were not yet available in Philadelphia. The expansion of TLA anticipated a broader and more ambitious investment in film culture. Murray founded and directed the Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Film Festival beginning in 1995; TLA Entertainment Group operated the Philadelphia Film Festival for ten years beginning in 2001. In 2000, Murray started his first major distribution company, TLA Releasing, which later expanded to divisions in both the United States and the United Kingdom. TLA Releasing, according to Murray, was originally conceived of as a “precursor to Artsploitation” and “geared toward traditional art movies, the somewhat weird, and gay/lesbian films.” These productions, however, did not all fare well commercially and as a consequence TLA Releasing pursued the LGBT market exclusively. TLA Entertainment Group’s main business became its distribution division, including VHS, DVD, and online streaming, until Murray sold TLA Releasing in 2011.16 The TLA Releasing sale contained a no-compete clause for gay and lesbian films, but not for art films or extreme cinema; Murray founded Artsploitation Films in the same year. As of August 2013, Artsploitation has released nineteen films from seventeen countries.17 They include Gandu (2010), a frenetic, explicit portrait of a rapping Indian thug; the Japanese yakuza gangster film Hard Romantiker (Hādo romanchikkā, 2011); the American horror Toad Road (2012); Hemel (2012), the Dutch portrait of a nymphomaniac; and Clip (Klip, 2012), which graphically chronicles the sexual experimentations of a Serbian girl. According to Murray, Artsploitation began as a concept and as a personal taste. “It started out with that name. So Artsploitation being this kind of art film meets genre film. But when I entered the market I didn’t have a model so I just went and [acquired] whatever I liked. And it skewed closer to art

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films with controversial elements in the film that scared away a lot of traditional distributors. But more so I enjoyed every film. So I like these challenging films that have that edge to them.” According to Murray, beyond personal taste, Artsploitation “filled a need. I felt genre films were already being picked up,” but while attending film festivals internationally he noted that many productions with artistic and commercial potential failed to find a distributor in the United States. According to Murray the company ethos is to disseminate “interesting, challenging films with sex.” On the company’s website, the motto is stated as follows: “Not strictly a genre label, ARTSPLOITATION FILMS looks for intriguing, unsettling, unpredictable and provocative films from around the world.”18 Like Invincible Pictures, Artsploitation has deployed the typical extreme cinema distribution model: releasing undervalued films with mostly small profit margins to niche audiences. With the more established TLA Releasing Murray would often begin involvement at the production stage, “start putting early money into a film to secure releasing rights” or working directly with the producer or director. In contrast, Artsploitation has involved “buying retail . . . going straight to the market,” that is, so-called negative pick-ups,19 usually via a sales agent. With sales agents, Murray revealed, “you pay a little more, but you don’t have any hassles with the crazy filmmakers. Standard contracts, everything’s normal. You deal with the filmmaker afterward.” Murray openly questioned the model’s financial feasibility on the production end. For first-time directors TLA would inject about $20,000 at the preproduction stage with the promise of an additional $30,000 of residuals; but with a typical budget of $120,000, filmmakers had to acquire significant funding from other sources such as Kickstarter and other crowd-sourcing campaigns. According to Murray, distributing extreme cinema is risky and often unprofitable. “To be honest,” he admitted, “Artsploitation is not the biggest grosser. I underwrite it.” This is not an uncommon feature in the sector; CEO Hamish McAlpine reportedly self-financed Tartan Films until its demise in 2008.20 In Murray’s estimation, the thin margins and primacy of personal taste in buying decisions make extreme cinema distribution even more hit-and-miss than the notoriously uncertain film business as a whole.21 Elijah Wood supported Toad Road (2012) as its executive producer; nevertheless, Murray stated, the film “didn’t do well.” Although the “support of the blogs has been amazing” and provided “the geek factor,” even Murray’s favorite films have suffered lackluster returns. In the end, he concluded about distributing edgy arthouse fare, “you just hope that . . . you look for a hit or two, without selling out.” Attracting a stable audience remains extreme cinema distributors’ greatest challenge. Genres such as science fiction have a naturally occurring demographic to which one can easily market. In contrast, according to Murray, the

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apparently inclusive advantage of hybrid modes such as extreme cinema— artistically sophisticated yet with a titillating allure—can develop into a commercial disadvantage in practice. Murray’s comments on marketing and audiences illuminate crucial characteristics of the mode’s distribution and deserve to be quoted in full. I thought I was going to have my cake and eat it too. I thought that I was going to get the genre crowd. And the reaction to the websites and the blogs when they reviewed the films were overwhelmingly positive. They still get great reviews. But I learned something that was pretty obvious but I didn’t see it at the time. The gay market, they’re loyal. You can take a comedy, a coming-out film, an international film, or even an artsy film with a gay theme and you got the same audience that’s willing in certain degrees to buy that DVD. For Artsploitation, I had to develop a new audience every time. You had a small part of the genre audience, but all the rest—so if I had Gandu, which is an Indian film, I had to go after the Indian audience as well as . . . hip-hop, had to go into the music publications. With Vanishing Waves [Aurora, 2012], a Lithuanian science-fiction film . . . you have to work out this whole thing. And so I found that every film took special handling. And for a small company, doing—and we had a PR guy out in California doing it—you don’t really get to everybody that way. It’s just hard to find each audience.

For Murray, this experience was all the more surprising because of his previous work with the gay market and film festivals. “The film festival audience is very loyal, very strong.” During his time running festivals, Murray said, “I felt I could show anything. If you promoted it right you got an audience.” Festivals have “in many ways replaced the art cinemas.” Because of this fact, Artsploitation has only done “a few” theatrical releases, because “really we count the festival circuit as the theatrical.” As TLA Releasing and Artsploitation are USdomiciled companies, even their UK subsidiaries do not qualify for generous European subsidies. “Our competitors could pick up films and show them theatrically because they were getting some money for it.” Censorship and controversy are not insurmountable obstacles to distributing extreme cinema in the United States and United Kingdom. Indeed, according to Murray, they can help or hinder, depending on cultural context. “We’ve been banned a few times in the UK. We actually had a horror film that [the BBFC] banned completely. They said there’s nothing redeeming in the entire film, you cannot show it in the UK. We of course sent a press release out on that. We loved it.” Nevertheless, the United Kingdom offers a challenge to independent distributors because all DVDs must receive BBFC classification. “The UK is a lot tougher . . . and they’re making it tougher for independents.” The certification procedure is “not cheap. . . . So you’re talking about $1,000

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right off the start. . . . It makes the US market a lot easier. We don’t do the [MPAA] rating system.”22 According to Murray, who also produces adult films, in the United States the “big thing is underaged. They’re obsessed here. . . . And they have the most strict system for that. You have to get their photo ID, an affidavit. You have to have a separate computer that has the files in there and only use the computer for that, so [the authorities] can take it with them.” In contrast, foreign arthouse taboo-breakers, Murray maintained, attract little attention from US law enforcement. Democratic government administrations “don’t care about sex so much. So when it comes to international films, I haven’t seen any problems in last twenty years. And now that even some mainstream art films have had truly graphic things and the world didn’t end,” Murray surmised, distributors of extreme cinema have little reason to fear censorship or obscenity lawsuits in the United States. Similar to the case of Invincible Pictures, controversy has played a vital yet ambivalent role in Artsploitation’s business model and distribution practices. Scandal creates attention and provides built-in publicity; this, in turn, reduces advertising costs. Murray’s statements on the history of acquiring and distributing Clip furthermore suggest how controversy can lower acquisition costs as well: I saw it at the Cannes market in 2012. I knew the sales agent pretty well. I went to see it and I thought “Oh My God, this is difficult.” So I went back to them and . . . it took me a couple of viewings to appreciate it, I didn’t appreciate it the first time. I only saw the problems of it, the underage and all this other stuff. They couldn’t sell it to anybody. Everybody passed on it because of the controversy. That film . . . which did very well for us, second best one. We made a deal with them. I said “I have to pay you less because I need to reserve some money for legal fees.” I said “I know I’m going to have problems with this.” So it ended up being a relatively cheap deal. They got it and they didn’t know what to do about it. But in the end, the filmmaker [Maja Milos], she’s gorgeous, she’s eloquent, she’s a real presence. I met her out in California when she did the film festival there. She’s amazing, did great press, gave good interviews. It found an audience . . . because it was geared toward the art crowd who can take that . . . especially because she used body doubles on everything. So it didn’t create the problems we expected.

Although Murray openly acknowledged the benefits of controversy and censorship in generating media exposure, he maintained—deferring to artistic quality and personal taste—that these elements are not Artsploitation acquisition priorities. “When I see these films, I’m not looking for controversy.” Recalling his first viewing of what turned out to be Artsploitation’s best-selling

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title, Hemel, Murray said his initial thoughts centered on its innovative representation of feminine pleasure. Hemel ’s “bold expression of female sexuality is really unusual in films. That really found a great audience here. It got some of the genre and some of the more artsy mainstream press with it for reviews and it played at a good festival circuit.” According to Murray, his own aesthetic evaluation drives acquisitions. Looking retrospectively at the Artsploitation list, however, Murray deciphered patterns to this taste, such as initial films about “troubled youth . . . younger guys in fucked-up situations” and disclosed that representations of nudity and sex often had a direct correlation to sales. After Gandu and Hard Romantiker Artsploitation Films subsequently distributed “a little sex series with Hemel and Vanishing Waves and Clip. And they did the best. Because you can get the . . . where guys will watch a film, you know, they’ll sit through the most dense art film just to see some breasts. And we don’t delude ourselves into thinking that we found more art film lovers.” These comments once again foreground the aesthetic-commercial conundrum of extreme cinema, its hybrid forms of art and exploitation, and the appeal that this has to certain distributors. Even a cursory gloss of marketing materials demonstrates how they project this appeal to potential audiences and, in fact, foreground controversy. The Artsploitation Clip DVD includes a cover image of the protagonist Jasna (Isidora Simijonovic) on a bed in panties, in the act of removing her pullover. The back features smaller images of two girls watching computer pornography and of two girls kissing as well as a larger image of Jasna’s face in the throes of passion. The plot description also cues the film’s potentially provocative content as a main attraction: “Controversial for raw, graphic sexuality among the teenage cast, CLIP marks an extraordinary debut for writer-director Maja Milos.” The front cover quotes from the Variety review in order to achieve a similar effect: “Maja Milos’ debut feature, depicting the hypersexualized nihilism of Serbian teens . . . [is] certain to generate a hurricane of controversy.” Gandu, to provide an additional example from the Artsploitation catalog, features a banner with the phrase “banned in India” on the DVD case. Artsploitation Films press releases attend prominently to these concerns: “this independent Indian film is a deliriously frantic, music-infused look at one poor young man and his dreams of becoming a rap star. GANDU (Hindi slang for ‘asshole’) is a bold and entertaining example of new Indian filmmaking that, ironically, is banned in India.”23 The DVD liner notes further the rhetoric of aesthetic transgression: “The film isn’t just rebellion against ‘Bollywood’ cliché, but rather an explosion of cinematic anarchy directed at the pedestrian nature of all world filmmaking.” It has long been a maxim that, in the words of Tanya Krzywinska, art cinema culture “often uses the provocation of transgression as a means to lure an audience,” even when the films themselves are “not particularly transgressive.”24 Indeed, the rhetoric of liberation informs the marketing of contemporary

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FIG. 10 Artsploitation’s distribution of Clip reveals how the prospect of scandal can reduce advertising costs as well as leverage acquisition prices.

extreme cinema and its forerunners. Keith Heffernan writes in his study of I Am Curious (Yellow) (Jag är nyfiken—gult, 1967) that “distributors and exhibitors have often highlighted the salacious or forbidden spectacle in international cinema for the parochial American filmgoing public, and films seeking to push the boundaries of content have often been deliberately, at times cynically, crafted by their makers with narrative and stylistic features that diverge strongly from the norms of classical Hollywood cinema.”25 Productions such as I Am Curious—which straddles the categories of art and exploitation, promises political allegory, and elicited Judith Crist’s proto-cynicism criticism—provide the narrative and stylistic precedent for today’s Clip and A Serbian Film. Furthermore, distributors such as Grove Press and exhibitors such as Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 anticipated the strategies of Artsploitation,

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Invincible Pictures, Tartan Films, and even Miramax and the Weinstein Company, which have also used this formula with relatively less graphic films such as Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Atame!, 1989); Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989); and The Crying Game (1992).26 In 1969, Variety predicted that I Am Curious would pave the way for a new hybrid genre that would appeal to both the middle-class arthouse patrons and the hardcore crowd.27 It is clear from Murray’s earlier statement about “going to have my cake and eat it too” that this desire remains at the heart of extreme cinema list-building and programming. It is equally evident—based on the demise of Miramax, Tartan Films, as well as Murray’s frank assessments—that this strategy is perilous and such successes often prove elusive. Some “top-down” matters can distill some similarities between the likes of Artsploitation and Invincible Pictures and allow for some provisional conclusions. Both are small companies: Invincible has thirty employees and Artsploitation even fewer. Their rhetoric emphasizes personal taste, commercial viability, artistic value, and the challenges of accessing audiences. In interview, both Ashley and Murray confirmed that their business model above all involves buying relatively inexpensive productions with bold content but artistic intentions and targeting a niche clientele. Although neither expects prodigious profit margins, each reduces uncertainty by negotiating modest purchase prices and by using controversy creatively: on the one hand to abate acquisition costs (by scaring away risk-averse competitors from beginning a bidding war) and on the other to pre-sell the film and minimize publicity costs. Both dwelled on the importance of developing professional relationships with sales agents, who represent, according to Mark Peranson, the “defining actor in the current political economy of the film festival” and art-cinema distribution. “The big sales agents—Wild Bunch, Fortissimo, Celluloid Dreams (a.k.a. ‘The Director’s Label’), Films Distribution, Pyramide, Bavaria—control the art film market.” Increasingly, sales agents perform a role similar to distributors; in addition, their rhetoric often coincides. Wild Bunch claims to be dedicated to “the nurture, development and creative exploitation of the radical, the innovative, the visionary, the truly extraordinary. . . . Often controversial, always provocative, our line-up stands as our statement of intent.” Sales agents often invest at production stage, determine the festivals at which the films play, and broker distributors’ acquisition price.28 Furthermore, both Artsploitation and Invincible Pictures reduce financial risks through diversification, some horizontal or vertical integration, or by embarking on joint ventures with established partners. For example, Artsploitation signed a multi-year deal with Kino Lorber for targeted publicity and disc and digital distribution.29 Invincible Pictures diversifies and provides some vertical integration in several ways. Although it has an in-house creative director and marketing staff, it delegates some tasks to outside partners, such

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as Adam Kersh of Brigade Marketing, who executed the A Serbian Film campaign; it also outsources much of its technology and development projects. In addition, its large Philadelphia studio has hosted the shoots for films such as Limitless (2011) and Silver Linings Playbook (2012) as well as television series. Invincible Pictures has even launched a VoD platform called FlixFling. Larger distributors with significant extreme cinema catalogs, such as Kino Lorber or Magnolia Pictures, diversify lists beyond artsploitation to include art-cinema classics, documentaries, children’s, or family-friendly films. Magnolia, furthermore, is part of a group that includes the Landmark Theatres arthouse-cinema chain with over fifty locations across the United States. Such cases complicate traditional analyses of distribution, which almost always focus on large operations affiliated with major studios.30 Small distributors exist institutionally to fill in the gaps: to deliver niche films to niche audiences and profit on this exchange.

Exhibition and Consumption Ventures for Extreme Cinema It is beyond the purview of this book to elaborate on every instance of extreme cinema exhibition and consumption. Nevertheless, it is essential to demonstrate the changes to these forms over the years and how new ventures and platforms have helped this mode of filmmaking prosper. As indicated in the Introduction, the establishment of the postwar arthouse circuit paralleled the rise in proto-extreme cinema, from Rome, Open City (Roma, città aperta, 1945) to Ingmar Bergman films. This mode of exhibition arose as a response to social changes and as a means by which the middleclass patrons could, via conspicuous consumption of artistic fare, articulate cultural distinctions. The cinemas catered to these needs not only by screening sophisticated foreign fare, but also by charging higher ticket prices, with stylish architecture and interior design, by deploying sexually suggestive advertising, and by dispensing coffee and wine rather than popcorn and candy.31 Historians place the peak of the arthouse cinema in the 1960s, after which a steady decline set in so that by 1980 the US arthouse circuit dwindled to less than 100 cinemas with a core market in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. A similar consolidation took place in the United Kingdom.32 To be sure, (largely chain-based) art cinemas still exist in major UK and US cities and university towns. In addition, other venues and platforms (including festivals) have taken up the slack of screening art films in general and extreme cinema in particular. Before examining today’s arthouse exhibition landscape, at least some attention should be devoted to other instances. They include the midnight movie movement, which, peaking in the 1970s, became a key site

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of exhibition for precursors of today’s extreme cinema and still continues in a reduced form to this day.33 Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970), the “artporn” Emmanuelle (1974), and David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) were cult hits in their extended late-night runs in cinemas across North American and Western European cities.34 Furthermore, Joan Hawkins has recently detailed the role of midnight screenings in the reception of key extreme precursor WR: Mysteries of the Organism (W.R.—Misterije organizma, 1971). It disappointed in its initial prestige platform release and short run but had a significant afterlife on the midnight-movie circuit, which overlapped somewhat with the arthouse network, but more often included second- or third-run mainstream and less reputable cinemas. There WR: Mysteries of the Organism culled word-of-mouth publicity and long-term cult prestige.35 The midnight-movie phenomenon lives on not only in select theatrical programs but also in latenight extreme-cinema sections at festivals such as Melbourne (“Night Shift”), Seattle (“Midnight Adrenaline”), and San Sebastián (“Midnight Showings”). The cinematic tradition of midnight movies itself derived from longstanding late-night television broadcasts of (often outdated) horror, sci-fi, exploitation, and other so-called paracinema.36 Indeed, the late-night film series “Extreme Cinema” played a key role in coining the term extreme cinema and its various idioms. Airing irregularly from 1997 to 2005 on Britain’s Channel 4 and sister station FilmFour and programmed by Nick Freand Jones and critic Mark Kermode, it featured cult horror (Suspiria, 1974) and midnight-movie classics (Emanuelle, Eraserhead) together with contemporary extreme cinema: for example, Crash (1996), Funny Games, Audition, and Fat Girl (À ma soeur!, 2001). Channel 4 resurrected the brand in 2012 to premiere Antichrist.37

Film Forum As an addendum to the discussion of distributor discourses and the last chapter on festival programmers’ rhetoric, the current chapter concludes by examining how exhibitors understand the role of extreme cinema in their programming and in the context of the substantial recent changes in film culture. I begin with a short case study of Film Forum, an archetypal contemporary independent arthouse cinema but also a singular and much-feted New York institution. Whereas Invincible Pictures and Artsploitation represent two companies dedicated more or less exclusively to niche extreme cinema, Film Forum provides a contrasting example to investigate how the mode functions in the institutional field of arthouse exhibition writ large. Regularly deemed “the city’s top arthouse theater” or “New York’s most prestigious, active and venturesome art-film theater,”38 Film Forum is such an established presence in New York (and American) cinema culture that in 2010 MoMA dedicated an

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exhibition series to long-serving director Karen Cooper, who took over operations soon after the 1970 founding.39 Since moving to West Houston Street in 1990, the theater has expanded to three screens. The programming remains divided between repertory (e.g., every existent Hitchcock film or a François Truffaut retrospective), curated by Bruce Goldstein, and premieres, planned by Cooper and Michael Maggiore. Maggiore has worked at Film Forum since 1994.40 Similar to festival organizers and niche distributors, arthouse programmers stress the significance of personal taste. According to Maggiore, “art programming is very much driven by our taste.” He and Cooper divide the festival circuit; typically, Maggiore attends Cannes, Sundance, and Toronto, while Cooper goes to Berlin, Amsterdam, and a third festival that varies annually. Maggiore estimated that the two see at least part of “about 700–800 films a year” at festivals, through submissions, or by soliciting screeners. At the Cannes market, for an example of Film Forum’s selection process, Maggiore (after consulting with Cooper) will approach sales agents and make an offer. Because agents usually broker sales with distributors first, “we have to stand back and wait until it does get a deal. But opening with us in many cases is seen as an advantage because it is a high-profile, yet . . . low-risk opening. Distributors would not need to spend the same kind of advertising money in-house as they would at commercial theaters in New York.” Often at festivals, “distributors’ acquisitions people that I know will check in with me during the festival about certain titles. ‘Have you seen this? What did you think? Would you open this?’” Here too professional relationships within the institutional field are deemed essential. Film Forum premieres thirty films a year; each typically runs for one or two weeks. The program’s relatively few contemporary productions entail precise decision-making according to one or more criteria. “We have to feel that we are selecting films that we . . . are enthusiastic about. Films that are showing us maybe a familiar subject in an unfamiliar perspective,” Maggiore said. “Films that are addressing . . . what we consider to be critical issues affecting the world. That are engaged with political and social issues. And in some cases films that we feel are exciting on an aesthetic basis. Films from filmmakers who are providing a fascinating and . . . energetic perspective.” Despite these criteria and the “lots of reasons why we choose the films we do,” according to Maggiore, Film Forum has had an overriding principle of programming: “making those decisions based on our taste and based on what films excite us.” Nevertheless, new distribution methods and changing consumer behavior have put pressure on arthouse cinemas and encouraged certain forms of programming and publicity. Maggiore admitted that “what’s changed is the marketplace. . . . There are so many more ways in which people can entertain themselves.” He continued: “Forget just films: video games, social networking,

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television. . . . Here [in the United States] there’s been a renaissance since The Sopranos premiered and it doesn’t seem to have stopped. There’s always a new series where people gorge themselves. And I do think that that has had some kind of an impact on movie-going.” To be sure, Film Forum’s special position in New York and the city’s unique characteristics have mitigated these developments somewhat. “We are fortunate that we are in New York City where there is a culture of movie-going. It’s a city filled with movie lovers. And people who live in generally small apartments and need to get out.” The sheer quantity of leisure pursuits and the proliferation of films on offer since the beginning of digital filmmaking have complicated arthouse programming and created new challenges and solutions to that competition. “When I started this job a busy week was 15 films opening. It gets a little hairy when there’s about 20 films opening. Now we’re seeing in the last year or two Fridays where as many as 26 or 28 films open. It’s remarkable how much is coming out. So it’s a crowded marketplace. What can you do? You can double down efforts to do as much publicity as you can. After all, we’re working with films that don’t have large marketing budgets.” Because institutions such as Film Forum increasingly take over the responsibilities of distributors’ marketing departments, they have developed ways to use e-mail and social media to their advantage, “focusing on grassroots marketing and doing group sales. Finding groups that—especially documentaries— that may have a niche interest in the subject matter. We’re able to have groups essentially buy out a show or sponsor a show, where they blast their list of 20,000 people and say that ‘we’re all coming to Film Forum Tuesday night at 7:30 to watch a screening introduced by the filmmaker, you’ve got to be there.’ We’ve had a lot of success with that.” Film Forum has hired a part-time grassroots marketer who “can work in tandem with distributors who have their own marketing team in place. We’ve really hired her because often we’re dealing with companies who just cannot even afford that. That’s a difference.” Finally, the cinema has introduced a range of programming efforts, including Cooper and Goldstein’s successful Film Forum Jr., a Sunday morning program of affordable ($7.50 tickets) classic children’s films, such as Annie Get Your Gun (1950) or Oliver! (1968). According to Maggiore, the “idea is to expose a new generation of moviegoers to the idea of coming together, watching a movie, watching it in its best possible presentation. So it’s either in 35mm or new DCP. Usually there’s some kind of contest or raffle or extra entertainment.” Programming extreme cinema represents another possible solution to the increased competition from other leisure pursuits. Film Forum had the exclusive theatrical premiere of Tetsuo: Iron Man and in general has screened many films on the periphery and close to the core of the extreme cinema cluster concept: for example, Save the Green Planet! ( Jigureul jikyeora!, 2003); Gamera— Guardian of the Universe (Gamera daikaijū kuchu kessen, 1995); Michael

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Haneke’s (German-language) Funny Games; and a number of Catherine Breillat and Lars von Trier projects. Similar to festival programmers and distributors, however, Maggiore uses the rhetoric of aesthetic quality to contextualize the mode’s overall role. “At Film Forum I can’t say that we approach programming the way that a ‘midnight movies’ programmer would. We’re not looking for extreme cinema. We’re looking for films of artistic worth and interest to us.” Maggiore offered the programming backstory of Audition to exemplify Film Forum’s general attitude. He first watched the Miike Takashi effort at the Rotterdam Film Festival, where Asian-specialist critic and programmer Tony Rayns “gave it a beautiful introduction. He warned us that in about an hour we would be ducking under our seats. And the film starts out so disarmingly . . . as almost a comedy of errors. At about the 45-minute mark, a bag moves across the room and I watched about 500 people jump out of their seats.” For Maggiore, the mixture of genre codes, thwarted expectations, and overall aesthetic value made it attractive to screen at Film Forum: “If Audition were only a jack-in-the-box horror film, I may have found it to be a thrilling exercise, but devoid of much other interest at the end. But it’s not. I think it’s a brilliant, genre-busting horror film. And it delivers thrills that are unexpected.” Despite Film Forum’s venerable status and arthouse reputation, Maggiore used the example of Audition to downplay any appearance of elitism, explain why extreme cinema has a necessary institutional role, and redeem Miike as an auteur. “I don’t dismiss those kinds of films. I think when people in the industry refer to genre films, it’s often demeaning. Somebody like Takashi Miike . . . there’s nobody like him.” Indeed, Maggiore said, if 13 Assassins “had not gone on in a more commercial direction, it’s something that we could have shown. And I thought of that film as so surprising after seeing Dead or Alive [Deddo oa araibu: Hanzaisha, 1999] [and] Ichi the Killer. You don’t expect [the] classical restraint that he used in 13 Assassins.” Miike has “made films in every conceivable genre. So I have a great deal of respect for him. . . . I wouldn’t dismiss him as somebody who’s just making movies for ‘Midnight Madness’ sections.” In sum, Maggiore concluded, returning to the themes of aesthetic value and personal taste, the “same holds true for other films that Karen [Cooper] or myself have programmed. There’s an aesthetic interest in them. There’s an artist at work. I think anyone who sees Tetsuo: Iron Man is going to say that this is the work of an original artist.” In general, Maggiore confirmed, extreme cinema screenings at Film Forum have enjoyed brisk box office and positive audience feedback. “There are some films that we thought we might get complaints over. I thought that Audition may not go over well with our audience. It actually did extremely well.” Similarly, the run of Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone (Seul contre tous, 1998) generated “nothing significant” in terms of the negative reactions that Maggiore had anticipated. For him the large amount of information readily available in the

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FIG. 11 Crossover auteurist horror like Audition appeals to exhibitors such as Film Forum’s Mike Maggiore and features as part of the sector’s larger efforts to generate younger audiences in the era of Facebook and Game of Thrones. ©Collection/REX Shutterstock. Reproduced by permission.

press and on the internet prepares viewers for the experience and self-selects audiences; in fact, too many warnings about the graphic content of films run the risk of disappointing audiences. “As much as our programming is driven by our tastes, it’s also affected by what’s available to us. There are some of those films out there, that may be lighter, we might not like them or they may be considered more commercial than what we can show. And that also has an impact on us. I’m happy we’re showing a very funny documentary, Jodorowksy’s Dune” (2013). In many ways, the concept of extreme cinema—from an exhibitor’s perspective—is inextricable from new developments in new media platforms, distribution windows, and consumption timeframes. According to Maggiore, exhibitors and distributors are “in a period of flux and I don’t know anyone who feels confident about what direction this is going in.” Nevertheless, it is clear that “what’s not working is you’re having twenty, twenty-five films every week, and I think everybody agrees.”41 Maggiore saw the proliferation of extreme cinema as a bet on crossover programming and audience appeal: “there have been more companies now developing catalogs of what are commonly referred to as genre films—horror and action, sci-fi—that are going dayand-date with VoD. There’s a whole strata now of films that are getting that

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kind of treatment. In other words, rushing it instead of really placing emphasis on a theatrical run and then going to DVD with a traditional window.” Indeed, “Nymphomaniac is good example. That’s on VoD right now. And there are other companies that are starting subsidiaries who just do kind of extreme cinema. One company that comes to mind is Film Movement. They just started a genre division. . . . Magnolia has Magnet. And I’m sure that those . . . are big revenue generators for those companies.”

New Modes and Models Maggiore’s statements resound with scholarly theories and consultants’ reports on the exigencies of contemporary film culture: the purpose of theatrical exhibition has changed dramatically since the days of Rome, Open City and I Am Curious. Whereas a cinema run was once the goal and end of film distribution and theatrical box office results were the measure of success, independent distributors now deem it more as a marketing expense than a main revenue source. Moreover, scholars such as Charles Acland and Philip Drake regard theatrical exhibition as loss leaders that add cultural (and economic) value for other iterations of consumption such as DVD or VoD.42 Despite all jeremiads about the death of theatrical exhibition, according to Acland, cinemas these days “remain a space of high visibility for a text that might be encountered later in its multimedia life-cycle, as a video, pay-per-view, DVD, VCD, cable, or broadcast commodity.”43 This idea strikes a chord with Maggiore’s statements about enticing sales agents and distributors with a low-risk, prestige opening at Film Forum. These runs often take place to fulfill third-party contractual obligations or to enable the film to compete for an Academy Award. “We find that it’s become more competitive when we open a film because there are just more films opening,” Maggiore said in interview. “A lot of those companies that are opening films for day-and-date VoD are contractually required to open them theatrically, even if it’s just an unpublicized release.” Despite Film Forum’s relative advantage in this respect, it faces the same dramatic changes to arthouse exhibition conventional wisdom and practices as institutions in other locations and positions. In yesteryears, theatrical distribution meant platform releasing: a film debuted in a select major city or two (e.g., New York, Los Angeles, London) and subsequently traveled to secondary markets and then to the regions, as long as newspaper reviews and word-of-mouth publicity proved positive and durable. This strategy is becoming less common and the process has accelerated.44 Arthouse films including extreme cinema receive a brief (if any) theatrical release and—as Maggiore explained with his example of Film Forum’s grassroots marketing assistant—social media and e-mail lists must target each film’s specific audience, often people who are not necessarily

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avid cinemagoers. The “days of marketing films to very large, homogeneous audiences,” scholar Geoff Lealand writes, “have largely gone.”45 The internet and especially Facebook allow a precise, efficient, and low-cost means of advertising extreme films to a niche clientele. Because the arthouse demographic is middle-class and middle-aged (and threatening to become more so), cinemas need to attract younger audiences.46 This is a not unproblematic enterprise since young people these days have largely grown up with the idea of solitary viewing in a private space as a norm: the post-1980 “VHS generation” seldom had their first experiences watching films in cinemas.47 Prescient institutions meet the challenge: Film Forum uses its successful Film Forum Jr. series to groom younger viewers and normalize high-quality public screenings and the social experience of cinema attendance. Cult, sophisticated, and potentially lurid or titillating programming represents another solution to the problem of attracting younger audiences. Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema uses extreme cinema to appeal to the local Williamsburg hipster community. Not only does it screen an eclectic mixture of edgy contemporary genre, arthouse, and exploitation fare; it embeds this filmmaking into an overall leisure experience. In July 2014 the program featured Bong Joon Ho’s science fiction Snowpiercer (Seolgungnyeolcha, 2013) and Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) as well as midnight screenings of Inland Empire (2006) and Death Race 2000 (1975). Furthermore, the cinema invites bloggers, fanzine writers, or authors to introduce films and maintains an extensive and eclectic food and drink menu with copious specials and tie-ins. If the mid-twentieth-century arthouses relied on distinctions from mainstream movie theaters and television, today’s cinemas have many more possible consumer activities with which to contend. Correspondingly, if red wine and European-style coffee formerly sufficed to furnish a unique evening out, today’s operations must provide much more. Nitehawk Cinema offers eight draft beers, eight canned or bottled drinks (including Swedish cider and German Gaffel Kölsch), eight types of wine, a full liquor and cocktail selection, and full waiter service of a dazzling array of tapas, burgers, deli sandwiches, and entrees, to be consumed in the table-equipped screening rooms.48 Nitehawk hosts special screenings with country bands and Southern-style food (called Country Brunchin’), silent or cult foreign films with live electronic music soundtracks (Live Sound Cinema), and several series devoted especially to contemporary extreme cinema or its precursors: for example, Nitehawk Naughties and Nitehawk Nasties. The Brooklyn venue, although perhaps a model, is not altogether unique: in interview, Raymond Murray announced that he is opening Warehouse Cinema, an alternative three-screen luxury cinema on North Sixth Street, a former industrial site on the edge of Philadelphia, with bar and food service inside the cinema.49 These ventures demonstrate Acland’s contention that “Faced with a proliferation of non-theatrical sites and

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situations of film consumption, that more reified temple of the cinephile— the movie theater—is ever more tightly bound up with prestige, exclusivity, and urbanity.”50 Through extreme programming, geographic location, pricing and package deals, design, ergonomic seating, targeted publicity, and gourmet food and beverage service, today’s arthouses position themselves and seek to compete with home viewing’s mutable showtimes and possible preferences, among a plethora of other social activities. Upscaling is not limited to movie theaters. DVDs and Blu-ray discs can, as Acland describes, “be dressed up with the ornamentation of connoisseurship, which is part of the genius of DVD extras, box sets, and collector’s editions.” Because distributors rely heavily on DVD sales (rather than theatrical runs), this is especially the case in the extreme cinema sector.51 One example of this phenomenon is Invincible Pictures’ distribution of A Serbian Film. It was released in cut and uncut versions, on DVD and Blu-ray discs and as a digital download, and also in a limited-edition deluxe DVD and Blu-ray collector’s package with special features, including a metahistory of the cuts.52 Film Movement represents another example. The distributor of Antares and Les apaches (among other extreme cinema) and, according to its website “some of the world’s best indie & foreign film,” relies on a film-of-the-month subscription service that allows members to receive a new feature and short every month on DVD or on demand as well as access to a substantial back catalog. Their theatrical releases run simultaneously with the home viewing service. Horizontal integration, vertical integration, and new dissemination platforms have further consolidated the embattled art-cinema sector and contributed to its survival. In the United Kingdom, Curzon continues to expand. Calling itself the “leading independent cinema chain,” it offers an urban (if less funky than Nitehawk Cinema), lavish experience in specially designed spaces among London’s upscale neighborhoods (including Mayfair, Chelsea, Bloomsbury, Soho, and Richmond), posh regional centers, and franchising ventures with regional performing arts centers. Its growth and success can be ascribed to its vertical integration: parent company Curzon World also owns specialty distributor and production company Artificial Eye, which has a heavy financial stake in extreme cinema. Blue Is the Warmest Color and Nymphomaniac, which Artificial Eye distributed, had intensive runs at Curzon cinemas. Moreover, Curzon World owns Curzon Home Cinema: the streaming VoD platform resembles an arthouse Netflix. Crucially, Curzon Home Cinema provides day-and-date access to films playing at Curzon cinemas throughout the United Kingdom. The two volumes of Nymphomaniac, in other words, screened in March 2014 at London’s Curzon Soho and Curzon Bloomsbury cinemas and were available to buy, rent, or watch under subscription in private via the Curzon Home Cinema website and app. Curzon Home Cinema has launched or is in talks to be available on a whole host of Smart TV and

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internet-connected television services, such as Samsung smart televisions, BT, Virgin, and Sky, making it in effect an on-demand channel. This wide availability allows suburbanites and village dwellers access to sophisticated and daring films playing in upmarket London cinemas; the (voluntarily and involuntarily) immobile also benefit. Curzon’s motives extend beyond these important increases in potential audience, however: the synchronous theatrical and home viewing releases effectively discourage illegal piracy and downloading.53 In a post-video era where films such as Blue Is the Warmest Color or Miss Violence (2013) typically have a theatrical-to-DVD window of less than two months,54 VoD business models contribute significantly to extreme cinema’s dissemination. Invincible Pictures’ subsidiary VoD platform FlixFling exemplifies this process. The platform allows rental, download, and subscription access to over 20,000 titles, including those from Starz, Magnolia, and, in Thomas Ashley’s words, “other major studios to announce soon. We have probably one of the most highly curated catalogs available on any service.” FlixFling is available on a host of mobile devices including as an iTunes and Google Play app and via Yahoo Connected TVs, Samsung smart televisions, Roku, Vidora, Vizio, and Windows 8, not to mention UltraViolet and Xbox 360.55 Patrons who buy the company’s DVDs, such as A Serbian Film or Sennentuntschi, also receive a code to download a free digital copy via FlixFling. For Ashley and Invincible Pictures, the VoD platform not only allows patrons too shy to say “one ticket for Nymphomaniac, please” a chance to satisfy their curiosity in a private, safe space. It resolves the dilemma of distributing these films at all. According to Ashley, the idea for FlixFling came about in the late 2000s amid the rapid decline of DVD sales and the demise of large video store chains such as Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.56 Invincible Pictures “lost a ton of money” because of those bankruptcies and moreover “didn’t get a lot of product back. It was a nightmare. And we still had TV sales and on-demand sales . . . but there’s a huge hole here.” He continued: “Netflix had really just started in the streaming world. . . . It was really just starting to catch on. The iPhone had just come out. And we were actually the first company to start streaming over an iPhone, other than iTunes.” At the time, a number of independent distributors experienced difficulties licensing rights with the notoriously conservative Netflix; FlixFling filled the market gap by embracing edgier and more extreme fare. According to Ashley, his company entered into a partnership with Magnolia Pictures to distribute Nymphomaniac on VoD in the United States because Netflix refused to carry the notorious diptych under acceptable terms and without substantial cuts.57 FlixFling was “one of the only streaming services” that would agree to include the selection on its platform and both Ashley’s company and Magnolia earned “extraordinarily well” on the deal.

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With the proliferation of new films, crowded release schedules, and dwindling admissions figures especially in suburbs and rural areas, cinemagoing has become a particularly urban activity. While Film Forum is clearly thriving and adapting to the new challenges of theatrical exhibition, its function in the unique cultural geography of New York remains perhaps its most significant asset. Although “we are not in a postcinema era,” as Acland submits, we are indeed “in an age after the monopolization of the motion picture theater as a site for moving-image culture.”58 Distributors’ decisions substantially shape extreme cinema’s reception. Indeed, they play a major role in how close a given film will reside to the center or periphery of the cluster concept: in other words, they help determine, in the short and long term, whether viewers consider a particular production to be art or cult, erotica or exploitation, horror or subversion, or all of the above. Historical case studies reveal how distributors and exhibitors have participated in legitimating films and subgenres and transformed the status of certain films from exploitation to art. Japanese “pink films” crossed over from back-alley Shinjuku peep shows for sararīman to the global arthouse circuit, film festivals, and a retrospective at the Cinémathèque française.59 Lisa and the Devil (1972), to cite an example from a different cultural context, survived two contrasting distribution and reception fates: first as “bad product” and “failed” horror, and twenty years later as against-the-grain auteur Mario Bava’s stylistically innovative arthouse work.60 Such transformations can occur over long stretches of time and in the course of sudden, influential “rediscoveries.” Often, however, they transpire in extreme cinema’s normal, present-tense circulations: negotiating licensing agreements, composing catalog copy, selecting stills, arranging poster and advert layouts, and choosing which viewers to target and by which means. Distributors’ responsibility in making content accessible to consumers and codetermining its form points ahead to the following chapter on regulation. Judgments on releasing, cut or uncut, extreme films to different markets must weigh commercial (and sometimes personal) risks of classification, outright bans, and violating obscenity laws. These decisions are far from academic. Issuing multiple versions (as in the case of A Serbian Film) extends the revenue window and makes the marketing of the initial iteration efficient for the publicity of the next. On the reception side, internet forums teem with discussions about owning or having seen a certain “authentic” version of one extreme film or another. How viewers respond to extreme cinema depends significantly on which version they see and the knowledge about whether it has suffered censorship. In the United Kingdom, for example, Ichi the Killer entered into fans’ consciousness largely through a Dutch DVD version, rather than the cut version that the BBFC classified. Accordingly then, in order to understand that

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film and its “naturally occurring” UK audience, we would need to examine the Dutch version, the vicissitudes of its distribution, and the company itself.61 Creative distributors of extreme cinema have diversified their offerings, integrated vertically, discursively foregrounded their independent branding, and fully embraced digital platforms and what media scholars call disintermediation: reconfiguring content flows and bypassing conventional avenues of dissemination.62 The case studies in this chapter serve to challenge simple binaries between individual agency and socially determined institutions. Clearly, the forces of personal taste, evaluations of aesthetic and commercial value, economic imperatives, the ambivalent potential of controversy and classification, and the virtues and problems of new media platforms inflect behavior. Conscious of the interdependence of these concerns, the next chapter shifts focus to regulation, and in particular to the MPAA and BBFC.

5 The Interpretations of Regulation

Extreme cinema sometimes faces outright prohibitions or suffers the consequences of obscenity laws. The Australian Classification Board, for example, initially banned the “real-sex” dramas Romance (1999), Baise-moi (2000), Intimacy (2001), and 9 Songs (2004). Authorities in Ontario refused to allow Baise-moi a cinema release; in Quebec, where the film garnered the top restricted rating, the exhibitor ceased screenings after an irate audience member entered the projection booth and damaged the print. Police seized a copy of Ken Park (2002) when a group of cinephiles tried to project it in Sydney; the DVD remains unrated and unavailable in Britain or the United States, unless one orders Russian or Dutch imports. Ireland’s Film Censors Office refused to classify The Idiots (Idioterne, 1998) in 1999 and black bars covered shots of genitals and sexual penetration in US theatrical release.1 Censorship is not simply an abstraction of artistic repression; it can present an existential problem for distributors and exhibitors as well. Distributors who have purchased rights often withstand lengthy battles with classification boards to pass their films, which have no real value until they are exhibited in cinemas, broadcast on television, or sold as DVDs and downloads.2 Although such prohibitions ensure media attention, extreme cinema regulation in the United States and United Kingdom is more often a quieter story of behind-the-scene cuts and backroom deals to achieve a lower rating or to avoid outright rejection. In the United States, the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA), a subsidiary of the MPAA, the film industry lobby

94

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group, rates films for theatrical and home video release based on one of five designations: G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17. In Britain, the BBFC classifies films according to two scales: one for cinema exhibition (U, PG, 12A, 15, 18) and one for release on home entertainment (U, PG, 12, 15, 18). There also exists the rating R18, which only applies to adult films on offer in licensed sex shops. The US and UK classification bodies remain, besides those of Australia and the Republic of Ireland, two of the strictest in developed Anglophone countries and among the most conservative in the world’s richest nations.3 Like, for example, Germany’s Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft (FSK)—and unlike the Irish Film Classification Office or the Australian Classification Board, which are statutory authorities—the CARA and the BBFC are nongovernmental organizations funded by the film industry. Nevertheless, through arrangements with governmental bodies (i.e., that only classified films may be shown in that jurisdiction, that rated films will not be prosecuted for obscenity, or the BBFC’s duty to classify DVDs under the British Video Recordings Act) and collusive agreements with distributors and exhibitors, the CARA and the BBFC effectively regulate what films can and cannot be screened and seen for all but film festivals and a tiny minority of cinemas. In practice, such business and legal implications (not to mention the MPAA’s political lobbying) entail a substantial power over film culture. Such bodies represent what institutionalists call associations or meta-organizations. They “effectively pursue the interests of their members” by “promulgating standards” regarding the “behavior of the own members” but also “often attempting to affect the behavior of wider publics.”4 This is surely not the place even to telegraph histories of film classification in the United States and the United Kingdom; increasing, important research has been conducted in this area over the years and recently there have even been a few much needed attempts to—if not directly contrast national censorship regimes—at least put them into dialogue.5 A comparative examination of the MPAA’s and BBFC’s respective responses to the proliferation of extreme cinema in the 1990s and the 2000s illustrates the potential pathways that regulation may take and also demonstrates these organizations’ relative effectiveness. The MPAA, I submit, has been less successful in its attempts to introduce a modern, adult approach to explicit arthouse fare. By analyzing public statements, press releases, declassified examiners’ reports, correspondence, internal memos, and commissioned research, this chapter reveals, in contrast, how the BBFC has more effectively balanced stakeholder demands and provided a cinephile, liberal bias that has allowed for and incentivized the existence of extreme cinema. With a public relations campaign, the use of scientific discourses, and the ghettoization of sexual violence, the BBFC has passed most arthouse taboo-breakers without cuts since 1998.

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MPAA: The Introduction and Failure of NC-17 Despite all differences,6 there is a structural similarity to how classification bodies such as the MPAA and the BBFC must respond to historical changes and pressures from the industry, governments, courts, and the press. The BBFC faced significant reorganization, altered ratings decisions, and was charged with the legal remit to certify all home video releases in response to the media furor surrounding the early 1980s emergence of controversial home entertainment rentals (the so-called Video Nasties) and the murder of the young boy James Bulger in 1993. So too has the MPAA had to defend itself after mass shootings such as the Columbine High School and the Sandy Hook Elementary School incidents.7 The MPAA and the BBFC have undertaken two similar changes in the last decades. Both organizations have created new ratings at the top of the classification scale and both have attempted to justify their decisions with appeals to public opinion studies or scientific research. The difference in the details of these changes, however, has led to the MPAA’s relatively conservative record on extreme cinema and the BBFC’s more liberal policy. In order to illuminate this process, let us examine briefly the MPAA’s introduction of NC-17. Although the MPAA first introduced NC-17 in 1990, it had long envisioned restructuring the top of the scale. Already in the 1960s, with the rise of more (especially sexually) edgy content in films such as Blow-Up (1966) and Belle de Jour (1967), there were calls to distinguish between patently prurient exploitation pictures and artistically worthwhile works. Nevertheless, when the new ratings system took effect in 1968, it contained no such designation: X became the catchall top rating.8 Some sophisticated productions, such as Midnight Cowboy (1969), I Am Curious (Yellow) (Jag är nyfiken—en film i gult, 1967, US-release 1969), and Last Tango in Paris (Ultimo tango a Parigi, 1972), had successful theatrical runs with X. Nevertheless, exploitation pictures and pornography soon co-opted it, as a 1969 Variety article about the “misinterpretation” of X already anticipated.9 Art film distributors and producers hoping to capture a sophisticated audience—but one not keen on attending films like Vixen (1969) or Deep Throat (1972)—took painstaking efforts (including appeals and cuts) to receive a lower classification, as was the case with Lindsay Anderson’s If (1968). Unless they intended a titillating, go-for-broke marketing campaign à la Last Tango in Paris, distributors had every reason to strive for R: by 1970, about half of US cinemas would not exhibit X-rated films and most mainstream print, television, and media outlets denied them advertising space.10 The introduction of X precipitated a surge of R-ratings (whose scope increased) and cutting negotiations with the MPAA; after the early 1970s, the major studios abandoned X to the independents.11 A system intended to

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prevent state censorship had the ironic effect of more tightly regulating content and yoking the provocative with the prurient. As Jon Lewis has written, the MPAA’s preclusion of an artistically worthwhile top rating proved to be an effective strategy to shield the studios from competition: “As more and more films that would have been rated X in 1968 were rated R in and after 1970, the MPAA used the X rating to effectively marginalize foreign art as well as American independent, underground, and experimental films.”12 Although perhaps a short-term fix, the new rating system failed to address pressing disputes at the top classification level. Foreign territories with not wholly dissimilar cultural attitudes, to provide a contrasting example, resolved the matter in a relatively straightforward way: in November 1982, the BBFC replaced its own X category with 18, a classification neither predisposed to marketers’ titillating appropriations nor easily equated with prurience.13 Eight years later, in September 1990, the MPAA dropped X and introduced the new category NC-17. The results in the American case, however, proved disastrous. Initially, industry insiders greeted NC-17 as a welcome solution. A contemporaneous Los Angeles Times article stated that the “new rating category is expected to clear the way for strong adult-theme films to be released and marketed in theaters without the taint of pornography now associated with an X rating.”14 Studio bosses predicted a bright future for the rating and its effects on enabling provocative content to reach consenting adults. A MCAUniversal executive hailed NC-17 as “a category that can work with honor, to replace the X which had a stigma attached to it,” a sentiment echoed by a vice president of Miramax. In turn, MPAA president Jack Valenti predicted that it “takes us back to the days, hopefully, of Midnight Cowboy, Last Tango in Paris, and A Clockwork Orange” and revealed that the change was made possible by pornography’s transition out of cinemas and onto video. Nevertheless, several dissenters anticipated the pitfalls of the new classification. One distributor voiced his concerns that NC-17 was simply replacing X, rather than creating a new category “in between R and X that would signify adult.” The vexing issue of advertising for NC-17 films, Valenti assured in response, “would not be a problem.” In fact, this would be a crucial problem. As table 1 shows, the effect of NC-17 in the early 1990s repeated the history of X in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Within three years, the new rating was effectively unfit for purpose. Despite the comparatively innocuous name, film producers and distributors avoided NC-17 for the same reason that filmmakers had shunned X: it carried a stigma and limited the potential audience. These statistics are especially conspicuous when one considers that there has indeed been a surge—not a drop—in explicit arthouse fare, as evidenced by the present book. Furthermore, the numbers of NC-17 films are somewhat inflated: they include productions released years before and originally rated X—such as The Story of O

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(Histoire d’O, 1975)—but subsequently reclassified as NC-17. Only eighteen new films premiered at NC-17 between 1990 and 2004. In the 1990s, American critics regularly lamented the lost chance, accusing the MPAA of “cowardice” and referring to the retooled classification as a commercial “ticket to oblivion.”15 There have been occasional attempts to revive NC-17 and reappropriate it for its designed function. In 2004, the Los Angeles Times ran a revealing roundup of the contemporary NC-17 films The Dreamers (2003), Young Adam (2003), and High Tension (2003).16 “The NC-17 rating, long seen as the kiss of death for a movie,” the article begins, “is suddenly coming to life.” Describing the efforts of distributors to push for a “legitimate adult rating,” the piece provides an inventory of the system’s faults: many cinemas refused to play NC-17 films; mainstream media balked at selling advertising; Blockbuster, Wal-Mart, and other chains would not stock the DVDs; and directors’ contracts often Table 1

MPAA Film Classifications, 1990–2014 Year

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

NC-17

R

PG-13

PG

G

18 16 7 2 2 5 3 6 4 2 1 1 1 1 4 4 1 4 0 1 0 3 0 2 0

367 375 395 374 392 458 469 432 435 471 529 491 538 644 541 552 534 498 551 478 407 422 420 391 398

103 119 117 112 100 110 116 116 115 107 147 163 144 186 184 231 191 207 200 190 177 199 187 190 179

74 90 88 98 121 100 106 96 70 64 51 56 73 81 113 110 95 107 110 101 93 102 117 114 116

9 17 20 23 29 28 24 27 45 44 38 30 34 36 33 38 33 34 41 22 27 43 21 18 20

SOURCE: CARA’s website, Filmratings.com.

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stipulated an R-rated final cut. Despite her overall positive tone, the author admits that economics “will dictate whether the rating takes hold or remains on the back burner.” Of course, as table 1 indicates, the general optimism— and the prediction of a Fox Searchlight distributor that in “the next six years, there will certainly be more NC-17 movies than in the past six” (there were in fact ten in each period)—was not borne out. Tellingly, the MPAA website details the introduction of PG-13 but does not include NC-17 in its “Ratings History.”17 NC-17 has been effectively written out of the institutional history. These days, it only classifies a handful of explicit films with aspirations of exhibition in a wider selection of arthouses: The Dreamers and Blue Is the Warmest Color (La vie d’Adèle, 2013) are such exceptional examples. In general, US distributors prefer to use the “Unrated” designation for DVD and even some theatrical releases, for example, Artisan’s The Center of the World (2001), Lionsgate Films’ Irreversible (Irréversible, 2002), or ThinkFilm’s Shortbus (2006). Otherwise, cuts ensure an R and potentially wider distribution, a not unproblematic procedure in a country whose baseline rhetoric revolves around the First Amendment’s guarantee of free expression. Charles E. Ramos, the justice of the New York Supreme Court who handled a Miramax lawsuit against the MPAA, maintained that the association’s ratings politics “censors serious films by the force of economic pressure.”18 More than one commentator has suggested that the Hollywood majors enjoy preferential treatment and more liberal parameters, especially in their specialty area, violence; arthouse sexuality, a major domain of extreme cinema, suffers disproportionately.19

The BBFC: R18, Public Relations, and the Precedent of The Idiots The Idiots and Romance, indices of the MPAA’s inability to deal with extreme (especially sexually explicit) cinema, became important precedents for the BBFC’s more liberal line. These looser rules responded to the BBFC’s increasing political marginalization in the later 1990s. Out of step with public values and under attack from the tabloid press (e.g., for passing Crash [1996] uncut) and intervening politicians, the BBFC in the 1990s suffered from low morale and classification turnarounds of weeks and sometimes months. In the words of his successor, director James Ferman (1975–1999) ran the board as if it were his “personal fiefdom.”20 Beginning with a change in leadership in the late 1990s (Andreas Whittam Smith, president, 1997–2002; Robin Duval, director, 1999–2004), the BBFC has sought to modernize classification in particular and the organization’s operations and appearance in general. The major efforts have included: separating hardcore pornography from adults-only legitimate filmmaking,

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sequestering sexual violence as a bad object, embarking on a modern public relations campaign, and using research projects to justify its decisions. All of these innovations worked to legitimize extreme cinema and allow more of it to be seen with fewer or, usually, no cuts. Censorship is often a matter of deflection and contrast: classifiers demonize one type of material in order to pass another. In the United Kingdom, extreme cinema has benefited from this practice of relativity. The liberalization of the R18 category initiated this process. Up until the early 1990s, Britain was conservative by European standards in its regulation of sexual representation.21 Sex education videos were not permitted to show penetration and even licensed sex shops could sell only the tamest softcore pornography. These heavy restrictions—and the proximity of the Netherlands, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, which had significantly more laissez-faire policies in place for a quarter century—yielded a hardcore black market in Britain. In 1991, the BBFC finally passed at 18 the first educational video to depict penetration, The Lover’s Guide (1991), with a nervous press statement about the educational context, the definitions of obscenity, and the fact that adults who could lawfully possess the video might have been married since the age of sixteen.22 This seemingly small step became a milestone in the turn to come. It was no doubt hastened by Scotland Yard’s 1994 legal advice to the BBFC that consenting adults could view images of sex at R18; the subsequent 1996 relaxation of R18 guidelines, agreed in consultation with the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police, thus made hardcore pornography available for sale in licensed sex shops.23 The BBFC’s strategy, in the words of Robin Duval, was to isolate the most transgressive and lewd material “by legitimising the rest.”24 The distinction would be drawn around hardcore pornography and especially sexual violence. Duval’s recollections betray the motivations behind the change. In the course of his comments he mentions the fact that, although In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korīda, 1976) had finally been classified for cinema release in 1991, at the time of his arrival to the BBFC the home video remained banned. A consensus emerged for a liberalization that his predecessor had been unwilling or unable to make. “Though sexual portrayal as graphic as that in Last Tango in Paris had been permitted as long ago as 1972, there had, if anything,” Duval recounted, “been a retrenchment during the Ferman era.”25 Ros Hodgkiss, a disgruntled former examiner, suggested that under Ferman, decisions were made willy-nilly; examiners’ “[i]ntelligent interpretation could be overridden by the biological assumptions of the chief censor.” Soon after joining the board full-time in 1995, she learned that blood “on breasts was an absolute no-no, and any scene involving bodice ripping was liable to cuts. I was outraged by the term ‘Peter Meter,’ a measure of the potential for a rape scene to arouse.” Hodgkiss resigned after the new regime “ordered a ‘censorship roadshow’

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and a series of public meetings,” which she found arrogant, “paternalistic,” and “emotionally manipulative.” Hodgkiss doubted that “a handful of public meetings, some of which were attended by less than 30 people,” could yield meaningful, representative findings.26 In fact, precisely these displays of outreach and the appearance of scientific evidence would prove invaluable to the BBFC’s public relations and, in turn, its authority. Soon after assuming the directorship, Duval set important standards: the reactions to The Idiots and Seul contre tous allowed the BBFC to pass uncut almost all subsequent controversial arthouse films. According to Duval, the board responded to what was in effect a new phenomenon in art cinema: at the end of the twentieth century, “explicit sex in arthouse movies was still extremely rare—and in mainstream commercial cinema virtually unknown.” The former film featured a brief shot of penetrative sex; the latter included a scene in which a character watches penetration on a television. These films, Duval maintained, had a number of similarities: both were “well-made European arthouse works likely to attract a culturally limited adult audience, both had important points to make, and both featured a single scene of real sex.”27 It is important to note Duval’s emphasis on the small target audience and his hermeneutics of quality: these ways of speaking about extreme cinema prevail at today’s BBFC. The differences between the two real-sex inserts, however, amounted to questions of context. Because the sex in Seul contre tous was “far more graphic, of much greater duration, and more clearly foregrounded,” and, most problematically, consisted of “extended clips from an actual porn video,” the board required optical blurring of the offending explicit details. “There was no way of reconciling this material with current obscenity standards and the prohibition of similar or less explicit stuff in ‘R18’s.”28 Von Trier’s film was passed at 18, however. Duval’s rationale is revealing: In the case of The Idiots it was clear what, in common sense, our decision would be. Finding a means of presenting that decision publicly was (again) more difficult. The Board argued that this was a film with serious points to make and in which the exceptionally brief moment of real sex was justified by its context. In other words, they were clearly integrated within the film’s narrative and thematic development and that of the film’s characters. The important distinction with an ‘R18’ work was that the context was not that of viewer arousal.29

In this passage we see the extent to which “common sense”—that British adults should be able to see cursory depictions of sex in an art film—guided the board’s decisions. Indeed, the real issues were public relations and keeping up appearances with the press. In the years to come, the exceptionally brief penetration insert in The Idiots would function as the key precedent to

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rehearse in future cases of explicit sexual representations in extreme cinema; together with the scientific-statutory appearance of the new guidelines in 2000, it laid the way for a whole host of real-sex films to be classified uncut at 18 in the next ten years. “Thus, with the greater explicitness permitted by the new Guidelines,” Duval recollects, “some of the steam went out of sex issues in European arthouse movies. The Board’s new-found ability to defend its classification policy evidentially meant that media attention began to dwindle.”30 In fact, the new policy did not go unnoticed. Writing about Catherine Breillat’s Romance in Sight and Sound in 1999, Linda Ruth Williams submitted that times were very quickly changing: [A]rt films have almost lost their ability to shock. The tide has turned back so far that censors are barely worried about the potentially corrupting influence of anything with subtitles because they expect only a small percentage of the audience will be watching. Romance has been passed uncut by the British Board of Film Classification as an ‘18’ in the UK despite the fact that it includes footage of Marie being penetrated by penises (shot side on, but seemingly unfaked) and by hands (seen more directly)—her own, her doctors’ and her lover’s.31

Although perhaps the tabloids could no longer derive as much media capital from inveighing against the BBFC, arthouse filmmakers and distributors took notice that British film culture was ready for unsimulated sex and, by extension, extreme cinema.

The Scientific and Democratic Discourses Classifications alone do not tell the full story, however. Indeed, it is much more revealing to examine the ex post facto justifications of these decisions in the accompanying public relations campaign: a “scientific” discourse based on interpretations of democratic public opinion. These took tangible form in the new 2000 guidelines, which retrospectively sanctioned the Idiots standards and provided the framework for most extreme cinema to be passed intact. A brief comparison illuminates the BBFC’s tactics. On its website, the MPAA gestures to studies it conducts via the Opinion Research Corporation of Princeton, New Jersey; each year since 1969, the association has commissioned a nationwide poll on the approval of the ratings system.32 It is revealing, however, that a good deal of the American organization’s website is filled with injunctions, amicus briefs, and other legal maneuvers that the association has made on behalf of its members. In contrast, the BBFC has compiled dozens of files under the rubric “Research.”33 Moreover, the new leadership’s very first step was to compose and publish, for the first time in the BBFC’s history, written classification guidelines

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of what was permissible at each category. The 1998 guidelines, compiled by the long-serving and outgoing director James Ferman, simply reflected current practice and were based on subjective criteria of “public acceptability” rather than empirical data. The rules were, in the words of Ferman’s successor Duval, “a weakness that needed urgent attention.” Lacking the appearance of scientific fact, they were “vulnerable to attack from any newspaper or pressure group that felt it had a better finger on the public’s pulse.”34 Duval recalled that the board needed to wrest the agenda from a hostile media and start winning the arguments, seize the regular news-breaking initiative, assert an authority based on evidence and public approval, establish our own presence on the broadcast channels and in editorial coverage. This entailed a programme of research and consultation (to provide the necessary vires), publication of Guidelines transparently based upon those outcomes, and of proactive and if necessary aggressive press and public relations.35

With a background in marketing and communications for the UK government in the Central Office of Information and later the regulation of private broadcasting for the Independent Television Commission, Duval immediately set priorities based on his previous experience, “where the emphasis was very much on collecting evidence of what the public expected.”36 The BBFC “has always striven to remain in step with public attitudes towards matters of taste and decency,” newly appointed Duval wrote in 2000, expressing his desire for “greater transparency, accountability and consistency.”37 The efforts had specific designs and targets. The board, according to Duval’s master plan, needed to appear more responsive to the popular tastes and concerns, more rigorous in its evaluations, and yet more democratic in its rationales. With light scientific jargon and the methods and metrics of opinion polls, he knew from his professional experience, the BBFC could deflate the emotional impact of a sensitive subject and recapture control over the tenor and tempo of the debate from the tabloid press. This strategy became visible as a yearlong public consultation process beginning in 1999. It consisted of an “extensive and detailed” UK-wide questionnaire survey, roadshow discussions, school and university presentations, consultations with the industry and lobby groups, and citizens’ juries that evaluated test cases with the help of experts, including clinical psychologists.38 This effort came in conjunction with other methods of assessing public opinion, such as the BBFC’s participation in the British Social Attitudes Survey “to gauge the public mood on a number of classification issues like sex and violence.” According to Duval, these initiatives informed “all classification policy and decision-making,” including “the new revised Guidelines, which reflect

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FIG. 12 The arrival of president Andreas Whittam Smith (1997–2002) and director Robin Duval (1999–2004, pictured here) dramatically reformed the BBFC. Duval’s background in PR helped improve the board’s image; decisions on The Idiots and other edgy arthouse fare paved the way for the classification of extreme cinema. ©Jeremy Young/REX Shutterstock. Reproduced by permission.

the views and sensibilities of the British public as revealed in the research and consultation process.”39 The results of this exercise were published in a report entitled Sense and Sensibilities. The main findings are curious for the way in which they selectively highlight matters where the “British public” in effect endorsed the policies that had already been in place since the late 1990s. The outcomes were presented along four matrices: bad language, drugs, sex, violence. The latter two categories are especially pertinent to the regulation of extreme cinema. Under the heading of sex, Pam Hanley’s report states that “46% of the national sample agreed that ‘people over 18 have a right to see graphic portrayals of real sex in films and videos’” and that “54% of the national sample thought that the Guidelines were ‘about right’” on the classification of sexual content. “The consensus of both juries,” the report concludes, “was that some relaxation in sex Guidelines was possible, especially at ‘15’ and ‘18.’” The questionnaire required respondents to rate how “offensive” they found bad language, sex, violence, horror, blasphemy, nudity, and drug use in films; nudity and sex were found to be the least offensive. The report recognized that although the majority found the proposed sex standards “about right” (54%), the next highest group deemed them “not strict enough” (32%). Nevertheless,

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it noted—uniquely among the other detailed findings—that “of all the categories being considered, the sex Guidelines had the highest proportion (12%) judging them to be too strict.” Hanley highlighted three anonymous quotations from the citizens’ juries: all three advocated more liberal conventions regarding depictions of real sex. The report furthermore cited the “many” members of the citizens’ juries who “raised what they considered the absurdity of being legally allowed to have sex at 16, but unable to see it on film until the age of 18.”40 The report’s presentation of British attitudes on sexual representation thus clearly and selectively foregrounded results that confirmed the Board’s guidelines. Indeed, the report was not only relevant for the short term; it continues to function, like the Talmud or the US Constitution, as a reference point for future interpretation. Based on these findings, Duval has concluded that “people were relaxed about depictions of sexual activity, at the adult and at the mid-teen level.”41 Adults in Britain, in other words, should be allowed to watch the sort of sex which they themselves legally perform with their partners: this “finding” curiously echoes Scotland Yard’s 1994 legal instruction to the BBFC. The main conclusions about violence were that “46% of the national sample agreed with the statement that ‘watching violence in films generally makes people more likely to be violent in real life’” but “nearly three-quarters of them disagreed with it once they had heard the evidence of the ‘expert witnesses.’” The report attested that “51% of the national sample thought that the violence Guidelines were ‘about right.’” The role of the “expert witnesses” is revealing. There is no suggestion that the board called in expert witnesses to comment on whether watching real sex causes people to become more sexual in real life or whether dialogue containing “bad language” affects viewers’ vocabularies. The BBFC used these “expert witnesses” to dispute the “media effects” research and popular beliefs (i.e., the idea that watching violence in media may contribute to aggression in viewers’ lives) and thereby persuade the citizens’ juries that the board’s policies were “about right.” Although the report claims that the “jurors were generally satisfied” with the BBFC’s classification of violence, their “main concern was sexual violence, which they felt very strongly should be handled with great care.” One jury enjoined the board to excise any depiction of rape “unless it was clearly shown in a negative light.”42 As a matter of fact, sexual violence was already a special cause of concern for the censor and many later commissioned “scientific” reports would hone in on this subject. Henceforth, the BBFC would separate “sexual violence” as a discrete category apart from “sex” and “violence.” The BBFC channeled the Sense and Sensibilities findings into the revised September 2000 guidelines: they were more or less the “draft Guidelines” with which the citizens’ juries had started. The concrete outcome was thus an endorsement of the changes that were in effect already in place and that

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outgoing director James Ferman had advocated in 1998: 1) a loosened R18 classification, which effectively legalized hardcore pornography to be sold in licensed sex shops; 2) a clear mandate to allow “real sex” at the 18 rating, but really only, in the words of critic Mark Kermode, in “arthouse fare of limited appeal such as Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998) and Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999)”;43 3) ex post facto justification for recent classifications of previously prohibited films such as The Exorcist (1973) and Straw Dogs (1971); and 4) a new boundary for issues of sexual violence. The Hanley report and the subsequent guidelines paved the way for the likes of 9 Songs, Brilliantlove (2010), and Kelly + Victor (2012), not to mention a flood of foreign hardcore arthouse titles. Sense and Sensibilities provided the “public opinion” evidence that justified passing nudity, sex, and much violence. At the same time, the board worked on another front to bolster its public relations interests: using commissioned research, it created a scapegoat bad object. The BBFC research into sexual violence and hardcore pornography—although deeply problematic methodologically—attempted to establish an authority based on putative scientific evidence and deflect attention away from the slackening restrictions on extreme cinema. Being able to gesture toward the numerous reports it accumulated was good public relations. The BBFC was “doing something” about the most pernicious films and could justify, by contrast, the new liberalization for art cinema.44

Foreignness and the Distinction Discourse: The Censor as Cinephile, Critic Ghettoizing sexual violence and deferring to research findings are not the only means by which the BBFC deflects public criticism and justifies its “common sense” classification of most extreme cinema. The board also legitimates the foreign and operates according to discourses of distinction; by these means, it rates arthouse taboo-breakers more generously than more commercial genres such as horror or softcore pornography. This veneration of the aesthetic and the exotic, it should be emphasized, represents a much different policy than the US ratings board. Indeed, there has long been the perception that the MPAA rates independent and foreign films more strictly than Hollywood fare. As early as the late 1930s, American trade papers documented how art films’ foreign origins made them especially prone to confiscation by customs officials and censorship on municipal and state level.45 Conventional wisdom among American film critics,46 this sentiment has also fueled prominent lawsuits to appeal X and NC-17 ratings, such as those filed on behalf of Abel Ferrara’s King of New York (1990) and Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Átame!, 1989). In its legal case for

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the latter film, Miramax alleged that the MPAA was “motivated by a prejudice toward foreign films and a prejudice toward independent distributors as well as a bias in favor of films released by major studios.”47 In contrast, the BBFC has usually encountered the opposite charge: the board, journalists claim, on the one hand overlooks explicit or harmful representations in middle-class fare and especially sophisticated non-Anglophone works, perpetuating a double standard that discounts low horror and pornography on the other. Similar to the case of the MPAA, there is historical evidence for this belief. Indeed, researchers have detailed how anxieties about supposedly controversial films aimed at and playing to working-class spectators led to the BBFC’s establishment. In the early years, the BBFC demanded numerous and extensive cuts, mainly for sexual content, such as suggestive situations, dancing, “impropriety” in behavior or clothing, but also for depictions of drunkenness, blasphemy, or “native customs in foreign lands abhorrent to British ideals.” These cuts, Simon Brown concludes, symptomatically reveal “the types of moral thinking underpinning the work of the BBFC, which reflected a very middle-class view of Britain and, more importantly perhaps, a middle-class view of the working class, which constituted at this time the main audience for cinemas.”48 In some ways a paternalistic attitude still pervades the BBFC today in its surveys about what depictions of violence or sexual violence might do to “others,” the latter clearly being defined as weak-minded and susceptible to suggestion. Over the decades, the board’s values responded to changing political and cultural moods as well as legislation. The 1960 Lady Chatterley trial, the availability of the birth control pill from 1961, the 1967 Abortion Act, and the 1969 Divorce Act affected BBFC judgments.49 Nevertheless, as extreme cinema’s precursors proliferated in the 1960s, the patrician values and views that set foreign, sophisticated cinema apart from tawdry exploitation persisted. John Nichols and John Trevelyan, BBFC leaders from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, that is, the golden age of arthouse cinema, maintained “an already familiar practice of policing foreign-language films less harshly. This attitude remained a more or less overt BBFC policy ever since it published a pamphlet deliberating on the dangers of presenting troubling images to ‘the average audience which includes a not inconsiderable proportion of people of immature judgement.’”50 The board’s longstanding foreign-filmmaking policy relies on normative distinctions and value judgments about films—rather than, as one might intuit about the role of the censor, judging a film’s values. “Category decisions are made in the light of experience,” Trevelyan wrote in 1970; “if there were rules they would have to be applied equally to films of quality and to commercial exploitation, and both the film-maker and the public would suffer.” According to Trevelyan, examiners “take into account their impressions of the

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film’s artistic integrity. The Board is normally more generous to a film of quality and integrity than to a film that appears to have been made for commercial exploitation.” Openly admitting biases, Trevelyan cited foreign art directors to validate the BBFC’s standards: “the French director, Max Ophuls, once said that it was the most intelligent system of censorship in the world.”51 Clearly, even in the present day, the BBFC makes a good deal of evaluations (and assumptions) about non-Anglophone films, their cultures, and how audiences will respond to such material.52 In his advocacy of British and American horror cinema, Mark Kermode has repeatedly accused the board of hypocrisy based on language and perceived quality. During the millennial liberalization of extreme cinema old and new, Kermode maintained that while “explicit foreign-language films such as Romance, Ai no corrida, Saló and Baise-moi may be reaping the benefits of the BBFC’s alleged ‘new openness,’” the renewed rejection of a certificate for the UK release of “Wes Craven’s comparatively mild 70s slasher classic The Last House on the Left” shows that “little has changed when it comes to cutting and banning English-language films dealing with similarly controversial themes.”53 Upon the debut of the English-language Intimacy, A. C. Grayling wrote in The Guardian that graphic “representation of sex in serious films has until now been left to foreign-language cinema, doubtless because former censors thought their provenance gave a kind of zoological respectability to their sexual content. They also doubtless thought that since such films attract mainly small numbers of intellectuals, their depiction of foreign goings-on would not damage the nation’s morals.”54 Not only pundits have argued this case, however. Martin Barker and Melanie Selfe have demonstrated that the perception of the BBFC’s bias is entrenched among extreme cinema audiences. In their study of sexual violence in foreign films, Barker et al. find that audiences identify the board with a “middle-class suburban mentality which not only rates films by culturally inappropriate criteria, but thereby belongs within an establishment which is a threat to the pleasures and commitments of this kind of film viewer.”55 Audiences posit that the BBFC uses a film’s foreignness (and in particular certain national cinemas, such as French) to excuse sexual explicitness and even sexual violence. Commenting on Irreversible, for instance, one study participant opined that because “the film is French-subtitled and the director knows his way around a book of critical theory, the censors think they’re watching something ‘respectable.’”56 Elaborating on the same study elsewhere, Selfe draws similar conclusions based on other focus group members. One participant thought that the board classified Baise-moi primarily on the basis of its foreignness, responding to it in the context of a “greater French tradition of maybe intellectual porn.” He continued to say that the “BBFC have only passed it because they’ve been confused by it. If that had been a Californian guy there is absolutely no way [pause] they would have passed it. But because

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it’s French people [they] will [pause] treat it a bit more seriously.” Selfe notes that this “common and not unjustified impression of a BBFC bias” was prevalent among the focus groups, who often accused the board of “superficial and snobbish” preference for foreign fare.57 The BBFC has long maintained that “context” is an important consideration in their classification. Clearly, this refers to evaluations of artistic value and intentions. In addition, foreignness has factored into the calculus: classification justifications routinely defer to national characteristics. The example of Romance is illustrative. Breillat’s film underwent cuts to receive an R-rating in the United States, but passed uncut at 18 in the United Kingdom. A BBFC press release, meant to preempt criticism of the classification, referred to Romance as “a serious work,” a status, the statement implies, derived to a great extent from its cultural heritage: “This is a French-language film with subtitles, directed by Catherine Breillat. . . . With its overtly philosophical commentary, it is a particularly French piece. It is also very French in the frank way it addresses sexual issues.”58 Such cultural essentialism cues Anglophone associations between Frenchness, art, and forthright sexuality. The press releases for other extreme art films similarly justify the board’s decisions by gesturing to national traditions.59 Examining the archived BBFC classification reports, which are available to researchers after twenty years, reveals that this manner of relativizing extreme content with perceptions of foreign cultures is longstanding in internal documents and not only present in statements composed for the media. Examiners dwell on the film’s national origins early and often in their comments; they routinely authorize frank and potentially offensive representations with references to cultural context. One examiner report for Betty Blue (37°2 le matin, 1986) begins thus: “Very French but very winning tragic love story. We start out with a couple making love in a beach house.”60 By contiguity, it implies that a French film would naturally begin with sex. Such rhetoric anticipates a larger cultural defense of the copious and explicit sex. The report continues: “This is an out and out French ‘art’ movie which does show the physical details of passion but totally justifies it by its own integrity. There is a lot of nudity throughout. However, it is the kind of nudity that is not prurient or needing to be defended.” Indeed, according to the male examiner, the film’s Frenchness and quality (already conflated in his report) warrant controverting protocols. Applying a light touch is all the more acceptable because an enlightened middle-class arthouse audience, rather than an imagined impressionable, pleasure-hungry grindhouse crowd, will inevitably see the picture. “I have to admit that, especially at our current ‘low’ ‘18’ it breaches what one could see in a sex film, but so what? I doubt if this slight inconsistency will be exposed (the ‘punters’ would never last the arty two hours) and if any ‘yours disgusted’ letters come in we have a perfect artistic defence here.” According

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to his female colleague’s ecstatic three-page assessment, “Like so many of the great French films of the past ( Quai des Brunes, Le Diable au Corps, Le Jour de Leve [sic], Pierrot le Fou etc, I could go on all night) Betty Blue (called 37.2° Le Matin in French, which translates roughly as High Fever) gives a romanticised, idealised picture of a love which is somehow too intense to last.”61 She opines that certain intrinsic traditions make French productions—as opposed to Hollywood—deliver artistic treatments of sexuality that deserve a lighter touch: “French directors like Beinex seem to have the knack of making sex on screen seem natural and direct, not smutty or titillating (as in 9 ½ Weeks).” Internal documents relating to extreme cinema forerunners indicate how the BBFC has traditionally derived normative moral appraisals from a curious quotient of cultural factors and aesthetic evaluations. The examiners’ report of WR: Mysteries of the Organism (W.R.—Misterije organizma, 1971) begins: “Seen by the President [and numerous examiners]. This is a Jugoslav film, very disconnected and incoherent.”62 An internal memo from the board president to the secretary-general similarly foregrounds nationality: “This is a Yugoslav film of some distinction which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival where it was highly acclaimed by the leading British film critics. It is partly a political film which draws parallels between the Soviet Union and the United States of America, and which implies that the only form of liberation for human beings is sexual liberation.”63 It is important to note the way that he highlights the nationality of the film’s production (“Yugoslav film”) and reception (“Cannes Film Festival”; “British film critics”), as well as the political allegory (“political film which draws parallels between the Soviet Union and the United States of America”). Via syntax he implies that these cultural factors contribute to the film’s presumed artistic value (“a Yugoslav film of some distinction which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival where it was highly acclaimed by the leading British film critics”). Ultimately and after much negotiation between the BBFC, the UK distributor, and a local London council, WR suffered cuts to only one scene. The same fate did not befall Ken Russell’s contemporaneous The Devils (1971). The contrast speaks directly to the influence of language and culture in BBFC classifications of daring art films. Examiner reports never referred to the production as a “British film”; the board subjected The Devils to extensive deletions in order for it to be exhibited. A letter from a member of the public testifies to the irony that greeted the decision. One concerned citizen from Bexleyheath inveighed that the board’s classification succumbed to nationalcultural preconceptions and automatisms: “how I can imagine your treatment of it if it were Japanese . . . or if it were made by American-International instead of Ken Russell.”64 In many ways, exceptions prove the rule. According to director David Cooke, “difficulties” arose with the classification of A Serbian Film (Srpski

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film, 2010): “the Board accepted that the film was intended as a political allegory regarding recent events in Serbia; nonetheless, the manner in which the sexual violence was presented, with an emphasis on nudity and other sexual detail, raised harm concerns, as did the juxtaposition of sexual and violent images with images of children.”65 Similar to the rhetoric surrounding WR nearly forty years prior, Cooke’s statement reveals the extent to which the board considered the film’s nationality and allegorical potential as mitigating factors to its apparent explicitness and potential “harm.” In this specific case, however, the specter of underage sexualization (together with sexual violence, the BBFC’s ultimate bugbear) outweighed the stylish aesthetic, metaphorical potential, and foreign cachet: the board demanded over 4 minutes of cuts from A Serbian Film. This evidence notwithstanding, the BBFC has repeatedly denied accusations that it regards Anglophone and non-Anglophone films in a different manner. In 2001, then press officer Sue Clark claimed that the board makes “no distinction between foreign-language films and English-language films” and that “the content of the film” is the crucial factor, rather than the “language spoken.”66 Witness also this statement from the 1999 Annual Report, written after the release of The Idiots, Romance, and Seul contre tous: The classification Guidelines, first published in 1998 on the basis of the practice of many years, continue to be our central touchstone. They inform the Board and the public and the moving pictures industry. At the same time, whether or not something is acceptable still depends ultimately upon how it is treated i.e. its context. Contrary to speculation, the Board makes no distinction between American movies and ‘art films.’ If it occasionally appears that a decision about the portrayal of sex or violence favours the latter, then that may only be because such films have managed to treat sensitive topics with particular responsibility.67

Indeed, as Robin Duval openly admits, the organization has long been “sensitive to the charge that it only permitted explicit sex in ‘arty foreign films.’” Over the years, the BBFC has advanced several arguments to justify perceived discrepancies. One rhetorical tactic reflects on (and disavows responsibility for) trends in national cinema production. Duval claimed for instance that the “problem of course was that American and British film-makers rarely entered this territory, except in a half-hearted way.”68 In other words, the BBFC appeared to classify explicit sex in Anglophone and non-Anglophone films in a different manner only because the former did not dare to break this taboo, until the release of Intimacy: “Of course, we applied exactly the same contextual tests and exactly the same guideline criteria to Intimacy as we would anything else, and lo and behold we passed uncut an English-speaking movie with the same kind of content that people would have thought had been specially

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reserved for art-house movies such as Ai no Corrida, Romance and The Idiots.”69 After the board (in the words of Duval) “sat back to bask in the revelation of [its] consistency,”70 critics pointed out that the film was directed by a Frenchman and financed with non-British funds: So then the argument shifts, and we’re told that Intimacy is a British art house movie. You can’t win—but nor do we expect to. So now we’re sitting here patiently waiting for a popular movie which sets these identical challenges, and we will treat that exactly the same; it makes not the slightest difference to us that the audience for that movie might include a range of people who never go to art movies. If it’s a movie which, within its own internal context, justifies something unprecedented, then it’s quite possible that we would take a liberal view of that.71

This passage, beyond asserting the BBFC’s consistency and objectivity and rationalizing its decisions based on (national) filmmaking preferences, contains another typical protest: the board examines arthouse and popular cinema with the same criteria, no matter who the intended spectators are or where they might see the film. Such rhetoric directly contradicts another common BBFC claim: that it can afford to be liberal with art films because only a circumscribed (implication: middle-class, arthouse) audience has them in their purview. The Betty Blue examiner cited earlier makes precisely this inference in his statement about the film’s unavailability to the “punters.” Such sentiments measure potential harm in direct relation to box office admissions: in other words, the BBFC assumes that representations— despite their nature or quantity within the film itself—must be less disturbing if contained in a release with a small potential audience. Asked to explain the defense of Baise-moi’s “serious cultural purpose” when many pundits consider it to be like “Roger Corman in French and with real sex,” Duval replied that “as a French film it will end up in the art houses anyway!”72 Likewise, the explicit sex in Destricted (2006)—much of it simply mediated versions or recreations of commercial pornography—“reminded” the board of art installations at museums and galleries. For this reason, the omnibus project passed at 18.73 The BBFC takes every opportunity to highlight favorable attitudes to daring Anglophone art films. It cites 9 Songs as such an example: the classification further solidified the institution’s position on extreme cinema. Michael Winterbottom’s film stages a catalog of unsimulated sex acts, including fellatio, cunnilingus, and vaginal penetration. “What was new about this, to the press at least,” recollects David Cooke, “was this was a British film by a British director.”74 A BBFC statement revealed that “after bearing in mind the intention of the filmmaker, the likely audience of the work and the likely interpretation of the work for a wider audience it was felt that the sex in 9 Songs could be

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contained at the adult category.” A section of the page, labeled “Notes for Editors,” reminds journalists that “there are precedents for the Board passing real sex at ‘18,’ including Ai No Corrida classified ‘18’ in 1991 (which also depicts the development of a relationship using images of real sex) and more recently Romance (1999) and Intimacy (2001).”75 Nevertheless, internal documents indicate that national origins and a selfconsciousness about public perceptions were very much at issue in the BBFC’s classification. The board’s discussions took into account “a sense that audience expectation might be very different for a British film.”76 An examiner noted that there was “no reason to intervene—indeed if we do intervene we would be signing up to the oft voiced criticism that we favour arthouse product/ audiences over more mainstream product/audiences.” The report concludes that 9 Songs presented “a wonderful opportunity to make it clear that we meant it when we said that adults [ . . . ] have the right to choose their own entertainment within the law.”77 Duval juxtaposed the classification of 9 Songs uncut (in the cinema version) against the decisions for brief deletions to the French films The Pornographer (Le pornographe, 2001) and Baise-moi: these were “proof ” that the board could be tolerant toward transgressive Anglophone filmmaking.78 Sensitivities over a foreign-language, middle-class prejudice have had the perhaps unintended effect of liberalizing all extreme cinema classifications.

The Censor’s Interpretations: The Return of the Aesthetic Embrace Explaining the 9 Songs case in retrospect, Cooke maintained that “the sex scenes in question were indeed justified by context. First of all, 9 Songs was not a pornographic film, in that the explicit scenes were not being shown primarily to titillate the audience. It wasn’t shot like porn and it doesn’t look like porn. Rather, the film tells its story through sex: the manner in which the sex is portrayed, scene by scene, mirrors the developments in the couple’s relationship.”79 It is noteworthy that Cooke’s rhetoric matches director Michael Winterbottom’s contentions about the film, which later chapters will investigate in depth, to an uncanny degree. In general they also suggest the extent to which interpretation and textual analysis inform ratings. Despite David Cooke’s claim that “it is not the Board’s role to make aesthetic decisions,”80 the attention to foreignness outlined earlier is but one essential part of the BBFC’s basic classification procedure: interpretation. The WR file reveals how reception, for example at a major film festival, affected the censor’s response; the BBFC understood the important British pundits’ “critical acclaim” at Cannes as pressure to release the film with few if any cuts. In general, examiner reports dwell on traditional interpretative rhetoric to such an extent that many could function as write-ups for a broadsheet or cinephile

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magazine. The main text of the WR report begins not with a description of potentially prurient content, but rather with an evaluation of aesthetic (and entertainment) value. It dwells on national origins, narrative form, potential (middle-class, arthouse) audience, and attempts to make a thematic and chiefly allegorical reading: This is a Jugoslav film, very disconnected and incoherent, but, broadly speaking in favour of love, which is encouraged by sexual freedom, and against rigid political systems of the left and right, which, it is suggested, spring from sexual repression and result in violence, murder and war. We all thought it undisciplined and difficult to understand though we concluded that some of the satire was amusing and to the point. A great deal of it presents no problem for ‘X’ from the censorship point of view, and the film is so obscure as to have small future as an exploitation piece.81

Such analyses span the decades. The Betty Blue reports cited earlier laud the film’s “obvious artistic merit” (“it is a film of high artistic merit as well as dramatic interest”) in the most effusive terms.82 Other assessments are less complimentary, but nonetheless place the judgment of aesthetics and entertainment at the forefront. One female examiner, rating the director’s cut release in 1992, counted herself as “one of a small minority who has never enjoyed this contrived effort from Beineix, and although a couple of the extra scenes do improve the piece by giving it more breadth and rounded edges, a couple of the later ones had best been left out.”83 A male colleague was even less sympathetic; his “examination” of Betty Blue counts essentially as a hatchet job. It criticizes style (especially cinematography), interprets (and derides) themes and characterization, and bemoans what he perceives to be an unwarranted positive critical reception. The only feature he seems to appreciate, in fact, are the corporeal gymnastics on offer in the copious sex scenes: Nice bodies, shame about the film, which is essentially a 3 hour blue jeans commercial mixed in with an attempt at whimsy and seriousness, and an unhappy ending. It is not so just because of the tiresomely glossy way in which it’s shot— but more because of its thematic devotion to the idea of the ‘free spirit’ breaking the restrictive bonds of society—though in the end trapped by them. Yet by any standards Betty is just the spoilt child of the advertising age. As she says during her descent into madness ‘If I want anything it’s denied me,’ whereas free spirits should of course receive on the basis of desire—so subsequent tantrums—there is an awful lot of property smashed up in this film—are not just justified but admirable. The director’s cut version of 3 hours . . . is nonetheless likely to receive the same misplaced admiration it received first time round.84

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Far from exceptional, such sarcastic interpretations often partake of the cynicism criticism. One male examiner reacted to the 1988 video release of The Devils with a personal appraisal, speculations on the production history, and assertions of the filmmaker’s self-promotional designs: “It was a noisy, overstated film that left me empty at the end. I think the only reason I can find this film appearing in 1971 with very heavy sexual and violent content was to really shock the world. Thanks to heavy cuts that foiled any such designs of Ken Russell.”85 A report on Mikey (1992) anticipated the examiner’s later work as a critic for an international cinephile magazine; the film is a “clichéd, single-stranded, slowly-paced and altogether dismal formula horror movie.”86 An anonymous colleague delivered a particularly scathing and world-weary assessment, also on Mikey: “Clearly there is one major problem with this feature, and that is the lamentable failure of the primary school teacher to speak English properly. ‘Does she cook good?’ she asks one of her charges, and in general seems to feel that the less grammatically and precisely she speaks the more her young pupils will learn and prosper. Of course the exact opposite is true.” The text reads like an academic essay. The examiner proceeds by making a general observation: for example, “this comes across as a by now fairly standard spin on the horror fable”; “This is like the traditional horror narrative in its use of ominous repetition”; “In traditional manner it pitches the naivete of the film’s protagonists against the increasingly cynical wisdom of its audience.” Under each of these categories, he or she furnishes several examples from the film.87 As a rule, the reports dwell much more on aesthetics and thematic interpretation (or in this last case, a genre analysis) than on what one would presume would be the primary task: to suggest a rating and enumerate shots, sequences, or scenes in support of that classification. If examiners’ negative evaluations subscribe to the cynicism criticism, many public statements used to justify passing contemporary extreme cinema resemble the aesthetic embrace. Already in the 1960s, the BBFC hierarchy began to regard provocative art films such as Blow-Up and Belle de jour in this manner. Then director Trevelyan recalled the former as problematic because of “nakedness with ‘flashes’ of pubic hair” but “decided to pass the film without any cuts on the grounds of the film’s quality and integrity.” (The words quality and integrity recur in reports throughout the decades in order to distinguish challenging art from worthless exploitation.) He remarked that the latter “had explicit sexual perversions” but nevertheless passed because “its quality was undeniable.” For the BBFC head, interpreting artistic achievement—rather than computing any absolute number, length, or nature of indecent elements—was decisive. When sent “an unsavoury script of no merit” by a producer who intended to make the film in the style of Blow-Up, Trevelyan replied that “if he could make it as well as Antonioni we would probably pass it, but that I thought this unlikely.”88 According to later director Duval, “what we strive to do all the

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time, is to identify a legitimate point of view. However you or I may personally respond to Baise-moi, it has a serious purpose—it is about women reacting to violence and humiliation visited upon them by men.”89 Here the BBFC reads the film “objectively” (“However you or I may personally respond”)—much in the manner of aesthetic-embrace academics who have defended the film—as having a legitimate, artistic purpose. The board used the same justification to authorize images of sexual violence in Import/Export (2007), “a subtitled feature by the Austrian director Ulrich Seidl,” and real penetration in Nicholas Roeg’s Puffball (2007).90 The subjective and speculative nature of such hermeneutic distinctions have left the board open to internal critique and external attack and were among the motivations for the BBFC’s millennial drive for transparency and objectivity.91 Nevertheless, there is no doubt that interpretation choreographs BBFC decision-making even today. David Cooke, to cite a final example of the aesthetic embrace’s reach among regulators, provided a lengthy rationale for passing Destricted uncut that relies upon leaps of analytical faith: the “conceptual distinction between ‘pornographic’ images and ‘explicit’ images was searchingly questioned and interrogated” by the omnibus film of erotic shorts. Cooke describes the project as the work of “artists and film-makers,” naming Sam Taylor-Wood, Matthew Barney, Gaspar Noé, and Larry Clark. Relying on the press materials and quoting statements by the directors to support the classification, Cooke writes that the filmmakers “had been commissioned to explore ‘the fine line where pornography and art intersect,’ as the explanatory note informs us.” Evaluating style, he asserts that the “manner of filming was cold, detached and clinical,” provides contextual information about the oeuvre of Richard Prince, and opines that the film “reminded us of the kind of thing one might see at the ICA [London’s Institute of Contemporary Art] or other venues as a form of ‘performance art.’”92 Although Cooke states that “the BBFC is not appointed as an arbiter of aesthetics or as a judge or artistic merit,” such functions underpin—and have done for decades—the board’s modus operandi. The official explanation for passing 9 Songs uncut at 18 was ultimately “a question of intent. The intent of a sex film is sexual arousal. That is not the intention behind this film.”93 In 2009, the board formally introduced “underlying intentions of a work” into its Guidelines.94 The BBFC’s interpretations—both those aimed at explaining decisions to the public and the rhetoric found in examiners’ reports and internal memos—follow traditional ways of speaking about films. One, as we have seen in the previous section, is a national cinema discourse by which certain cultures (because of traditions or on account of essential characteristics) tend to produce—and should be allowed to distribute in the United Kingdom—films with certain content, themes, and styles. (The earlier report on Betty Blue

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and the press releases on Romance are exemplary.) The second convention is auteurism, and especially the apprehension of artistic intentions. The examiners claim to know the “designs of Ken Russell” and place Betty Blue within Jean-Jacques Beinex’s corpus of works; the BBFC passed Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer (1979) because “it is the product of a genuine, if disturbing imagination, of a film maker of talent.”95 In a contrasting manner to the MPAA, the BBFC classifies films based on reckonings of aesthetic value. If independent or foreign arthouse works suffer harsher scrutiny in the United States, such works enjoy greater freedom under the BBFC’s policies. Whereas MPAA policies and imperatives have relegated extreme cinema to the margins of US film culture and largely removed it from the ratings system, the BBFC has worked to incorporate these productions into its classification regime. By all accounts the MPAA is still invested in clandestine bargaining to arrive at R. Filmmakers, industry insiders, scholars, and critics have highlighted the absurdities of this procedure. When Steve McQueen’s arthouse shocker Shame (2011) was rated NC-17, Entertainment Weekly featured a series of the MPAA’s contradictory, arbitrary decisions that evidenced, the magazine contended, a bias toward fluff y, American-made studio fare over independent, foreign-language dramas. American Pie (1999) was “asked to trim a few pie thrusts” to achieve an R rating. Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008) successfully appealed their NC-17, after arguing that the depictions of sex were “comedic.” The female-female cunnilingus in Black Swan (2010) passed at R; CARA rated the male-female cunnilingus in indie effort Blue Valentine (2010) NC-17, until public outcry led to a reversal. Kimberly Peirce, director of Boys Don’t Cry (1999), removed heavy breathing during a sex scene in order to pacify classifiers’ “squeamishness” regarding female pleasure.96 Film regulation in the United States occurs “with a wink” or a nod. “Officially they can’t tell you what to cut because that would be censorship,” one insider told Peter Travers, but “unofficially they do.”97 Under fire from the press and filmmakers, the MPAA’s current position resembles that of the mid-1990s BBFC in crucial ways. Former CARA head Richard Heffner floated the idea of the classification panel including “experts on the effects of sex and violence on children” in order to lend the ratings scientific authority.98 The association, recalling the first moves of Whittam Smith and Duval at the BBFC, has now made several attempts to become more transparent, including revealing the names of senior examiners, introducing an RSS feed and e-mail alerts of the latest ratings, allowing filmmakers to cite precedents when making appeals, and providing more descriptive and specific rationales of decisions. US commentators, however, remain skeptical.99 Indeed, the research at the BBFC that I have undertaken for this chapter would be impossible to conduct at CARA: its files remain classified.

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The British ratings board’s rhetoric has been transitioning from censorship to classification (what the MPAA has always claimed to be doing) for decades; already in 1984, this impetus led to the current name, after its origins as the British Board of Film Censors. The influx of new personnel in the late 1990s and the simultaneous proliferation of extreme cinema hastened this metamorphosis. To be sure, the reasons for the liberalization are mutually cultural and industrial. We must understand the attitude shift at the BBFC in the context of the 1994 opening of the Channel Tunnel, New Labour’s 1997 election victory, the deregulation of the airline industry and the ascent of low-cost airlines Ryanair and Easyjet, the EU’s increasing intrusions, and even the Continentalstyle extension of pub hours. All of these factors brought the United Kingdom closer to Europe in political and cultural terms. The relaxation of restrictions at 18 and R18 responded to the surge in regulated and unregulated material coming into Britain in an increasingly interconnected Europe and world, made small by cheaper flights, more mobile citizens, and more porous border crossings. The new BBFC reflected perceptions of more permissive public attitudes toward sexual representation and attended to the irony that MTV music videos were often more risqué than the material legally obtainable in licensed sex shops. These macro-social developments occurred in concert with individual behavior. The examiner reports reveal how the BBFC is largely made up of individual cinephiles, who, subscribing to typical auteurist and national cinema discourses, do not wish to see (art) cut(s). In contrast to the mysterious “parents” who make up the CARA and rotate on a regular basis, this surely contributed to the push for extreme cinema to remain, in one examiner’s idiom, “unbowlderised.”100 In addition to these cultural and institutional explanations, significant changes in media also influenced the revised attitudes toward extreme cinema. In an era of disintermediation and internet permissiveness, ratings boards face an anxiety of authority. It is no coincidence that the new BBFC line coincided with the new accessibility of explicit images and pornography on the web. In the age of Amazon accounts, peer-to-peer networks, and widespread film piracy, regional or national film censorship becomes anachronistic. Under pressure from distributors, exhibitors, courts and legislation, filmmakers, press, and the public, the BBFC expresses this fear of lost status symptomatically and in private memos and classified examination reports, but also openly in interviews. When asked about the future in 2001, Duval stated that “the industry as well as the [BBFC] has a fundamental duty to provide more information about why a film has a particular classification. Cinema-goers and video/DVD-viewers will not take uncritically our ratings for ever.”101 Censors and classification boards in democratic societies must always confront the specter of public opinion.102 The new appeals to democratic discourse—that is, the pretense that the classifications reflect public

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attitudes—attempt to consolidate political support in the face of declining power to control. Upon publication of the new 2014 guidelines, Whittam Smith wondered in The Independent: “Can the ratings war be won?” The former BBFC president’s military metaphor articulates a precarious position between the fronts. Not unlike today’s distressed, undermined, and paranoid parents, classification bodies feel ever more acutely “powerless” to monitor viewing habits vis-à-vis new technology and social media.103 Modernization is ultimately self-preservation: the BBFC, like the MPAA, is attempting to increase its scope and rate television shows and music videos. In this sense, one should be careful not to overstate the BBFC’s transformation. It is somewhat superficial, a matter of keeping up appearances. Extreme cinema has benefitted directly from this development also because it remains a boutique product. As perennial censorship critics Mark Kermode, Julian Petley, and Linda Ruth Williams remind us, the board is still far from a purely advisory body.104 The recent cuts to or non-classification of A Serbian Film (4m 12s of cuts), The Bunny Game (2010, rejected), The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence (2011, 2m 37s of cuts) attest to their claims. According to Petley, the amount of intervention at the 18 and R18 levels indicates that “censorship in its purest and most direct form . . . takes place in contemporary Britain with considerable frequency.” In 2009, for example, the BBFC cut 14.5 percent and 24.1 percent of the DVDs submitted at 18 and R18, respectively.105 Nevertheless, none of these commentators can deny that there has been a dramatic decrease over the last fifteen years, as table 2 demonstrates. Even though some may argue that any cut at all is too much, British film censorship has softened considerably since 1974, when the BBFC required deletions to 34 percent of distributed films. It would be a mistake to claim that BBFC developments directly caused or have been solely responsible for extreme cinema. But as Britain ranks among the world’s largest film markets, it would be equally naïve to ignore the influence that these changes exerted.106 (There is an even stronger correlation between the relative lack of US extreme cinema and its difficulties with the MPAA: passing at NC-17 or going unrated limits distribution possibilities to a niche audience.) The precedents the BBFC set with The Idiots and Romance encouraged a second and further waves of explicit works, such as 9 Songs, Shortbus, Brilliantlove, or Kelly + Victor: interviews demonstrate that the former material inspired the latter’s filmmakers. The loosened R18 in the late 1990s had a direct effect on the films that distributors sought to have classified; a similar, if perhaps more modest, effect can be ascertained at 18.107 In sum, we can conclude that the BBFC’s liberalization contributed to larger developments that incentivized funders, filmmakers, distributors, and others to take on such challenging projects. To wit, the classification of arthouse taboo-breakers at 18 (rather than, in the United States, NC-17 or unrated)

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Table 2

BBFC Cuts, 1985–2013 Year

2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 1985

Film

Video

Total number

Number cut

Percentage cut

Total number

Number cut

Percentage cut

974 851 710 654 555 639 574 555 590 562 588 585 508 525 532 448 439 446 410 402 379 371 378 423 407 369 344 387 404

23 18 7 9 11 8 5 10 7 5 11 20 14 12 20 14 16 21 27 21 37 28 47 44 59 54 36 45 73

2.4% 2.1% 1.0% 1.4% 2.0% 1.3% 0.9% 1.8% 1.2% 0.9% 1.9% 3.4% 2.8% 2.3% 3.8% 3.1% 3.6% 4.7% 6.6% 5.2% 9.8% 7.5% 12.4% 10.4% 14.5% 14.6% 10.5% 11.6% 18.1%

8,211 9,454 9,374 12,840 7,000 11,439 12,232 15,124 13,884 11,970 10,835 8,893 7,344 6,327 4,679 4,310 3,285 3,727 3,261 3,032 2,952 3,077 3,403 3,598 3,372 2,564 3,442 4511 639

101 145 139 314 251 411 547 589 525 456 430 324 255 173 250 328 229 264 219 193 216 195 238 279 253 234 406 447 44

1.2% 1.5% 1.5% 2.4% 3.6% 3.6% 4.5% 3.9% 3.8% 3.8% 4.0% 3.6% 3.5% 2.7% 5.3% 7.6% 7.0% 7.1% 6.7% 6.4% 7.3% 6.3% 7.0% 7.8% 7.5% 9.1% 11.8% 9.9% 6.9%

SOURCE: “BBFC Statistics,” BBFC, n.d., accessed April 4, 2014, http://www.bbfc.co.uk/website/

statistics.nsf.

partly explains the respective box office figures between the territories. Even though the United States has a population roughly six times as large as the United Kingdom, we shall see how extreme cinema’s commercial performance in the latter country relatively (and sometimes even absolutely) outpaces results in the former. Regulation “significantly inhibits artistic freedom,” Jon Lewis reminds us, but “only incidentally stems from the predictable, political, elitist assumptions about the mass audience and the persuasive, potentially dangerous impact

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of film on them.” For Lewis, “the political and social utility of film censorship is altogether secondary to its economic function . . . content censorship functions to secure the long-term health of the industry as a whole.”108 In the realm of extreme cinema, regulatory processes serve a number of interests and motivations. Outright bans and top ratings (NC-17, 18, and so on) provide filmmakers with status as transgressive rebels (as ridiculed in the cynicism criticism) and potentially help distributors’ sales.109 The Tartan DVD release of The Pornographer used BBFC’s eleven-second cut in its marketing strategy; Gaspar Noé supposedly wanted Seul contre tous “banned at least somewhere to prove its confrontational power.”110 The ratings system can actually benefit distributors, affording them the opportunity to differentiate their product for different markets: an R-rated version for cinematic release and the promise of an “uncut” DVD can potentially double their profits with a single product. Furthermore, censorship reinforces the identity and cachet of film festivals as sites of artistic freedom, outside the reach of ratings boards, as seen with the example of Melbourne. The MPAA and BBFC serve the industry by providing the impression—to the state, press, and public—that they are “doing something” to protect children or moral values. Finally, some viewers of banned or top-rated films derive a rebellious utility from seeing the “forbidden” images that the establishment wants to keep from them; they take delight in defying standards of decency and in challenging the perceived paternalism of authority figures.111 Depending on whether we see a film (cut or uncut) in a cinema, on home video, via streaming, or at a film festival, we see a different version. This, it is clear from audience research, can have a dramatic impact on our experience, comprehension, and evaluation of extreme cinema.112

6 The Added Value of International Distribution

The last chapter revealed how classification bodies use different standards to judge violent, sexually violent, and especially sexual content in cinema according to films’ language and country of origin. This is a reminder that—despite the enlightened academics, critics, and audiences who may categorize films in other terms—Anglophone distributors, exhibitors, and the general public approach the so-called foreign film with special demands and expectations. This and the following chapter show how notions of the foreign and the extreme interact dynamically in value-adding processes. Specifically they demonstrate how: 1) Anglophone distributors promote arthouse taboobreakers by foregrounding their exotic appeal and conflating transgressive content and foreign origins, and how 2) non-Anglophone filmmakers and small national cinemas use extreme cinema in conjunction with strategies of national self-representation in order to gain attention and a foothold in a competitive, globalized marketplace.

Exoticism, Orientalism, and Cross-Cultural Reception Exoticism is an “aesthetics of decontextualization.”1 It always implies a (mis) translation, a process of interpretive displacement. These are qualities not necessarily endemic to peoples or works themselves, but ascribed to them by the ego- and ethnocentric observer. It is, according to Graham Huggan, 122

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a “mode of aesthetic perception—one which renders people, objects and places strange even as it domesticates them and which effectively manufactures otherness even as it claims to surrender to its immanent mystery.”2 In the last decades, exoticism has come under intense scrutiny. These scholarly exchanges commonly point out the implicit assertions of power that underlie descriptions and evocations of the perceived culture, a discursive paradigm usually referred to as orientalism. Edward Said’s seminal work, Orientalism, sparked and informed debate; it demonstrated how Europeans constructed a particular image of the Middle East and Asia in order to legitimate their political and cultural authority. In Western representations including travel writing, academic treatises, political statements, novels, and poetry, according to Said, “the Orient” had only partly to do with actual cultures or places. Instead it functioned “as a sort of surrogate and even underground” Western self and “in the position both of outsider and of incorporated weak partner for the West.” Consistently, writers identified the East with certain (sometimes contradictory) characteristics, including eroticism, sensuality, depravity, degeneracy, “idyllic pleasure,” dramatic energy, laziness, terror, despotism, childishness, gullibility, irrationality, eccentricity, an “aberrant mentality,” and “backwardness.” The Orient, according to many prevalent discourses, evoked “the imagery of exotic places, the cultivation of sadomasochistic tastes . . . a fascination with the macabre, with the notion of a Fatal Woman, with secrecy and occultism.”3 Revisionists have criticized Said’s conclusions as reductive and challenged and refined them in an entire field of postcolonial theory and research.4 Koichi Iwabuchi, in his study of cultural products’ transnational trajectories to and from Japan, has shown how the emphasis on the global flows between West and East obscures the decentralized power structures and “vitalized local practices of appropriation and consumption of foreign cultural products and meanings” between Japan, other Asian countries, and “the West.”5 The binary and unidirectional conception of a distant Western observer who misinterprets Eastern culture, in other words, elides the multidirectional agencies that form cultural exchange and perception. This is an important point to which I will return later. Exoticism and orientalism are modes of cross-cultural reception and representation; there is both a misunderstanding but also often a certain attraction to the distantly perceived object, which may also reflect a fantasy of the perceiver’s own culture.6 Early in the history of cinema, orientalist representations became popular attractions for audiences and profitable products for the industry. Hollywood “representations of the East—typically titillating viewers with the thrills of unbridled passion, miscegenation, and wild adventure in a raw and natural setting”—Matthew Bernstein details, “were by the [1910s] conventional constructions.” In the 1940s and 1950s industry insiders

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used the epitaph “t and s,” that is, “tits and sand movies,” to refer to the reliably profitable productions that offered the attractions of exotic women and locales.7 “Television, the films, and all the media’s resources,” according to Said, led to a “reinforcement of the stereotypes by which the Orient is viewed.”8 Just as the representation of a foreign culture displaces and distorts its object, the transnational dissemination and reception of art and culture shift the way that observers appraise. In the case of film, scholars have written how the national origins of a film, and its “foreignness,” frame expectations and inform evaluations. The Anglophone world has often associated Continental European cinema with art, cosmopolitanism, but also scurrilous or sordid attitudes toward sex. According to Linda Williams, whereas American audiences came to expect violent imagery in domestic productions (which Hollywood producers also successfully exported abroad), sex “has never seemed quite so American” and the “foreign film” provided “models of sexual sophistication” both to US film producers and audiences.9 Such associations also informed British censors’ decisions on films such as Betty Blue (37°2 le matin, 1986). These perceptions stem in part from imagined national characteristics. To an extent, however, they also bespeak generalizations derived from cinematic experiences and as such, we know from historical accounts, vary over time. In the years following the First World War, for instance, critics and audiences associated Italian productions with large casts and period spectacle, Swedish films with location shooting and panorama views of natural landscape, and German imports with gothic imaginaries and stylized mise-en-scène.10 In a study of British attitudes toward French cinema, to cite a contemporary example, Martin Barker maintains that there “is a widespread and loose belief that ‘French cinema’ has long been a site for seeing things hidden in other cinematic traditions, that French films are, being blunt, sexier, more explicit, less scared of nudity, eroticism, and some of the stranger forms of sexuality” and seeks to understand how ideas of “Frenchness” affect audiences’ responses to representations of sexual violence. Barker concludes that British cinemagoers associate French sexually violent films with a “seriousness” of purpose. One typical respondent claimed that “Baise-Moi is a really excellent film. The French have something of a tradition of producing very dark, very incisive, and utterly brilliant films that deal with social issues in a truly adult way, and this is one of them.”11 Ingrid Stigsdotter’s study of British audience expectations of French films and their actual responses to Amélie (Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, 2001) reveals a similar phenomenon. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “feel-good” production jarred with the UK public’s “very idea of a French film.” The British audiences that Stigsdotter studied characterized French cinema as typically “raunchy,” “intense,” “oversexed,” and associated it with artistic quality, emotional depth, the breaking of Hollywood conventions, and a certain “French” setting, language, and music.12

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Melanie Selfe’s and Martin Barker’s investigations of Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1, 2001) complicate the previous French example. British audiences perceived this extreme film almost exclusively through the interpretative lens of “Japaneseness,” a way of seeing that ultimately relativized the film’s violence, sexual violence, and gender representations. According to one respondent, Miike Takashi’s production is “a Japanese film so there’s part of that culture that is extremely opaque.” The focus group member contrasts this perception with how he responds to the work of Michael Haneke: “I know the guy who’s made it is Austrian, I’ve been to Austria, I looked at their inability to look at their own history. So that comes when I watch the film. . . . I have more . . . resources to figure it out with a European film than I do with a Japanese film.”13 In Selfe’s estimation, British audience appraisals of Ichi the Killer “tended to present both Japan and the film’s aesthetics as too culturally alien for the film to have anything relevant to ‘say’ about the nature of gender relationships and sexual violence in the U.K.”14 Linking “foreignness” with “extremity,” Chuck Kleinhans has written furthermore about the role of “cross-cultural disgust” in the US reception of Asian horror films. In a series of essays he examines depictions of fetuses, abortion, cannibalism, bodily waste, rape, incest, and the ingestion of urine and animals rarely consumed as food in the West. The films in question include the Filipino Dog Food (Azucena, 2000), the Korean Address Unknown (Suchwiin bulmyeong, 2001), Dumplings (Jiao zi, 2004) and The Untold Story (Bat sin fan dim: Yan yuk cha siu bau, 1993) from Hong Kong, the Japanese Visitor Q (Bijita Q, 2001), and the Asian co-production Public Toilet (Hwajangshil eodieyo?, 2002). Kleinhans contrasts the blithe and frank treatment of abortion in the Hong Kong production Spacked Out (Mo yan ka sai, 2000) with American films that deal with the subject, such as The Illegal Operation (1962) and If These Walls Could Talk (1996); the latter two address the issue in a didactic, melodramatic, “social problem” formula and avoid depicting the fetus itself. For Kleinhans, seen in the context of the “rise of a distinct market in the West for ‘Asian Extreme’ horror cinema and the increased circularity of world cinemas,” such films demonstrate that “while ‘disgust’ as an emotion may be universal in mankind . . . what provokes disgust varies from culture to culture.”15 To wit, the last chapter examined one fact of such differing sensitivities: the national censorship and classification boards that adjudicate on such matters based on perceived cultural norms and public opinion. Barker’s and Selfe’s research into how films’ national origins affect audience responses to representations of rape and Kleinhans’s analysis of disgust’s transnational potentials in East Asian horror gesture to how a discussion of orientalism and transnational reception has a clear bearing on the present book’s key issues. According to their findings, Americans and Britons associate French cinema with the serious and raunchy; Asian horror cinema can elicit a

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particular disgust. These points bespeak the larger potential for foreignness to add value to audience expectations and responses, especially when exoticism coincides with the transgressive, salacious, or disturbing aspects of extreme cinema. But this value does not accrue automatically; nor does it develop solely as a vague understanding among audiences or critics in the reception phase. The industry takes advantage of this potential: it markets extreme cinema with a view to cue such reactions and maximize earnings. The remainder of this chapter scrutinizes the Tartan Asia Extreme label as a case study of this phenomenon.

Case Study: Tartan Asia Extreme Tartan Films’ Asia Extreme was the first and most prominent label designed specifically to distribute edgy East and Southeast Asian cinema to the United Kingdom and, later, North America. It made a crucial contribution to the recognition and relative success of transgressive Asian cinema around the millennium in the Anglophone world and anticipated a number of other similar labels: for example, Contender Entertainment’s Premier Asia, Anchor Bay Entertainment’s Dark Asia, Columbia Tri-Star Home Entertainment’s Eastern Edge, Optimum Releasing’s Optimum Asia, and the Weinstein Company’s Dragon Dynasty. Tartan Asia Extreme marketing aimed above all to highlight graphically violent and sexually aberrant content. According to its many academic and journalist critics, Asia Extreme presented Asian cultures and films through an orientalist lens and profited from a cultural reduction of East Asia to the “morally and culturally alien.”16 In order to evaluate the concept and marketing strategy of Asia Extreme we first need to examine briefly the organization of its London-based company. Tartan Films was founded in 1984, operated between 1992 and 2003 as MetroTartan Distribution, and reverted back to the name Tartan Films from 2003 until 2008, when it went into administration. Palisades Media Corporation acquired and now distributes the defunct company’s back catalog under the name Palisades Tartan US and UK. From 2004 until 2008 Tartan also maintained an American offshoot, Tartan Films USA. Cofounder and CEO Hamish McAlpine remained a prominent and not uncontroversial figurehead for the company, embodying the brand. According to trade reports, McAlpine ran the organization like a “tsar” and financed a substantial portion of operations with his family fortune.17 He cultivated— similar to the Weinstein brothers—a flamboyant and maverick reputation for the passionate advocacy of independent, arthouse, and foreign filmmaking and has been no stranger to art-world hijinks, including a fist fight with Ken Park (2002) co-director Larry Clark during promotion work for the London Film Festival.18 Over the years McAlpine has maintained a high-profile presence

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FIG. 13 In public appearances (as here with the artist Tracey Emin), Tartan CEO Hamish McAlpine projected a bon vivant persona that coincided with the bold fare he distributed. ©Rachel Young/REX Shutterstock. Reproduced by permission.

among distribution executives, never remaining reticent about his motives in frequent interviews with both the trade papers and the mainstream media. Much like the extreme distributors examined in chapter 4, Tartan’s business model involved list diversification and vertical integration. For example, Tartan distributed Sergei Eisenstein, Ingmar Bergman, and Pedro Almodóvar films as well as productions that in their home countries were deemed to be exploitation or generic schlock (e.g., Herschell Gordon Lewis, Miike Takashi). McAlpine’s ventures included production (for example, Donald Cammell’s

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Wild Side [1995] and Bundy [2002]), theatrical and DVD distribution, the booking company Zoo Productions (which programmed London arthouses such as the Ritzy, the Gate Notting Hill, and the Electric), as well as outright ownership of a number of cinemas, such as the Regals.19 Despite the vertical integration, the lack of horizontal integration eventually led to the firm’s failure; McAlpine invested too much money in niche projects that proved to be commercial flops. These included the distribution of Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (2007) and Park Chan-wook’s I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (Ssa-i-bo-geu-ji-man-gwen-chan-a, 2006) and the production of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games U.S. (2007). The timing of these failures was less than fortuitous. Tartan suffered serious cash-flow difficulties when the worldwide recession hit in late 2007 and McAlpine personally lost 5 million pounds after the company folded.20 Tartan began releasing films under the Asia Extreme banner in 2001. Like many decisions at his company, McAlpine has been credited with singlehandedly creating the series brand. According to interviews, the executive invented the concept after watching two films from Japan and two films from Thailand and South Korea, respectively: Ringu (1998), Audition (Odishon, 1999), Bangkok Dangerous (2000), and Nowhere to Hide (Injeong sajeong bol geot eobtda, 1999).21 Seeing a potential interest in what he thought was a new trend of “ballsy cinema,”22 McAlpine sought to appeal to the allure of controversy and a visceral sense of risk. The name consciously alluded to the contemporaneous series on the UK’s Channel 4, “Extreme Cinema,” which presented edgy horror and art-horror fare such as The Brood (1979), Day of the Dead (1985), Crash (1996), Man Bites Dog (C’est arrivé près de chez vous, 1992), and Ringu during its run.23 The name also evokes, as Chi-Yun Shin has noted, the contemporary trends for “extreme sports” such as “skateboarding, snowboarding, and BMX racing that are associated with youth subculture and inducing an adrenaline rush in participants.”24 By foregrounding both foreignness (Asia) and supposedly controversial content (Extreme), the marketing strategy attempted to expand the traditionally circumscribed cachet of art cinema. UK Film Council research indicates that 70 percent of the British arthouse audience belong to the middle classes rather than the working classes or the underclass; 57 percent are older than thirty-five years old, an age group that accounts for only 33 percent of cinemagoers overall.25 Nevertheless, much like Raymond Murray’s Artsploitation, Tartan sought crossover appeal to two potential demographics: middle-aged foreign-film aficionados as well as the larger, more lucrative market of young male action-horror enthusiasts. In an interview McAlpine likened his target audience “to the middlebrow crowd that in the 1960s patronized art theaters.” These people “went to foreign films because of the sexual elements in films like I Am Curious (Yellow) [ Jag är nyfiken—en film i gult, 1967],” the mogul

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clarified. He also pointed to his second market niche. “The audience we have found in the U.K. for Battle Royale [Batoru rowaiaru, 2000] and the rest has been a young goth or heavy metal crowd that is attracted to a certain level of weirdness or even just by the ultraviolence in the case of the Miike films. These are people who would not otherwise be prepared to put up with subtitles.”26 Tartan Asia Extreme advertisements, merchandising, and exhibition practices reveal an approach to address especially the younger audience. In promotional materials, Tartan positioned the Asian films as aberrant and transgressive: “If the weird, the wonderful and the dangerous is your thing, then you really don’t want to miss this chance to take a walk on the wild side.”27 Specially designed t-shirts for Battle Royale, to name one example, featured an anime-style image of a uniformed schoolgirl being shot as a way to offer (and conflate) violence and Western perceptions of Japanese culture and iconography. Tie-ins with the Singaporean beer Tiger and other Asian brands sponsored an annual “Asia Extreme Roadshow” that took titles to UK and US multiplex cinemas and raffled a trip to Asia.28 This exhibition strategy and the beer and bar ventures expanded the films’ reach to youthful, genre-orientated viewers while simultaneously maintaining an exotic mystery and attraction. According to McAlpine, his aim was a market ignored by both distributors and arthouse exhibitors, who concentrated on “Italian soppy, weepy, romantic comedies” for “liberal bourgeois” spectators, rather than realizing that every “kid who has a PlayStation probably has a copy of Oldboy [Oldeuboi, 2003] or Battle Royale.”29 Tartan’s advertising efforts focused on arresting posters and DVD box art. These were so effective and celebrated that distributors of the Asia Extreme titles in other territories often copied Tartan designs. DVD covers were especially important because—although the company distributed theatrically—its ultimate aim and most lucrative sector remained home entertainment distribution. “DVD,” McAlpine opined, “is the motor that drives our industry, whether you’re in niche (or mainstream).”30 Indeed, Tartan’s PR officer Paul Smith confirmed in interview that Asia Extreme titles, which composed half of Tartan’s top twenty sellers, performed better as home video than as theatrical releases.31 Examining the label’s DVD designs provides a more complete illustration of distributors’ tactics. Asia Extreme DVD cases are strikingly consistent. To be sure, any effective brand must produce a regularized and recognizable iconography. In this case, however, the repetition and standardization across Asia Extreme DVD designs also compensates for and masks the significant differences between the films themselves, in terms of their style, genre, themes, production values, and culture of origin. Although the majority of Asia Extreme titles are horrors or thrillers, the label includes action films, police procedurals, science fiction, musicals, and genre-bending auteurist projects. The fundamental organizing

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principle of the series revolved around a continent of origin and (Hamish McAlpine’s) personal taste for a shocking “sensibility” by which “the rule book seems to have been thrown away.” Tartan representatives reported that the films were supposed to be “cultural hand grenades” marked less by “quality” than by the capacity to provoke attention and controversy.32 Commentators often point out the illusory unity of the Asia Extreme label in an Adornian vein (Tartan is supposedly duping the masses), without acknowledging how this aesthetic-generic dilemma requires creative choices for distributors and their marketers to enact.33 In this case Tartan needed to solve a perennial problem of niche distribution: How to effectively position and align films acquired according to vagaries of personal taste? Ultimately, Asia Extreme DVD boxes return to a baseline of extreme cinema marketing: they entice viewers by offering an exoticized view of “extreme” foreign cultures. Most Asia Extreme titles feature black as the background and dominant color. Occasionally, the choice is in keeping with a nighttime scene, as in the case of the US DVD cover for Oldboy, in which Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) and Mi-do (Kang Hye-jeong) walk through a Seoul neighborhood flanked with pubs, restaurants, and (sex) shops. The prominent neon signs, written almost exclusively in vertical hangul and many in red, evoke a seedy, dangerous Asian urban district. Although Dae-su walks ahead defiantly, Mi-do, whose top covers neither her bosom nor her midriff, clutches Dae-su and looks worriedly askew to the left of the frame. As a rule, however, the black color scheme does not pertain to any sort of realism; rather, it functions as an emotional cue. These include the DVD covers for Infection (Kansen, 2004), R-Point (Arpointeu, 2004), Dumplings, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Boksuneun naui geot, 2002), the UK release of Oldboy, Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi, 2005), The Eye 2 (Gin gwai 2, 2004), The Eye: Infinity (Gin gwai 10, 2005), Battle Royale, and Battle Royale 2 (Batoru rowaiaru II: Chinkonka, 2003). In color and advertising researcher Eva Heller’s empirical studies, she finds that Westerners strongly associate black with the following: evil, brutality, elegance, callousness, cruelty, furtiveness, death, illegality, emptiness, power, magic, the forbidden, and depravity.34 Significantly, this list overlaps with the descriptions of “the Orient” that Said identified. Although the color choice could be justified on purely aesthetic or branding grounds, it should be noted that other arthouse taboo-breakers Tartan distributed from non-Asian countries and under its other labels—productions with similar shocking and controversial content—do not use black as the prevailing color in their packaging. See, for example, the bright red, montage design of Taxidermia (2006), the white that dominates the cover image for Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo, 2005), or the white-silver-red design of Funny Games (1997). In addition, the aforementioned copycat labels that followed in

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the wake of Tartan Asia Extreme also consistently privilege black in their DVD designs, for example, the Thai horror-thriller The Commitment (2004) and the Korean APT (Apateu, 2006). One of these labels—Dark Asia—evokes the color and its associations with depravity and the enigmatic in its very name. Another tactic in the general evocation of mystery is the recurring iconography of an unidentifiable bloody, tortured, dead, or undead female body. This includes A Tale of Two Sisters (Janghwa, Hongryeon, 2003), which depicts the eponymous girls sitting and lying respectively on a couch, covered in blood. The Into the Mirror (Geoul sokeuro, 2003) DVD shows part of a woman’s face in the top of the frame; most of the composition is taken up by a white-tiled floor, with blood filling the grooves. The cover of Arang (2006) illustrates a woman whose face is obscured above the mouth; she sits, wearing a white dress, bathed in blood. In her cupped hands, blood drips down onto her lap. On the cover of The Heirloom (Zhai bian, 2005), the bottom half of a hanged woman with a skirt and bare legs floats in the air; a plethora of nooses surrounds her in the house. The DVD for Marebito (2004), to cite a final example of this trend, portrays a pale young woman with bare legs and a thin, skimpy dress, lying on a sheet; there is an open shackle next to her feet. Although the girl’s dark hair is partly visible and partially covers her bosom, it blends into the image’s black background, which obscures her face. In these examples we see how the cover designs intend to elicit feelings of mystery and project a dark tone: they represent women’s bloody, tortured, dead, or undead bodies but withhold parts of these bodies from view. Marebito and others, such as Arang, The Ghost (Ryeong, 2004), Ghost of Mae Nak (2005), Face (Peiseu, 2004), Lady Vengeance, and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (US version) furthermore take advantage of Asian women’s traditionally dark hair and blend these figures into the black background of the images. In addition, Tartan Asia Extreme DVDs concentrate prominently on one body part: abnormal eyes. The cover for Face features the image of a woman’s face and part of her bangs; as the rest of the image is black, she is literally disembodied. Her mouth is slightly agape and her eyes are open uncommonly wide. Instead of the interior of her mouth or her irises and pupils there is black and, in the case of the woman’s eyes, black and a small mirror image of the woman’s face in each socket. The cover of The Ghost features a woman’s face and a man’s hand choking her throat. She bleeds from her nose and temple and looks directly at the viewer with eyes that are surrounded by black. Lady Vengeance features a woman’s eyes only: a leather coat obscures her nose and mouth and only a lock of hair otherwise protrudes into the composition. The woman’s eyes reflect light; heavy red and pink make-up encircles them. The Ab-Normal Beauty (Sei mong se jun, 2004) cover shows only a woman’s eye and half of her nose and mouth; The Victim (Phii khon pen, 2006) reveals only a woman’s eye with the rest of her face covered by bloody hands; in The Maid (2005), hair

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FIG. 14 Face. Tartan’s Asia Extreme DVD designs evoked mystery and provoked attention

with a dark color scheme and a focus on Asian women’s eyes or their eroticized, violated, or lifeless bodies.

completely obscures a woman’s face with the exception of one eye, which is entirely white and lacks an iris or pupil. The DVDs’ consistent focus on women’s eyes is significant. Eye shapes traditionally function as the most common shibboleth to distinguish Asians from other “races.” Tartan’s use of images that so closely and prominently fixate on eyes, often at the expense of any other object, sends a clear message to UK and US viewers. Like a passport stamp, the eyes certify that the film comes from “the Orient.”35 In sum, the Tartan Asia Extreme DVD designs present eroticized female body parts, foregrounding features (black hair, certain eye shapes and make-up) that often distinguish Asians from Westerners. This type of exoticized sexualization extends a general strategy present in other avenues of marketing.

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The cover of a 2003 promotional leaflet, for example, depicts four publicity stills—including a nude woman, a scantily clad woman with a gun, and one masturbating woman—from series films A Snake of June (Rokugatsu no hebi, 2002), Bad Guy (Nabbeun namja, 2001), and Shiri (Swiri, 1999). The text above the images announces: “Welcome to the World of Tartan Asia Extreme!”36 The layout seeks to yoke exotic, unbridled female sexuality with notions of adventure and danger. In this context it is important to observe that Tartan consciously selected and modified these images in order to achieve desired associations. As Daniel Martin has noted, a similar South Korean promotional poster for Bad Guy also features the photo of the naked woman’s back; there, however, a sheet covers the woman’s buttocks. In contrast, Tartan chose to run the publicity with full nudity. In turn, the Shiri campaign advertised with the aforementioned image, in which a woman with a minimalistic dress and obscured face holds a gun. Not only does that film feature few women (it revolves around a masculine espionage conflict). None of the female characters ever wears such a revealing dress.37 In Tartan’s representational language, Asian women function as either disembodied, faceless victims or dominating femmes fatales (Audition or Shiri): this constitutes the traditional binary of “sexually available Geishas or demure China Dolls” and “Dragon Ladies or Dominatrix” that form the Western imagination of the “Asian Mystique.”38 Promotional taglines further these goals: for example, “It’s Korea, it’s dangerous, it’s great.”39 Tartan pitched The Isle to audiences as “arresting, shocking, visceral”; viewers of Ringu were instructed to “watch at your own risk. . . .”40 In addition, the distributor consciously exaggerated the censorship troubles and moral panic that Battle Royale encountered in its Japanese reception.41 All of these descriptions resound with Said’s studies of orientalist discourses and representations. In his analysis, let us remember, Said identified an emphasis on “the imagery of exotic places, the cultivation of sadomasochistic tastes” and “a fascination with the macabre, with the notion of a Fatal Woman, with secrecy and occultism,” which “valorized and enhanced female types of this legendary, richly suggestive, and associative sort.” These imaginaries were “eminently corporeal” and fixated on “an eastward and southward search” for “exciting spectacle” and the “perennially mysterious.” Often they revolved around fantasies of women with “luxuriant and seemingly unbounded sexuality,” who “place no demands” on men.42 I am not the first scholar to suggest that Tartan Asia Extreme deployed orientalist discourses to promote its series to UK and US audiences. Indeed, the best and most thorough commentators on Tartan Asia Extreme, Chi-Yun Shin and Daniel Martin, have argued or implied this. Martin has demonstrated, for example, how in the case of Battle Royale the distributor profited by satisfying the “British perception of Japan as (stereotypically) culturally

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and morally distant” and in press notes cued critics to dwell on the film’s status as specifically Japanese, “foreign, even ‘alien.’”43 Writing specifically about the label’s Japanese titles, Gary Needham has suggested that the “promise of danger and the unexpected is linked with the way in which these films are marketed according to their otherness from Hollywood, and subsequently feeds into typical fantasies of the ‘Orient’ characterised by exoticism, mystery and danger.”44 In turn, Shin has criticized the series for homogenizing Asian cultures. Conflating films from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, and other countries under one banner, it thus misrepresented different national cinemas to Western audiences.45 Because most of these extreme films fared modestly in their domestic box office rankings and remain “quite marginal within the region’s overall outputs, which are regularly dominated by melodramas, comedies, and romances,” Tartan Asia Extreme identified an entire continent with one type of film and thereby reinforced Western stereotypes of perverse, immoral, violent, sexually open, or deviant Asians.46 Indeed, even the oft-repeated backstory about Hamish McAlpine “discovering” these films partakes of a typical orientalism. The orientalist, according to Said’s rubric, acts as “interpreter, exhibitor, personality, mediator, representative (and representing) expert.”47 I agree with many of these commentators’ points and, indeed, have detailed earlier how Tartan participates in such discourses in its DVD designs and other advertising efforts. Nevertheless, there are at least four reductive dangers to this approach if it is taken too far or, more precisely, not far enough. First, there is a risk of simply gesturing toward stereotypes or “negative images” that are present in the marketing and reception of these films, without explaining their success. “Just as it is no longer satisfactory for academic critics to denote negative images of the peoples of North Africa and Asia,” Matthew Bernstein cautions, “analysts of Orientalism recognize that simplifying films to a structured opposition between East and West cannot account for these films’ specific articulation of power relations and even for their compelling appeal to audiences.”48 Second, there is a danger of morally evaluating audience and critical reactions. According to Martin, for example, “the British critical and journalistic response to Battle Royale,” which focused on the film’s exotic and morally alien “Japanese” qualities, “represents a ‘step back’ after the overwhelmingly positive and clearly un-Orientalist response to Ring.”49 Such claims are based on expectations of a “correct” reading (liberal, internationalisthumanist) and of certain regimes of knowledge. Similar preconceptions also inflect Shin’s contentions that Asia Extreme provides Western viewers with false presumptions about the entirety of domestic production in Asian national cinemas. This sort of cynicism criticism abounds: let us recall James Quandt’s enjoinder that the trend for extremity has meant that “far worthier French films have gone wanting” in North American

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cinemas.50 Joan Hawkins similarly worries that US distributors’ taste for Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, and Baise-moi (2000) over other important French works means that “the Beur and banlieue films against which (at least in part) they must be read are rarely seen outside the festival circuit.”51 Such arguments ignore real consumers’ desires. For instance, do Americans and Britons wish to see Thai comedies? Do non-specialist UK and US audiences care to know the complete corpus and generic make-up of national cinemas and use that information in their consumption choices? These commentators also ignore industrial realities (e.g., do UK and US distributors believe they can return a profit with Korean melodramas?) and assert expectations that defy the facts of film distribution and consumption in practice. They ignore essential motivations for why the industry and audiences disseminate and consume films. I raise these objections not as mere ivory-tower navel-gazing or small-time hair-splitting. Prior accounts have neglected to ask the important, big-issue questions. Why would orientalism be a successful marketing strategy to pursue? How does this strategy add value? Exoticization, of which Tartan Asia Extreme marketing partakes, casts these films in pleasant and familiar light. Despite justifiable accusations of stereotyping, simplification, and eroticization, in other words, a libidinal economy and history encouraged the company to pursue this allure. Although Tartan has in the meanwhile failed as a business, the Asia Extreme line hardly hindered its success. Indeed, in an acquisitions list that included art cinema masters such as Ingmar Bergman and contemporary top-draw auteurs such as Pedro Almodóvar, Asia Extreme titles made up ten of their twenty bestsellers.52 Beyond profits, furthermore, the label succeeded in establishing a successful and recognizable brand name that reorganized how critics, fans, scholars, film festival series, repertory retrospectives, and other distributors view and categorize these films. As primary gatekeepers, Tartan rescued these productions from isolated cult bastions and delivered them into the mainstream shelves of shopping malls and high streets.53 Yes, ideological criticism of Asia Extreme is necessary. But short-circuiting this analysis at a false-consciousness stage, ignoring why these particular Asian films with precisely these forms of marketing attract comparatively more Western viewers, is inadequate. Third, scholarly inquiry into the orientalist marketing of Asia Extreme manifests certain problematic assumptions about the cultures in question, and especially wealthy, advanced countries such as Japan and South Korea. In Said’s original formulation of orientalism and in his follow-up elaborations in Culture and Imperialism, he portrays Japan as an underdeveloped nation, an object of prey for American and European cultural imperialism. “Japan’s double status as an ex-imperial, lingering economic, and to a lesser extent, cultural power in Asia, on the one hand, and as a culturally subordinated non-Western

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nation, on the other,” Iwabuchi comments, “disappears behind a totalized notion of Western global cultural power.” This view of Japan, which Asia Extreme commentators implicitly adopt, presumes wily Western machinations and infantile Eastern docility. In fact, Japan has consciously cultivated a “selfOrientalizing discourse, a narrative that at once testifies to a firm incorporation into, and a subtle exploitation of, Western Orientalist discourse.” Representing itself as “culturally exclusive, homogenous, and uniquely particularistic,” Japan has accommodated the foreign gaze in order to construct a self-image that retains a projected sense of weakness and all the while dominate Asian politics, economics, and cultural export. According to Iwabuchi, “the complicity between Western Orientalism and Japan’s self-Orientalism effectively works only when Japanese cultural power in Asia is subsumed under Japan’s cultural subordination to the West.”54 By painting Japanese film imports as emanating from a weaker, orientalized culture, Asia Extreme scholars involuntarily perpetuate the myth of Japanese and Asian victimhood. Following from this, the fourth potentially reductive problem with excessive focus on orientalism in marketing by Tartan (or any other cross-cultural distributor) is that it disallows filmmakers’ agency and how they themselves may cue (self-)exoticizing strategies. In an ironic but surely unintentional way, scholars who dwell solely on Tartan’s orientalist tactics themselves partake of an orientalist discourse. What the orientalist “says about the Orient,” Said writes, is “to be understood as description obtained in a one-way exchange: as they spoke and behaved, he observed and wrote down.”55 The matter of producers’ autoexoticization is an essential feature of extreme cinema, a discussion to which the following chapter turns.

7 Sex, Violence, and Self-Exoticization

In today’s global marketplace, the idea of a national film addressing a national audience would seem quaint if it were not such poor business sense. Transnational flows of media and other goods have become routine and normal; indeed, it is clear that filmmakers take foreign audiences and markets into account, and many do so well before production begins.1 The example of Amélie (Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, 2001) is indicative. Although French pundits criticized its sanitized, nostalgic, and altogether fantastic version of contemporary Paris, the film proved to be a worldwide success. Claudie Ossard, the producer, has stated how he and his collaborators envisioned Amélie as addressing international audiences even before the script was complete. He sold the film “on the basis of the screenplay to almost all of the big territories including the US.”2 Amélie proposes an uncontroversial, romanticized, feel-good portrait of France. This, however, has not been filmmakers’ exclusive means to attract foreign audiences. An alternative, long-standing, and durable strategy capitalizes on national stereotypes of sexual frankness, abject violence, lurid perversity, and other dark or sensational qualities.3 In the 1960s Swedish producers actively profited from foreign associations of their country and national cinema with sexual liberation and pornography.4 Art filmmakers, mainstream producers, and lowbrow entrepreneurs targeting the softcore exhibition circuit took advantage of these connotations and these films’ relative commercial success abroad. In turn, this cued, for instance, a US exploitation mogul to recut Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika, 137

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1953) into a 62-minute dubbed English version that revolved around the Harriet Andersson nude swimming scene; he retitled it Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl and sold it to grindhouses.5 Because of widespread perceptions of a risqué Swedish cinema, Germans coined the term Schwedenfilm to describe sexually explicit films, regardless of their heritage. Commenting on this phenomenon in 1966, Swedish Film Institute founder Harry Schein—in a rhetorical move that anticipates Said—contended that foreign perceptions about Swedish cinema and sex “reveal less about Swedish film than they do about the moral (pre)conceptions of our foreign friends.”6 Detailing how American audiences looked to Scandinavia as a model of a sexually liberated culture, Eric Schaefer has furthermore elaborated on how Swedish filmmakers understood the need to export their products in order to survive and consciously used sexual content to attract international distributors and appeal to foreign audiences.7 To return to the case of Asia Extreme, we must reckon with the fact that not only Tartan marketing materials and Westerners’ write-ups deploy orientalist discourses; filmmakers such as Miike Takashi propagate remarkably similar opinions about their home cultures in interviews and public statements. Miike confirmed “the idea of Japan as excessive, and bound by a different moral standard than the West” and, in the words of Daniel Martin, was “working just as hard as Tartan to sell the film based on promises of taboo-breaking titillation.”8 Clearly, Anglophone distributors seek to enhance their imports’ prospects with appeals to the exotic and the extreme; orientalism, however, hardly follows a linear, West-East trajectory. To focus only on the role of Tartan and other Westerners would create an oversimplified, distorted, and ultimately false portrait of exoticism as a strategy that Western distributors perform upon passive, victimized Eastern filmmakers. We must take stock of the ways in which filmmakers are complicit in this process and, in fact, themselves invite such publicity schemes and interpretation scenarios.

From Orientalism to Self-Exoticism At least since Rashomon (1950) Japanese producers have pursued selfexoticizing strategies in their filmmaking in order to appeal to international and especially Western audiences.9 When Kurosawa Akira’s film first played in Japan, its critical and popular reception was solid but unspectacular. After it subsequently competed at the 1951 Venice Film Festival and garnered international critics’ highest plaudits, the Golden Lion, and the 1952 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Japanese commentators greeted the foreign acclaim with considerable skepticism. They downplayed the international success—and even Venice’s selection of the film over the objections of Japanese officials, who would have preferred that an Ozu Yasujiro production represent

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the domestic industry—as an unfortunate and predictable reaction to the project’s exotic and extreme potential. According to these critics, Rashomon’s very Japanese period setting and samurais, on the one hand, and the titillating rape scene, on the other, inspired the orientalist Western imagination about Asian culture and society.10 Daiei, the Japanese studio responsible for production and distribution, had cued this binary reading from the beginning. One of the original posters features two images: Mifune Toshiro, in his period bandit costume, brandishing a sword and a menacing facial expression, and Kyo Machiko, the raped samurai’s wife, in fear and on the ground. According to Yoshiharu Tezuka, Rashomon’s international success “made Japanese filmmakers/producers very self-conscious about the Western gaze” because the “export potential of Japanese films was dramatically enhanced.” The success of an exoticized, eroticized film emboldened leading Japanese filmmakers and producers, such as Daiei president Masaichi Nagata, “consciously to pursue self-Orientalist strategies.” Although some Japanese filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s denied making “films for export” with the “gaze of the Western Other” in mind, Tezuka demonstrates that in practice this was their modus operandi. Nagata and others undertook targeted internationalization tactics—in the narrative structure, characterization, marketing, and so on— to appeal to Western sensibilities and to gain recognition on the world stage, including film festival competition and prizes.11 Indeed, one of the most important precursors to today’s extreme cinema, In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korīda, 1976), began as a conscious plan to execute on its international potential: an exotic Japanese period setting as well as extreme representations of sex and sexual violence. French producer Anatole Dauman approached Japanese New Wave filmmaker Oshima Nagisa with the idea of making a Japanese “pornographic film” for Western audiences. Oshima, inspired by Last Tango in Paris (Ultimo tango a Parigi, 1972) and other European art filmmakers’ experiments with graphic sexuality, saw that “there was a real market for erotic films made in the Orient” and eventually accepted Dauman’s offer.12 In Oshima’s own words, he set out to make “a film that broke taboos . . . a pornographic film,”13 one that, as several scholars have noted, takes its inspiration from the Japanese shunga tradition of graphic erotic art, Ihara Saikaku’s “floating world” stories, and Kabuki plays.14 Production transpired in Japan with Japanese actors; in order to skirt domestic censorship, however, the French film stock returned to France for development. Transnational and transgressive, the putatively Asian film pursued a patently Western appeal. “Oshima knew his real chances for exhibition lay in Western Europe and the English-speaking world,” according to Linda Williams. “He thus aimed his film at Western eyes or at those Japanese audiences who, like himself, were envious of what seemed to be greater Western sexual freedom. Oshima’s ‘Japanese’ film would enter his country as a French import.”15 Tezuka

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understands this project in the discursive context of “Resistance Cosmopolitanism,” that is, the defiance of national frameworks (in this instance Japanese morals, tastes, and censorship laws) in order to form a strategic alliance with foreign otherness (the international film festival circuit, producers, and audiences).16 Oshima himself later reflected on his tenuous position between the fronts: because of severe funding difficulties in Japan he felt encouraged (if not forced) to “make films that are sure to attract audiences everywhere, even if they are small,” a style of transnational filmmaking addressing primarily international spectators and one that many of his arthouse colleagues shared. The director reported that he “confirmed this in conversations with Wim Wenders, Bernardo Bertolucci, Paolo Taviani, Theo Angelopoulos, Jim Jarmusch, Mrinal Sen, and others” and claimed that the then young Asian filmmakers Chen Kaige and Lee Jang Ho had “shown such passionate interest in me because they have strong hopes and plans for the internationalization of their films as well.”17 These historical examples serve to show how non-Anglophone filmmakers actively exploit notions of the exotic and extreme in the global marketplace, and in turn how the tidy binaries that informed initial discussions of orientalism cannot withstand scrutiny. As Matthew Bernstein writes, “the closer one looks at Orientalism in film, the more likely one is to find that such oppositions are blurred, complicated, and undone.”18 In this context it is important to investigate not only how Anglophone distributors such as Tartan “sex-up” or “exoticize” foreign films by foregrounding graphic violence, erotic imagery, and “alien” national characteristics. Non-Anglophone filmmakers pursue or cue such representations, topics, and rhetoric in order to gain attention internationally; indeed, this strategy can occupy major stands of national cinemas. The remainder of this chapter explores the question that follows from this discussion: What are the material conditions by which a national cinema may be incentivized to auto-exoticize and deploy graphic violence and explicit sexuality? I begin with a case study that explores how extreme cinema can be a response to the structural realities of small national cinemas.

Case Study: Sex, Violence, and National Self-Representation in Recent Austrian Cinema With the possible exception of Korea and despite the numerous inventories of the “new French extremity,” perhaps no other nation has been more closely linked to extreme cinematic depictions of sex and violence than Austria. Dennis Lim’s New York Times article on a Lincoln Center series of contemporary Austrian film, “Greetings from the Land of Feel-Bad Cinema,” is typical of the Anglophone regard and deserves to be examined in depth.19 “It is often

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said that artists represent the conscience of a nation,” Lim begins. Citing writers Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, he surmises that in “Austria that conscience tends to be expressed with a certain amount of contempt. . . . True to form, the salient quality of Austrian film’s new wave is its willingness to confront the abject and emphasize the negative.” The “tiny country” with a penchant to provoke “has become something like the world capital of feel-bad cinema,” regularly serving “scornful allegory for the national character” with a “taste for confrontation.” Lim’s take on Austrian cinema is decidedly unexceptional.20 According to The Guardian’s Phil Hoad, “for the Austrian League of Extraordinarily Pessimistic Gentlemen,” including directors Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl, Götz Spielmann, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, and Markus Schleinzer, “it’s all about the good stuff : sex tourism, the disappointment of immigrants, care-home degradation, suburban paedophilia, irrational violence, industrial farming and, lest we forget, latent Nazism.”21 Even Martin Schweighofer, CEO of the Austrian Film Commission, admits ironically that, based on this coverage, in the “worldwide struggle for uniqueness Austria seems to have succeeded admirably.”22 It is remarkable that extreme cinema makes up a substantial proportion of the few Austrian productions exhibited at film festivals, sold in foreign territories, feted on the pages of international cinephile magazines, or awarded significant prizes. These, the most prominent Austrian films abroad, include Funny Games (1997), The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin, 2001), Dog Days (Hundstage, 2001), Struggle (2003), Antares (2004), Import/Export (2007), Michael (2011), Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe, 2012), and Paradise: Faith (Paradies: Glaube, 2012). A number premiered in competition at Cannes (Funny Games; The Piano Teacher; Import/Export; Michael; Paradise: Love) or Venice (Paradise: Faith). The following provides an industry analysis in order to show how and why there has been a surge of arthouse sex and violence in recent Austrian cinema. The discussion proceeds by outlining the limitations of domestic film culture before briefly sketching the major production trends in contemporary Austrian cinema. This context functions not for its own sake, but rather to suggest how production trends, aesthetics, and attitudes derive partly from the lack of material self-sufficiency in the domestic market.

Realities of Contemporary Austrian Film Culture Austria is a fruitful and complex case study because of a seeming paradox: although it is by any standards a wealthy country with cultural subsidy programs, talented film professionals, and excellent infrastructure, its film culture faces some severe limitations. In 2011, there were 157 cinemas in Austria, divided unevenly between cities and countryside: although there were

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40 cinemas in Vienna, of the eight remaining Bundesländer (federal states), the Burgenland had 4 cinemas and Carinthia 7. This means that the number of residents per cinema seat varied from 60 (in Vienna) to 137 (in the Burgenland). In itself this situation is not dire. When extrapolated to reflect the approximately 8.5 million inhabitants, Austria’s 577 cinema screens and 99,979 seats compare roughly to other Western and Central European countries. With 6.8 screens per 100,000 inhabitants, Austria’s screen density certainly pales in comparison to the United States (12.6), France (9.0), Australia (8.7), or Spain (8.3); nevertheless, it surpasses Italy (6.4), the United Kingdom (6.1), and Germany (5.6).23 Despite this capacity, however, the actual consumption of cinema is low. There were roughly 16 million cinema admissions in 2011, which put the average cinema attendance per capita per annum at 2.0; comparing this figure to the United Kingdom (2.8 per capita) yields a difference of 40 percent. Although Austrian cinema attendance is not out of line with European averages, it remains a small fraction of the figures from similarly wealthy countries such as the United States (3.8), Australia (3.8), France (3.6), or Iceland (5.0). DVD consumption is even more meager. In 2011, 14.8 million DVDs were sold in Austria (1.7 per capita), versus 204 million in the United Kingdom (3.2 per capita). In Britain, in other words, nearly twice as many DVDs are sold per capita than in Austria.24 My consideration of exhibition and consumption thus far has not taken the films’ country of production into account. The fate of Austrian films casts special light on structural dilemmas. In 2011, domestic cinemas premiered 318 films; of these, 41 were Austrian productions or co-productions. Although this implies that nearly 13 percent of exhibited films were Austrian, the market share—which is based on numbers of admissions, rather than numbers of productions—yields a much lower figure: 3.6 percent. Out of every 1,000 visitors to Austrian cinemas, in other words, only 36 saw an Austrian film. Compared to countries with traditionally high market shares, including the United States, Japan, South Korea, or India, this percentage is inappreciable. But even in European comparison Austria ranks at the very bottom. It is helpful to contrast the situation in Turkey (50.2%), France (41.6%), Italy (37.5%), the United Kingdom (36.2%), or Germany (21.8%); even smaller countries such as Denmark (27%), Sweden (21.3%), the Netherlands (22.4%), the Czech Republic (28.5%), or Belgium (10.7%) fared much better. Indeed, among European countries, only Portugal (0.7%), Bosnia-Herzegovina (0.9%), and Romania (1.4%) had a smaller domestic market share than Austria.25 The 3.6 percent market share, close to the historical average, means that— even of the relatively low consumption of films in Austria—local productions earn very little. The differences between the numbers of admissions to domestic productions and those overall are particularly illuminating. In 2010, for

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example, Avatar attracted 1.8 million admissions; the most popular Austrian film, The Unintentional Kidnapping of Mrs. Elfriede Ott (Die unabsichtliche Entführung der Frau Elfriede Ott), yielded 200,000, and celebrated arthouse co-production The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band) only 44,000. In 2011, the blockbuster US comedy The Hangover 2 was seen 624,000 times. The top Austrian effort, the children’s film Lilly the Witch: The Journey to Mandolan (Hexe Lili: Die Reise nach Mandolan; 115,000), barely entered the top 50 overall; the top comedy, Echte Wiener 2 (84,000), and My Best Enemy (Mein bester Feind; 13,257; tenth among domestic films), starring Moritz Bleibtreu and Georg Friedrich, were conspicuous for their low turnouts. It should be emphasized that these are the best-performing Austrian productions; once one departs from the annual top ten domestic films, the outlook is inauspicious. Of the roughly forty Austrian films that have premiered annually over the last years, the five with the lowest box office yield national attendance figures with only two or low three digits.26 Even before inspecting matters of production such as subsidies, we must conclude that Austrian film consumption cannot sustain a functional domestic filmmaking culture.

Domestic Production and Exhibition Funding Relatively few sources fund Austrian film production. Unlike, for example, in Germany, there is no critical mass of private television money (e.g., from Sat1 or PRO7) available to jumpstart projects. In the alpine republic, monies largely derive from public bodies that seek evidence of artistic intentions. By far, the largest funders of Austrian theatrical films remain the Austrian Film Institute and the public broadcaster, the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF), which in 2011 respectively spent over €15 million and €7 million to subsidize production and, to a lesser extent, production development, advertising, festival participation, and other costs. Even these larger organizations will only support about ten films a year each (sometimes overlapping). Smaller subsidies are provided by other governmental and quasi-governmental groups, including the Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur, and Filmstandort Austria. In efforts to attract tourism and local jobs, the regions also back productions that take place in their area or fulfill other criteria. These include the Cine Tirol Film Commission, Cinestyria Filmcommission & Fonds, and Filmfonds Wien. The sums here are decidedly modest, with most Bundesland budgets under €1 million and the smallest, Voralberg and the Burgenland, only respectively contributing €22,400 and €37,845 in 2011.27 Practitioners and pundits alike acknowledge the vexing subsidy prospects as the industry’s sore point. “Percentage-wise,” Die Presse critic Christoph Huber has claimed, Austria’s “funding is the worst in Europe.”28 During a reception at

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Vienna City Hall in honor of Cannes prizewinner The Piano Teacher, Michael Haneke—who, it should be noted, has been one of the few perennial beneficiaries of national funding—and other industry representatives loudly protested the dire situation to the secretary of state for culture and media. They claimed that, although Austrian productions were over-proportionally represented at international festivals, domestic subsidies remained completely inadequate to sustain an industry fighting for its financial existence. Without support from television and abroad, Haneke said, The Piano Teacher would have never come to fruition; young and well-trained film professionals can hardly find work.29 The Austrian subsidy bodies subscribe to aesthetic-economic remits; these, in turn, anticipate how the strategic, “artistic” representation of sex and violence can help a film to be produced. The Austrian Film Institute, for example, is “established to provide funding for Austrian films with regard to cultural and economic aspects.” Its purpose is “supporting the production, dissemination and marketing of Austrian films which seem likely to achieve both audience approval and international recognition, thereby enhancing the economic viability, quality, autonomy and cultural identity of Austrian film productions.”30 Exhibitors are also encouraged, by way of financial support, to program such Austrian productions. The KinoReferenzförderung of the Filmfonds Wien, to highlight one example, serves the sustainability of “quality” exhibition. Cinemas that showcase Austrian and European films in at least 40 percent of their overall offerings can apply for a subsidy of up to €10,000; the European Union provides similar stimulus.31 These economic incentives encourage the production and programming of “artistic” national-European filmmaking, a category that has strong overlaps with extreme cinema.

Production Trends Three major production trends dominate contemporary Austrian filmmaking: documentaries, comedies, and extreme cinema. In crucial ways, each of these modes directly responds to the structural limitations of the industry with specific means of national self-representation and (inter)national address. The first, documentaries, makes up about half of Austrian productions (52% in 2011). When viewed against the percentage of documentaries screened from the nations with the largest number of imports to Austria, the United States (5%) and Germany (11%), the contrast is stark and the magnitude apparent.32 Successful recent Austrian documentaries include Darwin’s Nightmare (Darwins Alptraum, 2004); Workingman’s Death (2005); Our Daily Bread (Unser täglich Brot, 2005); We Feed the World (2005); Let’s Make Money (2007); Plastic Planet (2009); and Whores’ Glory (2011). At least three salient qualities characterize these productions. First, a number of these films perform

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relatively well abroad. This includes festival and some theatrical exhibition, but above all DVD, streaming, and television sales in foreign markets. Second, the documentaries (and especially the successful ones) tend to be issueoriented. So, for example, the aforementioned exemplars deal with global warming, workers’ conditions, threats to food production, global capitalism, environmental dangers, and the realities of prostitution. Third, although Austrians produce and partly or exclusively fund these films, for the most part the documentaries neither take place in Austria nor feature Austrian subjects. Often, any voice-over or intertitles are rendered first in English, rather than German. Many of these films have an original English title that remains untranslated in the domestic release. In general, Austrian documentaries downplay their cultural origins and address an international market, following its imperatives and appealing to its needs and desires. The second major trend is comedies. These comprise 15 percent of Austrian productions and thus represent the most prevalent genre film (detective films/ thrillers follow at 7%).33 These are also the most popular domestic releases with the highest admission tallies. Hinterholz 8 (1998) retains the record for the most popular Austrian film of all time (over 800,000 admissions); of the all-time Austrian top ten, eight are comedies.34 Moreover, Austrian Film Institute-commissioned marketing reports register that comedies have the highest genre affinity in Austria (71%) and the highest potential audience (270,000).35 Nevertheless, comedies represent a cottage industry with very little to no resonance abroad. Recent exemplars, such as Come Sweet Death (Komm, süßer Tod, 2000), Forever Never Anywhere (Immer nie am Meer, 2007), or MA 2412—Die Staatsdiener (2009), star local comedians ( Josef Hader, Roland Düringer, Alfred Dorfer, Christoph Grissemann) who speak in dialect. ORF television money plays an important role in funding these films, which screen internationally, if at all, in a few niche outlets in Berlin, Munich, or Zürich. The third major category is drama/art films, and specifically, extreme cinema. Although these modes are not interchangeable and surely represent a spectrum of representational practices, it is possible to make some generalizations about their aesthetics. These productions favor realist conventions, elliptical narrative forms and editing, characters with opaque backgrounds and motivations, the treatment of social issues (especially violence, prostitution, immigration, or class issues), and sudden, inexplicable bursts of violence. Ordinarily, character psychology remains enigmatic, if not absent. In Breathing (Atmen, 2011), for example, the viewer has no way to understand why the main character, Roman, who has killed another boy, is violent and aggressive until the very last scenes, when he meets the mother who abandoned him. Austrian extreme cinema—in contrast to documentaries, which export well because of their universal quality, and comedies, whose cultural specificity

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appeals exclusively to the domestic market—travel well on the festival circuit because of certain negative national-cultural depictions. Clearly, such productions maintain artistic intentions: they appear at festivals and depart from the conventional aesthetics, narrative functions, and justifications of violence (e.g., catharsis, irony, self-defense, or result of trauma). Nevertheless, they appear in DVD catalogs and online streaming services with publicity that emphasizes their titillating quality. The DVD covers of The Piano Teacher and Import/Export respectively feature a sex scene on a restroom floor and a sex worker’s naked backside. Antares’s trailer is typical. It juxtaposes clips of violence (a character throwing a glass against the wall, a fistfight, a lovers’ quarrel on the street) with lengthy and explicit snippets of sex. These sequences are punctuated with white intertitles on a black screen. The first announce the film’s festival appearances (Diagonale, Locarno, Toronto, Pusan); two that follow purport to summarize the plot: “Three stories of passion . . . and one of death.” This marketing scenario telegraphs art, sex, and violence as the film’s impetus and modus operandi. Three film stills, rendered in red and black, dominate the otherwise white Film Movement Antares DVD cover: a man and a naked, blindfolded woman kissing; a man looking at a woman who avoids his gaze; and a naked man lying on a bed with female hands on his arm and shoulder. Under three emblems of the Toronto, Locarno, and Vancouver film festivals and above

FIGS. 15 and 16 The promotion of Antares highlighted extreme cinema’s typical trinity of art, sex, and violence, strongly recalling the iconography of previous efforts, such as Sex, Lies, and Videotape.

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the red title is a quotation from the Chicago Tribune: “THREE STEAMY EPISODES OF DESIRE, SEX AND JEALOUSY . . . A FIERY LOOK AT THE VAGARIES OF MODERN LOVE.” Overall, the iconography borrows liberally from the marketing of earlier sex-themed art films. The thin, suggestive fragments of publicity stills arranged in parallel strongly resonates with the advertising and DVD cover for Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989); the red-black effect also features in the promotional materials for other explicit arthouse projects such as The Center of the World (2001).

Explanations for Austrian Extreme Cinema Theoretical paradigms of national representation can help explain these production trends. Before proceeding to that discussion, however, it is important to consider how broader analysis can strengthen, refine, and complicate conventional assertions about the composition of Austrian cinema. Dennis Lim’s “Greetings from the Land of Feel-Bad Cinema” and other typical approaches argue that certain features and particular traditions within Austrian culture— from the paintings of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt to the literature of Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek to Catholic conceptions of sexuality and depicting women—serve as precedents and intertextual antecedents to the representational tactics of The Piano Teacher, Dog Days, Struggle, or Paradise: Faith. A stronger claim, however, would embed these national-essentialist claims (which no doubt have some merit) into more concrete institutional frameworks. Setting aside questionable sobriquets like “feel-bad cinema,” no one would dispute the fact that the Austrian industry is small and tightly networked. Given these personal-professional constellations, one might say that extreme cinema has become an “institutional aesthetic” in Austria, a feedback circuit that pervades education and national-cultural bodies. Only one true film school exists in Austria, the Filmakademie Wien, a part of the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. The professors on this course include Michael Haneke and, since 2011, Götz Spielmann. The Filmakademie’s alumni include Barbara Albert, Jessica Hausner, Ruth Mader, Ulrich Seidl, Anja Salomonowitz, and Spielmann. In other words, these are the leading exponents of Austrian extreme cinema. These students went on to work for their “teachers” and the talent pool has remained close. Hausner was script girl for Haneke’s Funny Games. Salomonowitz organized casting and unit management for Seidl’s Jesus, You Know (Jesus, du weißt, 2003). Markus Schleinzer has been casting director for over sixty Austrian productions and co-productions, including for Haneke, Hausner, and Seidl. In public appearances, Haneke speaks of these figures as “my students”; according to Albert, in Vienna “all the filmmakers know each other.”36 Whether or not these younger filmmakers

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admit this influence (or, as is often the case, deny it and assert an artistic, unique identity), the effects of installing the “Austrian League of Extraordinarily Pessimistic Gentlemen” into the upper echelons of institutional power need to be examined critically and soberly. What does it say about Austrian film culture that the purveyors of extreme cinema hold the country’s highest positions in the education of budding talent? The consolidated and circumscribed Austrian culture industry, in which a handful of role models wield a large amount of local authority, can give rise to a master-apprentice phenomenon whereby a hegemonic style prevails. This is true especially among first projects by young filmmakers, who often consciously or unconsciously conform to existing standards in order to have their work vetted and whose first feature is sometimes their final university project.37 Austrian public television and any private funders look for reliable antecedents, a search that can lead back to unknown knowns, the festival-tested Haneke-Seidl institutional aesthetic with a fresh face. In Viennese offices and meeting rooms with great expectations, high aspirations, but relatively little capital, patterns with proven results in international arthouse distribution look attractive and less risky. For a beginner filmmaker, pitching one’s film in the vein of a Haneke can be doubly strategic. Indeed, such tactics have helped jumpstart the careers of younger filmmakers without international reputations. Jessica Hausner and Ruth Mader delivered disturbing accounts of sex and violence in their respective initial projects Lovely Rita (2001)—which depicts a young teenaged girl whose repressive upbringing in an Austrian village leads her to random sex acts with strangers— and Struggle, which choreographs explicit acts of prostitution, auto-erotic asphyxiation, sado-masochism, and sexual violence. Anja Salomonowitz’s It Happened Just Before (Kurz davor ist es passiert, 2006) regards human sex trafficking with a provocative experiment: “everyday people” (a customs officer, a provincial women, a bordello bartender, a diplomat, and a taxi driver) recite real reports from trafficked foreign women in Austria. These cases substantiate and help explain the findings from chapter 1: disturbing themes and explicit representations of violence and sex serve a discursive strategy to establish the filmmaker and her project as artistic. Such a path, especially at an early-career stage, lays the way for the film to enter arthouse distribution and exhibition channels. In this case, Hausner, Mader, and Salomonowitz—with the recognition and funding they received from these initial provocations—turned to different and more subdued aesthetic directions, a common pattern nationally and internationally. Indeed, it should be emphasized that these Austrian films function within transnational networks and form one part in a global constellation; the trend for explicitness in the domestic arthouse cinema cannot be explained solely by cultural genealogies confined to the Austrian nation-state.

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Austrian extreme films have much greater similarities—in form, style, mode of address, means of production, vehicle of distribution, and sites of exhibition and consumption—with the Mexican film Leap Year (Año bisiesto, 2010), the French Romance (1999), or the Japanese Audition (Ōdishon, 1999), than with domestic productions such as Hinterholz 8 or The Unintentional Kidnapping of Mrs. Elfriede Ott. The fact that Austrian cinema is a small, minor national cinema—that is, it does not have the capital, reach, domestic audience, or international distribution network, that, for example, Italian or French cinema does— means that extreme representations of sex, violence, and sexual violence can function as comparatively attractive ways to elicit international attention from film festival programmers, journalists, buyers at distribution companies, and audiences. With moribund domestic film consumption and rabid competition for scarce production resources, filmmakers are incentivized, on the one hand, to differentiate their product, and on the other, to follow an institutionally sanctioned, safe model with a record of success. In the case of Austrian cinema, these two goals align: disturbing sex and violence appear transgressive and familiar (i.e., to Haneke, Seidl, Spielmann, and so on). According to Schweighofer, “not having a film industry” on the scale of larger European neighbors “has its disadvantages but also its advantages.” Radical filmmakers dealing with abject subject matter “such as Haneke or Seidl would have never survived to make a second film [had they embarked on careers] in Germany.”38

International Incentives for Cultural Representation: From Auto-Erasure to Auto-Ethnography Austrian cinema’s structural problems are not wholly unique. Generally, small national cinemas encounter similar challenges. Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie argue that small nations “by definition have very limited domestic markets for all locally produced goods and services—including culture—and so have been forced by the neo-liberal economic and political pressures of globalisation into a greater dependency on external markets.”39 Austria’s low market share derives partly from the dominance of a large nation that shares the same language: Germany corners the market for non-Hollywood fare. To be clear, my discussion neither implies that all Austrian art films are taboo-breakers, nor does it suggest that other national cinemas, large or small, are either auto-exotic extreme or not. Rather, I submit that filmmakers working within an industry with structural preconditions similar to Austrian cinema’s have incentives to use the exotic-extreme mode of representation and that it is one of several paths that they may take to surpass these obstacles.

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Indeed, responses to small-nation challenges and attempts to gain recognition on the world stage may take several forms. For example, Hjort has demonstrated that Dogme95 represented Danish cinema’s reaction to globalization. By creating a manifesto that promoted a new aesthetic based on inexpensive film cameras and technology, Dogme95 attempted to bypass the local industry’s structural funding problems, attract attention, and thereby compete with Hollywood. According to Hjort this represented a “non-nationalist” approach. In other words, rather than using the self-exoticizing tactics of heritage films or other instances of “intensified localism,” the Dogme95 movement used public performances (marketing itself as a “new wave” including a launch of manifestos at a Paris cinema in 1995) and aesthetic-technological principles (the “Vow of Chastity”) in order to produce a recognizable brand.40 (In addition, it must be noted, the first two and most recognized Dogme95 films, The Celebration [Festen, 1998] and The Idiots [Idioterne, 1998], reside on the respective periphery and center of the extreme cinema concept.) Scholars conceive of two basic modes by which small nations such as Austria or “marginalized” cultures such as Thailand can configure their national identity so as to increase their cultural products’ appeal. One method downplays or elides national markers and emphasizes universally applicable and understood elements, a process that David Martin-Jones and María Soledad Montañez, in the Uruguayan context, call auto-erasure. Because in Uruguay since the 1990s there has been neither sufficient state funding nor a robust domestic audience to support a full film industry and because the country lacks “readily recognizable national iconography,” Martin–Jones and Soledad Montañez argue, local films omit national specificities in order to enter the global marketplace. Specifically, Martin-Jones and Soledad Montañez analyze how the production company Control Z Films has used anonymous locations not obviously Uruguayan (or even South American) and an international “film festival aesthetic” in order to tell “globally applicable stories.” These narratives attend to “universal” character psychology, maintain a loose episodic structure, foreground mood and character over action, eschew spectacular effects as well as recognizable stars, and deploy distinctive but accessible camerawork or editing. According to Martin-Jones and Soledad Montañez, auto-erasure “is a way to negotiate a place for film production in relation to global funding and distribution networks—in this instance, the film festival network—when the politics of auto-ethnography do not function because of the invisibility of the nation internationally, be it in terms of iconography . . . or because it is a small production company.”41 The other major self-representation strategy is called auto-ethnography or self-orientalism. Under this rubric, small or marginalized nations’ cultural productions maintain or exaggerate a strong sense of local identity in order for that construction to be comprehensible and saleable abroad.42 This might

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entail dwelling on internationally recognizable settings or iconography (the Swiss Alps, an Irish pub, the Loch Ness monster, the Casanova type, the Geisha figure) or “national characteristics.”43 Taking their cue from literary specialists who examined how colonized peoples internalized and sold back Westerners’ orientalized images of themselves, scholars have extended the metaphor to film.44 Within this academic paradigm, there is some debate about the cultural producers’ agency; for instance, Rey Chow argues that Chinese Fifth Generation filmmakers engage with the Western gaze as active self-affirmation.45 In this scholarship, Martin-Jones summarizes, “autoethnography in cinema is considered a cunning strategy through which filmmakers can self-consciously ‘auto-exoticise,’ thereby giving international audiences what they expect (reassuring them with stereotypical images of the nation) whilst simultaneously addressing issues of interest to local audiences.”46 Although they acknowledge the activity of cultural producers and thus resolve some vexing notions of Said’s orientalism, both auto-erasure and autoethnography remain problematic as explanatory models. As Martin-Jones himself has noted, the practice of auto-ethnography is complicated by transnational co-productions, funding sources, and personnel involved in filmmaking.47 In addition, both terms imply that there is a “correct” quality (not touristic or clichéd) and quantity (enough to establish location and milieu) of national specificity that films should contain—and that policing the tenor of these national specificities should preoccupy scholars and critics. Furthermore, although Martin-Jones and Soledad Montañez catalog auto-erasure with an inventory of US independent filmmaking’s aesthetic features, they seem unconcerned about auto-erasure in the United States. American independent films, according to the research they refer to, also offer loose, episodic, and often solipsistic narratives set in anonymous, unnamed suburbia, and yet Martin-Jones and Soledad Montañez perpetuate the familiar preconception whereby Uruguay (or Indonesia or Norway) has a national cinema that should express its national culture whereas the United States spawns “Hollywood” and “independent filmmaking,” both of which are either not expected to engage with local culture or which emerge from a putatively cultureless nation.48 In general, these issues threaten to obscure the more important question: Why should or might a filmmaker include obvious or recognizable markers of nationality? Above all, we need to explore how filmmakers can use the expectation, presence, or lack of national characteristics to increase international appeal. To this end, I submit that an important third item augments the constellation of auto-ethnography and auto-erasure: the implication that aberrant (especially sexual and violent) behavior is a national characteristic. Although this matter has not received comprehensive scholarly attention, it does indeed factor into accounts of independent and national filmmaking and even the

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sources that Martin-Jones and Soledad Montañez quote, for example, Jim Hillier’s contention that some US independent films try to gain attention by “working with more daring or controversial subject matter.”49 To be sure, my proposed category takes some elements of the auto-ethnographic model. Its function, however, is altogether different than the vision of France proposed in Amélie or the Merchant-Ivory heritage films’ England. In those cases, selfexoticization remains fundamentally romantic and attractive. Austrian filmmakers, in contrast, associate “Austrianness” with the decidedly negative national traditions of Adolf Hitler, Kurt Waldheim, or Josef Fritzl; they suggest a link between violence, emotional coldness, and aberrant sexuality, on the one hand, with Austrian society and history, on the other. Unlike Amélie, this is “feel-bad cinema.” Needing access to global capital via international tastemakers and gatekeepers, an essentialist appeal to “Austrian” values, themes, and issues—a feature of domestic extreme cinema—cannot operate in the manner that comedies make use of local dialect, humor, and other special knowledge unavailable to international viewers. The Austrian art productions must construct a national vision that is palatable to foreign expectations and tastes. To attract funders, film festival programmers, distributors, journalists, and arthouse audiences, in other words, filmmakers can present domestic culture as violent, sexually deviant, abject, or otherwise negative. Certainly, the early films of Michael Haneke, such as The Seventh Continent (Der siebente Kontinent, 1989), Benny’s Video (1992), and Amok (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls, 1994) pursue this strategy. Feted at Cannes and among French and international pundits for these devastating critiques of Austrian society, Haneke summed them up in published statements and interviews as his “glaciation trilogy”: a chronicle of the emotional coldness of Austrian culture.50 His later film The Piano Teacher adapted the eponymous novel by Elfriede Jelinek, another (in)famous artist whose work and public life has been marked by criticism of her home country and the stance of Resistance Cosmopolitanism. Ulrich Seidl, to cite another example, has compared himself to Thomas Bernhard and constructed a public persona as a kind of Nestbeschmutzer, that is, someone who criticizes the national culture and bites the hand that feeds.51 His films have time and again provoked controversy for negative national self-representation, from his cinema debut Good News (Good News: Von Kolporteuren, toten Hunden und anderen Wienern, 1990) and the bestial Animal Love (Tierische Liebe, 1996) to Paradise: Faith. A rightwing fringe group unsuccessfully sued Paradise for blasphemy after its depiction of an Austrian woman masturbating with a crucifix received widespread press attention at the 2012 Venice International Film Festival.52 The omnibus film State of the Nation: Austria in Six Chapters (Zur Lage: Österreich in sechs Kapiteln, 2002), co-directed by Barbara Albert, Michael Glawogger, Ulrich Seidl, and Michael Sturminger, encounters a series of eccentric compatriots,

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dwelling on prevalent racism, xenophobia, homophobia, Catholic traditionalism, perceptions of failed family structures, political indifference, and selfhate. Symptomatic of the self-essentializing project, Glawogger sets out in his chapter to discover—or, one might argue in the vein of Said, invent—the dark “Austrian soul.” Markus Schleinzer’s Michael, which chronicles a young boy’s imprisonment in a middle-class Austrian pedophile’s basement, makes use of the international coverage and outrage over the Natascha Kampusch and Josef Fritzl incidents—two of the few times that Austria featured in news abroad and the most covered stories about the country since the Kurt Waldheim affair. It is illuminating to examine the US and UK critical responses in some depth, so as to understand how such self-critical extreme films both receive and cue international attention. Selected for the Cannes International Film Festival in May 2011 (and playing the festival circuit in Moscow, Toronto, Rio de Janeiro, London, Tokyo, Thessaloniki, and elsewhere), Michael premiered theatrically in the United States in February 2012 and in the United Kingdom in March of that year. Two discourses prominently framed the US and UK receptions: 1) Austrian identity (and history) and 2) the film’s indebtedness to the concerns and style of Michael Haneke. Philip French, who concluded that “Hannah Arendt’s conjunction of banality and evil comes to mind” when watching Michael, provides an example of how these discourses sometimes intertwined. He began his review for The Observer thus: The Josef Fritzl affair and similar cases of horrendous incarceration revealed in its wake have now produced a sizable body of documentaries, feature films and fiction too, of which Michael is a minor, rather puzzling addition. The 40-year-old Austrian film-maker Markus Schleinzer, whose first feature film this is, has worked as a casting director on over 60 films, among them Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf and, most significantly, The White Ribbon, on which he coached the child actors.53

Jonathan Romney’s 528-word review for The Independent used the words Austria and Austrian five times and invoked Haneke thrice. “You don’t normally look to Austrian cinema for a good time, as Michael Haneke fans know,” Romney began. “But even by Austrian standards, Markus Schleinzer’s Michael is sobering.” For Romney, the main characters’ meatloaf suppers and afterdinner wash-ups represented “a neat Austrian ménage.” According to the critic, “Schleinzer—previously Haneke’s casting director—wants us to examine the topic of child abuse outside the perspective of media rhetoric (no easy task in Austria, given the national shock caused by the Fritzl and Kampusch cases).”54 Nick Pinkerton of the Village Voice provided a similar interpretation

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based on national context and “psychology.” “The clean, orderly home has a particular hold on the Austrian imagination—particularly the basement, the nation’s subterranean subconscious,” the review picks up, noting that several domestic filmmakers, including Seidl and Rainer Frimmel, have worked on similar themes. It was clear to Pinkerton that “the incest dungeon discovered in a cellar in rural Amstetten, Austria” was the “inspiration here.”55 Although Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian notice was unquestionably positive, he submitted that, while engaging with the recent Austrian past, the fiction “can’t compare in horror to the real-life Kampusch and Fritzl cases that have inspired it.”56 Schleinzer’s role as Haneke’s casting director received acknowledgment in every American and British review that I read; pundits always deployed this fact to suggest the latter’s influence on Michael. For the New York Times’ Stephen Holden, who reminded his readers about Schleinzer’s work for the arthouse giant, “the movie recalls Michael Haneke’s Funny Games.”57 According to Pinkerton, Schleinzer’s prior duties revealed the “best comparison”: Haneke’s cinema of “placid surface over a sucking undercurrent” and “antientertainment style that foreswears obvious tools of viewer manipulation.”58 In The Independent, Romney wrote that the director’s “cool, clinical direction is very much school-of-Haneke.”59 For Bradshaw, who to his credit mentioned Schleinzer’s work for Seidl and Hausner in addition to (“most importantly”) Haneke, the protégé “has clearly learned a good deal from the master’s icy clarity and control” and diligently studied “Haneke’s The Seventh Continent, another truly horrible vision of violence, secrecy and family dysfunction.”60 Even negative reviews posited the connection. Although Mark Olsen (Los Angeles Times) found the film “shallow in comparison” and submitted it lacked “Haneke’s sense of deep morality,” he noted that Schleinzer’s previous work with the provocateur dictated a common “sense of detachment.”61 In sum, US and UK reviewers interpreted the film as a commentary on Austrian history and the Austrian “mentality.” In their ubiquitous references to the influence of Haneke (and, in the articles by Romney, Pinkerton, and Bradshaw, of other Austrian films and filmmakers) they also intuited what I described as the institutional aesthetic. The New Republic’s venerable Stanley Kauffmann, however, delivered perhaps the most revealing Anglophone review. Although his write-up covers the same topics as the other American and British critics and details the Haneke homage in depth, it assumes a more reflective tone and reckons with why a filmmaker might treat his nation’s extremity actively and with specific goals in mind. “In recent years we have learned about psychoses in Austria comparable to this one. One can surmise that Schleinzer joined his film experience with Austrian sources not only because of aptness but because that junction would be noted. (As, for instance, here.)”62 In this vein, it is important to note how the filmmakers themselves anticipated the critical response. Although in interviews Schleinzer said that he did

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not intend to make “another feel-bad Austrian movie,” his rhetoric and thematic emphases resounded with the evaluations that dominated the US and UK reception. The director disclosed his motivations behind the narrative. When he began writing his script, he hoped above all to explore a contemporary Austrian issue that was of topical interest internationally: “It was late 2008 and you couldn’t pick up a paper or switch on television without noticing the Madeline McCann case, the Natascha Kampusch case or the Josef Fritzl case.” In addition (and, like the critics mentioned earlier, quoting Hannah Arendt), Schleinzer emphasized the potential national allegory: “What is interesting about Austria is that the country likes to see itself as a victim of Nazism. We say that we were annexed by Hitler, and after World War II we declared we were his first victim. This is why Austrian society has been held back in the last 60 years. We have just seen ourselves as a tourist destination—a country of Mozart and mountains. That view doesn’t lead to a modern, openhearted society.”63 Furthermore, Schleinzer revealed that Haneke encouraged him to make Michael and, although attempting to establish some distance, acknowledged his boss’s influence when asked if his aesthetic was “mimicking Haneke.” According to Schleinzer, it “doesn’t make much sense to me to have this father figure and then, when it comes to directing my own film, for everyone to say ‘Markus is making movies exactly as Haneke does.’ But I cannot deny that I have learnt a lot from him.” In a telling formulation, the director himself raised (but rejected) the idea that his style represented a calculated attempt to capitalize on titillating material and Haneke’s provocative style, continuing: “I don’t think the way we did Michael is a branding for my future art work,

FIG. 17 US and UK reviewers uniformly reduced Markus Schleinzer’s subtle, haunting Michael to a Haneke-inspired deliberation on Austrian history and “characteristics,” a reading cued in filmmaker interviews. Image courtesy of Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion.

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but when we were talking about this story and how it should be told and shot, it was very clear to us we had to use this kind of movie language to bring the story on, which is of course very similar to Haneke’s earlier work.”64 Schleinzer’s comments in speaking with foreign interviewers—and the basic stance of Austrian extreme cinema in general—is a negative autoethnography or, perhaps even more specifically, what Tezuka terms Resistance Cosmopolitanism. That concept, as sketched earlier to describe Oshima’s configuration of national identity in the discourses surrounding In the Realm of the Senses, entails a defiance of national frameworks (here the self-promotion of Austria as wealthy, modern land with a proud cultural history—“a country of Mozart and mountains”—and an earthy sense of humor) in order to form a strategic alliance with foreign otherness (the international film festival circuit, producers, and audiences). In the past scholars used the terms auto-ethnography and self-orientalism to describe predominantly Asian (or so-called Third World) cultures; time and again they have chronicled how middle-class Western perspectives commodify those foreign, exotic cultures and how the latter, in turn, sometimes replicate the orientalist gaze. Yet the Austrian case and others suggest that advanced Western cultures also participate in this phenomenon, and not merely in the consumer role. Already in 1989, Thomas Elsaesser remarked how the New German Cinema bared the national shame (the Nazi period and its legacy) to international tastemakers in London and New York: see, for example, Our Hitler (Hitler—ein Film aus Deutschland, 1977); The Patriot (Die Patriotin, 1979); The Marriage of Maria Braun (Die Ehe der Maria Braun, 1979); or Germany Pale Mother (Deutschland bleiche Mutter, 1980). Incentivized by national subsidy structures to adapt celebrated literary works for the screen, the movement’s filmmakers participated in a Resistance Cosmopolitanism by using these very works to create parables—for example, Young Törless (Der junge Törless, 1966); Signs of Life (Lebenszeichen, 1968); Michael Kohlhaas (Michael Kohlhaas—Der Rebell, 1969); Effi Briest (1974)—comprehensible to foreign critics and international (film festival) audiences as critiques of the Federal Republic and the fascist German past.65 In a different mode, to this day the historical film has been Germany’s most enduring export, to the point that it is—nominated for Oscars and nearly the only German genre to enjoy theatrical distribution in the United States and Britain—internationally nearly synonymous with German cinema. These productions concentrate on the dark past (Holocaust, Nazis, left-wing terrorists), rather than, as has been the case with so-called heritage cinemas, such as the English period films Chariots of Fire (1981) or Remains of the Day (1993), dwelling on what might be termed the “highlights” of national history.66 Treating national cinemas as rarefied aesthetic realms obscures the material conditions that inevitably also affect narrative shapes and formal designs.

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In conclusion, there are several ways for film projects and industries with sophisticated artistic intentions yet meager financial prerequisites to attract the necessary attention of festivals, critics, distributors, and audiences.67 As capital-intensive projects unable to rely on substantial domestic funding, Austrian films typically take one of three paths: 1) a cottage industry of comedies popular with local viewers but without export value, 2) documentaries that perform an auto-erasure of national specificity, 3) or a self-critical national association with extremity. This discussion complicates the idea that small national cinemas, faced with a modest domestic market and competition from Hollywood and other locally dominant cinemas, most often resort to a conservative, “ethnic nationalism,” such as heritage films.68 Other small cinemas with similar structural preconditions partake of this strategy and have produced relatively significant numbers of extreme productions. These include, for instance, recent “weird Greek cinema” such as Dogtooth (Kynodontas, 2009), Attenberg (2010), and Miss Violence (2013); Chilean films such as In Bed (En la cama, 2005), Tony Manero (2008), The Maid (La nana, 2009), or Young & Wild (Joven y alocada, 2012); or Estonian exemplars such as The Class (Klass, 2007).69 Nevertheless, these facts do not preclude significant strands of larger cinemas (e.g., France) to also indulge the extreme. Furthermore, other small nations with limited film school options and circumscribed sources of domestic funding, such as the Republic of Ireland, have not pursued the auto-exotic extreme path or have not done so to a significant degree.70 Orientalism, auto-erasure, and auto-ethnography have some but ultimately limited usefulness in explaining how national origins affect the reception of extreme cinema in the United States and the United Kingdom. In advancing the thesis that examining incentives and motivations of individual agents in film production, distribution, and reception provides a better model, I have problematized the ways that scholars typically explain the cross-cultural reception of (especially Asian) filmmaking. The present chapter, moreover, has demonstrated how the “unknown” and the “exotic” also feature in rich Western nations’ art film production and marketing strategies. Structural limitations of small nations can encourage such strategies in order to overcome the lack of self-sufficiency in the domestic film market. In the case of recent Austrian cinema, extreme violence or sexuality goes hand in hand with the negative self-presentation of the nation and national characteristics. Rather than the binaries of East and West, oppressed and oppressor, there is a need to acknowledge and account for the many smaller and larger exchanges that take place in the film world and for the ways in which the exotic and extreme can be elements in trajectories other than cultural imperialism.71 Orientalism carries with it—despite the refinements made to

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Said’s initial definitions—a power structure that paradoxically results in the reduced agency of the “observed” country. Similarly problematic and ultimately unproductive is the much hand-wringing over the proper amounts of national self-representation or the wrangling over whether a film is ethnographic or auto-ethnographic. These conundrums belie the fact that cinema is and has always been an international medium with transnational production and reception contexts. In contrast, a structurated, institutional way of viewing cinema that analyzes motivations and incentives allows for, focuses on, and helps us understand the role of agency.

8 Aesthetic Innovation and the Real

Academic Debate over Sexually Graphic Art Films In 2013, Blue Is the Warmest Color (La vie d’Adèle) animated frenzied responses upon its May premiere at the Cannes International Film Festival and its subsequent theatrical run. In the United States and the United Kingdom, where Abdellatif Kechiche’s film was released in the autumn, the controversy over the graphic lesbian sex scenes between Adèle (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Emma (Léa Seydoux) overwhelmed the aesthetic merits that had led the Cannes jury to award it the Palme d’Or. The film earned an 18 rating in the United Kingdom and an NC-17 in the United States; it was banned in Idaho. Stoked by the lead actresses’ comments about the “horrible” on-set working conditions and those by the author of the graphic novel on which the film is based—that Kechiche’s adaptation displayed a heterosexual “visual bias”— Anglophone critics debated whether or not the lengthy scenes of probing and moaning were pornographic and whether the director had exploited his young performers. (Exarchopoulos was allegedly underage during production.)1 The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, to name one prominent but also typical example, inveighed that the film silenced women’s desires in order to focus on “patriarchal anxieties about sex, female appetite, and maternity,” which in turn invaded the style and form.2 “The controversies aroused by Abdellatif 159

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Kechiche’s film,” The New Yorker’s Richard Brody summarized, “show just how hung up on sex Americans are, left and right.” He went on to argue, however, that “they’re right to be hung up” on the sex: “the problem with Kechiche’s scenes is that they’re too good—too unusual, too challenging, too original— to be assimilated (despite Dargis’s protests to the contrary) to the familiar movie going experience.”3 Although Brody claimed to see remarkable innovation and originality in Blue Is the Warmest Color, a sui generis case and just cause for much deliberation and blogging, a certain déjà vu attends to the film, its reception, and the ensuing controversies. In fact, according to film critics, censors, and other observers, arthouse cinema has become significantly more sexually explicit since the turn of the millennium. In 2001, Howard Hampton described how commercial filmmaking “and its pornographic double have been locked in a clandestine embrace” and dubbed the new graphic trend in highbrow cinemas “artcore jollies.”4 The same year, Time critic Richard Corliss remarked that despite American cinema’s “puritan” attitudes toward sex, in Europe “the art-sex picture has blossomed so fully it is nearly its own genre.”5 Scott MacKenzie, in the academic journal Screen, pointed toward pornography’s increasing inroads into art cinema and “a trend in the cinema to push the boundaries of what can be shown on the screen and to challenge the often dictatorial interpretation given to censorship guidelines.”6 To be sure, art cinema has always had sexual designs. A selected genealogy of provocative productions since merely the 1970s would span from WR: Mysteries of the Organism (W.R.—Misterije organizma, 1971) and Last Tango in Paris (Ultimo tango a Parigi, 1972) to In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korīda, 1976) and A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille, 1976), and from Devil in the Flesh (Diavolo in corpo, 1986) and Betty Blue (37°2 le matin, 1986), to The Ages of Lulu (Las edades de Lulú, 1990).7 Nevertheless, the aforementioned commentators and numerous others identified an exploding, especially explicit trend that picked up at the close of the 1990s on the by-then proliferating festival circuit.8 The millennial “hardcore art” included The Idiots (Idioterne, 1998), L’ennui (1998), Lies (Gojitmal, 1999), Romance (1999), Baise-moi (2000), Intimacy (2001), Sex and Lucía (Lucía y el sexo, 2001), and several other prominent exemplars.9 The trend has continued unabated; the several dozen films are far too many to list here in the main text.10 They include productions from Australia, Austria, Chile, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Arousing journalistic concern and sharing distribution labels and locations of consumption, these films reside more or less at the center of the extreme cinema cluster. All played at serious festivals; those that did enjoy theatrical distribution were exhibited on the arthouse circuit (in a few cases in addition to traditional cinemas or multiplexes). Some thematize sex throughout and feature lengthy and frequent erotic sequences; others, such as

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The Idiots, are not necessarily primarily concerned with sex as a subject and yet contain “real sex” inserts, that is, brief shots of penetration performed by the actors or body doubles. The cluster definition provides a flexibility to account for the trend, rather than hitherto approaches, which usually focus on one single element. According to the hegemonic scholarship, the true innovation is “real sex” in art cinema: the presence of penetration elides traditional high– low boundaries between legitimate cinema (whether commercial-generic or arthouse) and hardcore pornography. The explicitly sexual art film, perhaps the most-investigated subset of extreme cinema, deserves to be reconsidered in light of the findings provided in this book. The present chapter analyzes the trend’s small number of narrative tropes and trajectories and provides an inventory of the academic claims made for its innovation in terms of form, style, and tone, before critically evaluating perhaps the largest debate: the status of the “real” (sex). Examining and testing academic discourse in detail substantiates the broad claims made earlier in the book but also suggests how scholars need to move beyond the aesthetic embrace. Only by putting formal shapes and stylistic designs into dialogue with distribution and reception discourses and asking both aesthetic-cultural and socioeconomic questions, can we more fully account for sexually explicit arthouse taboo-breakers in particular and extreme cinema in general.

Narrative Form(ula)s and the Aesthetic Embrace Individual hardcore art films, and above all celebrated auteurs’ textual designs, have inspired much scholarly investigation.11 In order to relay previous commentators’ concerns with these films and to anticipate how I suggest we better understand them, the following section surveys the films’ narrative paradigms and considers how scholars have posited them to be original. Aesthetic embracers have asserted sex-heavy art films’ innovation by gesturing toward supposedly radical styles or forms, dark, self-reflexive tones, and graphic, non-simulated sex acts.

Amour Fou Scenario Contemporary hardcore art films’ narratives are strikingly consistent and familiar. The amour fou scenario is perhaps the most common. Specifically, many films chronicle in episodic form a sexual relationship, usually between a man and a woman (but sometimes between a woman and another woman). It becomes progressively (and usually mutually) obsessive and typically ends with the dissolution of the relationship and/or the physical or psychological demise of one partner.12 Last Tango in Paris and In the Realm of the Senses remain the two clear precedents for the contemporary sexually explicit art film. Today’s filmmakers often cite them as inspirations; critics and academics concur. For Linda

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Williams, Deep Throat (1972) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 picture, which depicts the downfall of a recently widowed American man (played by Marlon Brando) in increasingly hermetic and kinky sexual relations (including an infamous scene of butter-lubricated anal sex) with a young Parisian woman, were the “first movies to spur a widely recognized public response to their unprecedented, sustained sexual subject matter.” In the same vein, In the Realm of the Senses, even more explicit in its depictions of unsimulated sex between actors Tatsuya Fuji and Eiko Matsuda and others, charts an obsessive love that ends with the bloody dismemberment of the male protagonist’s penis, and his death. According to Williams, this “hard-core reworking of Last Tango” represented a “breakthrough film that would finally prove that explicit sex did not negate art . . . an art film in the European erotic tradition very close to the mad love of the surrealists, Georges Bataille, and Last Tango.”13 Today’s extreme cinema seldom reenacts the sexually violent dramaturgy of In the Realm of the Senses’ dénouement (although examples do: see Baise-moi or Antichrist [2009]). Yet many if not most contemporary art-sex films follow Last Tango in Paris and In the Realm of the Senses and offer the tale of a couple consumed by an amour fou, one that, at the expense of other concerns, ends in one or both characters’ ruin. Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy is set in a gritty South London neighborhood. It depicts unsimulated sex (including fellatio) between Jay (Mark Rylance) and Claire (Kerry Fox): a man and a woman who, although they do not know each other’s names, meet each Wednesday at Jay’s dingy flat to copulate. Observing the subtleties of class backgrounds and the desires to both preserve and transcend social constraints, the film demonstrates how Jay’s persistent investigations into Claire’s life short-circuit the affair. Taking place in Santiago over an even shorter time period, In Bed (En la cama, 2005) too involves the problems of anonymous sex between a man and a woman, Bruno and Daniela, whose one-night stand in a motel room moves from lustful to contemplative, conversational, and violent. Loosely based on In Bed, Julio Medem’s Room in Rome (Habitación en Roma, 2010) reproduces the narrative of a one-night stand in a hotel room; its novelty is the eponymous location and the fact that the lovers are both women. Several of the amour fou narratives introduce a pathological aspect to one or both of the central partners’ sexuality. Pola X (1999) implies incestuous desires that destroy the charmed life of Pierre, the male protagonist; in L’ennui jealousy consumes Professor Martin’s pursuit of the much younger Cecilia and results in his demise. Kelly + Victor (2012) depicts the title couple’s torrid love affair, which—bracketed by their friends’ S&M prostitution and general sordid nature—descends into cutting, erotic asphyxiation, and Victor’s death during sex. The Center of the World (2001), to cite another example, follows a depressed dot-com millionaire, Richard (Peter Sarsgaard), from Ohio to Las Vegas, where he takes a local stripper, Florence (Molly Parker), as an escort for

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his hotel-room sexual escapades. Typical of the trend in general, Wayne Wang’s film contrasts how initial sexual motives—for Richard, power and intimacy, for Florence, money—can change and collide, and foregrounds the emotions (or lack thereof ) at play in erotic relations. If Richard and Florence’s control games reveal unstable mental issues, the sex in Leap Year (Año bisiesto, 2010) is remarkable for its physically violent nature. In static, long takes set entirely within a downscale one-bedroom Mexico City apartment, protagonist Laura (Monica del Carmen) talks on the telephone to her concerned mother back home in the province, tries to revive her failing career as freelance business journalist, and brings home strangers she meets in clubs for increasingly rough and humiliating rendezvous. When she meets Arturo the sex turns even more

FIG. 18 Leap Year’s sparse portrait of an obsessive, sadistic, and ultimately destructive sexual relationship partakes of the long amour fou tradition that includes Last Tango in Paris and In the Realm of the Senses.

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base and intense; Laura’s short, sturdy body and pendulous breasts bear her partner’s sadistic fury and the violence that he commands her to inflict upon herself during his unannounced visits. Narrated in a spare, non-psychological mode, Leap Year only hints that Laura’s penchant for masochism may have its roots in her deceased father’s devious behavior. A determinant of nearly all of the amour fou films is the main characters’ creation of a claustrophobic space apart from the world. Lars von Trier’s Antichrist pushes this trope to symbolic excess by staging a mythical cabin in the woods (“Eden”) as the isolated refuge of a psychologically disturbed pair, He (Willem Defoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Operatic and altogether stylized, the 2009 effort partakes of the horror genre, chronicling how the couple, whose child has died, fails to alleviate their mental distress and various psychological traumas with therapy and drugs. Increasingly sadistic torture and violent sex culminate in She severing her clitoris while masturbating and beating He’s penis bloody.

Sex Addict Scenario A common variation on the amour fou theme reduces the focus on obsessive, pathological sexuality from a couple to a single protagonist. This usually manifests itself as a sex addiction that threatens and finally destroys the protagonist’s relationship to his or her partner or family. Brownian Movement (2010) tells the story of a doctor named Charlotte (Sandra Hüller), who furtively rents an apartment: there on her lunch breaks she undertakes a series of sexual encounters with her male patients. Although she has an attractive husband, a doting child, a comfortable bourgeois life, and a respectable profession, she prefers seedy trysts with a cast of freaks: grotesquely hirsute, morbidly obese, or mentally unstable men. When her affairs emerge, Charlotte undergoes psychotherapy, but her marriage falters and her career fails on account of her transgressions. Hemel (2012) similarly chronicles a woman addicted to sex. The title character has a string of graphic and progressively disturbing escapades with men. Seemingly devoid of emotion, she wants a lover to leave immediately after sex; like “lions and real men,” she likes to fall asleep without postcoital caresses. Hemel’s behavior resembles that of her father, Gijs, a sophisticated and handsome art dealer and musician who cavorts with young women. The protagonist’s pathological sexual attitudes indicate her overall infantile, fragile mental state and forewarn the strained relationship with her father. Similar to Brownian Movement and Hemel, Shame’s (2011) portrait of sex addiction hinges on the affliction representing a means to escape adult responsibilities and emotions. Like both of those films, in Shame the unfeeling pursuit of sex results in the destruction of family ties, in this case the relationship between the porn- and sex-obsessed protagonist Brandon (Michael Fassbender) and his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan). The film portrays Brandon’s downfall in a series of outré, polymorphous, and increasingly desperate and painful sex acts throughout

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New York. Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (2014), programmatic in its attention to sexual compulsion, is the latest high-profile project in this familiar vein.

Initiation Scenario Besides the amour fou coupling scenario and the pathological sex addict variation, the initiation scenario represents the other common narrative pattern. Such films locate sex as an (or the most) important element within a journey of (typically, an innocent young woman’s) self-discovery. This narrative has a long history, from the literature of Moll Flanders and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure to Mädchen in Uniform (1931) and Emmanuelle (1974). Perhaps the most famous contemporary examples include Catherine Breillat’s films, which, as academics writing in an auteurist mode have duly noted, have concentrated on this theme since A Real Young Girl and have continued to do so in the more recent works Fat Girl (À ma soeur!, 2001), Romance, and Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer, 2004). “Sexual initiation and selfdiscovery narratives,” Tanya Krzywinska remarks, “privilege the transition from innocence to experience,” which “comes through much soul searching, conflicting emotions, tears and joy.”14 Breillat’s earlier efforts concentrate on the desire, trauma, and ambivalence surrounding the loss of virginity (Fat Girl or Virgin [36 fillette, 1988]) and recent projects have extended these themes to adult women. Romance recounts the sexual and emotional education of a schoolteacher, Marie (Caroline Ducey). After her model boyfriend announces he will no longer sleep with her, Marie seeks out fulfillment in a series of erotic adventures, including a one-night-stand with a man she picks up in a bar and bondage sessions with her colleague. Explicitly depicting masturbation, fellatio, ejaculation, penetration, and childbirth, Romance concludes with Marie’s awakening and empowerment and the murder of her boyfriend. Shortbus (2006), a relatively rare US hardcore arthouse taboo-breaker, also subscribes to the sexual initiation scenario. The story, told in parallel narrative, concerns several characters’ attempts to overcome their insecurities and angst regarding sex, including an unfulfilled dominatrix and a suicidal, never-before-penetrated gay man. The central protagonist, however, is Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee), a Chinese-Canadian couples therapist. Despite her profession—and the callisthenic sex acts that we see her undertake with her husband—Sofia has never experienced an orgasm. Her quest in the film represents a classic initiation narrative: to achieve sexual enlightenment. Shortbus, but even more so other examples of the initiation scenario, focus squarely on a La Ronde–style revue of sexual acts between various characters. This is typical of films such as Secret Things (Choses secrètes, 2002) or Q (2011), which depict a variety of sex scenes (fellatio, masturbation, stranger sex, voyeurism, lesbian sex) played out in revolving character constellations. The steady progression of these (usually casual) acts is punctuated by conversation scenes between the two female protagonists (in Secret Things) or between the

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female characters in locker-room showers (Q). In both, such dialogues function to mutually inform (and sometimes misinform) the other women about the progress of their sexual educations. A number of other films conform to the initiation scenario, including Ken Park (2002), À l’aventure (2008), Sleeping Beauty (2011), Clip (Klip, 2012), Call Girl (2012), and Blue Is the Warmest Color. The last, despite its lesbian coupling, revolves around an archetypal initiation. Adèle, an initially straight young woman from an unsophisticated background, explores her desires and sexuality, first through a brief heterosexual fling, and then through a stormy love affair—depicted in lengthy, graphic scenes of fingering, scissoring, grunting, and licking—with a bourgeois-bohemian art student.

Scholars’ Claims to Innovation: Form, Style, Attitude In and of themselves, the preceding narrative paradigms are hardly novel. Indeed, amour fou and initiation stories have long traditions, both in literature and cinema. Nevertheless, academics and critics consistently argue that the recent arthouse sex films—though particular forms, styles, and attitudes toward their subject—in fact offer an innovative experience that provides a different, more artistic, and sometimes subversive take on sexuality and on representing sexuality on screen.

Form and Style Writing in the aesthetic-embrace mode, a number of academics anticipate and echo what we will later see is a key rhetorical strategy of filmmakers: they assert that certain formal and stylistic emphases differentiate arthouse sex films from pornography. For an example, let us examine Krzywinska’s conclusions about The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin, 2001), which closely follows the pathological, sex addict paradigm. Michael Haneke’s production studies Erika Kohut, a troubled middle-class woman who visits sex shops, urinates at a drive-in, cuts her genitals, and engages in impulsive and socially inappropriate sex acts. Although The Piano Teacher has in common with hardcore pornography “the use of real time in a number of key scenes,” Krzywinska writes, it “differs from the circumstantial style of hard-core” by several means: the withholding of orgasm, staging and framing an act of fellatio so as to remain beyond the viewer’s clear sight, “smooth” cinematography, and “seamless” editing. Likewise, according to Krzywinska, Intimacy begins with a sequence that resonates with, but ultimately subverts, pornographic form. In particular, it recalls the “the ‘stranger sex’ format: a narrative device often deployed in hard-core because it tends to sideline complex emotional connections in favour of carnal pleasure without obligation.” Nevertheless, she continues, unlike “hard-core, the sexual encounter is not staged rhythmically

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through various ‘acts’ or positions and there is no cum-shot, although the spectator is left with little doubt that penetration has occurred.” For Krzywinska, then, these factors and other realist tropes (lack of nondiegetic music, ambient sound) mark a clear stylistic distinction to pornography, despite the heavy emphasis and graphic presentation of sex: “The sum of these strategies gives the sense that the camera is following, rather than orchestrating, a real rather than fabricated and choreographed event.”15 Another academic’s take on 9 Songs (2004) further illuminates the scholarly regard. Michael Winterbottom’s amour fou film follows Matt, a climate researcher, who recalls his affair with Lisa, an American woman he meets at a concert in London. Almost the entire running time alternates between scenes of the couple’s explicit sex (which include the staples of hardcore pornography, including erections, masturbation, auto-erotic stimulation with a vibrator, cunnilingus, vaginal intercourse, and ejaculation) and rock concerts. For Williams, “structurally [ 9 Songs] comes closest to conventional pornography.” Indeed, she continues, if “pornography can be defined simply as a string of sexual numbers hung onto a plot existing primarily as an excuse for the sex, then, as I have argued elsewhere, pornography’s closest genre affiliation is the musical in which the lyrical choreography of song and dance numbers resemble the rhythms of bodies in the sex act.” Nevertheless, she goes on to argue, the Winterbottom film “is not pornography if we mean by that a genre intent on the maximum visibility of sexual function with the accompanying intent to arouse. Despite its undoubted display of graphic sex, and despite the fact that its display might arouse, it never focuses on the plumbing details of hard-core involuntary display. It is graphic, we might say, without being pornographic.”16 9 Songs’ bulging inventory of unsimulated and explicitly presented sex acts and its scant attention to other narrative concerns notwithstanding, Williams claims, the film innovates, surpassing pornography’s sole focus on genitals and orgasms. Distinction motivates Williams’s analysis; the linguistic-philosophical shibboleth “graphic . . . without being pornographic” is typical and echoes, for example, Haneke’s rhetoric of wishing “to make an obscene film but not a pornographic one.”17 Williams’s regard is unexceptional. Several commentators argue that contemporary hardcore art films innovate because of radical emphases and form: by focusing so much on sex at the expense of other, more traditional drivers of plot and characterization (e.g., dialogue, gesture, costume), sexual acts not only replace or interrupt narrative (as in pornography), sex becomes a form of storytelling.18 In 9 Songs, then, the quality, types, and performance of sex communicate the dissolution of Matt and Lisa’s affair; a dialogue-less scene in which a forlorn Matt finds Lisa in bed and watches her climax with the aid of a vibrator telegraphs the impending end of the relationship without words. According to these scholars, Lies presents a similar scenario. The Korean amour fou initiation tale chronicles the torrid affair of J, a thirty-eight-year-old

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married architect, and Y, an eighteen-year-old pupil who wants to lose her virginity. Meeting in love motels, the couple indulges in all forms of oral, vaginal, and anal sexual activity; the narrative arc shows the sex becoming ever rougher as the two explore sado-masochism. Sex scenes almost unavoidably contribute to Lies’ narrative and causality, because of their frequency (thirteen) and, in particular, their duration (three are over 7 minutes long; one clocks in at over 10 minutes). A precise tally shows that a total of 49 minutes and 38 seconds of the 105 minutes of screen time is devoted to sex scenes, that is, 47 percent.19 One seriously wonders, however, to what extent such formal features are truly innovative. There are certainly precursors whereby sex substitutes for characterization and narrative arc; one need not look any further than Last Tango in Paris, In the Realm of the Senses, or Crash (1996). In these productions, as Linda Ruth Williams writes about David Cronenberg’s film, “very often the sex scenes are absolutely the plot and character development.”20 Indeed, it is important to test the assertions of these scholars, who usually fail to support their claims with details. Over a running time (excluding the end credits) of 65 minutes, 9 Songs contains fifteen sex scenes, which range in length between 18 seconds to 5 minutes and 37 seconds.21 This means that sex scenes comprise 25 minutes and 46 seconds (just under 40%) of the running time. When their quantity is assessed together with the revealing quality, it is unsurprising that critics dubbed the project the “most sexually explicit film in the history of mainstream British cinema.”22 Nevertheless, when examined closely in terms of style, the representation of sex indeed differs from contemporary hardcore pornography. Pace Williams, this is true less because of the “maximum visibility of sexual function” and much more so on account of editing, shot length, shot scale, and framing. The twelfth sex scene (47.38–49.41) provides conclusive evidence. Typically, it begins abruptly and conforms to standard pornographic dramaturgy: on Matt’s bed, Lisa, naked except her panties, performs fellatio on Matt, who lies naked on his back. His erect penis is on display throughout almost the entire sequence (the “maximum visibility” that Williams associates with pornography); the scene ends with Lisa masturbating Matt to ejaculation on his abdomen, the “cum-shot” that Williams ascribes to pornography as its telos. Nevertheless, this scene differs from contemporary commercial hardcore, and first and foremost in its editing and shot length. The sequence is composed of seventeen shots, which entails an average shot length of 7.2 seconds. Furthermore, the shot scale alternates throughout between medium and medium close-up shots (observing the couple from Matt’s right-hand side from subtly different positions) and extreme long shots from well behind the foot of the bed. In one shot there is a pan from Lisa’s lips caressing Matt’s penis to his expression of ecstasy and back again: otherwise no zooming or other camera movement occurs, save the mild trembles that betray the handheld cinematography.

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Compare this style to hardcore pornography. I searched for “blow job” scenes on youporn.com and examined a number of examples, paying close attention to scenes roughly 2 minutes in length and especially those not marked “amateur” (even though these types of films are the most popular and prevalent forms of contemporary pornography and their stripped-down, unsophisticated aesthetic now informs even professional pornography). The sequences (“Vanessa Cage Gives Great Blow Job”; “London Keys Gives a Great POV Blow Job”; “Ultimate Blow Job”),23 evince a remarkably convergent aesthetic that includes relatively little editing and extremely long takes. It is not uncommon to find average shot lengths of 60 seconds or more; some representative films were composed of a single shot. The examples in question have average shot lengths of 41, 31, and 19 seconds, respectively.24 These sex scenes, in other words, are cut between 2.5 to nearly 6 times more slowly than 9 Songs. Furthermore, in contrast to the Winterbottom film, hardcore pornography hardly varies in shot scale (ranging only between medium close-up and extreme close-up), and the exceptional changes in scale occur via camera movements or zooming, rather than through editing. The POV shot, not used in 9 Songs, is the most prevalent method to frame fellatio; it prevails in almost all amateur submissions and also appears in many of the professional productions, for example, “London Keys Gives a Great POV Blow Job.” All of these stylistic differences obtain between 9 Songs and conventional contemporary pornography, before one even broaches the context for these scenes, the actors’ performance, the film’s potential aesthetic value, its market position, and the locations of dissemination and consumption.

Dark Tone/Intellectual Themes or Dialogue/Self-Reflexivity The second major claim scholars make for the novelty of explicit arthouse films is their dark, pessimistic tone, intellectual themes or dialogue, or self-reflexivity. The recent “new wave of French, German, Italian, Asian, and British films has defied the soft focus erotic prettiness of Hollywood’s sexual interludes,” according to Williams. These productions “innovate by choosing to focus on sex that is aggressive, loveless, or alienated in precise opposition to both the cloying romance of the dominant Hollywood model or the wall-to-wall ecstasy of hard-core pornography.”25 Krzywinska makes a similar point, writing that, in general, “sexual themes in art cinema often carry intellectual and/or psychological dimensions to differentiate them from other forms of sex-based cinema,” such as commercial erotic thrillers or hardcore pornography, and notes that many explicit art films, from Last Tango in Paris to Romance, end with the couple ultimately dissatisfied or the male partner’s death. She concludes that the realist productions “are deeply pessimistic about the possibility of achieving a reciprocal rich and lasting sexual relationship,” and function

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ultimately as social commentary. Like Williams, Krzywinska cites historical precedents to illustrate how dark, intellectual dimensions and “philosophical work” have served to distinguish these films as art, attract audiences, and prevent censorship.26 Indeed, individual readings of recent hardcore art films conventionally partake of this aesthetic embrace: they stress the pessimistic representations of intimacy (and humanity in general) and often claim that the projects thereby seek to problematize or subvert social norms about sexuality or identity. In this context, the scholarly commentary on Catherine Breillat is exemplary. Fat Girl “offers a much darker view of teenage sexuality and the loss of virginity than that found in any mainstream film,” Tanya Horeck writes, operating in the rhetorical mode of distinction.27 Adrienne Angelo’s claims about the director are remarkably similar: “While the often non-simulated performance of sex in her films is evocative of the pornographic genre, the existential discourse which frames or narrates these scenes—particularly with regard to woman’s troubled identity— serves, paradoxically, to de-eroticize the sexual spectacle.”28 Angelo’s logic, which makes conclusions about spectatorship based on the identification of intellectual themes, prevails in academic writings: that is, despite their graphic content and heavy focus on sex, the films’ textual workings foreclose audience arousal.29 A variation on this argument highlights self-reflexive potential. Enumerating Shortbus’s intertextual references to In the Realm of the Senses and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novella Venus in Furs and noting its themes of sexual selfdiscovery, Beth Johnson sees an “emergence of a cinematic culture in which hard-core sex acts are performed in order to progress sensory engagement with highbrow stories.” Because of these elements—and despite the narrative’s conventional focus on climax—“Sofia’s orgasmic achievement in the end of the film is represented” via an aesthetic that, “while climactic, is anything but affectively arousing.”30 Using sex addict Erika Kohut’s porn shop visits as an example, Krzywinska similarly argues that The Piano Teacher acknowledges “the place hard-core has in contemporary culture” and addresses “very directly the place of sexual imagery thematically, and alongside Intimacy borrows and reframes formal elements from hard-core.” In general, Krzywinska argues, recent hardcore art films “treat these conventions in self-reflexive ways” in order “to raise questions about the status of fantasy, spectacle and the real.”31 To wit, if we believe Tim Palmer, these productions are not fundamentally about sex at all: “At heart, these films use sex to emblematize the power struggles that arise within patriarchal societies.”32 Such a rhetorical strategy allows scholars to understand (and redeem) the graphic and predatory sexual violence in films such as Irreversible (2002) and Baise-moi.33 These projects, despite their apparently salacious quality, have a higher purpose, according to Krzywinska: “In combining [the aesthetic of hardcore pornography] with rawer and more disturbing images, such as rape, the viewer’s experience that

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what they are watching should be taken as real, at least within the frame of representation, is consolidated. A key motive behind the use of realism, either in terms of a documentary-style aesthetic or psychological realism, is to show that sex is a physical and problematic business.”34 Scholars who partake of the aesthetic embrace (and lay audiences who, empirical studies have shown, often maintain a similar stance)35 have a clear agenda: to assert distinctions and endorse the potentially exploitative works as artistically or culturally valuable.

Philosophical and Cultural Problems of Screening “Real” Sex Krzywinska’s and Johnson’s statements reveal how commentators emphasize self-reflexivity by gesturing to “genre subversion”: the blurring of the putative boundaries between high and low, art cinema and hardcore pornography. Although scholars note the length and number of sex scenes, the liberal portrayals of nudity, and other aesthetic factors, much if not most academic discussion has to do with issues that in fact pertain to production history: the implication of “real” sex, that is, the depiction of actual (rather than simulated) sexual penetration between actors. For these commentators, real sex in art cinema presents above all a philosophical problem. Specifically, the conundrum behind sexual representation in a subset of recent films (e.g., Intimacy, Lies, Romance, Ken Park, 9 Songs, Shortbus) derives from a perceived violation of generic rules. Despite the longstanding association of art films with taboo topics and frank eroticism, one dictate has obtained: legitimate cinema features elliptical, implied, or simulated sex. Pornography, in contrast, offers the actual performance of sex and its graphic depiction, according to a scientia sexualis imperative, or what Williams calls “maximum visibility.”36 This aesthetic custom has had very material consequences, for instance in the realm of regulation. For a long time in many countries, classification bodies used the depiction of sex as a decisive criterion in determining if the film could be exhibited (with or without cuts), where it might be projected (arthouse cinemas or multiplexes, rather than adult cinemas), and whether or where it was allowed to be rented or purchased (rental outlets, rather than sex shops or the internet). These guidelines have real economic consequences, which have only served to reinforce the generic formulas and distinctions between legitimate erotic expressions and pornography. Such issues motivate and dominate scholarly reckonings. For these commentators, the break with tradition represents the key novelty and essential characteristic of the new trend. According to Williams, the presence of real sex in recent art films unhinges the long-stable boundaries that almost without exception ruled in cinema history. Representations of sex were “bifurcated into two radically different forms: hard core (explicit, unsimulated) and soft core (simulated, faked).”37 In turn, Lewis argues that the new presence of real

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sex in art cinema indicates that “there is a seriousness of purpose and kind of aesthetic purity to which these films aspire, a gesture towards a new cinematic realism made by filmmakers and actors who are willing to show and do anything for their art.”38 Krzywinska’s view in many ways synthesizes the notions of realism, self-reflexivity, and artistic transgression that Williams and Lewis anticipate. Recent hardcore art films “invoke the immersive sensationalism of hard-core; but, unlike hard-core, these films frame ‘real sex’ in terms of issues such as identity politics, power and the blurred relationships between fantasy and reality, the ideal and the actual.” Krzywinska continues: “Rather than buying into overly simplified distinctions between authenticity and performance (a distinction marked visibly in hardcore), it is the awkward slippage between the two that provides art films with their major thematic and philosophical focus.”39 When art films depict vaginal penetration, fellatio, or ejaculation, the aesthetic embracer claims, they blur distinctions of high and low and irrevocably change our experience of film. According to these commentators, such philosophical-generic dilemmas precipitate a heightened audience reflection. Since legitimate cinema has historically indulged certain sex acts (kissing) but elided others (oral sex, vaginal penetration), watching unsimulated sex in legitimate cinema supposedly produces a boundary-breaking, defamiliarizing effect. “Explicit sexuality has the strangest power to turn a narrative film into a documentary,” Lewis quotes critic Roger Ebert’s response to viewing Devil in the Flesh and its depiction of fellatio. “The moment the characters take off their clothes and get down to business, we aren’t looking at characters anymore, we’re looking at naked actors.” Their physiological nature and novelty in non-pornographic cinema make such acts seem special, out of the ordinary, instinctive, spontaneous, or “real,” rather than performed, acted, or staged. For Lewis, the goal of sexual depictions in arthouse films such as Intimacy “is not to recreate a moment in the life of two fictional characters, but for the actors to capture and for the viewer to witness some sort of real intimacy that happens when the actors are asked to do more than just simulate some real physical act.”40 This remark, a reminder of cinema’s distinctive recording function, is typical of the aesthetic embrace. “When characters have ‘real sex’ on screen,” Tanya Krzywinska observes, “spectators are to some extent taken out of the frame of fictional representation, focus shifting perhaps from character to actor.”41 The recent hardcore art films, observers stress time and again, transgress longstanding conventions that have become self-evident over time. These border-crossings have to do with representational strategies (e.g., 9 Songs’ choreography of real sex scenes, one of which ends with a “money shot” ejaculation) but also casting. In Catherine Breillat’s Romance, the Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi has a key role and performs unsimulated sex; Baise-moi also features several actors with porn backgrounds engaging in sex. To wit, in Romance, it is both Siffredi and his character who have an erection; in 9 Songs, “Matt” and

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actor Kieran O’Brien physically ejaculate semen; in The Brown Bunny (2003), “Daisy” caresses an erect penis in her mouth and simultaneously the scene documents the actress Chloë Sevigny giving her then boyfriend Vincent Gallo a blow job. The highly stylized and choreographed field of commercial fiction filmmaking affords us a behind-the-scenes glimpse.

The Real as Discourse Using formal analysis—as Williams, Lewis, Krzywinska, and I have done—it is not difficult to differentiate extreme films from conventional pornography. To my mind, pursuing this “distinction” line further misses the point. Nevertheless, the real-sex dilemma clearly inspires considerable curiosity and controversy. We need to take seriously the Wikipedia page that users have assembled on “Films with Non-Simulated Sexual Activity,” the IMDB forums on “Sexually Explicit Films (Unsimulated and Simulated)” and “The Most Sexually Explicit Movies,” and the hundreds of other blogs, online lists, photo galleries, and news items that purport to direct readers to “Non-Porn Movies Featuring Real Sex” or “List of Unsimulated Sex Movies.”42 Empirical studies show that audiences care about whether something is real or staged.43 If the issue of the real in extreme cinema is not merely an academic question, should it be a question that academics seek to address? That is to say: How should we best investigate this matter? Until now the standard method has foregrounded the real as artistic innovation and generic transgression; the aesthetic embracers pursue this argument. But surely, one might ask, how can these films all be new if so many operate along similar lines? Is there a way to make sense of these productions that transcends formal proofs of distinction? I contend that we can most profitably examine the role of the real in extreme cinema via filmmakers’ and distributors’ rhetorical assertions and investigate how precisely they stoke curiosity and court controversy, promises that the films themselves may or may not keep. Examining sexually explicit extreme cinema’s discourse furthermore provides insights into ethical dimensions of production and their publicity value in the films’ reception. For the partners of the actors who performed sexual acts in these films, uncomfortable questions arose about boundaries and infidelities. Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo, 2005) actress Anapola Mushkadiz opined that the fellatio and other sex scenes “were more difficult for [co-star and nonprofessional actor Marcos] Hernandez than for her, probably because he’s married.”44 9 Songs star Kieran O’Brien refused to comment on the impact the real sex had on his family and personal relationships, when a journalist asked him about it.45 In a lengthy column for The Guardian Alexander Linklater described the jealousy he experienced when his partner Kerry Fox took the real-sex role in Intimacy.46 In many cases we have examined, from Nymphomaniac to Blue Is the Warmest Color, such questions structure

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interviews with and press coverage of extreme cinema’s directors and actors: headline-grabbing quotations vie for attention upon the film’s release. A discursive approach also helps us understand how the knowledge of actors’ (preexisting or potential) off-screen relationships affects the responses to explicit sex scenes. In the critical and popular reception, celebrity couples become a key point of interest. Often, their presence contributes tactically to filmmakers’ aesthetic aspirations. Written by, directed by, and starring Vincent Gallo, The Brown Bunny concludes with a scene in which Daisy (Sevigny) performs fellatio on Bud (Gallo) for over 3 minutes. Shot in a realist style and mainly in close-up, it contains sparse and barely comprehensible dialogue, audible ambient sounds, and no music. In interviews, Gallo and Sevigny used the rhetoric of artistic virtuosity and realism to explain the sequence, which critics vigorously contested upon the film’s premiere at Cannes and subsequent general release.47 Sevigny, for example, reported that she was initially “hesitant” to perform fellatio on camera, but “eventually concluded that the scene was integral to the movie” and its realism.48 According to Gallo, the “graphic images are used to enhance those sequences” about “complex issues surrounding intimacy,” such as “responsibility, insecurity, resentment, hate, greed, mourning.” Gallo presented himself as the consummate artist who bared his soul (and naked body) for the honesty of art and realism: “Everything that I do is for personal sacrifice. . . . Do you think it’s fun to show your c[ock] in a film for ten billion to scrutinize for eternity? . . . I pushed [the privacy that I value] aside to achieve the goals that I had in this movie.” Gallo continued: “it’s clear that my intentions were to create disturbing effects around intimacies— both metaphysical and personal intimacies with this character’s life.”49 Perhaps more so than evaluating the film’s artistic merits, interviews and reviews above all scrutinized the sex scene, Gallo and Sevigny’s relationship, and the professional risk that Sevigny had taken. Michaël Cohen’s It Begins with the End (Ça commence par la fin, 2010), a typical amour fou story starring real-life husband and wife Cohen and Emmanuelle Béart, further characterizes this trend. Narrated in reverse chronology, the film records the tempestuous relationship between Gabrielle (Béart) and Jean (Cohen). Beside a parade of canoodles and passionate embraces in low-lit Parisian back alleys and bedrooms, a 5-minute lovemaking scene between Cohen and Béart that comes 20 minutes into the proceedings created the most furor. It includes a nearly 3-minute-long take of slow, missionary position thrusting that may or—as was hinted at in press reports—may not be simulated. A press core that had almost uniformly not seen the picture turned its non-appearance at Cannes into an opportunity for a “scandal film” mode of reportage.50 Clearly, a large part of the real sex/real couples phenomenon has to do with extratextual discourse that surrounds celebrities. Since the early days of cinema a fan-magazine subculture has existed, based on a longstanding desire to know

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what filmmakers do in their private lives. Already in 1915, for example, Photoplay magazine published a series of articles entitled “Who’s Married to Who in the Movies?,” which promised to reveal information about famous actors who were married to each other.51 In this way, the cases of The Brown Bunny and It Begins with the End share affinities with journalists’ and fans’ ways of writing and speaking about the performances of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963), Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), or Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005). Because of the explicit nature of the Gallo and Cohen films and the fact that the stars also wrote, produced, and directed their works, however, the idea arose that the audience not only experienced an insight into the Béart-Cohen household or could observe two actors who fancy each other. Viewers were watching a home sex tape. In most (even and especially “real-sex”) arthouse films, lovemaking scenes are carefully planned and blocked; the following chapter demonstrates how painstakingly filmmakers emphasize the acts’ staged nature. But, in the case of The Brown Bunny or It Begins with the End, where the male lead was also the director, the suspicion arose that each choreographed the action based on his own private sex life, which he supposedly reenacts with his lover on screen. The backgrounds of the two actresses in question only served to heighten the titillation. Béart’s breakthrough came as a model and actress in David Hamilton’s soft-focus softcore effort First Desires (Premiers désirs, 1984). Commentators have regularly derided Hamilton’s photography and films of young women and girls as exploitative, indecent, and potentially pedophilic; in Britain, at least two men were convicted of possessing child pornography for having Hamilton’s photo books.52 Béart’s subsequent roles—for example, as a nude model in La belle noiseuse (1991) and as a prostitute and pole-dancing stripper in Nathalie . . . (2003)—have solidified her reputation for erotic fare.53 Similarly, Sevigny’s discovery in Kids (1995), which prompted outcry over the supposed sexual exploitation of its young actors,54 preceded a string of arthouse and independent performances containing explicit scenes: for example, Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000).55 In the case of The Brown Bunny, critics commented that the actress’s participation would forfeit her credibility and ruin her career. Her representation, William Morris Agency, supposedly dropped the actress as a client because the fellatio scene was “one step above pornography.”56 There is empirical evidence to suggest that some audiences who are aware of “real-couple” discourses encounter these films with heightened awareness, expectation, and interest. In Martin Barker’s study, one viewer described the personal motivation for attending the graphically (sexually) violent Irreversible, in which the married actors Vincent Cassell and Monica Bellucci played the central romantic couple: “I went to see it as it was a French film and I like both Vincent Cassell and Monica Bellucci. The fact that they were a real-life couple at the time

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FIG. 19 Vincent Gallo and Chloë Sevigny at the Cannes premiere of The Brown Bunny in 2004. Their off-the-set relationship encouraged and affected responses to the “real sex” scenes in the film. ©David Heerde/REX Shutterstock. Reproduced by permission.

playing a couple added to my interest.”57 Summing up the survey participants’ response to Irreversible, Barker noted that the knowledge of the lead actors’ offscreen relationship had a marked effect on reception: “to watch, in the ‘later’ parts of the film, scenes of real/fictional sexual intimacy between the knownto-be-married couple, for many, redoubled the arousal and emotional tensions around seeing [Bellucci’s] perfection violated” in the infamous rape scene.58 Such expectations and reactions require a willingness to look beyond the screen to examine press and marketing discourses. Aesthetic embracers consider sexually explicit extreme cinema to be innovative and genre-bending, despite

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its precedents and familiar narratives. Graphic and unsimulated art-cinema sex has elicited anxious critical assessments and much academic discourse, even if, when considered logically, the presence of real sex in legitimate cinema should disturb us as little as the existence of “real eating” on screen. These facts point toward a number of conclusions. First, film’s recording function continues to fascinate audiences and preoccupy scholars. Sex scenes between any persons in whatever manner can be described at any length in novels, poems, or biographies, where the notion of “real” sex is meaningless. In contrast, such sequences must be, according to The Reality Effect author Joel Black, “enacted in the literal, visible world recorded on film; they must actually take place so that they can be seen.”59 In cinema a real body stands in for a fictional one; there is, to quote Jean-Louis Comolli’s seminal essay on the subject, a “body too much.”60 Second, the recording function also codetermines genre divisions and taste distinctions. Both the disturbing and innovative qualities that aesthetic embracers see in these films revolve around violations of long-established traditions and of borderlines between allegedly high and low modes of filmmaking. In part, censorship and classification boards enforce these codes, but by and large the artistic and economic motives of filmmakers and the industry self-regulate. Finally, this chapter has tested the limits of what one can understand by attending to the real, in specific, and issues of film-textual aesthetics, in general. Previous scholarly approaches create a methodological quandary. If hardcore means porn actors performing real sex and softcore erotica entails movie actors simulating sex, policing these distinctions entails scholars, critics, and consumers speculating about production history and slippery questions of visible evidence. Indeed, as Linda Ruth Williams contends, “perhaps the only tenable way of distinguishing ‘soft’ from ‘hard’ is by reference to the ‘reality’ of the filmmaking situation: were they really doing it or not? Does the film drive to show us the intimate details of this reality, or does it want to arouse without explicit disclosure? In mainstream cinema this distinction is also complicated by the suggestiveness of ‘leaks’ in the PR campaigns of mainstream films that the actors were indeed ‘really doing it.’”61 Given the manifold interests at stake, a more productive means of engagement must look beyond purely textual methods that draw conclusions based on subjects, themes, representational forms, and speculations about potential effects on viewers. The focus on unsimulated sex fails to take account of the greater trend toward explicit sexual representations; it places commentators in the awkward fan (and censor’s) positions of timing erections on stopwatches and asking the did-they-or-didn’t-they question. With few exceptions, notably Lewis’s rich and important work, scholars have merely hinted at the economic but also artistic-cultural factors that might encourage these films’ production and circulation. The following chapter embarks on this task.

9 A Discursive Approach to Hardcore Art Cinema

Recent arthouse sex films make use of a circumscribed set of narrative conventions. Despite these regularized patterns, scholars celebrate their supposedly innovative form, style, tone, and self-reflexivity; the unsimulated sex featured in a number of these productions allegedly subverts arthouse expectations and destabilizes traditional boundaries between pornography and so-called legitimate filmmaking. But precisely how, beyond the textual workings of these films, are these distinctions eroded? Is the presence of “real sex” the only important factor in this process? I submit that the issues surrounding the arthouse production trend for explicit sex are more complex than many scholars portray them. This book has argued that the transgressive rhetoric of art film culture has set the reading protocols of extreme cinema. Commercial cues and stakeholders’ ways of communicating have affected our expectations and understandings of the trend. This chapter will demonstrate how, to whatever extent the hardcore art films’ stylistic and narrative forms engage with but ultimately defy the conventions of pornography, and to whatever extent filmmakers stress aesthetic value and seriousness of purpose in their rhetoric, marketing attenuates and undermines these factors. By investigating, in turn, filmmakers’ statements and advertising discourses, a basic tension 178

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comes into relief. On the one hand, filmmakers attempt in interviews and other public appearances to distance their films from pornography and emphasize realism, authenticity, and artistic freedom. On the other, distributors, exhibitors, critics, and other commentators highlight salacious material and indeed—in the case of posters, trailers, DVD cases, or advertisements— attempt to titillate.

Artistic Intentions: Distinction, Authenticity, and Virtuosity Amidst the controversy surrounding hardcore art films, filmmakers have often sought to justify their frank depictions of sex acts in interviews and other public forums. Their comments almost always revolve around the following themes: distinguishing the works from pornography, associating the depictions with artistic virtuosity, and affirming a commitment to realism and authenticity.

Creating Distinction from Pornography Perhaps the most prevalent way of speaking about these films rehearses a familiar distinction discourse: according to many hardcore art filmmakers, their works have little, or nothing at all, to do with pornography. In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about 9 Songs (2004), Michael Winterbottom addressed the matter unequivocally: Well, when we started making the film, everyone said that in England we wouldn’t be able to show it at all in cinemas. You know, that it would be deemed pornography. . . . It isn’t pornography, the truth is, you know, this was an attempt to show two people in a relationship, to show two people making love. It was not an attempt to excite the audience, or arouse the audience. You know, if you watch a porn movie, you watch a bunch of porn movies, and then watch 9 Songs—however you define pornography, 9 Songs just doesn’t look like the porn movies, doesn’t sound like them. It just doesn’t have the same effect as them. It’s just a completely different thing. That’s not to say it’s better than pornography, or worse, it’s just different.1

Here Winterbottom distinguishes his work with an aesthetic contrast (it neither looks nor sounds like smut), assumptions about audience reactions (it will neither arouse nor excite, does not have pornographic effects), and a common-sense appeal to objectivity (“however you define pornography” and the repeated use of just). Furthermore, he attempts to clarify higher intentions with euphemism: a film that devotes 40 percent of its running time to graphic sex is “an attempt to show two people in a relationship, to show two people making love.”

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Another common rhetorical tactic dismisses comparisons with base eroticism by providing insights into the production history. Discussing his film Intimacy (2001), Patrice Chéreau claimed that the awareness of “two actors doing their jobs” was what made the film “much different than pornography.” According to the director, the complexity of the labor and the seriousness of the personnel qualified the outcome as art: “It was difficult to do and the actors needed quiet and respect. But no one was aroused. As I said before, it was fascinating without being ‘exciting.’”2 By offering conclusions about what happened on set and revealing how the cast and crew felt, Chéreau provides privileged information that critics cannot access, know, or dispute. It is also important to note here how he, in familiar ways, distinguishes between the “fascinating” and the “exciting,” a shibboleth that abounds among filmmaker statements, whether between the obscene and pornographic, the graphic and pornographic, or other idioms.3 Moreover, when asked about whether he gave “much thought to how to represent sexuality on screen,” Chéreau emphasized the extensive work and planning that he and his collaborators devoted to the sex scenes: “Everything that happens in these scenes is in the script— in terms of blocking and gestures. We rehearsed these scenes in their entirety before shooting. While we had to get used to the presence of two totally naked actors, there was nothing embarrassing about it. The only rule was that, although we didn’t want to show anything in particular, we also didn’t want to hide anything.”4 The emphasis on labor and preparations, especially common tropes in filmmakers’ arguments, aims to distinguish their productions from pornography. In interview, 9 Songs lead actress Margo Stilley underlined the fact that (acting partner) Kieran O’Brien was not her boyfriend, that they had no contact or friendship off the set, that her character Lisa has a personality much different from her own, and that during the shoot she stayed in her role both in front of the camera and at home.5 For his part, O’Brien highlighted the staged nature of the sex scenes. Winterbottom “really mapped out everything,” O’Brien reported. “The order he wanted me to take off my clothes, her clothes, whether my socks stayed on or not. He had specific ideas of how he wanted our bodies to move. Sometimes, he would start us and then stop and say, ‘Let’s try this from a slightly different angle,’ and then take fifteen minutes to reset the shot.”6 All of these claims militate against perceptions that the film is simply a recording of reality, a documentary of instinctive passions. When the sex scenes in Blue Is the Warmest Color (La vie d’Adèle, 2013) were compared to pornography by the woman who wrote the source text, lead actress Léa Seydoux elaborated with “irritation” how the scenes were staged in many respects, including silicone “modesty patches” made from casts of the actresses’ bodies: “I wouldn’t do things for real. Like, uh, love for real, going to the toilet for

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real, or smoke for real,” Seydoux emphasized. Director Abdellatif Kechiche asked her “to smoke real cigarettes, and I said no. There are very good ones you can buy that are fake but look real. I quit three years ago.”7 John Cameron Mitchell, director of Shortbus (2006), has made similar statements. He underscored how his film resulted from three years of rehearsals. Painstakingly recruiting a group of lay performers via an internet call for interest (“The Sex Film Project”), he led workshops and improvisation sessions in order to develop the characters and build “the community.”8 In addition, he called the comparisons with pornography wrong, albeit admitting they were inevitable. His response resonates with the usual distinction rhetoric. Although others are unable to make the distinction between pornography and sexually explicit art, Mitchell implies, he can: Even my most enlightened friends are like, ‘How’s the porno film coming?’ because they can’t separate arousal from sex on film, even though novelists and all kinds of other artists have certainly used explicit sex in their examination of life. It kind of makes me wonder if it would be more interesting to de-eroticize the sex and see what was left over, because so many films get so hot and bothered rather than examine and go in-depth.9

The Shortbus director stressed that he placed the camera at a distance, so as to allow for a more intimate atmosphere and to prevent his performers from feeling exploited. In the documentary chronicling the making of the film, potential cast member Lindsay Beamish asks Mitchell whether Shortbus will be “using the, like, I don’t know how to put it, like, filmic tropes, or whatever, of pornography? Like, is there a close-up of, like, my pussy?” Mitchell responds by delineating his project in the clearest terms: “No. Pornography is something that there is no connection to in this film. The way it’s shot, the purpose of it, the receiving it, it’s just not anything to do with what we’re doing.”10 Distinguishing between pornography and her aesthetic project, Catherine Breillat has posited that the dividing line involves context and continuity. “Porn films remove sex from human dignity,” Breillat explained, but if “you reintegrate sex in human dignity, than you can film sexual scenes. . . . Instead of saying that this act is taboo and therefore ugly, I’d rather say that it’s taboo but it has to be shown in its entirety.”11 For Breillat, then, responsible, moral, and dignified erotic representation must include more explicit sex, but also more graphic emotions. “Pornography is the sexual act taken totally out of context, and made into a product for consumption, by using the most debased feelings or emotions of people, when in fact in daily life sexual acts are surrounded by emotions, consideration for the partner, pleasure and so on, which do not come within the pornographic depiction.” In a typical

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manner among hardcore art filmmakers, Breillat asserts that her particular emphases and style produce a more sophisticated and nuanced engagement with erotic representation, basing her conclusions on speculations about audience effects. Her graphic films acknowledge the emotions surrounding sex and thus transcend the prurient: “In Romance [1999] the images portray an idea and the characters experience emotion. The viewer intuits the emotion through the images he is watching. That is the difference between it and pornography.” Indeed, according to Breillat, the sexual themes and depictions, despite their insistent presence and explicit nature, are secondary in importance to the emotional context for the sex: “My first interest was the sentimental, romance story, then the sexual exploration. On a day-to-day basis, it was like going down to hell, seeing how far I could go. . . . The relationship between Marie and Paul—this passion—is in fact degradation, and the sexual journey is in fact a revelation, a transcendence.”12 Whereas Breillat and most other filmmakers assert visionary criteria, propose their own textual analysis, or relay private details of the production history, some—such as Bertrand Bonello, after the BBFC cut a sequence of The Pornographer (Le pornographe, 2001) for being “pornographic”—justify their distinctions with external sources of validation, such as critics’ evaluations, festival participation, and awards.13 A few directors further highlight artistic value by denying affinities with other extreme films. Chéreau, for example, militates against comparisons with “French porno-chic.” Maintaining that there are “no” similarities between his film and Romance or Baise-moi (2000), he told an interviewer: “Please don’t ask me what I think of Catherine Breillat and Romance. As you know, almost no one in France has seen Baise-Moi. I haven’t seen it. . . . I really hope there is no relationship between Intimacy and these films.” Revealing that he was “a little sad about some of the reviews that only concentrated on the sex,” Chéreau submitted that unlike Last Tango in Paris (Ultimo tango a Parigi, 1972), Intimacy deals “with the wider world in a way that Bertolucci doesn’t.”14 In a similar vein, Mitchell positioned his film as distinct from hardcore porn, American “cultural prudery,” but also from extreme cinema: “Certainly European films lately have used real sex and done it very effectively. I think Fat Girl [À ma soeur!, 2001] is amazing. But many of them fall in that other trap, where they’re so running away from Hollywood and porn that it ends up that the sex is bleak and humorless . . . ends in some kind of mutilation, usually.” Objecting to the “European” association of sex with displeasure, Mitchell claimed that he aimed to recast “real sex” in a positive way. For the American, “It feels almost like a cliché today now—9 Songs, Romance, [The] Brown Bunny [2003], all of these things in this really despairing mode that feels to me like it doesn’t respect the full range of stuff attached to sex either. Porn was one slice, and those were another grim slice.”15

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Deconstructing Pornography In a variation on these themes, some hardcore art filmmakers argue that they seek to blur or deconstruct the distinction between art and exploitation or that they seek to understand the nature or allure of pornography via artistic means. Explaining the origins of his film Spring Breakers (2012), Harmony Korine noted that he began by collecting “Spring Break imagery from various sites—co-ed pornography sites to frat party sites, Wild Cancun reality sites,” and that, “looking at them all together I was intrigued by . . . how sexualised and violent the imagery was but also by all these child-like pop-culture indicators, the fluorescent bathing suits and Hello Kitty bags. It was like a coded language or a separate vernacular.” According to Korine, the film’s story and aesthetic derived from the bifurcated moral values intrinsic to the material: “Again, it goes back to . . . those Spring Break pictures. . . . There was a seductive side to it and there was a nasty side. There was the pop side that seemed like candy and gloss and there was this sinister energy. . . . There was a duality, or a sexual and moral ambiguity. . . . That was the goal.”16 Lukas Moodysson, the director of A Hole in My Heart (Ett hål i mitt hjärta, 2004), claimed he was unconcerned that viewers used his film about amateur pornographers for arousal, citing a story of a couple that allegedly had had sex during a screening in Sweden. “I decided not to care if it became exploitative. . . . I wanted to talk about the sexualisation of public spaces, like commercials, and the way that porn seeps into everybody’s living room.” Even though he “didn’t want to be part of ” pornography itself, “after a while I realised I couldn’t draw that line.” As a result, “the film becomes part of what it’s talking about,” a self-reflection on the problems and pleasures of pornography, “a symptom, not a diagnosis.”17 Whereas Korine emphasizes his lengthy research and describes Spring Breakers as a longstanding project that consciously explores the boundaries of sexual art and exploitation, Moodysson relinquishes interpretive authority over the reception of his work, ultimately throwing up his hands to conclude that the distinction is impossible to make. According to the latter, critics have no right to take filmmakers to task over popular understandings of a phenomenon that has infiltrated a susceptible mass audience’s hearts and minds. In the vein of Korine, Vincent Gallo asserted that The Brown Bunny appropriates but ultimately subverts pornographic imagery and choreography, in a way that projects both classical dramaturgy and serious drama: I’m using traditional iconic images. Pornography is the ability for somebody to have enhanced sexual pleasure or sexual fantasy free from responsibility, guilt, insecurity, consequence, etc. etc. What I’ve done is taken those icons of pornography and juxtaposed them against responsibility, insecurity, resentment, hate, greed, mourning—together. There’s no way to separate them in my film. There’s no way to look at that scene and be titillated or sexually aroused.18

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Typical of this regard, Gallo cited the pervasive sexualization and so-called pornification of popular culture, in this case as the justification for the infamous billboard (featuring a coy still from the fellatio scene) he designed for view on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. “Look at advertisements now. Look at CK, look at Gucci, I mean, please! People like porn and eroticism,” he claimed, adding that his appropriations were nonetheless incapable of titillating. “Do you think if you were a porn connoisseur that billboard would have turned you on? . . . I wanted to use provocative images that were beautiful, dramatic, aesthetic, clearly outside of mainstream eroticism.”19 Here Gallo makes absolute claims on his audience (there is no possibility his film could arouse), emphasizes his subversive sexual representation, and yet rationalizes— with a hint of Moodysson’s self-absolution—his flirtations with pornography as necessary symptoms of contemporary filmmaking: he must serve a public that “like[s] porn and eroticism.” Perhaps most radically, Jang Sun-Woo, director of Lies (Gojitmal, 1999), pitched his project as a transgressive blurring or even abolition of conventional boundaries and hierarchies. According to Jang’s “Director’s Statement,” the film “is about a kind of life, a kind of sadness, the overthrowing of values [ . . . ] I’ve said before that I seek to rid the distinctions between good and evil, between beauty and ugliness.”20 At the same time, echoing Georges Bataille, who argued that eroticism is transgressive because it can defy the basic economic imperatives of production, reproduction, and consumption,21 Jang claimed that he envisioned Lies as “a dream of living, eating and fucking without having to work. Social orthodoxy prescribes that everyone should work hard and live a decent life—especially now that the Korean economy is under the control of the IMF.” By depicting “the lives of the characters in graffiti-like terms,” Jang wished “to make the distinction between pornography and enlightenment disappear. The same goes for the distinction between the spectator’s senses of empathy and isolation. I wanted the notions of good and evil to lose all meaning, but still have a film rich in a kind of pathos.” Ultimately, the intense sexuality, bondage, and sadomasochism aimed to disable moral discrimination: “I hope one can get past the desire to make such distinctions,” Jang stated. “What are we judging anyway? Let’s throw away the impulse to pass judgement. Let’s just play. After all, it’s all a game.”22 Jang’s comments—like those of other contrarians such as Breillat and Moodyssoon—resound with an anarchic rhetorical tradition that includes Oshima Nagisa. In defending In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korīda, 1976) from both critical and legal charges of obscenity in his “Theory of Experimental Pornographic Film,” Oshima maintained that, because of its prohibition in Japan, the film’s “existence is pornographic—regardless of its content.”23 Indeed, the director argued polemically, his film was pornography,

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albeit a radical form that interrogated and ultimately undermined the unstable culturally inscribed and morally determined definitions of obscenity: The concept of “obscenity” is tested when one dares to look at something that he has an unbearable desire to see, but has forbidden himself to look at. When one feels that everything that one had wanted to see has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears, the taboo disappears as well, and there is a certain liberation. . . . If that is the case, then the benefits of pornography are clear. Pornographic cinema should be authorized, immediately and completely. Only thus can “obscenity” be rendered essentially meaningless.24

Associating the Real with Artistic Virtuosity, Referencing Past Masters Much filmmaker rhetoric is essentially negative: their work is not obscene or prurient, it is no pornography. In this way they defend their artistic intentions against critics, claiming aesthetic value via a proclaimed distance from, or creative appropriation of, a bad object. Some, albeit fewer, rationales build a positive case. Such filmmakers associate extreme sexual depictions with artistic virtuosity. One method references canonical directors in order to establish authority and share in past masters’ cultural profits. Like critics, filmmakers contextualize their projects in cinema history, using antecedent masterworks to prompt an artistic reception by association. Gaspar Noé, director of I Stand Alone (Seul contre tous, 1998), evinces the simplest, and perhaps most effective, procedure: he has cited Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1976) as influences.25 When pressed on his titillating advertising for The Brown Bunny, Gallo positioned the film and his promotional work alongside extreme cinema precursors. “All the other pamphlets and formatting and imagery and text that I presented about the movie is highly intellectualized, highly conceptual, extremely discreet, and extremely conceptual in its aesthetics.” The billboard “was suggestive that the film was sophisticated in another way. . . . I wanted to show that the film was provocative, that it was in this tradition of adult cinema—Last Tango, Midnight Cowboy [1969], whatever.”26 Speaking about 9 Songs, Winterbottom referenced Oshima to explain and frame his artistic motivations: “the only film that was really a starting-point reference for the sex within [9 Songs] was Ai No Corrida,” which “tells the story through sex, but like a lot of films that deal with sex, it deals with sex in an extreme form—almost like a metaphor for power and society, and so on.”27 In another interview, Winterbottom elaborated: “When I was at university, the film club always showed In the Realm of the Senses at the start of a new year to get people to join. It was full of explicit sex, yet you can buy it in HMV now. That’s the benchmark.”28 Indeed, for a number of filmmakers, Oshima and especially his In the Realm of the Senses remain key reference points for

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their aesthetic ambitions. In Lies, Y alludes to Oshima’s film when she tells J that she would like to cut off his penis and keep it; in Shortbus, “pre-orgasmic” Sofia inserts a vibrating egg, labeled “In the Realm of the Senses,” into her vagina. Novo (2002) director Jean-Pierre Limosin produced four featurettes that appear on the Tartan DVD; three of these detail the Japanese influence of shunga, photography (especially Nobuyoshi Araki), and bondage techniques on the iconography of his film.29 Oshima became an apt measure of comparison not only for his status in the art-film canon and for the critical reception of In the Realm of the Senses.30 In addition, he was among the few filmmakers to make sustained and sophisticated pronouncements on the virtuosity of representing explicit sex on film. To be sure, other prominent filmmakers—from Stanley Kubrick and Quentin Tarantino to Gaspar Noé and Bruno Dumont—have also made such parallels.31 Above all, however, Oshima’s comments have served as a template for hardcore art filmmakers to justify their projects. “Film directors want to shoot the dying,” Oshima asserted in his theory of experimental pornography, and “they also want to shoot men and women . . . having sexual intercourse.” He reported that other colleagues also share this basic need to explicitly express extreme situations, especially death and sex; fellow filmmaker Shindo Kaneto “envied” the unbridled realism of In the Realm of the Senses. For Oshima, there is no point in making a sex film without unexpurgated representation: “I had resolved not to make that kind of film if there were no possibility of complete sexual expression. Sexual expression carried to its logical conclusion would result in the direct filming of sexual intercourse.”32

Commitment to Realism, Honesty, Truth, or Authenticity Finally, and following from Oshima’s comments, one of the most common stated motivations for the unsimulated or explicit representation of sex is a commitment to cinematic realism, honesty, truth, or authenticity. When asked whether he ever thought his graphic depictions of sex with young actors in Ken Park (2002) went “too far,” Larry Clark emphasized his background in the art world as evidence of his seriousness and referenced the words honest and honesty four times. Besides truth and authenticity (and the implication that extreme sexuality was in fact quotidian, a part of “real” life), Clark associated artistry with freedom (made possible by a more discriminating and circumscribed audience and a supposed lack of commercial influence) and with the transgression of mainstream norms. As an artist, you know, I don’t think in those terms. I come from the art world . . . so you make work and you show work and in the art world it’s fine. But this is different. When you’re making a film, you’re reaching such a bigger

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audience . . . and there’s all these rules. But as an artist I don’t think in terms of rules. I never think what you can’t do, you know. . . . I just do it. This is a film that has an emotional honesty and has a visual honesty. . . . [If you] turn the camera away or go to close up or shut the door, then you’re not being honest. And I wanted this film to be totally honest. . . . I’m truthfully not doing things to shock, I’m telling stories that I think need to be told . . . that you read about in the paper everyday.33

Catherine Breillat’s Romance abounds with erect and flaccid penises, unsimulated oral sex, penetration, and a documentary image of a live birth. In interview, Breillat emphasized how she wanted to create an honest portrait of a woman based on a “real feminine vision.” The sexual frankness went hand in hand with other formal articulations of aesthetic authenticity: for example, she “wanted to record the voice-over immediately after the scenes were shot and while the actress was still emotionally invested,” despite the protests of her sound engineer. According to Breillat, cinema “allows you to express all the nuances of a thing while including its opposites. . . . A truthful image of the world emerges from these contradictions and a film image allows you to achieve that.”34 Asked about realism in the context of an interview that highlighted Blue Is the Warmest Color’s “unrestrained images of bedroom activity,” director Abdellatif Kechiche responded that “I’d rather talk about a cinema of truth rather than of reality. I don’t want [my cinema] to resemble life. I want it to be life. I want there to be real moments of life in my films.”35 In turn, when the New York Post probed Anapola Mushkadiz, the nineteen-year-old first-time actress and star of Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo, 2005), about why she would provide oral sex on-screen to a “fat, middle-aged man she didn’t know” (Marcos Hernandez), she replied that she advocated truthful sexual representation, a mode currently missing from contemporary cinema: “Nowadays, sex and nudity are a big taboo. . . . [Y]ou watch a Sony program and there’s sex everywhere, but it’s a very plastic sex that doesn’t go with the way I think about nudity and sex. I knew that [the director, Carlos Reygados] was going to do something very different with the bodies and with the sex, something deeper than two people just having sex.”36 Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (Idioterne, 1998) offers a short scene of unsimulated penetration ostensibly in the pursuit of Dogma 95’s authenticity and realism project. In the “Vow of Chastity,” let us remember, the “supreme goal is to force the truth out of . . . characters and settings.” The Dogma 95 Manifesto contrasts this emphasis with the illusionism of conventional cinema: “The ‘supreme’ task of the decadent film-makers is to fool the audience. Is that what we are so proud of ? Is that what the ‘100 years’ have brought us? Illusions via which emotions can be communicated? [. . .] By the individual artist’s free choice of trickery?”37 If recollections of the shoot

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are credible, von Trier encouraged a corporeal realism on set. According to these accounts, actor Nikolaj Lie Kaas ( Jeppe) suffered a bloody nose and Bodil Jørgensen had her eyebrow split open after being hit by an errant plate in the final sequence: “‘Dogma blood!’ shouted von Trier in the last instance, sticking the camera in her face. ‘She was already on her way to the emergency room,’ he would enthusiastically recall, ‘before I stopped her to get a picture in the can.’”38 In this context, unsimulated sex functions as another visceral indicator of cinematic “purity” and the realization of the Vow of Chastity’s ethical antiillusionism, analogous to the shaky hand-held video style, method acting, and lack of a director credit. Asked by The Guardian as to why he included a “real gang bang” in The Idiots, von Trier claimed that it was not to shock, but rather—like the scene where the actors playing mentally handicapped actually meet real people with Down syndrome—to challenge the limits of realism: “At first you think it’s a fault, they’re not allowed to do that in a film. You stop for a minute, and then maybe the movie becomes bigger because you cannot just relax and say I know exactly what this film will bring. It’s like,” von Trier concluded, “when you put animals or children on the screen, you know if they were funny they were funny in real life. It was nothing they were instructed to do. It’s exactly the same with the hard-on. It has to be a reality.”39 According to this logic, intercourse efficiently signifies realism and essentially parallels other gestures, for example, location shoots, detailed set furnishings, authentic costumes, dialect, ambient and diegetic sound, and observational or hand-held camerawork.40 A similar way of thinking informs Winterbottom’s statements on why he chose to have his actors actually perform, rather than simulate, sex. His statements revolve around notions of honesty and point out the double standard between the representation and performance of sex versus other bodily functions, such as eating or drinking: If you’re trying to make a film about a love story, surely part of being in love with someone is making love to them. And if you can’t show that at all within the film, you know, how can you sort of deal sort of seriously with a love story? So and obviously, I’ve made lots of stories about relationships before and avoided the sort of physical side of it, avoided the sex. And it just seemed like, “Well, why not this time go to the other extreme of it?” See if you could take with a very, very simple premise—two people, in bed, making love. If you filmed it closely enough, and honestly enough and in enough detail, maybe you could capture something of the atmosphere of a relationship.41

According to Winterbottom, he likes “making films as real as possible. The one exception is that in a love story, the sex can never be real. If you film actors

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eating a meal, the food is real; the audience know that. But when it comes to sex they know it’s pretend. You’d never do that with food and so I started thinking we should make sex real.”42 Elsewhere, the director elaborated: “That was one of the things about 9 Songs. We were after authenticity. It’s frustrating when you do a sex scene, and you have to fake it.”43 It is striking how the filmmakers’ statements echo the concerns of academics outlined in the previous chapter, and vice versa. The discourses respond to, and perpetuate, each other. The aesthetic embrace of hardcore art films partakes of the critical mode overall: it affirms and legitimates the artistic aspirations contained in filmmakers’ discourse. Winterbottom, von Trier, and Kechiche, for example, raise two issues of realism and cinematic representation that have long been debated by film theorists. The first revolves around the so-called double standard of realism: If film is ontologically a recording medium and, according to prominent and influential theorists such as André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, should communicate or reveal reality as one of its essential aims, why are some elements of real life (speaking, smoking, crying) performed, whereas others (violence, sex) are foreclosed or fabricated? Hardcore art filmmakers aspire to correct this film-cultural tradition; they purport to maximize the consistency of realism and blur what they see to be arbitrary divisions between legitimate and illegitimate representations.44 Second, hardcore art filmmakers’ comments on realism hark back to its traditional status as an artistic engagement with the transgressive. “Allied to the more formal concept of realism as verisimilitude is the notion of truth telling” and a “higher claim to truth and authenticity in representation,” Julia Hallam writes in her book on the subject. Tracing the aesthetic history of realism and artists’ written invocations of the mode, Hallam finds a “preference for dealing with the unpleasant and taboo aspects of life and society in order to ‘tell the whole truth’” and a conviction that popular art “need not be entertainment . . . but that it could be a penetrating enquiry into the way we live.” In this way we can better understand the stated intentions of the hardcore art filmmakers: they conform to the general rhetoric of transgression and the consolidation of an artistic identity. Drawing on the long artistic tradition of deploying realism to depict “taboo aspects of social and sexual behaviour,” Hallam submits, contemporary “fictional entertainment is granted artistic status through a stylistic revelation of taboo behaviours and psychological states that often tends to sensationalise ‘others’ and their lifestyles.”45 Hardcore art filmmakers’ ways of speaking—defying or subverting pornography, associating explicitness with artistic virtuosity, and committing to authenticity and realism—have a common aim: to justify their projects and validate their films as art works with serious aims and significant aesthetic value. This goal stands in direct conflict to how distributors market and advertise this material.

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Marketing Low Concept: Highlighting the Prurient and Controversial Before examining marketing strategies and advertising tactics in depth, I first need to outline the hardcore art films’ particular commercial position, which helps explain distributors’ behavior. Jon Lewis contends that explicit art films fail to achieve even modest box office expectations: they are little seen but much talked about.46 This is true,

Table 3

Explicit Sex Art Films since 1998 Title

The Idiots I Stand Alone Lies Pola X Romance Baise-moi The Center of the World Intimacy The Piano Teacher Sex and Lucía Secret Things The Brown Bunny The Dreamers Young Adam Anatomy of Hell A Hole in My Heart 9 Songs Battle in Heaven Shortbus Lust, Caution Serbis Antichrist Leap Year Shame Sleeping Beauty Blue Is the Warmest Color Young & Beautiful Nymphomaniac: Volume I Nymphomaniac: Volume II

Year

1998 1998 1999 1999 1999 2000 2001 2001 2001 2001 2002 2003 2003 2003 2004 2004 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2011 2013 2013 2014 2014

Country

US Box Office

UK Box Office

E/DK/S/F/N/I F KOR F/CH/D/J F F USA F/UK/D/E A/F/G E/F F USA/J/F UK/F/I UK/F F S/DK UK MEX/B/F/D/N USA USA/CHN/TWN PHL/F/KOR/HKG DK/D/F/S/I/PL MEX UK AUS F/B/E F DK/D/F/B/UK DK/D/F/B/UK

$12,237 $57,131 $62,339 $174,096 $1,314,053 $276,655 $1,095,548 $405,094 $1,900,282 $1,594,779 $105,090 $366,301 $2,532,228 $767,373 $34,506 $3,784 $66,853 $70,899 $1,985,292 $4,604,982 $64,563 $404,122 $12,979 $3,909,002 $36,578 $2,199,787 $52,804 $785,896 $327,167

$228,886 $46,884 $22,662 $47,092 $332,651 $183,668 $39,449 $227,078 $242,131 $204,496 $4,341 * $1,197,016 $1,135,673 $15,540 $32,795 $581,909 $38,208 $399,162 $1,478,259 * $582,998 $12,158 $3,203,687 $52,318 $1,072,502 $215,403 $155,414 $92,015

SOURCES: BOMJ, IMDb Pro, Rentrak. NOTES: Asterisk denotes not released theatrically or too small gross to be followed by Rentrak.

UK figures converted into US dollars for ease of comparison. Average currency conversion rate for the calendar year (per www.oanda.com) used as metric.

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but requires qualification. To be sure, some never enjoy theatrical exhibition and only appear at festivals or on home video; by and large, they do not earn significant grosses in the United States and United Kingdom. Despite featuring widely in the news media and on the cover of Sight and Sound, for instance, Battle in Heaven ranked 244th out of 263 tracked releases at the 2005 UK box office. Nevertheless, the modest popular notice only partly pertains to explicit sex: subtitles pose a more substantial problem. Although The Idiots only earned five figures in its US release, its box office in Denmark ($845,001), Norway ($357,060), and Sweden ($339,768) proved remarkably buoyant, especially when one considers that these Scandinavian countries have populations smaller than London and New York. Interviews with niche extreme cinema distributors confirm this general phenomenon. “Foreign-language,” Raymond Murray said, “that’s the problem. You look at [the United States] with 300 million people and think ‘Oh my God,’ but you can only sell a couple thousand DVDs, because there’s just not a lot of people interested.” Murray reported that the UK subsidiary of his former label TLA Releasing would earn “as much” with foreign-language films as the US division.47 Indeed, US and UK distributors face considerable challenges: they must position “sexiness” alongside other marketable factors, such as a star, an auteur, the English language, an accessible style, or a reliable niche market (e.g., gays and lesbians, British Indians, and so on). The higher-earning productions in table 3 tend to prove the rule: they are almost exclusively Anglophone, directed by a notable auteur (e.g., Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers [2003]), star a prominent actor (Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan in Shame [2011]), use an easily digested style or narrative forms, and present sex as potentially positive, rather than disturbing or destructive (Shortbus; Sex and Lucía [Lucía y el sexo, 2001]; cf. A Hole in My Heart). The vast majority, if not all, of these films are low concept: that is, easily marketable, high-concept qualities are absent. According to Justin Wyatt, the latter include: an easily communicable idea that can be exploited in posters and other advertisements, a straightforward story composed of stock situations, simplified characterization, and a strong match between image and soundtrack. Sexually explicit art films lack most if not all of these features, which Wyatt sums up as “the look” (of the images), the marketing “hook,” and the “book” (i.e., a reductive narrative). A still of Tom Cruise and the pitch “Top Gun (1986) in race cars” can succinctly sum up a high-concept project such as Days of Thunder (1990); Universal successfully advertised Jaws (1975) with a giant shark emerging from the ocean below an unsuspecting female swimmer and the tagline, “The terrifying motion picture from the terrifying No. 1 best seller.”48 The extreme films under scrutiny often defy such breezy characterizations, however, and one wonders how to pitch them to audiences. “The story of a woman who philosophizes about sex, picks up a man at a bar, has a masochistic affair, and then kills

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her husband who loves her but refuses to sleep with her” sums up Romance, but hardly seems marketable. “A group of Danes pretend to be mentally handicapped and perform art-action interventions around town and have orgies” (The Idiots) or “a man and a woman engage in an increasingly troubling and ultimately destructive sexual affair” (Lies, 9 Songs, Center of the World [2001], It Begins with the End [Ça commence par la fin, 2010], Leap Year [Año bisiesto, 2010], Kelly + Victor [2012], and many amour fou stories) present marketers with similarly problematic concepts. If the high-concept film’s immediately iconic style translates easily to visual forms of advertisement such as television spots, trailers, and print and online ads,49 the low-concept film requires considerable effort. The case of Raymond Murray demonstrated how distributors struggle to build a new audience each time, rely on loyal base markets, or reach for a mainstream crowd willing to endure a dense narrative and subtitles for the sex scenes. Furthermore, as we have seen, they must negotiate regulatory-commercial obstacles. In the United States, many mainstream newspapers and other potential publicity avenues do not accept advertisements for films rated NC-17 or unclassified altogether. Cinemas, video rental outlets, DVD and VoD portals, online marketplaces, and other distribution and exhibition venues often decide not to program or make such films available purely on this basis. Examining marketing techniques in detail helps explain the films’ lack of box office success and reveals a major tension with filmmakers’ apparent intentions. Given that advertising should establish the film’s identity and stimulate the public’s interest in anticipation of the release, the mismatch between content and marketing campaign predictably anticipates a poor reception and box office. If, as Wyatt writes, the “marketing trait of a high concept film is a very close match between the film’s marketing campaign and the actual content of the film,”50 distributors largely violate these principles in order to generate interest in sexually explicit arthouse films. Indeed, the marketing strategy recalls the disjunction between advertisement and content typical of the classical exploitation film.51 Faced with arthouse sex films’ sometimes esoteric themes, harrowing subject matter, lack of star power, foreign languages, and other difficult-to-position elements, US and UK distributors almost always highlight salacious content and the controversy that the films have generated in their initial reception by critics, festival audiences, censors, or in foreign markets.

Hardcore Arthouse Marketing and Advertising Understanding the marketing of recent arthouse sex films requires examining items such as posters, still print and online advertisements, exhibitor booklets, trailers, websites, press kits, television and internet spots, and DVD covers

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and special features. Besides film festivals, DVD has been the most important mode of consumption in the last fifteen years. We need to attend to its designs most of all. The iconography of hardcore art film promotion is remarkably standardized. Several characteristics abound: 1) a striking central image of the human (female) body; 2) nudity or titillating obstruction of naked bodies; 3) red as the dominant color in the design; 4) warning signs, critics’ quotations, or other texts that refer to sexual and/or controversial content; 5) a relative absence of typical arthouse markers such as references to the filmmakers’ previous works, to festival participation, and to the film’s national origins or depicted culture. Before elaborating on these features individually, an initial example can illuminate how they work together in context. The Fox Lorber Films/Off Line Releasing/Win Star TV & Video US DVD release of Lies features on

FIG. 20 The marketing of hardcore art films, such as Lies, are remarkably consistent.

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its cover a woman’s bare stomach with a hint of her breast and, to the right, a large whip, which dominates the right half of the image and extends down to the title of the film, written in bold. Directly above the title are the cursive words, “A Film by Jang Sun Woo”; the tagline “Pain is Their Pleasure” features beneath. A critic’s recommendation (“The most heightened graphic-erotic tragedy since In the Realm of the Senses.”—Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly) and modestly sized DVD and Fox Lorber logos round out the generally uncluttered composition. The back contains a blurred image of J and Y kissing as well as a small frame grab of J kissing Y’s bent bare lower leg. The graphic design contains keywords in watermark (PLEASURE PAIN LIES), and, in small font, the requisite filmmaker credits, DVD specifications, and features. Three critics’ pronouncements and a plot summary take up most of the image, however. The quotations dwell on the sexual content: “A genuine and harrowing work of erotic drama . . . Grade A.”—Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly; “A no-holds-barred odyssey of sexual obsession.”—Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times; “A sly, candid anatomy of sexual desire.”—Dennis Lim, Village Voice. The words “erotic drama,” “sexual obsession,” and “sexual desire,” written in a significantly larger font than the other text, emphasize potentially lurid content with particular insistence. The plot description follows the same logic, underscoring salacious subject matter and representations, controversy, and the theme of transgression. It too highlights certain words visually. The opening, for instance, is rendered in block letters: JANG SUN WOO’s HIGHLY CONTROVERSIAL FILM chronicles the bizarre sexual relations of a 38 year-old married man, J, and an 18 year-old student, Y, who is intent on losing her virginity before graduation. After the initial encounter, they embark on a sexual odyssey toward the realms of obsession and sadomasochism. No common love affair, theirs tests the limits of both body and mind. Intense desires drive them into a relationship that revolves around pain, pleasure and unavoidable lies. As J’s sexual needs take on addictive dimensions, Y begins to draw back. Insecurities, doubts and indiscretions begin to weigh on a love that once knew no limits.

We can draw a number of general lessons from the Lies DVD cover design. First, DVD, poster, and print advertising designs almost always contain a prominent and striking image that dominates a relatively uncluttered composition. If, as Wyatt writes, the “marketing of high concept films is structured also by the choice of an image which is reducible, concise, and transferable into other media,”52 distributors attempt to apply this principle to these (low-concept) productions. This tactic ultimately misleads, however, because although hardcore art films aim to realize artistic intentions and deliberate on intellectual

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themes or even philosophical questions, distributors attempt to “summarize” these films with bodies: a large image of a naked or scantily clad woman or a male-female couple (occasionally female-female) arranged in a titillating position or engaged in a sex act. The Trimark US release of Romance depicts the naked torso of a woman (presumably protagonist Marie) whose raised and folded arms obscure her face and whose nipples the title hides. The posters also foreground the partially concealed female body: a woman’s bare waist and legs, her pubic region covered by her fingers, the title, and a large red “X.” Tartan’s The Pornographer shows a woman in medium close-up; a clapperboard conceals her face, leaving her enormous bosom and prodigious cleavage at the center of attention. Q (2011) and Spring Breakers similarly feature, respectively, a woman in a revealing bodice and a group of girls in bikinis, two leaning into the camera as to provide greater, bustier visual access. Where men do figure in marketing images they almost always function as sexual agents. The ThinkFilm DVD release of Lie with Me (2005) features Eric Balfour using his lips to caress Lauren Lee Smith’s naked body; in the poster we see only Balfour’s mouth, mustache, nose, and arm embracing a woman’s bare breast and abdomen. The advertising for L’ennui (1998) featured a naked Cécilia sat upon and kissing a naked Martin, or, in the vein of Romance (and alluding to the poster for Jean-Luc Godard’s never-completed La femme de Paul, avec le sourire), an anonymous woman lying on her back with erect, naked, folded legs, the title suppressing her vulva. A man and a woman in sexual embrace (of various types) feature as the poster or DVD cover image for Pola X (1999), Intimacy, The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin, 2001), Ken Park, The Principles of Lust (2003), Leap Year, Hemel (2012), Kelly + Victor, and others. With its auteur-director and cast of stars, Nymphomaniac (2014) had a rich marketing campaign with several poster designs. One simply encapsulates the project with a female body part as its central image: two parentheses made to resemble a vagina. This yonic symbol is repeated across several media (e.g., the website) as a logo for the film; in renderings of the title the two parentheses are used in place of the o, that is, Nymph()maniac. Another set of poster designs featured the unclothed actors’ orgasmically paralyzed faces next to their (character or stage) names. Producer Louise Vesth, who directed the marketing campaign, explained her task as “how to sell a difficult-to-sell film,” a proposition that Lars von Trier’s then-aversion to interviews only complicated. At the beginning of her involvement, Vesth reported, she knew nothing except that “it would be a very long porno,” a prospect she registered positively because of the genre’s easy communicability: “In the end everybody knows what a fuck is,” she said. Because of von Trier’s inability to deliver the film on schedule for Cannes, Vesth had to pique interest in the project for nearly a year, which encouraged her to design the series of titillating posters, regularly add racy

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stills to the film’s website, and upload short clips to YouTube: these “were supposed to suggest just how explicit the sex scenes in the film would be.” Vesth appreciated YouTube’s eventual removal of the clips, since the prohibition (for infringing on the site’s policy on indecency) contributed positively to the publicity. The many online parodies of the posters furthermore confirmed her impression of the designs’ iconic effectiveness.53 Vesth’s comments here are doubly suggestive. Taken at face value, they provide rare insights into extreme cinema marketing practices and reveal the salacious imperatives

FIG. 21 Louise Vesth’s Nymphomaniac promotion coordinated iconic images repeated across

a set of media and cleverly timed provocations, in order to pique interest in enfant terrible Lars von Trier’s “difficult-to-sell film.” ©Everett/REX Shutterstock. Reproduced by permission.

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that arthouse marketers, when faced with difficult filmmakers and hard-toposition films, are encouraged to take. In addition, we can read these statements symptomatically and performatively: made upon the film’s premiere at a Berlinale press conference, they surely also themselves seek to stoke journalistic and public interest in the film, as much a self-reflexive PR stunt as von Trier’s provocative t-shirt and Shia LaBeouf ’s rants and red-carpet hijinks. Generally, hardcore arthouse advertising features relatively uncluttered compositions. Nevertheless, images of the naked female body, as in the examples of Lies, Romance, The Pornographer, L’ennui, the US release of In Bed (En la cama, 2005), and others, are often partially obscured in patently titillating areas: for example, nipples, genitalia. Commonly, the title conceals the female breasts and/or vulva, as we have seen in Romance and the poster for L’ennui, and also in the Tartan DVD cover for Battle in Heaven, which superimposes the title over the breasts of Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz), who lies naked on the bed with her eyes closed. (Other promotional material, including the poster, uses a similar photo but one in which the woman’s long hair covers her breasts.) In other cases, prominent texts that stress the salacious content or provocative potential of the work (A-Film’s Ken Park and the Remstar release of Baise-moi) obscure female body parts. As a rule, the graphic design plays a coy hiding game. Although the Lies DVD maintains a subdued palette of skin tones, browns, and greens, a significant number use red as the prevailing color. The Tartan release of Secret Things (Choses secrètes, 2002) depicts Sandrine and Nathalie embracing; in the foreground, Christophe’s face watches them. Two large swathes of red dominate the top and bottom of the image, partially veiling Sandrine’s hand caressing Nathalie’s buttocks. On the back of the DVD, a large quote from The Guardian (“lesbian sex, public masturbation, orgies and worse [ . . . ] complex and powerful”) is also prominently written in red. Scarlet heartshaped pillows dominate The Works’ release of Shortbus and obscure the body parts (except hands and feet) of several characters and in particular the breasts and bare legs of the orgasmic Sofia, who lies in the center of the image. The title is pink, as are the three “X” in the tagline below: AN EXXXTREMELY ROMANTIC COMEDY. Baise-moi (Remstar), Free Will (Der Freie Wille, 2016) (Arthaus), and 9 Songs (Optimum Releasing) also feature red as the overriding color, and many others use it for the title.54 The first features a negative photograph, against a black background, of an underwear-clad woman holding a gun; what should be white in the image (the woman) is, in fact, red. The 9 Songs cover similarly features a high-contrast photo of Lisa (Margo Stilley) lying on a man, presumably Matt (Kieran O’Brien). The photo is rendered in red, as are the critics’ quotes and much of the other cover text (e.g., the tagline, “2 LOVERS. 1 YEAR.”); male and female ends of a guitar amplifier cord, meant to symbolize the film’s two central conceits (heterosexual sex and rock music), share the same

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hue. Similarly, the Momentum Pictures release of The Center of the World features a photograph that is digitally manipulated so as to be red: the porn actress Alisha Klass, prone on her back with her legs dangling in the air, inserts a lollipop into her open mouth. The black background obscures the naked Klass; the effect reduces her to spread legs and an oral orifice, agape. She is framed by the title as well as the words “WARNING. SEX. COME CLOSER. ENTER.”55 Symptomatic of the exploitative logic and mismatch between marketing and content, Klass plays a minor and insignificant role in the story. In sum, the designs deploy what color and advertising researchers reveal to be the most common associations with red: lust, the dynamic, energy, the erotic, danger, hectic, heat, passion, love, proximity, sexuality, the seductive, and the forbidden.56 The marketing links these (art) films with the red-light milieu, with lustful erotica, with the taboo in general, and with sex in particular. Critics’ quotations feature on about half of the trend’s DVD covers; several more print such texts on the back of the case. Unlike the images— which clearly attempt to titillate with women’s naked, partially obscured, and/or provocatively posed bodies, and which present graphic designs and color schemes that foreground potentially salacious content—the pundits’ soundbites often combine an attention to prurience and controversy with

FIG. 22 Hardcore art cinema’s marketing designs play a coy game of hide-and-seek.

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positive evaluations of quality and artistry. The aforementioned Secret Things quotation—which via ellipsis yokes promises of lesbian sex and public masturbation with attestations of a “complex and powerful” work of art— is exemplary. Indeed, like filmmakers’ discourses, the selected critics often invoke previous masters or muster contemporary comparisons. The Lies citation from Owen Gleiberman (“The most heightened graphic-erotic tragedy since In the Realm of the Senses”) echoes Michael Winterbottom’s comparisons between himself and Oshima as well as Jang’s allusions (in Lies and his “Director’s Statement”) to the Japanese classic. The back of the Trimark Romance DVD includes a quote from Newsweek (“AN EYEFUL. THE MOST SEXUALLY AUDACIOUS FILM SINCE LAST TANGO IN PARIS”) that similarly positions Breillat’s work among canonized arthouse treatments of sexuality. Most commonly, however, the excerpts from reviews seek to draw attention to the putatively salacious content or controversial status of the film. “THE MOST SEXUALLY EXPLICIT FILM IN THE HISTORY OF BRITISH CINEMA,” a quotation from The Guardian, heads the Optimum release of 9 Songs. In turn, “The most explicit British film since 9 Songs,” a line ascribed to The Observer, precedes the title of Brilliantlove (2010; Soda Pictures). The Baise-moi DVD cites a critic who claims the film is “GRAPHIC, HARDCORE, THE MOST UNGUSSIED EXPRESSION OF FEMALE SEXUAL RAGE EVER THROWN UP ON SCREEN!” Shortbus, by referring to a GQ write-up, implies that it is “THE MOST SEXUALLY EXPLICIT FILM TO GO ON RELEASE.” The Kino Video DVD of The Piano Teacher reprints a line from J. Hoberman of The Village Voice: Michael Haneke’s adaptation is “THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL EUROPEAN ART MOVIE OF THE SEASON.” Some distributors forgo critics’ pronouncements and simply supply their own copy. “Provocateur, philosopher and taboo-breaker, Jean-Claude Brisseau” directed À l’aventure (2008), according to the Axiom Films DVD. The text on the back of Tartan’s The Pornographer claims that this “controversial French film . . . caused outrage when the British film censors insisted that an 11-second sequence be removed from one of the film’s sex scenes.” A-Film disposes with verbs and superimposes individual words onto the cover design: for example, “Shocking Confrontational Explicit” (Ken Park) or “THE CONTROVERSIAL CINEMA SUCCESS CONFRONTATIONAL AND EXPLICIT” (Intimacy). The Nymphomaniac promotional campaign used the tagline “FORGET ABOUT LOVE” and the double entendre “COMING SOON” to make its focus on sex explicit, should the accompanying images not have already been suggestive enough: for example, Charlotte Gainsbourg being eaten out. As described earlier, some distributors place these “warnings” over female body parts or sex scenes, in the manner

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of brown-bag pornography censorship. In the design for A-Film’s Ken Park, “UNCENSORED” resides over the image of Shawn about to give oral sex to his girlfriend’s bare-chested mother. A large “WARNING” and accompanying text appear over the crotch of a bikini-clad woman on the cover of Remstar’s Baise-moi: “This film contains prolonged sex scenes of an extremely explicit nature and scenes of graphic violence, which some viewers may find shocking and disturbing.” This discussion of quotations leads to an important point about how distributors attempt to position sexually explicit extreme cinema beyond the core arthouse audiences. Media branding plays a significant role here. Although distributors sometimes quote upmarket and cinephile-friendly newspapers and magazines (Village Voice, the New York Times, The Guardian, Sight and Sound), they more often select broader-interest mainstream publications (GQ, Elle, Time, Newsweek, Empire, Time Out, Sunday Mirror, Entertainment Weekly). Downplaying highbrow pretensions and casting a wider net for a potential audience, this tactic is particularly noteworthy because mainstream publications seldom review such niche productions. Similarly, although the Lies and other DVDs and posters prominently display filmmakers’ names in their ad copy (as one might expect from art cinema), this is by no means the rule. Indeed, about half of these films, including some recognizable auteur vehicles (e.g., Romance), do not name the director on the cover; otherwise, they reference the filmmaker obliquely, for example, “FROM THE MAKERS OF KIDS” (Ken Park), or in small text (Spring Breakers, The Piano Teacher). Accordingly, the posters, DVD covers, and other promotional material make scant mention of film festival participation or awards.57 Indeed, this information is printed in small font (The Piano Teacher), placed in an unobtrusive position (Baise-moi mentions participation at Toronto, Seattle, and San Francisco inside a block of text on the back of the DVD cover), or, most often, completely elided. This treatment is notable since all of these films appeared at festivals and many of them debuted at prominent A-list events; acknowledging this connection would send a strong signal about their artistic quality. The Ken Park trailer is an exception that proves the rule: it refers to festival participation as a means to convey its iconoclastic, controversial status. The trailer begins with images from the film and a voiceover that acquaints the viewer with the characters, location, and mood; these facts are interspersed with titles that name the filmmakers Larry Clark, Ed Lachman, Harmony Korine, and their previous projects. It then reveals the film’s official selection at Venice, Telluride, Toronto, Montreal, Vienna, London, and a number of other festivals. As the music changes from driving punk rock to a heavier hip hop and the clips transition from images of skateboarding to smoking marijuana and graphic sex, the descriptive texts give way to normative

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evaluations of taboo-breaking potential: “SCANDALIZED IN VENICE SUPPRESSED IN MOSCOW TABOOED IN TORONTO VERBOTEN IN VIENNA. REVERED IN ROTTERDAM.” The line “EXPOSES SIDE OF LIFE MANY DON’T WANT TO SEE” overlays a bondage sequence. In a cunnilingus scene, “GRATUITOUS” and “SEX” black-box naked breasts and genitalia; further sex scenes are superimposed with “EXPLOITATIVE PROVOCATIVE AUDACIOUS” and “BADOLESCENTS. BETWEEN THE NEED TO SHOW AND THE DESIRE TO SHOCK. IN A WEIRD WAY THIS IS A MORAL FILM.” The Ken Park trailer brings us toward conclusions about the nature of arthouse sex films’ marketing and the basic tension with filmmakers’ artistic aspirations. The references to exploitation and the desire to shock, however ironic they may be, vitiate Clark and Lachman’s repeated attempts to combat journalistic assertions of having sexually exploited the young, unprofessional actors. The marketing of Ken Park in particular and arthouse hardcore in general strongly contradicts directors’ contentions of aesthetic purity, realism, and distinction from pornography, precisely by emphasizing the erotic content. Strikingly, the Ken Park trailer thematizes festival participation only to suggest that the film was too controversial for such events and their art-pour-l’art reputations. In sum, distributors marshal at best a halfhearted alignment (some directors’ names, occasional mentions of film festival participation) with arthouse marketing conventions and with filmmaker rhetoric. Overwhelmingly—in images, graphic design, critics’ quotations, plot summary, and text—publicity reduces the focus to salacious content and controversy at the expense of any other factors (style, story, stars, auteur, national provenance, festival or award prestige). The previous chapter revealed the preoccupation that many stakeholders have with the notion of the “real” in these films. Tanya Krzywinska opines that the new trend relies “on coding certain sexual activities as indicative of ‘authentic’ sex to create a marketable difference from softcore and mainstream sex films; these include penetration of various kinds, erection, the visible presence of bodily fluids (‘money shot’).”58 Nevertheless, this chapter has shown that there is little evidence that distributors have ever tried to capitalize on this supposedly “marketable difference.” The issue of the real, so important to many academics and filmmakers and to some journalists and audiences, plays no role in the marketing (besides interviews). The emphasis clearly remains on revealing images of women and provocative texts about putatively sexy or controversial content. In this way, the marketing designs downplay or elide the difference between sexual art films and more unambiguously exploitative erotic films. The latter, let us remember, are neither defended by their filmmakers in the terms

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described earlier, nor rescued by critics with aesthetic evaluations or fawning auteurist interviews and by academics with textual analysis. Indeed, comparing the subjects, colors, layout, and design of arthouse hardcore with patently softcore erotica yields remarkable similarities. It is remarkable to put into

FIGS. 23 and 24 The flirtation with softcore imagery (as seen here with a Spring Breakers poster and publicity still) both titillates and seeks to confirm filmmakers’ rhetoric about the artistic “deconstruction” of pornography. ©Moviestore/REX Shutterstock, reproduced by permission.

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dialogue the mise-en-scène of A-Film’s Ken Park DVD and Tartan’s Novo, which both feature a woman’s legs on the left and, on the right, a young man poised to give oral sex, with pornographic designs. There is little difference in the relationship between foreground and background in À l’aventure and Secret Things vis-à-vis the softcore Cinemax direct-to-video Carnal Sins (2001) or the 2008 release of Mucky Malcolm’s Misadventures 3. The staging of bodies in Spring Breakers is remarkably similar to Mistique Productions’ Poolside Orgy (2003) or Quantum Leap’s Key Largo (2004); so too does Q resemble the 2003 Lighthouse DVD release of The Bare Witch Project (1999). Battle in Heaven apes Azure’s Black Panty Chronicles—Vol. 2 (2006); the warning signs on Ken Park or Baise-moi resound with the 2001 release of Randy Housewives. The publicity for Gaspar Noé’s project Love (2015) simply uses pornographic imagery. In light of these similarities, the aesthetic embrace of innovation and “subversion” cannot adequately come to terms with these films and the meanings they accrue in their circulation and reception.

Conclusions Competing discourses and imperatives are at work in explicit art cinema culture: on the one hand, the desire to distinguish hardcore art cinema from pornography; on the other hand, the willingness to highlight explicitness and flirt with lowbrow erotica in order to attract attention.59 On one level, as the aesthetic embracers often argue, these films retain enough aspects of traditional arthouse depictions of sexuality (and contain, defamiliarize, or recontextualize pornographic tropes) to be recognized by many as art rather than exploitation. Lies or 9 Songs, despite their unwavering emphasis on sex, almost never or seldom, respectively, dwell on close-ups of genitalia. In 9 Songs, variety in shot scale (especially the frequent inclusion of long shots) and quick and elliptical editing does differentiate it from much pornography; it does not follow a strict scientia sexualis imperative. Romance indulges in much self-reflexivity in dialogue and situation; very few, if any porn films, feature philosophical musings, and none would devote so much running time to them. In general, almost all of these projects code sex as negative or problematic: a source of guilt or shame or an ephemeral and ultimately futile escape attempt. This contrasts to the pornotopian world where affirmative submission rules and every pleasure is satisfied. Even Shortbus, claimed by some to be exceptional in this regard, in fact also focuses on problems of sex.60 On another level, however, these films literally function as pornography. In the many websites organized by categories of graphic sex acts, 9 Songs features on a list of films that portray “lesbian lap dancing.” Performing an internet search on The Brown Bunny, one finds—among the first page of hits—sites

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that promise to have clips of the “infamous blow job scene.”61 Porn aggregators, such as YouPorn and PornHub, offer the Sevigny-Gallo fellatio scene as a discrete object (of 10 seconds up to 9 minutes) called “Chloe Sevigny BJ in ‘The Brown Bunny,’” “Chloe Sevigny blowjob and 3some,” or simply “chloe sevigny blowjob.” Depending on the specific search or browse terms, it commingles with other Sevigny nude or sex scenes from mainstream films, but also indisputably pornographic motion pictures such as “Gena Lee Nolin—Sex Tape,” “Joslyn James—Hardcore Double,” or “Big Booty Downtown Barbara Brown.”62 On these sites, one also encounters 9 Songs excerpts (not the concert footage) or collections of Emmanuelle Béart nude or sex scenes from La belle noiseuse (1991), Nathalie . . . (2003), or The Story of Marie and Julien (Histoire de Marie et Julien, 2003).63 Detached from art cinema culture and contextualized among the short sex clips that make up the majority of online pornography, these films function for the same arousing and masturbatory purposes as any other cheaply produced or amateur offering. Despite the creators’ intentions, consumers today can quickly and easily appropriate and refashion media; explicit art films remain particularly vulnerable. In this sense we could easily resolve the great debate over whether Blue Is the Warmest Color’s sex scenes are pornographic: they quite literally are, since the sequences are available on YouPorn with the purpose to arouse. For these conflicting reasons, sexually explicit extreme cinema from The Idiots to Nymphomaniac needs to be placed in a set of larger contexts: the historical context of Ecstasy (Ekstase, 1933), Ingmar Bergman films, Last Tango in Paris, and In the Realm of the Senses, but also what Linda Williams calls the “many forms of the ‘knowledge-pleasure’ of sexuality” and Linda Ruth Williams terms the “broad church” of sex cinema, from Disney canoodling to porn and snuff.64 We must consider The Brown Bunny in terms of its aesthetic and thematic debts to Two Lane Blacktop (1971); similarly, however, the reactions to the sex scene between Gallo and Sevigny demand juxtaposition with the furor and curiosity over the contemporary sex home videos of Tommy Lee Jones or Paris Hilton. Constellations of distribution technologies and censorship are likewise not unimportant. The new explicitness in art cinema emerged at the time when teenage comedies such as American Pie (1999) were produced in “cold” and “hot” versions: a PG-13 or R-rated version for theatrical release and a subsequent DVD with all breasts visible and all sex scenes uncut. But perhaps the most important context for hardcore art cinema is— unsurprising given the significant attention in filmmakers’ discourses—the contemporaneous proliferation of online pornography. To be sure, primitive humans were drawing sex scenes on cave walls and, in the words of one exploitation film producer, “after Mr. Edison made those tin-types gallop, it wasn’t but two days later that some enterprising guy had his girlfriend take her clothes off [for the camera]”; there is evidence of sexual intercourse on

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celluloid by 1902 or 1903 at the latest.65 Nevertheless, the easy access to and anonymous consumption of pornography enabled by the internet has marked a significant development. This began in the mid-1990s to early 2000s—not coincidentally the time when the extreme cinema started proliferating in earnest. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the internet is, above all, a pornography platform: the highest proportion of web traffic goes to adult sites (10.5%), surpassing web e-mail (9.6%), search engines (7.2%), and news sites (2.9%).66 In addition, porn represents the most popular film genre; the industry’s revenues dwarf Hollywood, television, or the music industry.67 In the face of such widespread hardcore, is it any wonder that the BBFC liberalized its guidelines for showing sex on screen when faced with The Idiots and Intimacy? Requesting cuts of a grunt or darkly-lit nipple from a scene playing at a poorly attended arthouse cinema seems silly in an age when the most sordid and prurient images remain nearly universally accessible. Breillat, Jang, Gallo, or Moodysson point to the fact that, consciously or unconsciously, all arthouse filmmakers who represent sex engage with pornography and its effects on our audiovisual vocabularies and vernaculars. Scholars and critics who note the realism of these films or the way in which the protagonists are normal, “ugly,” or have “modest” breasts or genitalia— also some of the most common descriptions of arthouse sex film precursors such as I Am Curious (Yellow) (Jag är nyfiken—en film i gult, 1967) or In the Realm of the Senses, let us remember—likewise betray their pornographic expectations. Sex on screen (in hardcore, soap operas, or commercial cinema) almost always transpires between people considered physically attractive and well-endowed.68 The question of whether real sex in art films constitutes pornography has been asked and answered repeatedly. But in many ways it is not the most relevant one. Indeed, the two modes cannot exist without one another; they are symbiotic in that they depend upon each other for their recognition as supposedly distinctive modes. This is not simply a matter of convergence, the melting of previously rigid formal or medial boundaries, or any postmodern inversions of hierarchies. In this sense I disagree with the aesthetic embracers who claim that “a new strand of hard-core film can now be classified as highbrow; an increasingly permeable space—a space in which previous delineations between heterosexual hard-core and homosexual hard-core, art and pornography, pleasure and pain, can coexist.”69 Such characterizations lack precision. Quite concrete artistic volitions, but also economic conditions, motivate the entanglements between the two. Graphic sex guarantees attention. Not necessarily at the box office, but certainly at festivals and with programmers and press. In this way, sex is to art cinema as 3-D or IMAX is to blockbusters: a means to fill the “sure seaters.” In this sense, the “radical breaking of boundaries” and other claims to novelty in fact represent an eternal return of the same.

Afterword

These days, a few clicks or taps on the home PC or a mobile device suffice to see a real live birth, people dying or being tortured, celebrities cavorting nude, and anonymous citizens changing clothes or having sex. This material is accessible to anyone with Wi-Fi or a 4G connection; darker regions of child pornography and snuff films exist in a netherworld beyond. In mid-twentieth-century art film culture, the precursors of extreme cinema were subversive, cutting-edge (or at least marketed that way), and more or less the only game in town. To be sure, there remained underground pornography clubs, mail-order catalogs, and stag films at fraternity houses and American Legion halls.1 But for an audience with sophisticated tastes or middle-class aspirations or hungry for an aesthetic experience with cultural significance, arthouse cinemas and museums remained the clear choice. Today, film in general and art films in particular face fierce competition. Consumers have an overwhelming array of leisure media at their disposal. To name but a few: high-quality television series, video games, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and an explosive number of features that can be instantly streamed, legally or illegally. The sobering current statistics for art cinema’s theatrical and home video returns demonstrate a clear need for strategic action to remain profitable or even to survive.2 Clearly, this diversification has bent or broken some areas of film culture. Cinema attendance has decreased in real numbers, profit margins have evaporated, and many movie theaters have shut down. The very activity has perhaps increased in status, however, no doubt helped by the consolidated arthouse sector’s herculean efforts to provide a comfortable and luxurious experience. A violent, sexually explicit, or otherwise transgressive art cinema is another means by which the form seeks to compete and survive. The specter of transgression—articulated by filmmakers, critics and audiences, festival organizers, distributors, and censors in public statements, interviews, reviews, 206

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letters to the editor, internet forums, festival programs, promotional material, and classification justifications—has served these stakeholders’ needs in different forms and to various extents. Naturally, it does not represent the sole means by which film world participants further their careers, attract funding and audiences, and compete with other providers, products, and activities. Nevertheless, we need to accept that this phenomenon exists in an entrenched, significant, and institutional form. Extreme cinema remains a quotient of product differentiation, from filmmakers’ statements and distributors’ adverts to academics’ analyses. In a noisy world of social media and thousands of film festivals, only a shout or scream gets heard. Marketing experts and industrial-organization institutionalists define differentiation as the means by which brands, products, or services are distinguished; companies cue these distinctions in the way that they target consumers with their goods. There are several methods to suggest differentiation. They include product form, reliability, style, features, and performance quality. Some products have low differentiation potential (e.g., aspirin or chicken) and others enjoy high differentiation potential (e.g., furniture or cars).3 Although film is a mass product, in general it has a very high potential for differentiation: for example, stars, directors, genres, stories, language, and national origins. The boutique institutional field of art cinema magnifies and exploits this potential: not only can consumers expect differences between a horror flick and a rom-com, they can detect variation between a Haneke and Noé, a Breillat, Winterbottom, or von Trier. Indeed, much of the discursive positioning examined in this book has revolved around differentiation and interpretation. Directors, critics, festival organizers, distributors, and censors attempt to distinguish extreme cinema from torture porn, pornography, commercial films, Hollywood, other extreme films, and so on. In special ways, the mode is dependent on this articulation of difference. Of course, despite the novelty of MUBI or Game of Thrones, product differentiation is not an entirely new cinematic phenomenon. Describing late 1920s exploitation films, Eric Schaefer writes that such tactics were “crucial in the mainstream motion picture business. Dozens of film competed against each other in any single week, hundreds in a given year.” Hollywood used certain stars, favored specific genres, deployed technological inventions, developed sophisticated publicity campaigns and promotions, or simply designed striking studio logos to help audiences differentiate. “Because exploitation films were in competition for the same entertainment dollar, their primary task was to promote their difference from mainstream movies. Allusions to sex and other forbidden topics, as well as their educational intent, were the primary signifiers of their difference.” In addition, they deployed sensationalized and graphic newspaper ads, posters, and window cards. Indeed, Schaefer attributes the demise of the classical exploitation film to the erosion of product

208 • Extreme Cinema

differentiation. Because of the incorporation of exploitation topics and motifs into Hollywood films, the emergence of “teenpics,” the rise of edgy foreign art films (the precursors of extreme cinema) in the United States, and a new brand of “sexploitation” films in the 1960s, critics, audiences, and industry insiders experienced increasing difficulties to parse the hitherto clear dividing lines of exploitation and mainstream, and the classical exploitation film rapidly disappeared as a result.4 Certainly, the movie industry’s mid-twentieth-century attempts to set cinema apart from television—an effort that yielded widescreen, 3D, Smell-O-Vision, and countless exhibitor raffles and promotions— also count as differentiation measures.5 Even more so than in the days when cinema’s clear competitor was television, however, the contemporary film industry in general and its art-cinema sector in particular are locked in a pitched battle of product differentiation. In times of technological transition and uncertain returns, shocking cinema by international auteurs emerges as a tried and tested recourse: “event cinema” for a bijou set. Indeed, one possible, admittedly partial way to describe extreme cinema would cast it as an act of differentiation in a declining product life cycle. This statement requires some explanation. Business scholars posit that marketing must change according to how the product, market, and competitors develop over time. They describe four stages of a product’s, product category’s, product form’s, or brand’s life cycle: 1) introduction, 2) growth, 3) maturity—a period when sales stop growing after potential consumers have become familiar with the product and competition increases—and 4) decline, when sales drift downward and returns decrease. By such measures (or any others, save real numbers of productions), it would be difficult to argue that cinema in general and art cinema in particular find themselves in a growth phase. Indeed, notwithstanding robust individual examples such as Film Forum or Nitehawk Cinema, some successful festivals and distributors, as well as a smattering of star filmmakers and their production companies, data for the art-cinema branch as a whole demonstrates a precariously mature, if not rapidly declining, state. There are several ways to deal with these developments. They include replacement demand (e.g., Film Forum’s grooming of young children as cinema-goers) or increasing advertising (grassroots marketing) or promotions (e.g., Nitehawk). In these stages, some companies respond by heightening their investment to dominate the shrinking market: for instance, 2929 Entertainment, the parent company of Magnolia Pictures and the Landmark Theatres chain, and Curzon World, which has created a similar art-cinema empire with production, distribution, exhibition, and a VoD service. Others depart the market altogether, reduce their product offer, withdraw from their poorestperforming market segments, or decrease the “firm’s investment level selectively, by dropping unprofitable customer groups, while simultaneously strengthening the firm’s investment in lucrative niches.” Invincible Pictures’ reorganization

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from production to more distribution and FlixFling is one example of this strategy. Raymond Murray’s evacuation of the home-video rental market and his reentry into arthouse cinema—with a Nitehawk-style business plan—is another. Above all, extreme cinema as a form could represent a late-mature and decline-stage tactic to stress brand differences and advantages as well as to concentrate focus on “hardcore loyals.” Gaspar Noé and Park Chan-wook, Artsploitation and Invincible Pictures, festival organizers and midnight-movie exhibitors alike seek a métier. They “pursue a niching strategy and achieve profits through low volume and a high margin.” The films’ aesthetics but in particular the artistic discourses that accompany their release offer a premium over torture porn, pornography, and other cognate genres—in a similar way, some radical voices might venture, that the marketing discourse surrounding Volvo (safe, upscale, family-friendly, Scandinavian quality and design) offers a premium over a Toyota or Ford.6 Is this how we should ultimately understand the mode? Against the backdrop of proliferating leisure activities, perceptions of an atomized public sphere, and the menace of instant, ubiquitous pornography and mind-bending violence, the ways of speaking and writing about these films attempt both to substitute for and compete with alternative erotic and violent moving images. Thus art cinema follows but amplifies its traditional concerns between intellectualism and innovation on the one hand and provocation and exploitation on the other; filmmakers, festival organizers, and especially distributors and the press take advantage of this putative content to attract viewers and readers. An industrial product with aesthetic and cultural aspirations, extreme cinema exists between the fronts of popular and alternative culture and between developments in technology and individualized viewing practices; it is caught between the confessionalism of reality TV and celebrity culture and the exhibitionistic, personal self-representations of contemporary art. It emerges calibrated to the systematized cycles of art culture and film festivals and the vagaries of global commercial distribution. Because of this currency and also the long prehistory of forerunners, it is difficult to imagine, so long as feature filmmaking exists, the extinction of extreme cinema. Indeed, the emergence of the Long Tail—a mode of cultural economics and consumption liberated from the “tyranny of locality” whereby niche interests and products are, in aggregate, just as profitable as blockbusters— bodes well for the continued proliferation of the mode.7 This book has demonstrated the uniformity and predictability of filmmakers’ statements, festival hijinks, press outrage, and marketing designs. Despite the déjà vu, the short-term benefits of controversy over sex and violence in art cinema will always drown out the few critical voices who reveal the institution for what it is. This should in no way imply that film world participants do not notice these patterns themselves. Let us recall the words of Xan Brooks, the Guardian journalist who has time and again written on the controversy that one or the

210 • Extreme Cinema

other exemplar has generated: “on a more cynical level—few editors have a problem with the ‘arty yet titillating’ angle. It’s the contract that we are all party to (editors, critics, film-makers alike).”8 Notwithstanding all selfreflexivity, it is in the interest of individuals to perpetuate the cycle: too many incentives foster its perpetual reproduction. Despite the normalized, regularized, dependable nature of transgression within art cinema as an institution—indeed, precisely because of its reliability—extreme cinema and its transgressive rhetoric will always remain a feature of film culture. The film world, to paraphrase Howard Becker, involves considerable effort to secure production funding, execute the shooting, edit the raw material, secure festival appearances, negotiate distribution in theaters and on DVD and VoD, create publicity materials, review films and interview filmmakers, and many other activities involving a whole host of social actors with various motives and stimuli.9 Surely, academics must take such developments into account, rather than ascribing meaning only to the workings of the finished textual product? After all, these processes and networks indelibly codetermine the shape and tenor of the film and the response that it receives.

FIG. 25 Ultimately, extreme cinema such as Battle in Heaven represents more than simply misunderstood genius or cynical provocation. ©Snap Stills/REX Shutterstock. Reproduced by permission.

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Solipsistic approaches anticipate their own conclusions: asking only aesthetic questions, for instance, will merely yield aesthetic answers. The same applies, of course, to sociological or economic lines of inquiry. This should not be construed as an attack on certain procedures and methodologies or as another blithe call to abandon interpretation and textual analysis. Indeed, despite the applicability of economic principles to the film world it makes no sense to pretend that its mass product has the cultural value of a cog or to deny that human beings respond to film in a much different way than to laundry detergent or automobile mufflers. Unlike “the banking, shoe manufacturing, or fast-food industries,” Janet Wasko and Eileen R. Meehan remind us, “media industries produce commodities that convey narratives, arguments, visions, symbolic worlds, and imagined possibilities.” They continue: “media products are simultaneously artifacts and commodities that are both created by artists and manufactured by workers, and present a vision for interpretation and an ideology for consumption to an active public of interpreters who may also be consumers targeted by advertisers or product placements and a commodity audience that can be measured and sold to advertisers.”10 For anyone who has encountered extreme cinema and sustained its harrowing, sometimes tedious, but often redemptive challenges, the mode represents more than the sum of interchangeable parts. Unlike radiator knobs or even gold, every film is a unique object, a prototype that cannot be replaced or wholly duplicated, despite our ability to define (and often times predict) its formal and thematic conventions and parameters.11 Originality remains the essential criterion of quality among cultural products; the artists and agents of extreme cinema do not seek a mass assembly line of reproducible models and the limitless growth-and-expansion telos of grand capitalist production. Ultimately, Leap Year (Año bisiesto, 2010) is no Volvo, a von Trier is not a Porsche. In my examination, I have tried to shift the debate from the many previous microstudies of genius or nihilism. A range of institutions shapes the circulation and meanings of extreme cinema; at the same time, individual cases and decisions, developing in everyday practices and routines, constitute these macro-phenomena. In the film world (as in any other area of cultural production), stakeholders, as Becker claims, “do not respond automatically to mysterious external forces surrounding them. Instead, they develop their lines of activity gradually, seeing how others respond to what they do and adjusting what they do next.”12 Institutional constraints guide—but do not necessarily determine—actions, behaviors, and meanings. How individuals communicate their goals, the ideas they take for granted, the way that these ideas become assumed “common sense” or “conventional wisdom,” in sum, the discourses that organize and regulate media: these all have material consequences. Studying them can thereby assist in better assessing the end product.

212 • Extreme Cinema

Balancing humanities and social sciences, close-up prospects and panoramic views, we can engage film with an inclusive, broad-church openness to diverse approaches and cross-referencing methods. As Vincent Mosco acknowledges: “Neither economics (e.g. money alone drives the media) nor culture (e.g. people’s values shape the media) provide the magic key to unlock our understanding of communication.”13 Industry studies, cultural studies, political economy, and textual analysis are not as incompatible as some commentators suppose; in fact, they can complement and inform each other. Key players in pushing these frontiers further have argued forcefully and eloquently for comprehensive methodologies that circumvent disciplinary border policing as well as erasing the hard-line, debilitating suspicions between the humanities and social sciences.14 Pursuing these avenues of investigation and attending to larger institutional scenarios need not preclude traditional focuses and interests of the discipline, such as the examination of authorship or national cinema. For example, this book has attended to discursive patterns in filmmakers’ rhetoric and how institutional deficiencies and incentives motivate the production of certain themes or genres. Indeed, such approaches can help us better scrutinize, as David Hesmondhalgh offers, “how notions of authorship operate in different types of production, legitimating certain aesthetic and economic practices over others.”15 Like a kaleidoscope, a small shift in scholarly inquiry allows familiar problems to appear in a new light. Whether we call such procedures media industry studies, the new film history, the new cinema history, a comprehensive methodology, or simply good practice, they can aid film and media scholars in more ably grasping our object of analysis and more efficiently advancing the field.

Notes Introduction 1

2

3

4

5

6

Patrick Frater, “Berlin: Lars von Trier Skips ‘Nymphomaniac’ Press Conference; Shia LaBeouf Storms Out,” Variety, February 9, 2014, http://variety.com/2014/ film/news/lars-von-trier-arrives-in-berlin-wearing-cannes-persona-non-grata-tshirt-1201094394/. Ibid.; Alex Stedman, “Shia LaBeouf Wears Paper Bag on Head to ‘Nymphomaniac’ Berlin Premiere,” Variety, February 9, 2014, http://variety.com/2014/film/news/ shia-labeouf-wears-paper-bag-on-head-to-nymphomaniac-berlin-premiere1201094699/; Alex Godfrey, “Jamie Bell: ‘I Hadn’t Said Hello to Charlotte Gainsbourg Before I Started Hitting Her in the Face,’” The Guardian, February 21, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/21/jamie-bell-charlottegainsbourg-nymphomaniac; Charlotte Cripps, “Nymphomaniac Star Stacy Martin Talks Sex, Nudity, and Porn Doubles,” The Independent, February 19, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/nymphomaniac-star-stacy-martin-talks-sex-nudity-and-porn-doubles-8500258.html; Xan Brooks, “Nymphomaniac Stars: ‘Lars Isn’t a Misogynist, He Loves Women,’” The Guardian, February 6, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/feb/06/ nymphomaniac-charlotte-gainsbourg-stacy-martin-lars-von-trier. Emine Saner, “From Nymphomaniac to Stranger by the Lake, Is Sex in Cinema Getting Too Real?,” The Guardian, February 21, 2014, http://www.theguardian .com/film/2014/feb/21/nymphomaniac-stranger-by-the-lake-sex-cinema. Scott Roxborough, “Romanian Distributor Appeals Ban on Lars von Trier’s ‘Nymphomaniac Vol. 2,’” Hollywood Reporter, January 30, 2014, http://www .hollywoodreporter.com/news/romanian-distributor-appeals-ban-lars-675594; Ben Beaumont-Thomas, “Part Two of Nymphomaniac Banned in Romania,” The Guardian, January 30, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/30/ nymphomaniac-banned-romania. Xan Brooks, “Cannes Film Festival Gears Up without Lars von Trier’s Latest Offering,” The Guardian, May 10, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/ may/10/cannes-film-festival-nymphomania-von-trier. “Ulrich Seidl wegen Blasphemie angezeigt,” Der Standard, September 4, 2012, http:// derstandard.at/1345165959498/Regisseur-Ulrich-Seidl-wegen-Blasphemie-angezeigt. 213

214 • Notes to Pages 3–5

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14 15

16

17 18 19

Charlotte Higgins, “Cannes Screening for Most Sexually Explicit British Film,” The Guardian, May 17, 2004, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/may/17/ cannes2004.film; “Cannes Film Sickens Audience,” BBC News, May 26, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/2008796.stm. See, for example, Agnes Poirier, “Ontario Upholds Ban on Baise-moi,” Screen Daily, November 21, 2000, http://www.screendaily.com/ontario-upholds-ban-on-baisemoi/404300.article. See David Rose, “Evidence Mounts That Violent Videos Desensitise Teenagers,” The Times, October 19, 2010, 17; Manohla Dargis, “Sometimes Blood Really Isn’t Indelible,” New York Times, March 3, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/ movies/03darg.html?_r=0. See, for example, James Quandt, “Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema,” Artforum 42.6 (2004): 126–132; Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974); Richard Falcon, “Reality Is Too Shocking,” Sight and Sound, January 1999, 10–13; Lisa Downing, “French Cinema’s New ‘Sexual Revolution’: Postmodern Porn and Troubled Genre,” French Cultural Studies 15.3 (2004): 265–280; Nicholaj Lübecker, The Feel-Bad Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Steve Erickson, “Sympathy, But No Devil,” Gay City News, August 18, 2005, http://gaycitynews.com/gcn_433/sympathybutnodevil.html. See Philip French, “No End in Sight,” Index on Censorship 24.6 (1995): 20–29, esp. 21; Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 86, 177, 195. See Simon Brown, “Censorship Under Siege: The BBFC in the Silent Era,” in Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age, ed. Edward Lamberti (London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 3–14; here 5–6. See Eric Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 331–334; Mayer quoted in ibid., 333. See Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 122–126. See Tino Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946–1973 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 8; and Mark Betz, “Art, Exploitation, Underground,” in Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste, ed. Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lázaro Reboll, Julian Stringer, and Andy Willis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 202–222; here especially 206. Wilinsky, Sure Seaters, 124. See also David Church, “From Exhibition to Genre: The Case of Grind-House Films,” Cinema Journal 50.4 (2011): 1–25; David Church, Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video and Exploitation Film Fandom (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015); and “Sexacious Selling Best B.O. Slant for Foreign Language Films in U.S.,” Variety, June 9, 1948, 2, 18; here 2. David F. Friedman, A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990), 100. “Sexacious Selling Best B.O. Slant for Foreign Language Films in U.S.,” 18. The Miracle case proved a debacle for censors, however, when the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of cinema’s standing as an art, despite flirtations with

Notes to Pages 5–7 • 215

20

21

22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29

30

31

prurience. See Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 191–192; Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core, 97–102. Gomery (Shared Pleasures, 188) details how the arthouse circuit in the United States represented a “rare trend upward in movie attendance in the early 1950s.” See David Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas: Foreign, Cult, Avant-Garde, and Beyond (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 8, 62; Shyon Baumann, Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 14–18, 21–22. See, for instance, “N.Y. Over-Seated for Sex,” Variety, July 2, 1969, 1, 70. See also Eric Schaefer, “‘I’ll Take Sweden’: The Shifting Discourse of the ‘Sexy Nation’ in Sexploitation Films,” in Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution, ed. Eric Schaefer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 207–234. Peter Lev, The Euro-American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 13. Garrett quoted in Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 7. See Schaefer, “‘I’ll Take Sweden,’” 207–234. See also David Friedman’s raunchy recollection that Americans liked Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre less for aesthetic vision or moral themes than because “he showed some ass and some tits.” Quoted in Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas, 226n8. “N.Y. Over-Seated for Sex,” 70; “Sexpix of $25,000–45,000 Negative Cost See Bright, Not Clouded, Future,” Variety, July 16, 1969, 17. See Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance, 8; Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas, 7. Steve Neale, “Art Cinema as Institution,” Screen 22.1 (1981): 11–39; the quotations in this paragraph are from 30, 37, 15, and 32. Ibid., 33. See also Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 42. See Variety’s list of top-grossing foreign-language films, reprinted in the appendix to Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance, 309–312. “Virtually all of the scholars who have written on art cinema as a movement,” Mark Betz has observed, “mention the degree to which sexual frankness and ‘adult’ displays of sexuality are constituent elements of European art cinema’s appeal.” Betz, “Art, Exploitation, Underground,” 204–205. An example of the nostalgic regard: “No one on either side of the Atlantic—or Pacific—wants to admit it today, but the fashion for foreign films depended a great deal on their frankness about sex.” See Andrew Sarris, “Why the Foreign Film Has Lost Its Cachet,” New York Times, May 2, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/movies/summer-filmsinternational-why-the-foreign-film-has-lost-its-cachet.html. On this issue, see Sharon Hayashi, “The Fantastic Trajectory of Japanese Pink Art Cinema from Stalin to Bush,” in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 48–61; here esp. 48. Later chapters will reveal how different censors and audiences interpret, legitimate, redeem, or dismiss extreme art films. Ratings bodies such as the Motion Picture Association of America and the British Board of Film Classification surely consider them one way; viewers who watch them for entertainment or an aesthetic experience see them very differently. Empirical audience studies reveal that such films are inevitably received across a spectrum of “overlapping art-house, cult, horror and exploitation film cultures.” See Melanie Selfe, “‘Incredibly French’?: Nation as an

216 • Notes to Pages 7–10

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35 36

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Interpretive Context for Extreme Cinema,” in Je t’aime—moi non plus: Franco-British Cinematic Relations, ed. Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 153–167; here 154. See Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover’s invocations of André Bazin’s “impure cinema” idiom in their “Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema,” in Global Art Cinema, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–27. See also Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas, 2. See Berys Gaut, “‘Art’ as a Cluster Concept,” in Theories of Art Today, ed. Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 25–44; esp. 26–27. Gaut denies that a cluster concept must contain necessary conditions. I agree with critics who argue that Gaut’s own cluster account of art contains de facto necessary conditions and that the presence of necessary conditions does not detract from a cluster concept’s utility. See Noël Carroll, “Introduction,” in Theories of Art Today, ed. Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 3–24; here 16. These components have included: in the narration, a tenuous, loose linkage of cause and effect and ambiguous resolutions; location shooting; themes with contemporary social relevance; psychologically complex characters with opaque objectives; foregrounded stylistic devices which may range from documentary-style realism (including use of available lighting only) to idiosyncratic subjectivity (long takes or rapid montage, abrupt transitions, baroque lighting or soundscapes, freeze frames, and so on). See David Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Practice,” Film Criticism 4.1 (1979): 56–64. Galt and Schoonover rehearse these debates in “Introduction: The Impurity of Art Cinema,” 6. See Mark Betz, “Beyond Europe: On Parametric Transcendence,” in Global Art Cinema, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 33–47. See, for example, Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall, eds., The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011); Tim Palmer, Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011). Eric Smoodin, “Introduction: The History of Film History,” in Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method, ed. Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 1–33; here 3–5. For the benefits of these approaches to film studies, see Paul McDonald’s recent dossier in Cinema Journal 52.3 (2013): 145–189. For an essay that reconciles the sometimes hostile camps of cultural studies and political economy, see Douglas Kellner, “Media Industries, Political Economy, and Media/Cultural Studies: An Articulation,” in Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, ed. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 95–107. For a review of the new political economy and institutionalist approach to the individual’s agency, see Eduardo Fernández-Huerga, “The Economic Behavior of Human Beings: The Institutional/ Post-Keynesian Model,” Journal of Economic Issues 42.3 (2008): 709–726. Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication, 2nd rev. ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2009), 3–4. Emphasis in original. John T. Caldwell, “Para-Industry: Researching Hollywood’s Blackwaters,” Cinema Journal 52.3 (2013): 157–165; here 158. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, 2nd rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), xxiv.

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Pierre Bourdieu, “Intellectual Field and Creative Project,” trans. Sian France, in Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education, ed. Michael F. D. Young (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1971), 161–188; here 161. Becker, Art Worlds, 1. W. Richard Scott, Institutions and Organizations: Ideas, Interests, and Identities, 4th rev. ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2014), 262. Becker, Art Worlds, 36. See Charles Acland, “Theatrical Exhibition: Accelerated Cinema,” in The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, ed. Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 83–105; here 88. See Neale, “Art Cinema as Institution,” 13: “there was never any systematic attention given Art Cinema as an institution. There was never any systematic analysis of its texts, its sources of finance, its modes and circuits of production, distribution and exhibition, its relationship to the state, the nature of the discourses used to support and promote it, the institutional basis of these discourses, the relations within and across each of these elements and the structure of the international film industry. All of these elements are crucial to Art Cinema.” See also Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen 30.4 (1989): 36–47. For an example of a scholarly work that actually carried through on these calls, see Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1989). Mark Betz, “The Name above the (Sub)Title: Internationalism, Coproduction, and the Polyglot European Art Cinema,” Camera Obscura 46 (2001): 1–45; here 7. Ingrid Stigsdotter and Tim Bergfelder, “Studying Cross-Cultural Marketing and Reception: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966),” in The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches, ed. James Chapman, Mark Glancy, and Sue Harper (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 215–228; here 225. See, for example, Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, eds., Inventing Film Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How Movies Became American (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); and Geoffrey NowellSmith and Christophe Dupin, eds., The British Film Institute, the Government, and Film Culture, 1933–2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York: Knopf, 1985), 132.

Chapter 1 Transgression and Distinction: Filmmaker Discourses Steve Neale, “Art Cinema as Institution,” Screen 22.1 (1981): 11–39; here 15. Both quotations in this paragraph derive from Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, 2nd rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 14. 3 Amos Vogel already made this link in the structure of his classic book, Film as a Subversive Art (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974). This early chronicle of one potential genealogy of extreme cinema groups formal and political heterodoxy together with subversive content, so that it yokes horror, pornography, avant-garde, exploitation, and European art cinema as a common history of “subversive cinema.” An Andalusian Dog (Un chien andalou, 1929) and In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korīda, 1976) partake of a mode that also includes the works of Sergei Eisenstein and Stan Brakhage. 1 2

218 • Notes to Pages 17–20

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David Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas: Foreign, Cult, Avant-Garde, and Beyond (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 75, 89, 94, 157. The quotations in this paragraph are from 94 and 157. Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Beyond Vogel and Hawkins, see also Jeffrey Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” Screen 36.4 (1995): 371–393; and Keith Heffernan, “Art House or House of Exorcism? The Changing Distribution and Reception Contexts of Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil,” in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, ed. Jeffrey Sconce (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 144–163. David Machin and Andrea Mayr, How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012), 2–3. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 55. As such, my analysis follows the methodological search for what Foucault calls the episteme: “by episteme, we mean, in fact, the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems” (211). Roger Friedland and Robert R. Alford, “Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, ed. Walter W. Powell and Paul J. DiMaggio (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 232–263; here 248. See Becker, Art Worlds, 36; Marc J. Ventresca and John W. Mohr, “Archival Research Methods,” in The Blackwell Companion to Organizations, ed. Joel A. C. Baum (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 805–828; here 819; Machin and Mayr, How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis, 24. Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003), 2–3. On this topic, see also Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986). Jenks, Transgression, 45. Cf. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950), 69. Jenks, Transgression, 95. Cf. Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (London: Penguin, 2001), 63–70. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976), 40. See also the discussion in Jenks, Transgression, 29. In fact, microstudies of exemplary films often make precisely this connection. For applications of Bataille to extreme cinema see, for example, Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Victoria Best and Martin Crowley, The New Pornographies: Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Adrienne Angelo, “Sexual Cartographies: Mapping Subjectivity in the Cinema of Catherine Breillat,” Journal for Cultural Research 14.1 (2010): 43–55; Tina Kendall, “Reframing Bataille: On Tacky Spectatorship in the New European Extremism,” in The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, ed. Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 43–54. Jenks, Transgression, 42, 7, 5. Cf. Bataille, Eroticism, 63: “The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it.”

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Scott, Institutions and Organizations, 36. Becker, Art Worlds, 351, 14. See Nick James, “The Confessions of Lars von Trier,” Sight and Sound, October 2011, 30–34; Jack Malvern, “Film Director Vows to Remain Silent after Nazi Remarks,” The Times, October 6, 2011, 4. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke, Free Exchange, trans. Randal Johnson and Hans Haacke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 11–12. John A. Walker, Art and Outrage: Provocation, Controversy, and the Visual Arts (London: Pluto Press, 1999), esp. 1ff. See Pierre Bourdieu, “Intellectual Field and Creative Project,” trans. Sian France, in Knowledge and Control: New Directions for the Sociology of Education, ed. Michael F. D. Young (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1971), 161–188; here esp. 163, 174. The quotation is from 163. See Jason Middleton, “The Subject of Torture: Regarding the Pain of Americans in Hostel,” Cinema Journal 49.4 (2010): 1–24; here 1–2. See also David Edelstein, “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn,” New York Magazine, February 6, 2006, http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/; Aaron Michael Kerner, Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015). Steve Jones reports that the term “torture porn” has been applied to films such as Antichrist, Irreversible, The Killer Inside Me, and Funny Games. “Critics’ attempts to decide whether these films count as torture porn have inspired lengthy debates over directorial intention and artistic merit in the press.” See Steve Jones, Torture Porn: Popular Horror after “Saw” (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 9. Unlike older horror films, which trade on the uncanny and the fantastic, the “torture porn” cycle depends on realistic situations and aesthetic: the scare is that this “could happen to you.” Middleton, “The Subject of Torture,” 24. As Barbara Wilinsky describes in her book on the birth of arthouse cinema, commercial imperatives and artistic remits meant that postwar American arthouse cinemas functioned on a seeming paradox: maximizing profits by selling the exclusivity of alternative culture to as wide an audience as possible. Art cinema, Wilinsky reminds us, has always “worked to create its image of difference for particular (and, oftentimes, financial) reasons.” In addition, the sociologist Shyon Baumann has detailed the legitimation process that film, and especially art cinema, underwent in the postwar period, and the socioeconomic incentives that motivated its production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Legitimacy is “a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system, of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions,” in other words in this case, the institutional framework of film culture. See Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 3–4; Shyon Baumann, Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 14–18, 22. On legitimacy, see Mark C. Suchman, “Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches,” Academy of Management Review 20.3 (1995): 571–610; here 574. The quotations in this paragraph derive from Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 2010), 23–24. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 5.

220 • Notes to Pages 22–29

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Ibid., 180. Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination,” in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Vintage, 1983), 205–234. Geoffrey Movius, “An Interview with Susan Sontag,” in Conversations with Susan Sontag, ed. Leland Poague ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 71. Ross, No Respect, 184. Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination,” 233. See Bourdieu, Distinction, xxviii. These are the objectives of contemporary critical discourse analysis. See Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (London: Sage, 2001), 2. See also Teun Adrianus van Dijk, Discourse Studies (London: Sage, 2007); Ruth Wodak, “Introduction: Terms and Concepts,” in Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michal Krzyzanowski (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), 1–42. For more on this subject, see Mattias Frey, “Tuning Out, Turning In, and Walking Off : The Film Spectator in Pain,” in Ethics and Images of Pain, ed. Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson (New York: Routledge, 2012), 93–111. Demetrios Matheou, “Fear at Ennui’s End,” Sight and Sound, August 2005, 17–18; here 17. Eric Kohn, “‘A Serbian Film’ Shocks Midnight Audiences at SXSW,” Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2010, http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/03/15/a-serbianfilm-shocks-midnight-audiences-at-sxsw/. See Gavin J. Blair, “Cannes: Takashi Miike on ‘Shield of Straw’ and Why Japanese Cinema Is Too Safe,” Hollywood Reporter, May 18, 2013, http://www.hollywoodreporter .com/news/cannes-takashi-miike-shield-straw-524551. Gavin Rees, “Getting Busy with the Miike,” The Guardian, March 17, 2001, http:// www.theguardian.com/film/2001/mar/17/features1. Gaspar Noé, “I’m Happy Some People Walk Out during My Film. It Makes the Ones Who Stay Feel Strong,” The Guardian, March 12, 1999, http://www .theguardian.com/film/1999/mar/12/features3. Further quotations in this paragraph come from the same source. Philipp Oehmke and Lars-Olav Beier, “‘Jeder Film vergewaltigt,’” Der Spiegel, October 19, 2009, 112–114. Quotations from 113. Noé, “I’m Happy Some People Walk Out during My Film.” Demetrios Matheou, “He’ll Hit Her—And Think It Feels Like a Kiss,” The Sunday Times, May 30, 2010, 7–8; here 7. Quoted in Hannah McGill, “Inside Out,” Sight and Sound, June 2010, 40–42; here 41. “Interview with Catherine Breillat,” Anatomy of Hell, DVD, directed by Catherine Breillat (2004; Tartan Video, 2005). Margret Köhler, “Fremd ist jeder,” Berliner Morgenpost, February 1, 2001. Julian Hanich, “Gehört die Gewalt ins Kino, Herr Haneke?,” Der Tagesspiegel, September 10, 1997. Michael Haneke, “Violence and the Media,” trans. Evan Torner, in A Companion to Michael Haneke, ed. Roy Grundmann (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 575–579; quotations from this paragraph from 576–577. For an elaborated investigation of Haneke’s film theory, see Mattias Frey, “The Message and the Medium: Haneke’s Film Theory and Digital Praxis,” in On Michael Haneke, ed. Brian Price and John David Rhodes (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 153–165. For a discussion of these ideas, see Frey, “The Message and the Medium.”

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Chapter 2 The Aesthetic Embrace and the Cynicism Criticism: Reception Discourses 1

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At a market screening in Cannes, a viewer collapsed and was hospitalized while attempting to walk out of A Serbian Film (Srpski film, 2010). See Todd Brown, “Cannes 2010: A SERBIAN FILM Claims a Victim,” Twitch, May 15, 2010, http:// twitchfilm.com/2010/05/cannes-2010-a-serbian-film-claims-a-victim.html. Filmmakers and distributors use these reputations as an opportunity: at the Toronto and Stockholm film festivals, the Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1, 2001) promotion team handed out vomit bags to audiences. See Tom Mes, Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike (Godalming: FAB, 2003), 335. This happened no doubt after notices reported that Miike’s previous film Audition (Ōdishon, 1999) had induced vomiting during screenings. See Steve Rose, “‘Blood Isn’t That Scary,’” The Guardian, June 2, 2003, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2003/jun/02/artsfeatures.dvdreviews2. Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall, “Introduction,” in The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, ed. Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), here 1–17; 1. Tim Palmer, Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 59. Demetrios Matheou, “Vanishing Road,” Sight and Sound, August 2005, 16. Horeck and Kendall, “Introduction,” 2. Similarly, critic Richard Falcon surmises that such films “share an aggressive desire to confront their audiences, to render the spectator’s position problematic.” See Richard Falcon, “Reality Is Too Shocking,” Sight and Sound, January 1999, 10–13; here 11. See Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003), 97–98. For examples of such interpretations of extreme cinema, see Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and the other examples listed in note 15 of chapter 1. Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior (New York: Viking, 2009), 216, 219–220. Jenks, Transgression, 179. In a manner not wholly unlike Pierre Bourdieu’s art sociology, these commentators suggest that aesthetic taste and cultural consumption function to construct an identity and legitimate social difference. Extreme cinema aficionados imagine themselves as part of an exclusive, alternative culture, therefore positioning their taste as distinct from others’. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 2010), xxix, xxx. Martin Barker et al., Audiences and Receptions of Sexual Violence in Contemporary Cinema (Aberystwyth: University of Wales, 2007), executive summary, 1; 38–39. For examples of such websites, see Mason McNeal, “The Top 50 Most Disturbing Movies Ever Made,” HackSlashChop, March 9, 2004, http://www.hackslashchop. net/news/2014/3/3/the-top-50-most-disturbing-movies-ever-made; “Unsimulated Sex,” Wikipedia, n.d., accessed June 7, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Unsimulated_sex. Barker et al., Audiences and Receptions of Sexual Violence in Contemporary Cinema, 183. See Tanya Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2006), 2, 16; Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 5.

222 • Notes to Pages 33–39

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Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 41. Xan Brooks, e-mail correspondence with the author, April 1, 2014. All further references to Brooks in this paragraph derive from this source. Linda Ruth Williams, “Sick Sisters,” Sight and Sound, July 2001, 28–29; here 28. Simon Hattenstone, “A Joke or the Most Brilliant Film-maker in Europe?,” The Guardian, January 22, 1999, http://www.theguardian.com/film/1999/jan/22/ features2. Xan Brooks, “Antichrist: A Work of Genius or the Sickest Film in the History of Cinema?,” The Guardian, July 16, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/ jul/16/antichrist-lars-von-trier-feminism. Mark Cousins and Jonathan Romney, “L’Humanité: Rapture or Ridicule?,” Sight and Sound, September 2000, 22–25. Nick James and Mark Kermode, “Horror Movie,” Sight and Sound, February 2003, 20–22. See the abstract accessible from the FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals, n.d., accessed November 15, 2013, http://gateway.proquest .com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88–4004&res_dat=xri:fiaf&rft_dat=xri:fiaf: article:004/0224276. Asbjørn Grønstad, “Abject Desire: Anatomie de l’enfer and the Unwatchable,” Studies in French Cinema 6.3 (2006): 161–169; here 163–164. Mes, Agitator, 228. Robert Hyland, “A Politics of Excess: Violence and Violation in Miike Takashi’s Audition,” in Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, ed. Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 199–218; here 199–200, 204. Palmer, Brutal Intimacy, 57, 11, 60, 58. In turn, Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall’s book on extreme cinema in France and Europe makes claims about the films’ uniqueness based on intricate and intentional modes of audience address. For the scholars, “it is first and foremost the uncompromising and highly self-reflexive appeal to the spectator that marks out the specificity of these films.” Indeed, using language remarkably similar to Palmer, Horeck and Kendall submit their interest in representation and, above all, spectatorial effects: “We locate the new extremism in cinema, then, not simply with respect to what is shown, but in light of the complex and often contradictory ways in which these films situate sex and violence as a means of interrogating the relationship between films and their spectators in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In their concerted practice of provocation as a mode of address, the films of the new extremism bring the notion of response to the fore, interrogating, challenging and often destroying the notion of a passive or disinterested spectator in ways that are productive for film theorising today.” Horeck and Kendall, “Introduction,” 1, 2. Christopher Tookey, “It’s Not Just the Internet That’s Full of Violent Porn—So Are Cinemas,” Daily Mail, November 1, 2011, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-2055937/Christopher-Tookey-Its-just-internet-thats-violent-porn—cinemas .html. Christopher Tookey, “Irreversible (Cert 18),” Daily Mail, n.d., accessed June 7, 2014, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-157764/Irreversible-Cert-18.html. Tony Rayns, “Seul contre tous,” Sight and Sound, April 1999, 58. Ginette Vincendeau, “The New French Extremism,” in The Cinema Book, 3rd. rev. ed., ed. Pam Cook (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 205.

Notes to Pages 40–47 • 223 29 30 31

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James and Kermode, “Horror Movie,” 20. Falcon, “Reality Is Too Shocking,” 12. Manohla Dargis, “Sometimes Blood Really Isn’t Indelible,” New York Times, March 3, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/movies/03darg.html?_r=0. See also the discussion in Joan Hawkins, “Culture Wars: Some New Trends in Art Horror,” Jump Cut 51 (2009), http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/artHorror/. Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 80. Ginette Vincendeau, “Sisters, Sex and Sitcom,” Sight and Sound, December 2001, 18–20; here 18. James Quandt, “Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema,” Artforum 42.6 (2004): 126–132; here 127–128. Ibid., 128, 132. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture, 80. Peter Brunette, “Art Films Offer Unflinching Look,” Boston Globe, March 9, 2003, N13, N16. Judith Crist, “I Am Curious (Yellow),” in Flesh and Blood: The National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence, and Censorship, ed. Peter Keough (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1995), 323–326; here 323, 324, 326. Originally appeared in New York Magazine, March 17, 1969. Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: Tango,” New Yorker, October 28, 1972, 130–138; here 130. Todd McCarthy, “All That Glitters Not Always Gold,” Variety, May 19, 1997, 7–8; here 8. Wolfram Schütte, “Eine deutsche Psychose?,” Perlentaucher, October 21, 2009, http://www.perlentaucher.de/artikel/5806.html. Bourdieu, Distinction, 55, 53. See, for example, Vincendeau’s article on the “new French extremity,” which weighs both modes. Although she highlights extreme cinema’s potential for “empty provocation” and the expression of “a moral or political void in French society,” she likewise entertains academics’ concerns: “The films are united by a desire to blur boundaries” and test “limits (the body, the abject, sexuality in the postmodern context).” Vincendeau, “The New French Extremity,” 205. Bourdieu, “Intellectual Field and Creative Project,” 165.

Chapter 3 The Rhetoric and Role of Film Festivals Nick James, “Horror Movie,” Sight and Sound, February 2003, 20–22; here 20. Anita Singh, “Cannes 2009: Antichrist Horror Film Headed for Britain,” Daily Telegraph, May 24, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/cannes-filmfestival/5374834/Cannes-2009-Antichrist-horror-film-headed-for-Britain.html; Xan Brooks, “Cannes Film Festival Gears Up without Lars Von Trier’s Latest Offering,” The Guardian, May 10, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/ may/10/cannes-film-festival-nymphomania-von-trier; Vanessa Thorpe, “Outrage as French Couple’s Film Judged Too Sexy for Cannes,” The Observer, May 16, 2010, 7. 3 See James Quandt, “The Sandwich Process: Simon Field Talks about Polemics and Poetry at Film Festivals,” in Dekalog 3: On Film Festivals, ed. Richard Porton (London: Wallflower, 2009), 72–73. 1 2

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Vanessa Schwartz, “The Cannes Film Festival and the Marketing of Cosmopolitanism,” in It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 56–99; here 98. Shyon Baumann, “Intellectualization and Art World Development: Film in the United States,” American Sociological Review 66.3 (2001): 404–426; here 408–409. David Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinemas: Foreign, Cult, Avant-Garde, and Beyond (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 78. The other framings are “the winner,” “the loser,” and “the favorite.” See Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 146, 157. See Eleanor Ringel, “Hail Mary,” in Flesh and Blood: The National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence, and Censorship, ed. Peter Keough (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1995), 281–283; here 281. Originally published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, October 13, 1985. Nick James, “Irréversible,” Sight and Sound, July 2002, 16. Ringel, “Hail Mary,” 282. On this issue, see Mattias Frey, The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism: The Anxiety of Authority (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 101–123. De Valck, Film Festivals, 157, 161. Ibid., 155–156. For examples of how festivals actively seek to program extreme cinema, see the following interview with Michelle Carey or the fact that—demonstrated in the Beth Barrett interview—the Seattle International Film employs a year-round programmer to find material for its midnight movies series. De Valck, Film Festivals, 161. Tim Palmer, Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 61 Julian Stringer, “Global Cities and the International Film Festival Economy,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 134–144; here 141. De Valck, Film Festivals, 157. Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 29. See “Christoph Terhechte Selects 10 Best New Filmmakers,” Phaidon, n.d., accessed June 18, 2013, http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/picture-galleries/2011/ february/01/christoph-terhechte-selects-10-best-new-filmmakers/. See also Mary Scherpe, “Interview: Christoph Terhechte,” stilinberlin.de, February 7, 2011, http://www.stilinberlin.de/2011/02/interview-christoph-terhechte.html. “Christoph Terhechte Selects 10 Best New Filmmakers.” Chris Fell, “Cultural Presentation in International Film Festivals,” public discussion, Japan Foundation London, July 12, 2013. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Chris Fell in this chapter derive from this source. Hussain Currimbhoy, “Cultural Presentation in International Film Festivals,” public discussion, Japan Foundation London, July 12, 2013. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Hussain Currimbhoy in this chapter derive from this source. Noah Cowan, interview with the author, March 25, 2014. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Noah Cowan in this chapter derive from this source. Rachel Rosen, interview with the author, March 25, 2014. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Rachel Rosen in this chapter derive from this source.

Notes to Pages 52–66 • 225 26 27

28

29

30 31 32 33 34

35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48

Beth Barrett, interview with the author, March 20, 2014. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Beth Barrett in this chapter derive from this source. See, for example, Marijke de Valck, “Finding Audiences for Films: Programming in Historical Perspective,” in Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (St. Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012), 25–40; here 27. David Gillam, “Cultural Presentation in International Film Festivals,” public discussion, Japan Foundation London, July 12, 2013. Unless otherwise noted, all references to David Gillam in this chapter derive from this source. Andrew Simpson, “Cultural Presentation in International Film Festivals,” public discussion, Japan Foundation London, July 12, 2013. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Andrew Simpson in this chapter derive from this source. See Scherpe, “Interview: Christoph Terhechte.” Quandt, “The Sandwich Process,” 56, 58. Barrett: “Exactly. It can’t just be bread and meat. You need some mustard, you need a tomato.” Jacobs quoted in Wong, Film Festivals, 1; see also ibid., 87, 29, 68, 164, 90. This fact derives in part from and points ahead to the midnight movies phenomenon. See J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Da Capo, 1991). Michelle Carey, e-mail correspondence with the author, October 3, 2013. Unless otherwise noted all further references to Michelle Carey in this chapter derive from this source. See Schwartz, “The Cannes Film Festival and the Marketing of Cosmopolitanism,” 57. De Valck, “Finding Audiences for Films,” 32. Wong, Film Festivals, 7, 17. Quandt, “The Sandwich Process,” 67. Scherpe, “Interview: Christoph Terhechte.” Mark Peranson, “First You Get the Power, Then You Get the Money: Two Models of Film Festivals,” Cineaste 33.3 (2008): 37–43; here 37. Ringel, “Hail Mary,” 281. Wong, Film Festivals, 90, 87. Quoted in ibid., 103. De Valck, “Finding Audiences for Films,” 35–36. See Geoffrey Macnab, “The Match-Makers—New Co-Production Markets,” Screen Daily, October 12, 2007, http://www.screendaily.com/the-match-makers-new-coproduction-markets/4035208.article. Wong, Film Festivals, 157, 145, 16. For example, Seattle currently has an African Pictures Program, supported by a multi-year grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Barrett said that the idea is “to develop those relationships with filmmakers in Africa so they have a US platform where they didn’t before. It’s the accessibility now you can send a Vimeo link without having to put something in the mail. So you’ve taken out the financial barriers for filmmakers to get the word out outside of the country, outside of the continent.” In 2014, Seattle supported films from fourteen African countries, such as the gritty South African child-gang drama Four Corners (2013). See also Sara Huey, “Seattle International Film Festival Announces African Pictures Lineup,” SIFF, April 13, 2014, http://www.siff.net/press/siff-press-releases/

226 • Notes to Pages 66–70

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african-pictures-line-up-2014. San Francisco runs a number of grant and fellowship schemes to help up-and-coming filmmakers develop their craft and progress their careers. In 2014 it reported awarding nearly $2 million in the prior five years (“Grants,” SFFS, n.d., accessed June 24, 2014, http://www.sffs.org/filmmaker360/ grants#.U6k8JRbbrbQ). According to executive director Cowan, contemporary filmmakers have “really baffling” vocational pathways. “Festivals, as not-for-profit entities are meant to make a difference, we have to be focused on the filmmaker and their own choices.” In turn, the funding schemes feed into programming. According to Cowan, “a significant part of this year’s festival is made up of films that this organization has actually supported, both from a development standpoint as well as a financial standpoint.” Cowan admitted that this is both a source of pride for the institution as well as a phenomenon “that complicates matters further. . . . But I do think that that’s one of the future pathways for our filmmakers that we need to be able to provide.” Peranson, “First You Get the Power,” 41, 42. Randall Halle, “Offering Tales They Want to Hear: Transnational European Film Funding as Neo-Orientalism,” in Global Art Cinema, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 303–319; here 304. See also Wong, Film Festivals, 145–153; de Valck, Film Festivals, 201. De Valck, Film Festivals, 34, 160. Emphasis in original. For instance, Gerald Peary remembers Cannes 2003 for his press-conference challenges of “perversely sexist” Lars von Trier and “cocky and smugly assured” Vincent Gallo. See Gerald Peary, “Memories of a Film Festival Addict,” in Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (St. Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012), 41–58; here 52–53. Jeffrey Ruoff, “Programming the Old and the New,” in Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (St. Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012), 135–154; here 140. Wong, Film Festivals, 68. Schwartz, “The Cannes Film Festival and the Marketing of Cosmopolitanism,” 84. Thomas Elsaesser, “Film Festival Networks: The New Topographies of Cinema in Europe,” in European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 82–107; here 97.

Chapter 4

Discourses and Modes of Distribution

Geoffrey Macnab, “Death of a Salesman,” The Guardian, July 4, 2008, http://www .theguardian.com/film/2008/jul/04/filmandmusic1.filmandmusic1. 2 See Harold Demsetz, “Barriers to Entry,” American Economic Review 72.1 (1982): 47–57. 3 Alisa Perren, “Rethinking Distribution for the Future of Media Industry Studies,” Cinema Journal 52.3 (2013): 165–171; here 165. See also Philip Drake, “Distribution and Marketing in Contemporary Hollywood,” in The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, ed. Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 63–82; esp. 63; Toby Miller, Freya Schiwy, and Marta Hernández Salván, “Distribution, the Forgotten Element in Transnational Cinema,” Transnational Cinemas 2.2 (2011): 197–215. 4 See, for example, Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, 2nd rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 93–95. 1

Notes to Pages 70–76 • 227 5

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7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14 15 16

17

18 19

See Julia Knight, “Getting to See Women’s Cinema,” in Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-Going, Exhibition and Reception, ed. Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), 295–314; here esp. 297. See Tino Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946–1973 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010); Mark Betz, Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). See also chapters such as David Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinema: Foreign, Cult, Avant-Garde, and Beyond (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 191–207; Tom O’Regan, “Cultural Exchange,” in A Companion to Film Theory, ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 262–294; Sharon Hayashi, “The Fantastic Trajectory of Pink Art Cinema from Stalin to Bush,” in Global Art Cinema, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 48–61. See Perren, “Rethinking Distribution,” 166. Ibid. Thomas Ashley, interview with the author, April 4, 2014. Unless otherwise noted, all information on and quotations from Thomas Ashley derive from this source. “Sex Drugs Guns DVD,” Invincible Pictures, n.d., accessed July 1, 2014, http://www .invinciblepictures.com/store/sex-drugs-guns-dvd. Becker, Art Worlds, 125. Geoffrey Macnab, “Invincible Takes North American Rights to A Serbian Film,” Screen Daily, November 5, 2010, http://www.screendaily.com/invincible-takesnorth-american-rights-to-a-serbian-film/5020239.article. See Chris Evans, “Sitges Director Faces Pornography Complaint over A Serbian Film,” Screen Daily, March 8, 2011, http://www.screendaily.com/festivals/sitgesdirector-faces-pornography-complaint-over-a-serbian-film/5024651.article; Eric Pape, “So Scandalous a Prosecutor Took Notice,” New York Times, May 12, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/movies/in-spain-serbian-film-raisesquestions-of-artistic-license.html?_r=0. Raymond Murray, interview with the author, April 4, 2014. Unless otherwise noted, all material relating to Murray in this chapter derives from this source. See also Lawrence Ferber, “Raymond Murray,” Passport, n.d., accessed July 8, 2014, http://www.passportmagazine.com/businessclass/RaymondMurray1183.php. Murray sold the remaining subsidiaries of TLA Entertainment in early 2014. See also Brian Brooks, “UPDATED: TLA Releasing Sold to Group Spearheaded by Derek Curl,” Indiewire, May 3, 2011, http://www.indiewire.com/article/tla_releasing_ sold_to_group_spearheaded_by_derek_curl; Ray Pride, “TLA Entertainment Group Sold to New York–Based Investment Firm Sterling Genesis International,” Movie City News, January 30, 2014, http://moviecitynews.com/2014/01/tlaentertainment-group-sold-to-new-york-based-investment-firm-sterling-genesisinternational/. See Liam O’Donnell, “Artsploitation Films: Ray Murray Talks Toad Road, New Models for Distribution, and More,” Cinapse, August 12, 2013, http://cinapse. co/2013/08/12/artsploitation-films-ray-murray-talks-toad-road-new-models-forfilm-distribution-and-more/. See the homepage of Artsploitation, n.d., accessed July 8, 2014, http://www .artsploitationfilms.com. For more on “negative pick-ups,” i.e., acquisitions made after films are completed, see Drake, “Distribution and Marketing in Contemporary Hollywood,” 76.

228 • Notes to Pages 76–83

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21 22

23

24 25

26

27 28 29

30

31

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33 34 35

See Geoffrey Macnab, “Hamish McAlpine’s Generation Unveils Busy Production Slate,” Screen Daily, September 19, 2011, http://www.screendaily.com/hamishmcalpines-generation-unveils-busy-production-slate/5032240.article. See Arthur De Vany, Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry (London: Routledge, 2004). For more on the BBFC’s increasing fees and the concomitant financial threat to independent distributors, see Michael Brooke, “The Price of Censorship,” Sight and Sound, August 2013, 18; Anton Bitel, “Life on the Margins,” Sight and Sound, July 2014, 20–21. See J. Hurtado, “New Distributor, Artsploitation Films, Hits the Ground Running with GANDU Dec. 11!,” Twitch, October 5, 2012, http://twitchfilm.com/2012/10/ new-distributor-artsploitation-films-hits-the-ground-running-with-gandu-dec11th.html. Tanya Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2006), 110. Keith Heffernan, “Prurient (Dis)Interest: The American Release and Reception of I Am Curious (Yellow),” in Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution, ed. Eric Schaefer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 105–125; here 105. See Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 99; Andrews, Theorizing Art Cinema, 199, 201; Kevin S. Sandler, The Naked Truth: Why Hollywood Doesn’t Make X-Rated Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 98, 187–192. “Sexpix of $25,000–45,000 Negative Cost See Bright, Not Clouded, Future,” Variety, July 16, 1969, 17. Mark Peranson, “First You Get the Power, Then You Get the Money: Two Models of Film Festivals,” Cineaste 33.3 (2008): 37–43; here 39, 40. Chris Tribbey, “Kino to Distribute Artsploitation,” Home Media Magazine, April 4, 2013, http://www.homemediamagazine.com/studios/ kino-distribute-artsploitation-30090. E.g., Jonathan Rosenbaum’s arguments about how Hollywood systematically circumscribes which films are distributed and exhibited. See his Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See (Chicago: A Capella, 2000), esp. 39–48. Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 3, 28, 82, 106–122. See also Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 180–195. Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 193. Andrew Tudor charts a similar decline in the United Kingdom. See Andrew Tudor, “The Rise and Fall of the Art (House) Movie,” in The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing, ed. David Inglis and John Hughson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 125–138; especially 135–138. Reasons for this decline included the rise of the blockbuster and saturation releasing, new home video options, suburbanization and the incipient multiplex movement, and the overall decline in cinema attendance. Gomery, Shared Pleasures, 194–195. See J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Da Capo, 1991). The quotation is from page 23. See Joan Hawkins, “Let the Sweet Juices Flow: WR and Midnight Movie Culture,” in Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution, ed. Eric Schaefer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 151–175; here 159, 161, 162–163.

Notes to Pages 83–89 • 229 36

37

38

39

40 41

42

43

44 45

46

See ibid., 160. See also Eric Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 124–125. The term paracinema derives from Jeffrey Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” Screen 36.4 (1995): 371–393. For more on the program and the situation at Channel 4 and Film4 at the time, see Paul Kerr, “Channel 4, British Film Culture and Me,” Channel 4 and British Film Culture, January 12, 2011, http://www.c4film.co.uk/channel-4-british-film-cultureand-me. For more on which titles were shown, see the Channel 4 program notes available at the BUFVC website, n.d., accessed April 17, 2015, http://bufvc.ac.uk/ tvandradio/c4pp. See Nicole Lyn Pesce and Rachel Wharton, “With Movie Ticket Prices Rising, Get the Most for Your Money,” New York Daily News, May 25, 2008, http://www .nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/movie-ticket-prices-rising-moneyarticle-1.333416; John Rockwell, “100 Movies a Day Without Insanity,” New York Times, February 22, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/22/movies/100movies-a-day-without-insanity.html. See “Karen Cooper Carte Blanche: 40 Years of Documentary Premieres at Film Forum,” MoMA, n.d., accessed July 9, 2014, http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/ films/1035; Kristin M. Jones, “The Art-House Maven,” Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB100014240527487040228045750 41243384304102. Michael Maggiore, interview with the author, April 9, 2014. Unless otherwise noted, all information and quotations from Maggiore derive from this source. Indeed, commentators on both sides of the Atlantic bemoan the surfeit of releases. See, for example, Manohla Dargis, “As Indies Explode, an Appeal for Sanity,” New York Times, January 9, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/movies/ flooding-theaters-isnt-good-for-filmmakers-or-filmgoers.html?_r=0; Nick Clark, “British Film Institute: ‘Twenty-three Films Released in One Day? Stop the Madness,’” The Independent, May 1, 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/films/news/british-film-institute-twentythree-films-releasedin-one-day-stop-the-madness-10220046.html?origin=internalSearch. See Charles R. Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 65. See also Drake, “Distribution and Marketing in Contemporary Hollywood,” 72. See also Andrew Hindes and Monica Roman, “Video Titles Do Pitstops on Screens,” Variety, September 16, 1996, 16. See Charles Acland, “Theatrical Exhibition: Accelerated Cinema,” in The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, ed. Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 94. See also 83. Acland, Screen Traffic, 23. See also Drake, “Distribution and Marketing in Contemporary Hollywood,” 67. Geoff Lealand, “A Nation of Film-Goers: Audiences, Exhibition, and Distribution in New Zealand,” in Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-Going, Exhibition and Reception, ed. Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), 141–155; here 144. See the consultancy report on British arthouse cinemas, KPMG, Film Council Specialised Exhibition and Distribution Strategy (2002), accessed July 20, 2014, http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/uk-film-council-kpmgreport-contents-and-executive-summary.pdf. See also Ian Huffer, “‘A Popcorn-Free

230 • Notes to Pages 89–91

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48 49

50 51 52

53

54

55

56 57

Zone’: Distinctions in Independent Film Exhibition in Wellington, New Zealand,” in Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-Going, Exhibition and Reception, ed. Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), 279–294; here 291. See also Josh L. Dickey, “Bizzers Optimistic About H’wood Possibilities,” Variety, December 5, 2012, http://variety.com/2012/film/news/bizzers-optimistic-abouth-wood-possibilities-1118063215/. In a forum on the future of film, Tom Bernard, co-founder of boutique arthouse division Sony Pictures Classics, said that “All I know is, we’re screwed when the Baby Boomers die out.” See Janna Jones, “The VHS Generation and Their Movie Experiences,” in Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-Going, Exhibition and Reception, ed. Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), 387–401; here 389, 395. See “Menu,” Nitehawk Cinema, n.d., accessed July 11, 2014, http://www.nitehawk cinema.com/menu/. See also Sandy Smith, “NoLibs Civic Still Concerned About TLA Movie Theater,” Philadelphia Magazine, February 26, 2014, http://www.phillymag.com/property/ 2014/02/26/nolibs-civic-still-concerned-tla-movie-theater/#more-2208961. Acland, “Theatrical Exhibition,” 94. Ibid., 86 and quote on 95. See also Drake, “Distribution and Marketing in Contemporary Hollywood,” 64. See also J. Hurtado, “A SERBIAN FILM Due on Limited Edition Blu-Ray from Invincible Pictures 10/25,” Twitch, July 30, 2011, http://twitchfilm.com/2011/ 07/a-serbian-film-due-on-limited-edition-blu-ray-from-invincible-pictures-1025 .html. For more on Curzon and its corporate strategies, see Christopher Williams, “Curzon Cinema Group Bids to Become the Apple of Independent Film,” Daily Telegraph, June 7, 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/ mediatechnologyandtelecoms/digital-media/10883771/Curzon-cinema-groupbids-to-become-the-Apple-of-independent-film.html. See Ian Mohr, “War of the Windows,” Variety, June 26, 2005, http://variety. com/2005/digital/news/war-of-the-windows-1117925067/. For more on the challenges of day-and-date releasing for independent distributors, see Chris O’Falt, “The 3 Biggest Problems Indies Face with Day-and-Date Releasing,” Hollywood Reporter, December 19, 2013, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ news/3-biggest-problems-indies-face-666871. For more on FlixFling, see “Invincible Pictures Has Apps to Buy, Rent Films,” Hollywood Reporter, November 9, 2009, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ news/invincible-pictures-apps-buy-rent-91085; “Thomas Ashley Interview: Bringing Digital Distribution to Indie Filmmakers,” Film Slate, n.d., accessed July 5, 2014, http://www.filmslatemagazine.com/interviews/thomas-ashley-bringing-digitaldistribution-to-indie-filmmakers; Hedi Khorsand, “Invincible Pictures CEO Tom Ashley Launches FlixFling,” Independent Film Quarterly, n.d., accessed July 5, 2014, http://independentfilmquarterly.com/index.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26 task%3Dview%26id%3D847%26Itemid%3D119; Carole Horst, “Cannes: FlixFling Bows Acquisition Fund,” Variety, May 16, 2014, http://variety.com/2014/film/ markets-festivals/cannes-flixfling-bows-acquistion-fund-1201183594/. In interview, Raymond Murray spoke of the “double-whammy” demise of the art film and video stores. Other interviews confirmed this impression. Raymond Murray complained that Netflix refuses to carry many films that show nudity and only pays $5,000–$50,000 per title.

Notes to Pages 92–96 • 231 58

59 60

61

62

See Acland, “Theatrical Exhibition,” 95, 88; see also Acland, Screen Traffic, 74, which demonstrates North American city-dwellers’ significantly higher rates of cinema attendance. The quotation derives from ibid., 46. Hayashi, “The Fantastic Trajectory of Pink Art Cinema from Stalin to Bush,” 48, 55. Keith Heffernan, “Art House or House of Exorcism? The Changing Distribution and Reception Contexts of Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil,” in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, ed. Jeffrey Sconce (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 144–163. Martin Barker et al., Audiences and Receptions of Sexual Violence in Contemporary Cinema (Aberystwyth: University of Wales, 2007), 127. Indeed, this fact, according to Barker and his team, “makes discussion of cuts a truly global phenomenon, and much discussion centres on how to get hold of the most complete version—also a global process. Knowing how to go about this marks a distinction between the serious Asian cinema fan,” and, one might generalize, a connoisseur of the extreme. See, for example, Perren, “Rethinking Distribution,” 167; see also Jordan Levin, “An Industry Perspective: Calibrating the Velocity of Change,” in Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, ed. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 256–263.

Chapter 5 The Interpretations of Regulation 1

2

3

4 5

6

See Michaela Boland, “Officials Ban ‘Baise-Moi,’” Variety, May 20, 2002, 8; Tamsen Tillson, “Ontario Keeps ‘Rape’ from Audiences’ Eyes,” Variety, November 20, 2000, 44; David Fickling, “Restricted Viewing,” The Guardian, July 7, 2003, http:// www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jul/07/worlddispatch.filmcensorship; Jack Stevenson, Lars von Trier (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 131–132; “Film Censor Bans The Idiots,” IFTN, October 28, 1999, http://www.iftn.ie/?act1 =record&aid=73&rid=2732&sr=1&only=1&hl=ifi&tpl=archnews. Former Tartan Films head Hamish McAlpine has spoken of the “many battles” he fought with the BBFC. See Ferry Hunt, “Hamish McAlpine Talks Tartan,” Take One, October 24, 2011, http://www.takeonecff.com/2011/ ferry-hunt-in-conversation-with-hamish-mcalpine. See Julian Petley, Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 1; Kevin Rockett, Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004). See W. Richard Scott, Institutions and Organizations: Ideas, Interests, and Identities, 4th rev. ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2014), 123. See, for example, Daniel Biltereyst and Roel Vande Winkel, eds., Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship Around the World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Saw Tiong Guan, Film Censorship in the Asia-Pacific Region (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). These differences stretch from the MPAA’s relative strength as the mouthpiece for the Hollywood majors (versus the BBFC’s near extinction in the late 1990s) to the slight incompatibility of the respective top ratings. In addition, as scholars and critics have often noted while comparing US and European film censorship, the MPAA has traditionally been more relaxed about violence and stricter regarding sexual depictions. This complaint is perennial and ubiquitous. See, for example, Stephen Farber, The Movie Rating Game (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press,

232 • Notes to Pages 96–99

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12 13

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17

1972); Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 64–65, 259–260; and the many critics’ invectives on the issue collected in Flesh and Blood: The National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence, and Censorship, ed. Peter Keough (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1995). See, for example, Kate Egan, Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Gavin Smith, “Letter from the Editor,” Film Comment 36.6 (2000): 2; Gary Susman, “How Hollywood Responded to the Sandy Hook School Shooting,” Rolling Stone, May 7, 2013, http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/ how-hollywood-responded-to-the-sandy-hook-school-shooting-20130507. See “Advisory, Better Than Rigid, Classing,” Variety, March 22, 1967, 13. See also Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 148–149, as well as Justin Wyatt, “The Stigma of X: Adult Cinema and the Institution of the MPAA Ratings System,” in Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era, ed. Matthew Bernstein (London: Athlone, 2000), 238–263. See further “MPAA’s New Code & Rating Rules,” Variety, October 9, 1968, 8; Stuart Byron, “Though Unintended, ‘X’ Still Is Taken as ‘Dirty’ or Shoddy’ [sic]; This Condition a Poser for Valenti,” Variety, February 26, 1969, 7, 70. See Byron, “Though Unintended,” 7, 70. “Critics Are Useful Sometimes; Paramount Cites Its Reviews on ‘If ’; Hope to Erase That X,” Variety, March 26, 1969, 3; Farber, The Movie Rating Game, 47–48. See “MPAA Film Ratings: 1968–81,” 36. See also Wyatt, “The Stigma of X,” 244; Gary Arnold, “Angel Heart and Lethal Weapon,” in Flesh and Blood: The National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence, and Censorship, ed. Peter Keough (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1995), 334–340; esp. 334. Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core, 188–189. Sian Barber, “More Than Just a ‘Nasty’ Decade: Classifying the Popular in the 1980s,” in Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age, ed. Edward Lamberti (London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 110–123; here 111. David J. Fox, “X Film Rating Dropped and Replaced by NC-17,” Los Angeles Times, September 27, 1990, http://articles.latimes.com/1990–09–27/news/mn-1406_1_rrated-films. All further quotations in this paragraph derive from this source. Speaking to Variety in 1998, Philip Kaufman, the director of the first NC-17 film Henry and June (1990), reflected on the failure of the system. See Christopher Stern, “Cheers, Jeers on Ratings Code Birthday,” Variety, November 2, 1998, 7, 14. See also Rainer, “Was It Really the Last Tango?”; Andy Klein, “Censorship and Self-Regulation,” in Flesh and Blood: The National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence, and Censorship, ed. Peter Keough (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1995), 307–314; Peter Travers, “Bad Lieutenant,” in Flesh and Blood: The National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence, and Censorship, ed. Peter Keough (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1995), 348–349 (originally published in Rolling Stone, November 26, 1992). Elaine Dutka, “NC-17 Comes Out from Hiding,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2004, http://articles.latimes.com/2004/apr/20/entertainment/et-dutka20. In this paragraph, all further quotations come from this source. “Ratings History,” MPAA, n.d., accessed February 26, 2014, http://www.mpaa.org/ ratings/ratings-history.

Notes to Pages 99–105 • 233 18

19

20

21

22

23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42

Quoted in Travers, “The Ratings Game,” 354. For more on the court case, see Kevin S. Sandler, The Naked Truth: Why Hollywood Doesn’t Make X-Rated Movies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 102–105. Among the many commentaries in this vein, see, for example, Dutka, “NC-17 Comes Out from Hiding”; Peter Travers, “The Ratings Game,” in Flesh and Blood: The National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence, and Censorship, ed. Peter Keough (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1995), 349–352 (originally published in Us, August 1992). Robin Duval, “‘The Last Days of the Board,’” in Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age, ed. Edward Lamberti (London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 146–158; here 147. In responses to outraged members of the public who wrote letters regarding The Devils, BBFC boss Stephen Murphy maintained that Britain boasted the strictest censorship in Europe, besides the dictatorships in Spain and Portugal. See BBFC File: The Devils. See Julian Petley, “Head-On Collisions: The BBFC in the 1990s,” in Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age, ed. Edward Lamberti (London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 127–142; here 135. See Petley, Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain, 135; Petley, “Head-On Collisions,” 137–138. Duval, “‘The Last Days of the Board,’” 147. Ibid., 153. Ros Hodgkiss, “‘Being a Censor Drives You Mad. It’s Not the Material That Corrupts. It’s the Job,’” The Guardian, November 20, 1998, http://www.theguardian .com/film/1998/nov/20/features. All further quotations in this paragraph derive from this source. Duval, “‘The Last Days of the Board,’” 153. Ibid., 153–154. Ibid., 153. My emphasis added. Ibid., 154. Linda Ruth Williams, “The Edge of the Razor,” Sight and Sound, October 1999, 13. See Stern, “Cheers, Jeers,” 14. Cf. “Policy & Research,” MPAA, n.d., accessed March 2, 2014, http://www.mpaa .org/policy; “Research,” BBFC, n.d., accessed March 2, 2014, http://www.bbfc .co.uk/what-classification/research. Duval, “‘The Last Days of the Board,’” 150. Ibid., 149. Quoted in the interview with Duval reprinted in Petley, Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain, 164. Originally published as Julian Petley, “Raising the Bar,” Sight and Sound, December 2001, 30–32. See Robin Duval, “Introduction,” in Pam Hanley, Sense and Sensibilities: Public Opinion and the BBFC Guidelines (London: BBFC, 2000), 2–3; here 2. See Hanley, Sense and Sensibilities; the quotation is Duval’s from “‘The Last Days of the Board,’” 150. Hanley, Sense and Sensibilities, 2–3. Ibid., 4, 19–20, 23, 24. Duval, “‘The Last Days of the Board,’” 150. Hanley, Sense and Sensibilities, 5, 26.

234 • Notes to Pages 106–108

43

44 45

46 47

48

49

50

51 52

53 54 55

See Mark Kermode, “The British Censors and Horror Cinema,” in British Horror Cinema, ed. Julian Petley and Steve Chibnall (London: Routledge, 2001), 10–22; here 21. There is no space here to go into detail about these reports. A good summary is provided in Petley, Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain, 180–196. See, for example, A. L. Finestone, “Foreign and ‘Sex Hygiene’ Films Invite New Decency Offensive,” Boxoffice, December 11, 1938, 12. See also Eric Schaefer’s discussion in “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 158–160. See, for example, Travers, “The Ratings Game,” 351. Quoted in Jay Carr, “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!,” in Flesh and Blood: The National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence, and Censorship, ed. Peter Keough (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1995), 345–347; here 345. See also Travers, “The Ratings Game,” 353; Sandler, The Naked Truth, 94–106. Simon Brown, “Censorship Under Siege: The BBFC in the Silent Era,” in Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age, ed. Edward Lamberti (London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 3–14; here 5–6. Tracy Hargreaves, “The Trevelyan Years: British Censorship and 1960s Cinema,” in Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age, ed. Edward Lamberti (London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 53–68; here 53. For a statement by Nicholls about how the board must change with the times, see Steve Chibnall, “From The Snake Pit to The Garden of Eden: A Time of Temptation for the Board,” in Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age, ed. Edward Lamberti (London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 29–49; here 42. Stevie Simkin, Straw Dogs (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 40. The pamphlet Simkin refers to was called “Censorship in Great Britain” and is quoted in Forsyth Hardy, “Censorship and Film Societies,” in Footnotes to the Film, ed. Charles Davy (London: Lovat Dickson, 1938), 264–278; here 267. John Trevelyan, “Film Censorship in Great Britain,” Screen 11.3 (1970): 19–30; here 24–25. To be sure, the board has traditionally been conservative with martial arts violence. Because of long-standing legislation against the depictions of animal cruelty, images of bullfighting or Asian films that depict eating live creatures, for example The Isle (Seom, 2000), have also been cut. These exceptions prove the rule. For more on martial arts violence, see Stevie Simkin, “Wake of the Flood: Key Issues in UK Censorship, 1970–5,” in Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age, ed. Edward Lamberti (London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 72–86; here 72, 80. For more on depictions of animals in East Asian films, see Duval, “‘The Last Days of the Board,’” 157; David Cooke, “The Director’s Commentary,” in Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age, ed. Edward Lamberti (London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 162–177; here 172. Mark Kermode, “Left on the Shelf,” Sight and Sound, July 2001, 26. See also Kermode, “The British Censors and Horror Cinema,” 21. A. C. Grayling, “The Censorship of Oral Sex,” The Guardian, May 17, 2001, http:// www.theguardian.com/world/2001/may/17/gender.uk1. Martin Barker et al., Audiences and Reception of Sexual Violence in Contemporary Cinema (Aberwystwyth: University of Wales, 2007), 191.

Notes to Pages 108–115 • 235 56

57

58

59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Martin Barker, “‘Typically French’?: Mediating Screened Rape to British Audiences,” in Rape in Art Cinema, ed. Dominique Russell (New York: Continuum, 2010), 145–158; here 157. Melanie Selfe, “‘Incredibly French’?: Nation as an Interpretive Context for Extreme Cinema,” in Je t’aime . . . moi non plus: Franco-British Cinematic Relations, ed. Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), 153–167; here 159, 163. Andreas Whittam Smith and Robin Duval, “The Cinema Film of Romance Has Been Classified by the BBFC as ‘18’ Without Cuts, for Adult Audiences,” BBFC, July 29, 1999, accessed February 26, 2014 via the Wayback Machine, http://web .archive.org/web/20081012075431/http://www.bbfc.co.uk/news/press/19990729 .html. See, for example, “BBFC Passes IRREVERSIBLE Uncut for Adult Cinema Audiences,” BBFC, October 21, 2002, accessed March 2, 2014 via the Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20080908012323/http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ news/press/20021021.html. Examiner’s Report (I), June 19, 1986, BBFC File: Betty Blue. Examiner’s Report (II), June 19, 1986, BBFC File: Betty Blue. Examiner’s Report, June 21, 1971, BBFC File: WR—Mysteries of the Organism. David Harlech to John Trevelyan, June 29, 1971, BBFC File: WR—Mysteries of the Organism. David Godin to John Trevelyan, July 24, 1971, BBFC File: The Devils. Cooke, “The Director’s Commentary,” 176. Quoted in Kermode, “Left on the Shelf,” 26. BBFC, Annual Report 1999 (London: BBFC, 2000), 4. Duval, “‘The Last Days of the Board,’” 155. Duval interviewed in Petley, Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain, 167. Duval, “‘The Last Days of the Board,’” 155. Duval interviewed in Petley, Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain, 167–168. Duval interviewed in ibid., 168. Cooke, “The Director’s Commentary,” 164. Ibid., 162. “9 Songs,” BBFC, n.d., accessed February 25, 2014, http://www.bbfc.co.uk/ case-studies/9-songs. Caitlin O’Brien, “Case Study: 9 Songs (2004),” in Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age, ed. Edward Lamberti (London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 178–179; here 178. Examiner’s Report, June 9, 2004, BBFC file: 9 Songs. Quoted in O’Brien, “Case Study: 9 Songs (2004),” 178. Duval, “‘The Last Days of the Board,’” 154–155; O’Brien, “Case Study: 9 Songs (2004),” 178. Cooke, “The Director’s Commentary,” 162. Ibid. Examiner’s Report, June 21, 1971, BBFC File: WR—Mysteries of the Organism. Examiner’s Report (II), June 19, 1986, BBFC File: Betty Blue. Examiner’s Report, February 7, 1992, BBFC File: Betty Blue. Ibid. Examiner’s Report, February 9, 1988, BBFC File: The Devils. Examiner’s Report, November 11, 1992, BBFC File: Mikey. Examiner’s Report, n.d., BBFC File: Mikey.

236 • Notes to Pages 115–118

88 John Trevelyan, What the Censor Saw (London: Michael Joseph, 1973), 115–116.

89 90 91

92 93 94 95

96

97 98

99 100

When a local government official asked Trevelyan’s successor Stephen Murphy to explain the BBFC’s sanction of Emmanuelle (1974), he responded that the board was “reinforced in the view that this was the right course by the fact that the national press seem to see it as a film of some merit” (quoted in Simkin, “Wake of the Flood,” 86). British critics’ interpretation of cultural distinction, it would seem, justified classification. See interview with Duval in Petley, Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain, 168. BBFC, Annual Report 2008 (London: BBFC, 2009), 87. In her squib, former examiner Ros Hodgkiss attacked BBFC chief James Ferman for his idiosyncratic classifications: “The specific censorship vocabulary, the policies, the peculiar working practices, were all Ferman’s. Logic and argument were subject to the whim of the director, who regularly overturned decisions.” According to Hodgkiss, Ferman “would announce the ‘truth’ of a film, a definitive interpretation. He congratulated himself on his Leavisite training, and wanted linear narrative and clear morality. Michael Hanneke’s [sic] Funny Games [1997] was ‘unremitting sadism.’ A treatise on ‘cool violence’ waylaid debate on Dobermann [1997].” As much as Ferman’s hermeneutics perturbed Hodgkiss, she opined in 1998 that “the appointment of Andreas Whittam Smith does not bode well. Whittam Smith lacks Ferman’s film literacy. During a screening of Dobermann he asked what LS (long shot) and postmodernism meant” (Hodgkiss, “‘Being a Censor Drives You Mad’”). This passage suggests Hodgkiss in fact considered interpretation to be a proper BBFC task. Ultimately, she advocates a brand of interpretation informed by the vocabularies of film form and cultural theory, and codified by protocols of good practice. Cooke, “The Director’s Commentary,” 163–164. These are the words of BBFC press officer Sue Clark, quoted in Melanie Williams, “9 Songs,” Film Quarterly 59.3 (2006): 59–63; here 60. Cooke, “The Director’s Commentary,” 164. Examiner’s Report, February 9, 1988, BBFC File: The Devils; Examiner’s Report (II), June 19, 1986, BBFC File: Betty Blue; Examiner’s Report, December 28, 1984, BBFC File: The Driller Killer. The last source is quoted in Barber, “More Than Just a ‘Nasty’ Decade,” 113. See “NC-17 to R: How 14 Movies Made the Cuts,” Entertainment Weekly, December 7, 2011, http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20483133_20550449_21088162,00. html#21088162; Peirce quoted in “Editorial: Do We Really Need Movie Ratings?,” Cineaste 32.1 (2006): 1; see also Gavin Smith, “Letter from the Editor,” Film Comment 36.6 (2000): 2; David Hochman, “Putting the R in Park,” Entertainment Weekly, July 9, 1999, http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,272257,00.html. Evan Rachel Wood expressed outrage when the MPAA requested cuts to a Charlie Countryman (2013) scene in which her character receives oral sex. See Alice Jones, “Violence Is Good. Female Sexuality Bad,” The Independent, November 30, 2013, 29. Travers, “The Ratings Game,” 352–353. See David M. Halbfinger, “Rating (and Finding) the Movie Raters,” New York Times, January 16, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/movies/ MoviesFeatures/16unra.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Kevin S. Sandler, “The Future of U.S. Censorship Studies,” Velvet Light Trap 63 (2009): 69–71. See Examiner’s Report, February 6, 1990, BBFC File: The Devils: “Sadly cut from the film version, by some 4 minutes, and identical to the version passed for video,

Notes to Pages 118–121 • 237

101 102

103

104 105 106

107 108

109

110 111 112

there seems to me to be no hindrance against passing for satellite broadcast. . . . In all these areas significant cuts have been made over and above the film version. From this perspective one can see how regrettable such temporary expedience can be. It is only the privileged few who can get to London or regional film theatres to see complete versions of work. Sad that classics such as this one cannot sit unbowlderised on book shelves in video form. But enough. Pass ‘18’ no cuts. 11 pm time ban recommended.” See interview with Duval reprinted in Petley, Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain, 171. The BBFC has claimed that it has difficulties to “gauge the importance of letters written in response to media coverage, since they tend to reflect the effectiveness of journalistic argument rather than the acceptability of the work itself in the form in which it was classified. What they do measure is the temperature of public opinion, and the Board can never ignore such moods, however transitory, since they may well determine the level of public confidence in the Board’s decision-making.” BBFC, Annual Report 1996–97 (London: BBFC, 1997), appendix II, 5. Andreas Whittam Smith, “The BBFC Has Announced New Film Classifications for Teens But Can the Ratings War Be Won?,” The Independent, January 15, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/the-bbfchas-announced-new-film-classifications-for-teens-but-can-the-ratings-war-bewon-9062688.html. See Kermode, “Left on the Shelf,” 26; Petley, Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain, 162; Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, 417. Petley, Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain, 3–4. See Charles Acland, “Theatrical Exhibition: Accelerated Cinema,” in The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, ed. Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 88; see also Charles R. Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 30. The “quantity of ‘R18’ submissions rocketed,” Duval recollected. See Duval, “‘The Last Days of the Board,’” 150. Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core, 6. For similar arguments, see also Stuart Klawans, “Warner Bros Before the Code,” in Flesh and Blood: The National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence, and Censorship, ed. Peter Keough (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1995), 302–307; here 304 (originally published in The Nation, February 14, 1994); Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!,” 37, 144; Sandler, The Naked Truth. When adjudicating Miramax’s suit on behalf of Almodóvar against the MPAA, Judge Ramos questioned the distributors’ motives, claiming that the exploitation of the original X rating in their marketing “leads to the inference that this proceeding may just be publicity.” Quoted in Sandler, The Naked Truth, 103. See Richard Falcon, “Reality Is Too Shocking,” Sight and Sound, January 1999, 10–13; here 13. Barker et al., Audiences and Receptions of Sexual Violence in Contemporary Cinema, executive summary, 3. For the role of “the original” among extreme cinema audiences, see Melanie Selfe, “Inflected Accounts and Irreversible Journeys,” Participations 5.1 (2008), http:// www.participations.org/Volume%205/Issue%201%20-%20special/5_01_selfe.htm. For a review of the phenomenon in general, see Vinzenz Hediger, “The Original Is Always Lost: Film History, Copyright Industries and the Problem of Reconstruction,” in Cinephilia: Movies, Love, and Memory, ed. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 133–147.

238 • Notes to Pages 122–124

Chapter 6 The Added Value of International Distribution 1

2 3 4

5 6

7

8 9

10

11

12

Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63; here 28. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), 13. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1983 [1978]), 3, 7, 208, 38–39, 118–119, 205–206, 180. See, for example, Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) or Rey Chow, Ethics After Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity, Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). For an overview of the vast scholarship to engage with Orientalism, see Daniel Martin Varisco, Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007). For a critical assessment of Said from a film studies perspective, see Michael Richardson, Otherness in Hollywood Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2010), 8–9. See also Homay King, Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 35. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have noted, even in Said’s conceptions of orientalism, a recurrent ambivalence emerges: “the ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon the low-Other . . . but also that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life.” Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), 5. Matthew Bernstein, “Introduction,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, ed. Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 1–18; here 3, 11. Said, Orientalism, 26. Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 64, 68. For another example, from the Australian context, see Mischa Barr, “Sex, Art and Sophistication: The Meanings of ‘Continental’ Cinema,” Journal of Australian Studies 33.1 (2009): 1–18. See Mattias Frey, “Cultural Problems of Classical Film Theory: Béla Balázs, ‘Universal Language’ and the Birth of National Cinema,” Screen 51.4 (2010): 324–340; esp. 336ff. Martin Barker, “‘Typically French’? Mediating Screened Rape to British Audiences,” in Rape in Art Cinema, ed. Dominique Russell (New York: Continuum, 2010), 145–158; here 145–146, 158, 154. See also Melanie Selfe, “‘Incredibly French’?: Nation as an Interpretive Context for Extreme Cinema,” in Je t’aime . . . moi non plus: Franco-British Cinematic Relations, ed. Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010), 153–167; Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley, French Film in Britain: Sex, Art, and Cinephilia (Oxford: Berghahn, 2013). Ingrid Stigsdotter, “‘Very Funny If You Can Keep Up with the Subtitles’: The British Reception of Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (Amélie),” in France at the Flicks: Trends in Contemporary French Popular Culture, ed. Darren Waldron

Notes to Pages 125–129 • 239

13 14

15

16

17

18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26

and Isabelle Vanderschelden (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 198–211; here 204, 207–208. Focus group member “Ken,” quoted in Selfe, “‘Incredibly French’?,” 156. Selfe, “‘Incredibly French’?,” 164. See also Martin Barker et al., Audiences and Receptions of Sexual Violence in Contemporary Cinema (Aberystwyth: University of Wales, 2007), 127–129, 138–139, 145–146. See also Melanie Selfe, “Inflected Accounts and Irreversible Journeys,” Participations 5.1 (2008), http://www .participations.org/Volume%205/Issue%201%20-%20special/5_01_selfe.htm. See Chuck Kleinhans, “Cross-Cultural Disgust: Some Problems in the Analysis of Contemporary Horror Cinema: Part One: Notes on Cross-Cultural Disgust,” Jump Cut 51 (2009), http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/crosscult Horror/index.html; Chuck Kleinhans, “Cross-Cultural Disgust: Some Problems in the Analysis of Contemporary Horror Cinema: Part Two: Re-Writing Disgust,” Jump Cut 52 (2010), http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc52.2010/Kleinhans Disgust2/. (The quotation is from “Part One.”) Daniel Martin, “Between the Local and the Global: ‘Asian Horror’ in Ahn Byung-ki’s Phone and Bunshinsaba,” in Korean Horror Cinema, ed. Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 145–157; quote from 152. See also Chi-Yun Shin, “The Art of Branding: Tartan ‘Asia Extreme’ Films,” in Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, ed. Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo WadaMarciano (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 85–100; esp. 97–98. These are the words of Don Boyd, the co-founder of Tartan. Quoted in Geoffrey Macnab, “Death of a Salesman,” The Guardian, July 4, 2008, http://www .theguardian.com/film/2008/jul/04/filmandmusic1.filmandmusic1. McAlpine claimed that he was the largest creditor when Tartan went bankrupt. See Geoffrey Macnab, “Hamish McAlpine’s Generation Unveils Busy Production Slate,” Screen Daily, September 19, 2011, http://www.screendaily.com/hamish-mcalpinesgeneration-unveils-busy-production-slate/5032240.article; Stuart Kemp, “Cannes 2012: Hamish McAlpine Returns to Producing, Ready for a Riot (Exclusive),” Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2012, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ cannes-2012-hamish-mcalpine-returns-327027. See Liz Hoggard, “Too Much Verité . . . ,” The Observer, November 17, 2002, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2002/nov/17/features.review. Ibid. See Macnab, “Hamish McAlpine’s Generation Unveils Busy Production Slate.” See Shin, “The Art of Branding,” 86. Ryan Mottesheard, “DVD Quick Study: Tartan Takes ‘Extreme’ Route to Genre Success,” Variety, September 6, 2005, http://variety.com/2005/film/international/ dvd-quick-study-tartan-takes-extreme-route-to-genre-success-1117928653/. McAlpine revealed the link to Channel 4 in interview (see Shin, “The Art of Branding,” 229n12). According to Tartan press officer Paul Smith, however, the brand developed in response to critics, who were identifying trends of “extreme Japanese thrillers” and the like. See Daniel Martin, “Asia Extreme: The Marketing and Critical Reception of Cult Asian Cinema in the UK” (PhD diss., University of East Anglia, 2009), 109. Shin, “The Art of Branding,” 89. KPMG, Film Council Specialised Exhibition and Distribution Strategy (2002), 114–116. David Chute, “East Goes West: Cannes’ Asian Bent Underlines an Already Growing Global Appetite for Far East Pics,” Variety, May 10, 2004, 7, 10; here 10.

240 • Notes to Pages 129–134

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34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Quoted in Gary Needham, “Japanese Cinema and Orientalism,” in Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide, ed. Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 8–16; here 9. See Shin, “The Art of Branding,” 89–91. See also Martin, “Asia Extreme,” 141–184. Mottesheard, “DVD Quick Study: Tartan Takes ‘Extreme’ Route to Genre Success.” Ibid. Quoted in Shin, “The Art of Branding,” 92 McAlpine quoted in Chute, “East Goes West,” 10. Paul Smith quoted in Martin, “Asia Extreme,” 140. See Needham, “Japanese Cinema and Orientalism,” 9; Shin, “The Art of Branding,” 97–99; Manohla Dargis, “Sometimes Blood Really Isn’t Indelible,” New York Times, March 3, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/movies/03darg.html?_r=0. A few titles do not conform to the taxonomy of Asia Extreme DVD designs that I lay out: their exceptional status proves the rule. Action-thriller titles such as Divergence (Saam cha hau, 2005), Heroic Duo (Shuang xiong, 2003), and Infernal Affairs (Mou gaan dou, 2002) feature (usually two) men with pointed guns in front of modern architecture during the daytime. Thus, there is some differentiation according to genre. Eva Heller, Wie Farben wirken (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989), 89–111. The shapes and types of eyes in these (mostly Korean) productions furthermore highlight exoticized and desirable features. Alessandra de Rossi, the “eye” on the cover of the Singaporean film The Maid, is of Italian-Filipina descent. Lee YoungAe, the actress who played the title character in Lady Vengeance, is known for her supernaturally large eyes, so much so that plastic surgeons report that Korean women reference her above all other models when consulting for East Asian blepharoplasty, also known as “double eyelid surgery.” See “Plastic Surgery Getting Popular in S. Korea: Women Want to Look Like Actress Lee Young-Ae,” New York Daily News, April 23, 2012, http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/plasticsurgery-popular-s-korea-lot-women-celebrity-article-1.1066076. For more on Asian blepharoplasty and the special anatomic, cultural, and psychological considerations of East Asian plastic surgery patients, see John A. McCurdy and Samuel M. Lam, Cosmetic Surgery of the Asian Face, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Thieme, 2005), esp. 3–9. See also John P. DiMoia, Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and NationBuilding in South Korea Since 1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), esp. 6, 202–212. Martin, “Asia Extreme,” 144. See ibid., 146, 150. See Sheridan Prasso, The Asian Mystique (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), 87 and dust jacket. See Martin, “Asia Extreme,” 151. See Shin, “The Art of Branding,” 92. See Andrea G. Arai, “Killing Kids: Recession and Survival in Twenty-First-Century Japan,” Postcolonial Studies 6.3 (2003): 367–379; Martin, “Asia Extreme,” 123. Said, Orientalism, 180, 184–185, 187; see also 188, 190, and 207–208. Martin, “Asia Extreme,” 110, 111. Needham, “Japanese Cinema and Orientalism,” 9. Shin, “The Art of Branding,” 97–99. Martin makes a similar argument: “Problematically, the Asia Extreme concept elided the individual differences between national

Notes to Pages 134–138 • 241

46

47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55

cinemas, and branded film from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Thailand as homogenously ‘Asian’ in order to encourage brand loyalty and suggest a consistent product line.” See Martin, “Between the Local and the Global,” 152–153. Shin, “The Art of Branding,” 97. Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin make a similar argument in their “Introduction,” in Korean Horror Cinema, ed. Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 1–20; especially 10. Said, Orientalism, 284. Bernstein, “Introduction,” 11. Martin, “Asia Extreme,” 139. James Quandt, “Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema,” Artforum 42.6 (2004): 126–32; here 132. Joan Hawkins, “Culture Wars: Some New Trends in Art Horror,” Jump Cut 51 (2009), http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/artHorror/. See also Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See (Chicago: A Capella, 2000). Shin, “The Art of Branding,” 92. See Mottesheard, “DVD Quick Study: Tartan Takes ‘Extreme’ Route to Genre Success” and Shin, “The Art of Branding,” 86. Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, 3, 7. Said, Orientalism, 160.

Chapter 7 1 2

3

4

5 6

Sex, Violence, and Self-Exoticization

See, for example, Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). Translated and quoted in Ingrid Stigsdotter, “‘Very Funny If You Can Keep Up with the Subtitles’: The British Reception of Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (Amélie),” in France at the Flicks: Trends in Contemporary French Popular Culture, ed. Darren Waldron and Isabelle Vanderschelden (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 198–211; here 202. This feature marks cinema from its early days, e.g., the post–First World War German film industry’s push of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920) and other expressionist horror films. See Mike Budd, “The Moments of Caligari,” in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 7–119, here esp. 22–25. See Eric Schaefer, “‘I’ll Take Sweden’: The Shifting Discourse of the ‘Sexy Nation’ in Sexploitation Films,” in Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution, ed. Eric Schaefer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 207–234. See also Ingrid Stigsdotter and Tim Bergfelder, “Studying Cross-Cultural Marketing and Reception: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966),” in The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches, ed. James Chapman, Mark Glancy, and Sue Harper (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 215–228; here 220. See Eric Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!” A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 335–336. Quoted in Stigsdotter and Bergfelder, “Studying Cross-Cultural Marketing and Reception,” 220. Cf. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin 1983 [1978]), 12, 22: Orientalism “has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world”; it “responded more to the culture that produced it than to its putative object, which was also produced by the West.”

242 • Notes to Pages 138–143

7 8 9 10

11 12 13

14

15 16 17 18

19

20

21

22 23 24 25 26

27

Schaefer, “‘I’ll Take Sweden,’” esp. 221. Daniel Martin, “Asia Extreme: The Marketing and Critical Reception of Cult Asian Cinema in the UK” (PhD diss., University of East Anglia, 2009), 97–98. Yoshiharu Tezuka, Japanese Cinema Goes Global: Filmworkers’ Journeys (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), 26. See Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, rev. and ed. Annette Michelson (London: Scolar Press, 1979), 282. Cf. Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 223–233. Tezuka, Japanese Cinema Goes Global, 26, 45, 54. Ibid., 70. Nagisa Oshima, Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, 1956–1978, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Dawn Lawson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 260. See Burch, To the Distant Observer, 343; Peter Lehman, Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 181–184; Maureen Turim, The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 128; Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 196–198; Lúcia Nagib, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (London: Continuum, 2011), 177–215. Williams, Screening Sex, 188. Tezuka, Japanese Cinema Goes Global, 70, 17, 67–68. See Oshima, Cinema, Censorship, and the State, 15. Matthew Bernstein, “Introduction,” in Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, ed. Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 1–18; here 11. Dennis Lim, “Greetings from the Land of Feel-Bad Cinema,” New York Times, November 26, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/movies/261im. html?ref=movies&_r=0. All further quotations from this paragraph derive from this article. See Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck, “New Austrian Film: The Non-Exceptional Exception,” in New Austrian Film, ed. Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 1–17. The motivation for the edited volume is to complicate and thereby correct the prevailing perception in the Anglophone world of a “feel-bad“ Austrian cinema. Phil Hoad, “Austrian Cinema: A Province Shaped by Past Masters of Pessimism,” The Guardian, June 19, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/ jun/19/austrian-cinema-past-masters-pessimism. Martin Schweighofer, “Introduction,” in Austrian Films 2013—Review (Vienna: Austrian Film Commission, 2013), 4–5; here 4. Filmwirtschaftsbericht 2012: Facts and Figures (Vienna: Austrian Film Institute, 2012), 33–35; Statistical Yearbook 2013 (London: British Film Institute, 2013), 118. Filmwirtschaftsbericht 2012, 9, 96, 10; Statistical Yearbook 2013, 118, 133. All info on market share derives from Filmwirtschaftsbericht 2012, 96. Filmwirtschaftsbericht 2012, 31, 41; see also, for example, “Statistik—2013 im Kino,” Österreichisches Filminstitut, n.d., accessed November 23, 2013, http://www. filminstitut.at/de/oe-filme-im-kino-2013/. See Filmwirtschaftsbericht 2012, 69–80, esp. 70–71. See also Angelika Teuschl, Filmförderung und Filmfinanzierung in Österreich: Förderungen transparent auf einen Blick 2012 (Vienna: Austrian Film Institute, 2013).

Notes to Pages 143–151 • 243 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

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38 39

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42 43 44

45 46 47 48

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Huber quoted in Lim, “Greetings from the Land of Feel-Bad Cinema.” See “Zahlen!,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 23, 2001. My emphasis added. See “Film Institute: Tasks and Aims,” Österreichisches Filminstitut, n.d., accessed January 30, 2014, http://www.filminstitut.at/en/tasks-and-aims/. See “Förderung,” Film Fonds Wien, n.d., accessed January 30, 2014, http://www .filmfonds-wien.at/foerderung/foerderbereiche. Felix Josef, Robert Wittmann, and Karl Fisher, Potenziale für den österreichischen Film, project 1720/08, December 2008, 47. Ibid. See “Statistik: Ö 1981+,” Österreichisches Filminstitut, n.d., accessed January 30, 2014, http://www.filminstitut.at/de/besuchszahlen/. Josef et al., Potenziale für den österreichischen Film, 9–11, 66–96. See also Eugen Semrau, Marketingstrategien für den österreichischen Film (Vienna: Austrian Film Institute, 2000). Michael Haneke’s comment in his remarks after the screening of The Rebellion (Die Rebellion, 1993) at the cinema of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, October 18, 2007. Albert quoted in Lim, “Greetings from the Land of Feel-Bad Cinema.” See “Professoren bleiben an der Filmakademie unter sich,” Der Standard, August 30, 2011, http://diestandard.at/1314652582700/ Professoren-bleiben-an-der-Filmakademie-unter-sich. Martin Schweighofer, in conversation with the author at the Picturing Austrian Cinema conference, Cambridge University, September 22, 2014. Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie, “Introduction,” in The Cinema of Small Nations, ed. Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 1–19; here 15. See Mette Hjort, “Dogma 95: A Small Nation’s Response to Globalisation,” in Purity and Provocation: Dogma 95, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 31–47; quote from 38. David Martin-Jones and María Soledad Montañez, “Uruguay Disappears: Small Cinemas, Control Z Films, and the Aesthetics and Politics of Auto-Erasure,” Cinema Journal 53.1 (2013): 26–51; here 32, 27, 28, 30, 43, 32–34, 45–46. Hjort and Petrie, “Introduction,” 15. David Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 18. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Chow, Primitive Passions, 176–182. Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema, 16–17. Ibid., 17–18. In general, the concept resembles the notion of cultural discount, the belief that a film’s cultural specificity harms its commercial viability abroad. Some commentators in this vein even suggest that US film “has tapped into a universal popular language and accordingly floats above historical and cultural specificity.” See Charles R. Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 33–34. Jim Hillier, “US Independent Cinema since the 1980s,” in Contemporary American Cinema, ed. Linda Ruth Williams and Michael Hammond (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006), 247–249, 251–256, 258–264; here 248. Quoted in Martin-Jones and Soledad Montañez, “Uruguay Disappears,” 34.

244 • Notes to Pages 152–157

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56 57

58 59 60 61

62

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65 66 67

See Michael Haneke, “Film als Katharsis,” in Austria (in)felix: zum österreichischen Film der 80er Jahre, ed. Francesco Bono (Graz: Blimp, 1992), 89; see also Mattias Frey, “Michael Haneke: A Cinema of Disturbance,” 2nd rev. ed., Senses of Cinema 57 (2010), http://sensesofcinema.com/2010/great-directors/michael-haneke/. See, for example, Marcus Rothe, “Die Hölle sind wir selbst,” Berliner Zeitung, August 1, 2002; Marli Feldvoss, “Seelische Verwahrlosung,” Berliner Zeitung, August 1, 2002; Cristina Nord, “’Ich lebe mit meinen Figuren,’” taz, August 1, 2002; Oliver Rahayel, “In die Hölle schauen,” Film-Dienst 56.9 (2003): 12–14. Seidl makes the comparison to Bernhard in the Nord interview. See, for example, Stefan Grissemann, Sündenfall: Die Grenzüberschreitungen des Filmemachers Ulrich Seidl (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2007), 95–97, 142; Mattias Frey, “The Greatest of These Is Love: Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise Trilogy,” Artforum 51.10 (2013): 149–150. Philip French, “Michael,” The Observer, March 4, 2012, http://www.theguardian. com/film/2012/mar/04/michael-thriller-review-markus-schleinzer. Jonathan Romney, “Michael,” The Independent, March 4, 2012, http://www .independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/michael-markus-schleinzer94-mins-18–7528183.html. Nick Pinkerton, “What Lies Beneath: A Man, a Boy, and a Basement in Michael,” Village Voice, February 15, 2012, http://www.villagevoice.com/2012–02–15/film/ what-lies-beneath-a-man-a-boy-and-a-basement-in-michael/. Peter Bradshaw, “Michael,” The Guardian, March 1, 2012, http://www.theguardian .com/film/2012/mar/01/michael-review. Stephen Holden, “Through the Eyes of a Predator Acting Like a Parent,” New York Times, February 14, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/movies/michael-apedophiles-story-from-markus-schleinzer.html. Pinkerton, “What Lies Beneath.” Romney, “Michael.” Bradshaw, “Michael.” Mark Olsen, “No Point to Michael’s Queasy Premise,” Los Angeles Times, February 16, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/16/entertainment/ la-et-michael-20120216. Stanley Kauffmann, “Masters and Boys,” The New Republic, March 14, 2012, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/101722/ michael-kid-with-bike-dardenne-haneke. All quotations from Schleinzer in this paragraph derive from Thomas Dawson, “Ordinary Indecent Paedophile: Markus Schleinzer’s Michael,” Sight and Sound, November 21, 2013, http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/ ordinary-indecent-paedophile-markus-schleinzer-s-michael. All quotations from Schleinzer in this paragraph derive from Tom Seymour, “Markus Schleinzer Talks Michael,” Empire, n.d., accessed January 30, 2014, http://www.empireonline.com/interviews/interview.asp?IID=1471. See Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1989), 290–308, 87–90, 107–108. See Mattias Frey, Postwall German Cinema: History, Film History, and Cinephilia (Oxford: Berghahn, 2013). Although referring explicitly to Asian cinemas, Tezuka’s point obtains in a variety of national contexts: “it is not an exaggeration to say that now the degree of success for Asian filmmakers is measured by the prizes they have won in international film

Notes to Pages 157–160 • 245

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festivals, and performances at box offices globally.” They approach production with the “explicit goal of film festival prizes.” See Tezuka, Japanese Cinema Goes Global, vii, 28. See Hjort, “Dogma 95,” 38. See Steve Rose, “Attenberg, Dogtooth and the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema,” The Guardian, August 27, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/aug/27/ attenberg-dogtooth-greece-cinema; see also Maria-Paz Peirano-Olate, “Contemporary Chilean Cinema: Film Practices and Narratives of National Cinema within the Chilean ‘Cinematographic Community’” (PhD diss., University of Kent, 2015). See, for example, David O. Mahoney, “‘No Sex Please, We’re Irish,’” Film Ireland, January-February 2008, 12–14. Mahoney seeks to understand why sex is treated so seldom in Irish cinema, especially since the nation’s novelists and playwrights have traditionally been so forthright in their explorations of the topic. One example of such research is Ian Robert Smith’s investigations into Bollywood—and also German, Thai, Chinese, and US—remakes of Korean cinema. See Ian Robert Smith, “Oldboy Goes to Bollywood: Zinda and the Transnational Appropriation of South Korean ‘Extreme Cinema,’” in Korean Horror Cinema, ed. Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 187–197.

Chapter 8 Aesthetic Innovation and the Real 1

2

3

4

5 6 7

8

See, for example, Emily Greenhouse, “Did a Director Push Too Far?,” The New Yorker, October 24, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ culture/2013/10/did-a-director-push-too-far.html; Jonathan Romney, “Women in Love,” Sight and Sound, December 2013, 38–42. Manohla Dargis, “Seeing You Seeing Me,” New York Times, October 25, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/movies/the-trouble-with-blue-is-the-warmest-color.html?_r=0. Richard Brody, “The Problem with Sex Scenes That Are Too Good,” The New Yorker, November 4, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/ 2013/11/blue-is-the-warmest-color-movie-sex-scenes.html. Howard Hampton, “Whatever You Desire: Notes on Movieland and Pornotopia,” Film Comment 37.4 (2001): 36–45. I have already noted James Quandt’s infamous 2004 squib on contemporary (French) art cinema’s “spumes of sperm.” See James Quandt, “Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema,” Artforum 42.6 (2004): 126–132. Richard Corliss, “Films That Are Good in Bed,” Time, November 18, 2001, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,184984,00.html. Scott MacKenzie, “Baise-moi, Feminist Cinemas and the Censorship Controversy,” Screen 43.3 (2002): 315–324; here 316. Numerous scholars have worked on this era. See, for example, Steve Neale, “Art Cinema as Institution,” Screen 22.1 (1981): 11–39; Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 201–226; Tanya Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2006), 2ff.; Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 26–67. Besides the aforementioned articles, see Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema, 217–227; Williams, Screening Sex, 258–298; Jon Lewis, “Real Sex: Aesthetics and Economics

246 • Notes to Pages 160–169

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11

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13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21

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of Art-House Porn,” Jump Cut 51 (2009), http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/ jc51.2009/LewisRealsex/1.html; Beth Johnson, “Shortbus: Highbrow Hard-Core,” in Hard to Swallow: Hard-Core Pornography on Screen, ed. Claire Hines and Darren Kerr (London: Wallflower, 2012), 163–176. E.g., I Stand Alone (Seul contre tous, 1998); Sitcom (1998); Pola X (1999); The Center of the World (2001); Dog Days (Hundstage, 2001); The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin, 2001); and The Pornographer (Le pornographe, 2001). A sampling would include Japón (2002); Ken Park (2002); Secret Things (Choses secrètes, 2002); A Snake of June (Rokugatsu no hebi, 2002); The Brown Bunny (2003); The Dreamers (2003); The Principles of Lust (2003); Young Adam (2003); Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer, 2004); Antares (2004); A Hole in My Heart (Ett hål i mitt hjärta, 2004); 9 Songs (2004); The Raspberry Reich (2004); Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo, 2005); In Bed (En la cama, 2005); Lie with Me (2005); The Free Will (Der freie Wille, 2006); the compilation film Destricted (2006); Shortbus (2006); Import/Export (2007); Lust, Caution (2007); À l’aventure (2008); Serbis (2008); Antichrist (2009); Room in Rome (Habitación en Roma, 2010); Brownian Movement (2010); It Begins with the End (Ça commence par la fin, 2010); Leap Year (Año bisiesto, 2010); Q (2011); Shame (2011); Sleeping Beauty (2011); Call Girl (2012); Clip (Klip, 2012); Hemel (2012); Kelly + Victor (2012); Simon Killer (2012); Blue Is the Warmest Color; Stranger by the Lake (L’Inconnu du lac, 2013); Young & Beautiful (Jeune & jolie, 2013); and Nymphomaniac (2014). Setting aside the many close analyses of single productions, the most inspired essays on the larger topic remain Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema, 217–227; Williams, Screening Sex, 258–298; and especially Lewis, “Real Sex.” For a primer on amour fou, see André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987). Exceptions to this rubric prove the rule. Stranger by the Lake, for example, probes a male–male relationship. Williams, Screening Sex, 120, 188, 184. Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema, 62. Ibid., 224, 223. Williams, Screening Sex, 266. Margret Köhler, “Fremd ist jeder,” Berliner Morgenpost, February 1, 2001. This view is advanced in Lewis, “Real Sex.” The times are 8.23–18.26; 26.29–31.37; 33.21–34.00; 38.45–45.47; 45.48–46.35; 51.40–52.01; 53.02–55.49; 58.45–1.06.42; 1.14.16–1.15.37; 1.15.38–1.16.55; 1.18.46– 1.22.40; 1.27.33–1.34.19; 1.39.48–1.44.25. Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 36. The times are 0.34–0.44 (plus 12 seconds crosscut from the subsequent concert scene); 3.20–4.04; 5.09–5.45; 7.46–11.28; 13.16–13.47; 20.00–21.26; 25.45–26.23; 26.36–33.13; 36.25–37.28; 38.10–39.55; 40.45–42.30; 45.37–47.37; 47.38–49.41; 53.57–54.15; 56.46–1.00.02. Charlotte Higgins, “Cannes Screening for Most Sexually Explicit British Film,” The Guardian, May 17, 2004, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/may/17/ cannes2004.film. E.g., “Vanessa Cage Gives Great Blow Job,” YouPorn, September 28, 2013, accessed January 7, 2014, http://youporn.com/watch/8865016/vanessa-cage-gives-greatblow-job/?from=search_full&pos=26; “London Keys Gives a Great POV Blow Job,” YouPorn, December 31, 2009, accessed January 7, 2014, http://youporn.com/ watch/397961/london-keyes-gives-a-great-pov-blow-job/.

Notes to Pages 169–171 • 247 24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31

32 33

34 35

36

The first 2.03 minutes of “Vanessa Cage,” for example, are composed of three shots; the first 2.03 minutes of “London Keys” are composed of four shots; the full 1.51 minutes of “Ultimate Blow Job” are composed of six shots. Williams, Screening Sex, 23. Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema, 45. Cf. Lewis, “Real Sex,” and Williams, Screening Sex, 120. Tanya Horeck, “Shame and the Sisters: Catherine Breillat’s À Ma Soeur (Fat Girl),” in Rape in Art Cinema, ed. Dominique Russell (New York: Continuum, 2010), 195–209; here 197. Adrienne Angelo, “Sexual Cartographies: Mapping Subjectivity in the Cinema of Catherine Breillat,” Journal for Cultural Research 14.1 (2010): 43–55; here 43. See also Williams, Screening Sex, 112. Johnson, “Shortbus: Highbrow Hard-Core,” 163, 175. Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema, 222–223, 225. See also Johnson, “Shortbus: Highbrow Hard-Core,” 174: “Shortbus can be understood to acknowledge the contemporary and often contentious ‘place’ that hard-core inhabits in popular culture as well as making visible new technologies of pleasure that have helped to shape the ways in which sexual pleasure could, or more probably, should, be performed.” Tim Palmer, Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 62. “A film like Baise-moi, however, depicts sex (and violence) in a way that challenges the mediating framework of the film itself. Baise-moi could be considered pornographic insofar as it depicts graphic sex acts. Like the pornographic film, Baise-moi brings the viewer as close as possible to the sexual act on-screen. But Baise-moi refuses to frame these sex acts in either pornographic terms (as a utopian, utilitarian, and largely nonnarrative chronicle of sexual content presented for its own sake) or within a cautionary tale that so often defines porn-in-film. Cinematically, Baise-moi has far more in common with the road movie genre or the thriller or even the horror film. Thus the affective pleasures taken from a film like Baise-moi, such as they are, stem from shock, horror, and perhaps anger but not from the pornographic titillation and gratification of sexual voyeurism.” Catherine Zuromskis, “Prurient Pictures and Popular Film: The Crisis of Pornographic Representation,” Velvet Light Trap 59 (2007): 4–14; here 13n2. Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema, 42. Martin Barker’s investigation of extreme cinema audiences demonstrates that such rhetoric is endemic of what he calls “Embracers,” i.e., those viewers who choose to engage with (rather than simply reject), and usually defend, explicit arthouse cinema. Elaborating on viewer comments such as “in my experience, Breillat makes films that are not meant to be ‘enjoyed’ in the traditional sense, but rather analyzed and understood through thought and symbolism,” Barker concludes that these “Embracer comments capture two elements of Breillat’s working image: that of a brave boundary-pusher, and of an intellectually challenging filmmaker.” Such audiences responded to the explicit initiation scenario of Fat Girl as “a ‘statement’ by the director, rather than something conceivable for a young girl.” See Martin Barker, “‘Typically French’?: Mediating Screened Rape to British Audiences,” in Rape in Art Cinema, ed. Dominique Russell (New York: Continuum, 2010), 145–158; here 152. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” 2nd rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 48; see also Williams, Screening Sex, 352n96.

248 • Notes to Pages 171–175

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Williams, Screening Sex, 64. Lewis, “Real Sex.” Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema, 227. Lewis, “Real Sex.” Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema, 222. “Unsimulated Sex,” Wikipedia, n.d., accessed January 15, 2014, http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Unsimulated_sex#Films_with_non-simulated_sexual_activity; CinemaPat, “Sexually Explicit Films (Unsimulated and Simulated),” IMDB, January 20, 2011, http://www.imdb.com/list/SFWK_TERJc8/; jackhyde90, “The Most Sexually Explicit Movies . . . ,” IMDB, October 20, 2011, http://www.imdb.com/list/ LM3jI3xPjuM/; Lucia Peters, “9 Non-Porn Movies Featuring Real Sex,” Crushable, March 29, 2011, http://www.crushable.com/2011/03/29/entertainment/9-nonporn-movies-featuring-real-sex/; “List of Unsimulated Sex Movies,” Screened, n.d., http://www.screened.com/unsimulated-sex/27–36/movies/. See Tony Bennett et al., Culture, Class, Distinction (London: Routledge, 2009), 147–149. See V. A. Musetto, “Heaven Can’t Wait,” New York Post, February 26, 2006, http:// nypost.com/2006/02/26/heaven-cant-wait-2/. See Stuart Jeffries, “‘I Am the Opposite of Ashamed,’” The Guardian, January 24, 2005, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/jan/24/1. See Alexander Linklater, “Dangerous Liaisons,” The Guardian, June 22, 2001, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/jun/22/features.features11. The critical reception of the film, particularly at Cannes, was scathing. See Lisa Schwarzbaum, “Critic’s Choice,” Entertainment Weekly, June 6, 2003, http:// www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,455355,00.html; Roger Ebert, “The Brown Bunny,” RogerEbert.com, September 3, 2004, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ the-brown-bunny-2004. Randy Kennedy, “Vincent Gallo Dares You to See It (If You Can Find It),” New York Times, August 15, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/movies/filmvincent-gallo-dares-you-to-see-it-if-you-can-find-it.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm. Rebecca Murray, “Vincent Gallo Discusses the Very Adult Film, ‘The Brown Bunny,’” About.com, n.d., accessed January 9, 2014, http://movies.about.com/od/ thebrownbunny/a/bbunnyvg081904_4.htm. See Vanessa Thorpe, “Cannes Festival Draws Veil Over Erotic Film Starring Emmanuelle Béart and Michaël Cohen,” The Observer, May 16, 2010, http://www .theguardian.com/film/2010/may/16/french-love-film-unscreened-cannes. See Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 107; Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 92–97. Chris Warmoll, “Hamilton’s Naked Girl Shots Ruled ‘Indecent,’” The Guardian, June 23, 2005, http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2005/jun/23/photography.art. “One of the most extraordinary and sophisticated movies of 1992, the French import La Belle Noiseuse,” critic Gary Arnold wrote, “even hinged on the sustained nudity of its leading lady, Emanuelle Beart.” Gary Arnold, “Rating Erotic Thrillers,” in Flesh and Blood: The National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence, and Censorship, ed. Peter Keough (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1995), 354–358; here 358. See, for example, Nick Hasted, “Paradise Found and Lost,” The Guardian, August 5, 1999, http://www.theguardian.com/film/1999/aug/05/artsfeatures; Jamie Sexton,

Notes to Pages 175–180 • 249

55

56

57 58 59 60

61

“Prisoner of Cool: Chloë Sevigny, Alternative Stardom and Image Management,” in Cult Film Stardom: Offbeat Attractions and Processes of Cultification, ed. Kate Egan and Sarah Thomas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 73–89; here 73, 76. See Donna Kaufman, “Chloe Sevigny: Why I Won’t Do Any More Nude Scenes,” iVillage, December 20, 2010, http://www.ivillage.com/chloe-sevigny-why-iwont-do-any-more-nude-scenes/1-a-307893; Stephen Rebello, “20Q: CHLOË SEVIGNY,” Playboy, July 23, 2013, http://www.playboy.com/playground/view/ chloe-sevigny-playboy-interview. “Chloe’s Sex Scene Woes; Affleck Hints at NYE Wedding; Gandalf Snubbed at ‘Rings’ Premiere,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 31, 2003, http://www .sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Chloe-s-sex-scene-woes-Affleck-hints-atNYE-2544660.php; see also Sexton, “Prisoner of Cool,” 81. Cf. Manohla Dargis, “The Narcissist and His Lover,” New York Times, August 27, 2004, http://www .nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9B07E1D6133EF934A1575BC0A9629C8B63. Barker, “‘Typically French’?,” 157. Ibid., 158. Joel Black, The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative (New York: Routledge, 2002), 28. Emphasis in original. “Imaginary characters have to be endowed with bodies, faces, looks and voices. Bodies which are quite real, since they are those of the actors: the ones we see. The body filmed is not an imaginary body, even if the fiction refers it to some purely invented character and whatever the phantasies for which it is the support. It is not imaginary to the extent that we see its image and know, as soon as we are in the spectator’s place, that a real body, the actor’s, is required for there to be an image of a body. The body of the imaginary character is the image of the real body of the actor.” Jean-Louis Comolli, “Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much,” trans. Ben Brewster, Screen 19.2 (1978): 41–53; here 42. Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 39–40.

Chapter 9 A Discursive Approach to Hardcore Art Cinema 1

2 3 4 5 6

“At the Movies: Interview with Michael Winterbottom, the Director of 9 Songs,” At the Movies with Margaret and David, October 25, 2006, http://www.abc.net.au/ atthemovies/txt/s1358917.htm. See also an interview with Winterbottom originally published in the New York Times Magazine: “Porn has its own sensibility. . . . From the way it’s shot, to the lighting, to the way the characters look. You watch ten porn films and then watch 9 Songs, it’s pretty clear the difference.” Stephen Rodrick, “Michael Winterbottom Gets Naked,” in Michael Winterbottom: Interviews, ed. Damon Smith ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 71–81; here 76. Richard Porton, “Elusive Intimacy: An Interview with Patrice Chéreau,” Cineaste 27.1 (2001): 16–19; here 18. E.g., Haneke’s statements in Margret Köhler, “Fremd ist jeder,” Berliner Morgenpost, February 1, 2001. Porton, “Elusive Intimacy,” 18. “Interview with Margo Stilley,” 9 Songs, DVD, directed by Michael Winterbottom (2004; Optimum Releasing, 2005). Rodrick, “Michael Winterbottom Gets Naked,” 75. Similarly, Ken Park co-director Larry Clark, when queried about the explicit sex scenes, replied that they were

250 • Notes to Pages 181–184

7

8

9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22

“hard work” and emphasized that he rehearsed with the actors for an entire year. See Ken Park, DVD, directed by Larry Clark and Ed Lachman (2002; A-Film, 2003). Ben Child, “Blue Is the Warmest Colour Sex Scenes Are Porn, Says Author of Graphic Novel,” The Guardian, May 30, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/ film/2013/may/30/blue-warmest-colour-porn-julie-maroh; Kate Bussmann, “Léa Seydoux Interview for Blue Is the Warmest Colour,” Daily Telegraph, November 22, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/10430925/LeaSeydoux-interview-for-Blue-is-the-Warmest-Colour.html. See Gifted and Challenged: The Making of Shortbus, the documentary chronicling the making of his film, on Shortbus, DVD, directed by John Cameron (2006; The Works, 2006). Devin Faraci, “Exclusive Interview: John Cameron Mitchell (Shortbus),” CHUD, October 4, 2006, http://www.chud.com/7792/ exclusive-interview-john-cameron-mitchell-shortbus/. See Gifted and Challenged. Robert Sklar, “A Woman’s Vision of Shame and Desire: An Interview with Catherine Breillat,” Cineaste 25.1 (1999): 24–26; here 25–26. Linda Ruth Williams, “The Edge of the Razor,” Sight and Sound, October 1999, 12–14; here 14, 13. Bertrand Bonello wrote an open letter to the BBFC after the British censor cut a short sequence (in which a porn actor ejaculates onto the face of an actress) from his film The Pornographer. Bonello wrote: “You say that the shot is pornographic. I think [the] history of cinema taught us to look at the meaning of the image, more than at the image itself. We can see what damage can be done in some countries when we lose the meaning of an image.” Bonello went on to cite the FIPRESCI award the film won at Cannes, the prestigious journals and newspapers that published a glowing review or recommendation of “film of the year,” and mentioned that The Pornographer was exhibited at the French Cinémathèque. He listed the awards won by the cast members and the venerable auteurs with whom the actors previously worked, including Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Claire Denis. “All these people are pornographers,” Bonello concluded his letter ironically, “We are all pornographers.” The text of this letter is featured as an extra on The Pornographer, DVD, directed by Bertrand Bonello (2001; Tartan Video; 2002). Porton, “Elusive Intimacy,” 16, 18. See Faraci, “Exclusive Interview: John Cameron Mitchell (Shortbus)”; Gifted and Challenged. Amy Taubin, “Cultural Mash-Up,” Sight and Sound, May 2013, 29. Xan Brooks, “Dirty Business,” The Guardian, January 4, 2005, http://www.theguardian.com/film/2005/jan/04/2. Rebecca Murray, “Vincent Gallo Discusses the Very Adult Film, ‘The Brown Bunny,’” About.com, n.d., accessed January 9, 2014, http://movies.about.com/od/ thebrownbunny/a/bbunnyvg081904_4.htm. Ibid. Jang Sun-Woo, “Director’s Statement,” Lies, DVD, directed by Jang Sun-Woo (1999; Win Star TV & Video, 2001). See, for example, Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (London: Penguin, 2001), 49–50. See also the discussion in Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003), 101. Jang, “Director’s Statement.”

Notes to Pages 184–187 • 251 23

24 25 26 27 28

29 30

31

32

33

34 35 36 37

Oshima Nagisa, “Theory of Experimental Pornographic Film,” in Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, 1956–1978, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Dawn Lawson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 253. Ibid., 261. See “Gaspar Noé,” Sight and Sound, n.d., accessed January 14, 2014, http://explore .bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/voter/953. Murray, “Vincent Gallo Discusses the Very Adult Film, ‘The Brown Bunny.’” Brian McFarlane and Deanne Williams, Michael Winterbottom (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 23. James Brown, “Lights, Camera, Explicit Action,” The Independent, May 13, 2004, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/lights-cameraexplicit-action-6170035.html#. In the Realm of the Senses was first passed uncut by the BBFC in 2011, thirty-five years after its initial release. See Ben Hoyle, “After 35 Years, Change in Child Law Means Sex Film Can Be Seen in Full,” The Times, September 16, 2011, 27. Novo, DVD, directed by Jean-Pierre Limosin (2002; Tartan DVD, 2005). According to Linda Williams In the Realm of the Senses was a “breakthrough film” that realized what “Anglo-American and European critics and directors had only dreamed of doing.” Her aesthetic embrace considers the film as the “first example of feature-length narrative cinema anywhere in the world to succeed as both art and pornography—as both genital maximum visibility and the erotic subtleties of line, color, light and performance.” Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 184, 183. Stanley Kubrick, for example, has been said to have watched pornography and remarked, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if one day someone who was an artist would do that—using really beautiful actors and good equipment.” Mike Golden, “‘ . . . Now Dig This . . . ’ The Terry Southern: Interview,” Smoke Signals Magazine, n.d., accessed December 12, 2013, http://www.smokesignalsmag.com/ISSUE0/Interviews/terrysoutherninterview.htm. Quentin Tarantino, when asked about his “cinematic obsessions,” the “Everest” of artistic accomplishment, announced his desire to direct a 1970s-style European sex film: “I came up with the idea of like a cool sex movie that would take place in Stockholm, with a couple of Americans visiting a couple of Swedish friends.” See Sheryl Garratt, “Quentin Tarantino: No U-Turns,” Daily Telegraph, December 15, 2007, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3667943/ Quentin-Tarantino-No-U-turns.html. See also Nicolas Schaller, “Les Nouvelles frontières du X,” Première, April 2007, 58–67. Oshima, “Theory of Experimental Pornographic Film,” 257. See also Lúcia Nagib’s discussion in World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (London: Continuum, 2011), 177ff. On the Ken Park DVD, co-director Ed Lachman says that Americans fail to understand sex “because they don’t know the difference between predatory sex and nurturing sex.” Sklar, “A Woman’s Vision of Shame and Desire,” 24, 26. Jonathan Romney, “Women in Love,” Sight and Sound, December 2013, 38–42; here 40–41. V. A. Musetto, “Heaven Can’t Wait,” New York Post, February 26, 2006, http:// nypost.com/2006/02/26/heaven-cant-wait-2/. See “Dogma 95” and “Vow of Chastity,” P.O.V. 10 (2002), http://pov.imv.au.dk/ Issue_10/section_1/artc1A.html.

252 • Notes to Pages 188–203

38 39

40 41 42 43

44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55

56

57 58 59

Translated and quoted in Jack Stevenson, Lars von Trier (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 121. Simon Hattenstone, “A Joke or the Most Brilliant Film-maker in Europe?,” The Guardian, January 22, 1999, http://www.theguardian.com/film/1999/jan/22/ features2. See Julia Hallam, Realism and Popular Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 102–103. “At the Movies: Interview with Michael Winterbottom.” Brown, “Lights, Camera, Explicit Action.” Colin Fraser, “Michael Winterbottom: Genova,” in Michael Winterbottom: Interviews, ed. Damon Smith ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 135–143; here 143. André Bazin, “Marginal Notes on Eroticism in the Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? Volume 2, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 169–175; here 170. These debates have been continued by Williams and Nagib, among others. See the discussions in Williams, Screening Sex, 65; Nagib, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism, 177–181. See Hallam, Realism and Popular Cinema, xiii, 77, 5–6, 8, 110. See Lewis, “Real Sex.” Raymond Murray, interview with the author, April 4, 2014. Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), 8, 16, 22, 17. On this issue, see also Lewis, “Real Sex.” Wyatt, High Concept, 23. Ibid., 24, 117. See Eric Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!” A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 96–135. Wyatt, High Concept, 122; cf. 129, where Wyatt presents the counter-example of the unsuccessful advertising for The Hunger (1983). See Susanne Lenz, “Sex kennt jeder,” Berliner Zeitung, February 13, 2014, http:// www.berliner-zeitung.de/film/nymphomaniac-plakat-kampagne-sex-kenntjeder,10809184,26187686.html. E.g., Romance, The Pornographer, or the word “Lust” in the A-Films release of The Principles of Lust. The US Artisan release of this film uses a slightly larger image of Klass, repositions the title vertically on the left side, and deploys a smaller font for the tagline. In this image, Klass’s body is not red, but her lollipop, lips, and high heels are rendered in that color. See Eva Heller, Wie Farben wirken (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989), esp. 51–68; Eva Heller, Wie Farben auf Gefühl und Verstand wirken (Munich: Droemer, 2000), esp. 55–86. It is exceptional that the DVDs parade these facts. Cf. Leap Year, Intimacy, In Bed, Hemel. Tanya Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema (London: Wallflower, 2006), 48. To be sure, this marketing strategy is not without precedent. As outlined in the Introduction, canny distributors have long used the salacious content or controversy surrounding sex in their marketing. Eric Schaefer and others have shown how even before the Second World War, importers appropriated European art films, selling them to American audiences with advertising that wrapped the films “in the lurid

Notes to Pages 203–205 • 253

60 61 62 63

64

65 66 67 68

69

garments of exploitation.” The French film Girls Club (Club de femmes, 1936) and the Czech/Austrian co-production Ecstasy (Ekstase, 1933) were promoted in their US runs firmly on the basis of their supposedly prurient content and the controversy they had engendered. Ecstasy’s advertising and US critical reception, Schaefer writes, “united concepts of foreignness, sexuality, immorality, art, and exploitation.” American distributor Samuel Cummins and exhibitors promoted the film “with such catch lines as ‘Suppressed Until Now! U.S. Customs has finally released the most amazing motion picture ever produced,’ and ‘The picture the world is whispering about.’” See Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!,” 332–333. Charter flights were organized for Japanese tourists to go to Paris to see the domestically censored In the Realm of the Senses, whose US theatrical run was in turn touted with the line “seized by New York customs.” See Williams, Screening Sex, 189. Historically, such a marketing strategy has not gone unappreciated by exhibitors. Employees at independent London cinemas, speaking about Ken Russell’s highbrow erotica Crimes of Passion (1984), told the Sunday Times that while “the idea that we’re showing porn in a top West end theatre is preposterous,” it is clear “that the whiff of erotica can bring in a matinée audience of gentlemen, which helps increase the total audience at the end of the day.” Quoted in Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 404. The difference is that the overall tone is redemptive and comic rather than existential and apocalyptic. Cf. Williams, Screening Sex, 286. “The Brown Bunny Clip: Blow Job Scene,” Trailer Addict, n.d., accessed January 15, 2014, http://www.traileraddict.com/clip/the-brown-bunny/blow-job-scene. Search http://youporn.com/search/?query=sevigny or http://youporn.com/ search/?query=brown+bunny. “margot stilley 9 songs sex scen” [sic], YouPorn, July 23, 2008, accessed January 14, 2014, http://youporn.com/watch/60845/margot-stilley-9-songssex-scen/?from=search_full&pos=1; search http://de.youporn.com/ search/?query=emanuelle+beart. See Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” 2nd rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 3; Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, 39. David F. Friedman quoted in Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!,” 6. Matthew Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 60. See Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, 38; Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema, 221–222. On this issue, see Melanie Willams, “9 Songs,” Film Quarterly 59.3 (2006): 59–63; here 60; and Williams, Screening Sex, 298. On the lengthy diatribes about Lena Nyman’s physical appearance, which dominated the reception of I Am Curious in the United States, see Keith Heffernan, “Prurient (Dis)Interest: The American Release and Reception of I Am Curious (Yellow),” in Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution, ed. Eric Schaefer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 105–125; esp. 117, 120–121. See Beth Johnson, “Shortbus: Highbrow Hard-Core,” in Hard to Swallow: Hard-Core Pornography on Screen, ed. Claire Hines and Darren Kerr (London: Wallflower, 2012), 163–176; here 164.

254 • Notes to Pages 206–212

Afterword 1

2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10

11

12 13 14

15

See Eric Schaefer, “Plain Brown Wrapper: Adult Films for the Home Market, 1930–1969,” in Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method, ed. Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 201–226. See, for example, Charles Gant, “The Numbers: 2013 in Review,” Sight and Sound, February 2014, 15. Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller, Marketing Management, 12th rev. ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006), 319, 376–377. See Eric Schaefer, “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!” A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 8, 103–104, 326. See, for example, Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley, “Dish Night at the Movies: Exhibitor Promotions and Female Audiences during the Great Depression,” in Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method, ed. Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 246–275. For quotes in this paragraph, see Kotler and Keller, Marketing Management, 311, 321–322, 326, 329–330. See Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006), esp. 17. Of course, the Long Tail accounts for the contemporary boom in extreme cinema productions and anticipates a bright future for the mode in aggregate. That means that streaming platforms such as FlixFling, Curzon Home Cinema, Amazon, and Netflix (if, of course, the latter become more liberal in acquiring films with nudity and sex) are set to profit from the small margins they will earn from distributing many of these productions. As raised in chapter 4, it remains to be seen whether individual filmmakers can sustain themselves with these projects or whether they remain stepping stones in, or ends of, careers. Xan Brooks, e-mail correspondence with the author, April 1, 2014. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, 2nd rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 1–5. Janet Wasko and Eileen R. Meehan, “Critical Crossroads or Parallel Routes? Political Economy and New Approaches to Studying Media Industries and Cultural Products,” Cinema Journal 52.3 (2013): 150–157; here 153. On this issue, see Joëlle Farchy, “Die Bedeutung von Information für die Nachfrage nach kulturellen Gütern,” trans. Vinzenz Hediger, in Demnächst in Ihrem Kino: Grundlagen der Filmwerbung und Filmvermarktung, ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Marburg: Schüren, 2005), 193–211. Becker, Art Worlds, 375. Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication, 2nd rev. ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2009), 127. See John T. Caldwell, “Para-Industry: Researching Hollywood’s Blackwaters,” Cinema Journal 52.3 (2013): 157–165; here 157–158. See also Douglas Kellner, “Media Industries, Political Economy, and Media/Cultural Studies: An Articulation,” in Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, ed. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 95–107; here especially 95, 97. David Hesmondhalgh, “Media Industry Studies, Media Production Studies,” in Media and Society, ed. James Curran (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), 145–163; here 149. On the issue of authorship in political economy approaches, see also Graham Murdock, “Authorship and Organization,” Screen Education 35 (1980): 19–34.

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Curtin, Michael, Jennifer Holt, and Kevin Sanson, eds. Distribution Revolution: Conversations About the Digital Future of Film and Television. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Dargis, Manohla. “Sometimes Blood Really Isn’t Indelible.” New York Times, March 3, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/movies/03darg.html?_r=0. De Valck, Marijke. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. ———. “Finding Audiences for Films: Programming in Historical Perspective.” In Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff, 25–40. St. Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012. De Vany, Arthur. Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry. London: Routledge, 2004. Downing, Lisa. “French Cinema’s New ‘Sexual Revolution’: Postmodern Porn and Troubled Genre.” French Cultural Studies 15.3 (2004): 265–280. Drake, Philip. “Distribution and Marketing in Contemporary Hollywood.” In The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, ed. Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko, 63–82. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Duval, Robin. “‘The Last Days of the Board.’” In Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age, ed. Edward Lamberti, 146–158. London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Edelstein, David. “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn.” New York Magazine, February 6, 2006. http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/. Egan, Kate. Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Film Festival Networks: The New Topographies of Cinema in Europe.” In European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, 82–107. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. Falcon, Richard. “Reality Is Too Shocking.” Sight and Sound, January 1999, 10–13. Farchy, Joëlle. “Die Bedeutung von Information für die Nachfrage nach kulturellen Gütern.” Trans. Vinzenz Hediger. In Demnächst in Ihrem Kino: Grundlagen der Filmwerbung und Filmvermarktung, ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, 193–211. Marburg: Schüren, 2005. Fernández-Huerga, Eduardo. “The Economic Behavior of Human Beings: The Institutional/ Post-Keynesian Model.” Journal of Economic Issues 42.3 (2008): 709–726. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 2002. Frey, Mattias. “A Cinema of Disturbance: The Films of Michael Haneke in Context.” 2nd rev. ed. Senses of Cinema 57 (2010). http://sensesofcinema.com/2010/great-directors/ michael-haneke/. ———. “The Ethics of Extreme Cinema.” In Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship, ed. Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey, 145–162. New York: Routledge, 2014. ———. “The Greatest of These Is Love: Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise Trilogy.” Artforum 51.10 (2013): 149–150. ———. “The Message and the Medium: Haneke’s Film Theory and Digital Praxis.” In On Michael Haneke, ed. Brian Price and John David Rhodes, 153–165. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2010. ———. “Tuning Out, Turning In, and Walking Off : The Film Spectator in Pain.” In Ethics and Images of Pain, ed. Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson, 93–111. New York: Routledge, 2012.

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Galt, Rosalind, and Karl Schoonover, eds. Global Art Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Gans, Herbert J. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Gaut, Berys. “‘Art’ as a Cluster Concept.” In Theories of Art Today, ed. Noël Carroll, 25–44. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Gomery, Douglas. Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Grissemann, Stefan. Sündenfall: Die Grenzüberschreitungen des Filmemachers Ulrich Seidl. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2007. Grønstad, Asbjørn. “Abject Desire: Anatomie de l’enfer and the Unwatchable.” Studies in French Cinema 6.3 (2006): 161–169. Guback, Thomas. The International Film Industry: Western Europe and America Since 1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. Hallam, Julia. Realism and Popular Cinema. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Halle, Randall. “Offering Tales They Want to Hear: Transnational European Film Funding as Neo-Orientalism.” In Global Art Cinema, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, 303–319. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Hampton, Howard. “Whatever You Desire: Notes on Movieland and Pornotopia.” Film Comment 37.4 (2001): 36–45. Haneke, Michael. “Film als Katharsis.” In Austria (in)felix: zum österreichischen Film der 80er Jahre, ed. Francesco Bono, 89. Graz: Blimp, 1992. ———. “Violence and the Media.” Trans. Evan Torner. In A Companion to Michael Haneke, ed. Roy Grundmann, 575–579. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Hawkins, Joan. “Culture Wars: Some New Trends in Art Horror.” Jump Cut 51 (2009). http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/artHorror/. ———. Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. ———. “Let the Sweet Juices Flow: WR and Midnight Movie Culture.” In Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution, ed. Eric Schaefer, 151–175. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Hayashi, Sharon. “The Fantastic Trajectory of Japanese Pink Art Cinema from Stalin to Bush.” In Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, 48–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Heffernan, Keith. “Art House or House of Exorcism? The Changing Distribution and Reception Contexts of Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil.” In Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, ed. Jeffrey Sconce, 144–163. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. ———. “Prurient (Dis)Interest: The American Release and Reception of I Am Curious (Yellow).” In Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution, ed. Eric Schaefer, 105–125. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Heller, Eva. Wie Farben auf Gefühl und Verstand wirken. Munich: Droemer, 2000. ———. Wie Farben wirken. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989. Hesmondhalgh, David. “Media Industry Studies, Media Production Studies.” In Media and Society, ed. James Curran, 145–163. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. Higson, Andrew. “The Concept of National Cinema.” Screen 30.4 (1989): 36–47. Hindman, Matthew. The Myth of Digital Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

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Hjort, Mette. “Dogma 95: A Small Nation’s Response to Globalisation.” In Purity and Provocation: Dogma 95, ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, 31–47. London: British Film Institute, 2003. Hjort, Mette, and Duncan Petrie. “Introduction.” In The Cinema of Small Nations, ed. Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie, 1–19. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Hoberman, J., and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Midnight Movies. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Da Capo, 1991. Holt, Jennifer, and Alisa Perren, eds. Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Horeck, Tanya. “Shame and the Sisters: Catherine Breillat’s À Ma Soeur (Fat Girl ).” In Rape in Art Cinema, ed. Dominique Russell, 195–209. New York: Continuum, 2010. Horeck, Tanya, and Tina Kendall, eds. The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge, 2001. Hyland, Robert. “A Politics of Excess: Violence and Violation in Miike Takashi’s Audition.” In Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, ed. Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, 199–218. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009. Iwabuchi, Koichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Jenks, Chris. Transgression. London: Routledge, 2003. Johnson, Beth. “Shortbus: Highbrow Hard-Core.” In Hard to Swallow: Hard-Core Pornography on Screen, ed. Claire Hines and Darren Kerr, 163–176. London: Wallflower, 2012. Jones, Steve. Torture Porn: Popular Horror after “Saw.” Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kael, Pauline. “Fantasies of the Art-House Audience.” Sight and Sound 31.1 (1961–1962): 4–9. Kellner, Douglas. “Media Industries, Political Economy, and Media/Cultural Studies: An Articulation.” In Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, ed. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, 95–107. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Kendall, Tina. “Reframing Bataille: On Tacky Spectatorship in the New European Extremism.” In The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, ed. Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall, 43–54. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Keough, Peter, ed. Flesh and Blood: The National Society of Film Critics on Sex, Violence, and Censorship. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1995. Kermode, Mark. “The British Censors and Horror Cinema.” In British Horror Cinema, ed. Julian Petley and Steve Chibnall, 10–22. London: Routledge, 2001. Kerner, Aaron Michael. Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11: Horror, Exploitation, and the Cinema of Sensation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. King, Homay. Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Kleinhans, Chuck. “Cross-Cultural Disgust: Some Problems in the Analysis of Contemporary Horror Cinema: Part One: Notes on Cross-Cultural Disgust.” Jump Cut 51 (2009). http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/crosscultHorror/index.html. ———. “Cross-Cultural Disgust: Some Problems in the Analysis of Contemporary Horror Cinema: Part Two: Re-Writing Disgust.” Jump Cut 52 (2010). http://www.ejumpcut.org/ archive/jc52.2010/KleinhansDisgust2/. Kotler, Philip, and Kevin Lane Keller. Marketing Management. 12th rev. ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006.

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KPMG. Film Council Specialised Exhibition and Distribution Strategy (2002). http://www .bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/uk-film-council-kpmg-report-contents-andexecutive-summary.pdf. Krzywinska, Tanya. Sex and the Cinema. London: Wallflower, 2006. Kuhn, Annette. Cinema, Censorship, and Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 1988. Lamberti, Edward, ed. Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age. London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Lev, Peter. The Euro-American Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Levin, Jordan. “An Industry Perspective: Calibrating the Velocity of Change.” In Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, ed. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, 256–263. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Lewis, Jon. Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry. New York: New York University Press, 2000. ———. “Real Sex: Aesthetics and Economics of Art-House Porn.” Jump Cut 51 (2009). http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/LewisRealsex/1.html. Lim, Dennis. “Greetings from the Land of Feel-Bad Cinema.” New York Times, November 26, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/movies/261im.html?ref=movies&_r=0. Lübecker, Nicholaj. The Feel-Bad Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Machin, David, and Andrea Mayr. How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis. Los Angeles: Sage, 2012. MacKenzie, Scott. “Baise-moi, Feminist Cinemas and the Censorship Controversy.” Screen 43.3 (2002): 315–324. Martin, Daniel. “Asia Extreme: The Marketing and Critical Reception of Cult Asian Cinema in the UK.” PhD diss., University of East Anglia, 2009. ———. “Between the Local and the Global: ‘Asian Horror’ in Ahn Byung-ki’s Phone and Bunshinsaba.” In Korean Horror Cinema, ed. Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin, 145–157. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. ———. “Japan’s Blair Witch: Restraint, Maturity, and Generic Canons in the British Critical Reception of Ring.” Cinema Journal 48.3 (2009): 35–51. Martin-Jones, David, and María Soledad Montañez. “Uruguay Disappears: Small Cinemas, Control Z Films, and the Aesthetics and Politics of Auto-Erasure.” Cinema Journal 53.1 (2013): 26–51. Mazdon, Lucy, and Catherine Wheatley. French Film in Britain: Sex, Art, and Cinephilia. Oxford: Berghahn, 2013. McFarlane, Brian, and Deanne Williams. Michael Winterbottom. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Mes, Tom. Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike. Godalming: FAB, 2003. Middleton, Jason. “The Subject of Torture: Regarding the Pain of Americans in Hostel.” Cinema Journal 49.4 (2010): 1–24. Miller, Geoffrey. Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. New York: Viking, 2009. Miller, Toby, Freya Schiwy, and Marta Hernández Salván. “Distribution, the Forgotten Element in Transnational Cinema.” Transnational Cinemas 2.2 (2011): 197–215. Mosco, Vincent. The Political Economy of Communication. 2nd rev. ed. Los Angeles: Sage, 2009. Nagib, Lúcia. World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism. London: Continuum, 2011. Neale, Steve. “Art Cinema as Institution.” Screen 22.1 (1981): 11–39. Needham, Gary. “Japanese Cinema and Orientalism.” In Asian Cinemas: A Reader and Guide, ed. Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham, 8–16. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

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Nelson, Maggie. The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. Noé, Gaspar. “I’m Happy Some People Walk Out during My Film. It Makes the Ones Who Stay Feel Strong.” The Guardian, March 12, 1999. http://www.theguardian.com/ film/1999/mar/12/features3. “N.Y. Over-Seated for Sex.” Variety, July 2, 1969, 1, 70. Oehmke, Philipp, and Lars-Olav Beier. “‘Jeder Film vergewaltigt.’” Der Spiegel, October 19, 2009, 112–114. O’Regan, Tom. “Cultural Exchange.” In A Companion to Film Theory, ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam, 262–294. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. Oshima, Nagisa. Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, 1956–1978. Ed. Annette Michelson. Trans. Dawn Lawson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Palmer, Tim. Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. Peirse, Alison, and Daniel Martin, eds. Korean Horror Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Peranson, Mark. “First You Get the Power, Then You Get the Money: Two Models of Film Festivals.” Cineaste 33.3 (2008): 37–43. Perren, Alisa. “Rethinking Distribution for the Future of Media Industry Studies.” Cinema Journal 52.3 (2013): 165–171. Petley, Julian. Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. ———. “Head-On Collisions: The BBFC in the 1990s.” In Behind the Scenes at the BBFC: Film Classification from the Silver Screen to the Digital Age, ed. Edward Lamberti, 127–142. London: British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Prasso, Sheridan. The Asian Mystique. New York: Public Affairs, 2005. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Quandt, James. “Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema.” Artforum 42.6 (2004): 126–132. Romney, Jonathan. “Women in Love.” Sight and Sound, December 2013, 38–42. Rose, Steve. “Attenberg, Dogtooth and the Weird Wave of Greek Cinema.” The Guardian, August 27, 2011. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/aug/27/attenberg -dogtooth-greece-cinema. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See. Chicago: A Capella, 2000. Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989. Ruoff, Jeffrey, ed. Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals. St. Andrews: St Andrews Film Studies, 2012. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1983 [1978]. Sandler, Kevin S. “The Future of U.S. Censorship Studies.” Velvet Light Trap 63 (2009): 69–71. ———. The Naked Truth: Why Hollywood Doesn’t Make X-Rated Movies. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Saner, Emine. “From Nymphomaniac to Stranger by the Lake, Is Sex in Cinema Getting Too Real?” The Guardian, February 21, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/ feb/21/nymphomaniac-stranger-by-the-lake-sex-cinema. Sarris, Andrew. “Why the Foreign Film Has Lost Its Cachet,” New York Times, May 2, 1999. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/movies/summer-films-international-why-theforeign-film-has-lost-its-cachet.html.

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Schaefer, Eric. “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!” A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. ———. “‘I’ll Take Sweden’: The Shifting Discourse of the ‘Sexy Nation’ in Sexploitation Films.” In Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution, ed. Eric Schaefer, 207–234. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. ———. “Plain Brown Wrapper: Adult Films for the Home Market, 1930–1969.” In Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method, ed. Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin, 201–226. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Schwartz, Vanessa. It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Sconce, Jeffrey. “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style.” Screen 36.4 (1995): 371–393. Scott, W. Richard. Institutions and Organizations: Ideas, Interests, and Identities. 4th rev. ed. Los Angeles: Sage, 2014. Selfe, Melanie. “‘Incredibly French’?: Nation as an Interpretive Context for Extreme Cinema.” In Je t’aime—moi non plus: Franco-British Cinematic Relations, ed. Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley, 153–167. New York: Berghahn, 2010. ———. “Inflected Accounts and Irreversible Journeys.” Participations 5.1 (2008). http://www .participations.org/Volume%205/Issue%201%20-%20special/5_01_selfe.htm. “Sexacious Selling Best B.O. Slant for Foreign Language Films in U.S.” Variety, June 9, 1948, 2, 18. “Sexpix of $25,000–45,000 Negative Cost See Bright, Not Clouded, Future.” Variety, July 16, 1969, 17. Sexton, Jamie. “Prisoner of Cool: Chloë Sevigny, Alternative Stardom, and Image Management.” In Cult Film Stardom: Offbeat Attractions and Processes of Cultification, ed. Kate Egan and Sarah Thomas, 73–89. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Shin, Chi-Yun. “The Art of Branding: Tartan ‘Asia Extreme’ Films.” In Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, ed. Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, 85–100. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009. Smith, Ian Robert. “Oldboy Goes to Bollywood: Zinda and the Transnational Appropriation of South Korean ‘Extreme Cinema.’” In Korean Horror Cinema, ed. Alison Peirse and Daniel Martin, 187–197. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Smoodin, Eric. “Introduction: The History of Film History.” In Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method, ed. Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin, 1–33. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Sontag, Susan. “The Pornographic Imagination.” In A Susan Sontag Reader, 205–234. New York: Vintage, 1983. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen, 1986. Stevenson, Jack. Lars von Trier. London: British Film Institute, 2002. Stigsdotter, Ingrid. “‘Very Funny If You Can Keep Up with the Subtitles’: The British Reception of Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (Amélie).” In France at the Flicks: Trends in Contemporary French Popular Culture, ed. Darren Waldron and Isabelle Vanderschelden, 198–211. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Stigsdotter, Ingrid, and Tim Bergfelder. “Studying Cross-Cultural Marketing and Reception: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966).” In The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches, ed. James Chapman, Mark Glancy, and Sue Harper, 215–228. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Stringer, Julian. “Global Cities and the International Film Festival Economy.” In Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, 134–144. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

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Suchman, Mark C. “Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches.” Academy of Management Review 20.3 (1995): 571–610. Tezuka, Yoshiharu. Japanese Cinema Goes Global: Filmworkers’ Journeys. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. Tiong Guan, Saw. Film Censorship in the Asia-Pacific Region. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. Trevelyan, John. “Film Censorship in Great Britain.” Screen 11.3 (1970): 19–30. Tudor, Andrew. “The Rise and Fall of the Art (House) Movie.” In The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing, ed. David Inglis and John Hughson, 125–138. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. van Dijk, Teun Adrianus. Discourse Studies. London: Sage, 2007. Veblen, Thorstein. “The Limitations of Marginal Utility.” Journal of Political Economy 17.9 (1909): 620–636. Ventresca, Marc J., and John W. Mohr. “Archival Research Methods.” In The Blackwell Companion to Organizations, ed. Joel A. C. Baum, 805–828. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Vincendeau, Ginette. “The New French Extremism.” In The Cinema Book, 3rd. rev. ed., ed. Pam Cook, 205. London: British Film Institute, 2007. ———. “Sisters, Sex and Sitcom.” Sight and Sound, December 2001, 18–20. Vogel, Amos. Film as a Subversive Art. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974. von Dassanowsky, Robert, and Oliver C. Speck. “New Austrian Film: The Non-Exceptional Exception.” In New Austrian Film, ed. Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck, 1–17. New York: Berghahn, 2011. Walker, John A. Art and Outrage: Provocation, Controversy, and the Visual Arts. London: Pluto Press, 1999. Wasko, Janet, and Eileen R. Meehan. “Critical Crossroads or Parallel Routes? Political Economy and New Approaches to Studying Media Industries and Cultural Products.” Cinema Journal 52.3 (2013): 150–157. Wilinsky, Barbara. Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” 2nd rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. ———. Screening Sex. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Williams, Linda Ruth. The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Wodak, Ruth. “Introduction: Terms and Concepts.” In Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. Ruth Wodak and Michal Krzyzanowski, 1–42. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008. Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage, 2001. Wong, Cindy Hing-Yuk. Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Wyatt, Justin. High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. ———. “The Stigma of X: Adult Cinema and the Institution of the MPAA Ratings System.” In Controlling Hollywood: Censorship and Regulation in the Studio Era, ed. Matthew Bernstein, 238–263. London: Athlone, 2000. Zuromskis, Catherine. “Prurient Pictures and Popular Film: The Crisis of Pornographic Representation.” Velvet Light Trap 59 (2007): 4–14.

Index NOTE: Boldface numbers indicate illustrations. Ab-Normal Beauty (Sei mong se jun, 2004), 131 academics, 159–177, 189, 201, 202, 210; and aesthetic embrace, 34; and distribution, 71; and filmmakers’ statements, 189; and foreign films, 122; and French cinema, 64; and innovation, 166–171; and microstudies, 9; and narrative formulas, 161–166; and orientalism, 122, 134; and realism, 15, 171–177; and spectator, 31; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 126. See also critics; scholars Academy Awards, 88, 138 Acland, Charles, 12, 88, 89–90, 92 Act of Seeing with One’s Eyes, The (1972), 18 actors: and art film vs. pornography, 180; and Nymphomaniac and pornography, 24; and real sex, 161, 162, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174–176, 177, 180, 186, 188–189 Address Unknown (Suchwiin bulmyeong, 2001), 125 advertising, 208; and art film vs. pornography, 178–179, 184, 185, 189, 190–203; and artistic virtuosity, 185; and distributors, 11, 70, 71; and earliest cinema history, 4–5; and internet, 89; for NC-17 films, 97, 98–99; and postwar arthouse circuit, 5, 82; and scandal, 78, 80; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 129, 133, 134. See also distributors; marketing; posters; publicity

aesthetic embrace, 13, 34–38, 43, 44, 161, 251n30; and academics, 166, 170, 171, 172; and against-the-grain conclusions, 35–36; and altruistic ambitions, 35; and artistic aspirations, 189; and BBFC, 113–121; and domestic cinema, 37; and exploitation, 34; and filmmakers vs. distributors, 15; and marketing, 203; and pornography, 205; and real sex, 173, 176–177; and recording function, 177 aesthetics, 24, 185, 201, 209; and academic scholars, 172; and arthouse sex films, 178; and Austrian film, 148; and BBFC, 106; and Blue Is the Warmest Color, 159; and Bourdieu, 21–22; and censors, 11; and confrontationalism, 36; and critics, 202; of decontextualization, 122–123; and disinterestedness, 23, 29; and distributors, 79; documentary-style, 171; and extreme cinema, 8; and film festivals, 8, 47, 57, 60; and Film Forum, 84, 86; and Haneke, 44; as institution, 8; institutional, 154; and Invincible Pictures, 73; and MPAA, 117; and Murray, 79; and Nymphomaniac, 1; and Tookey, 39; and transgression, 6, 23 A-Film, 69, 197, 200, 203 Ages of Lulu, The (Las edades de Lulú, 1990), 160 Airdoll (2009), 58 À l’aventure (2008), 69, 166, 199, 203 265

266 • Index

Albert, Barbara, 147, 152 allegory, 21, 24, 80, 110, 111, 114 Almodóvar, Pedro, 106, 127, 135, 237n109 Alphaville (1965), 18 Amants, Les (1958), 6 Amazon, 57, 71, 118, 254n7 Amélie (Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, 2001), 124, 137, 152 American Pie (1999), 117, 204 Amok (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls, 1994), 152 amour fou scenario, 161–164, 167, 174, 192 Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer, 2004), 38, 165, 190 Anderson, Lindsay, 96 Andersson, Harriet, 138 Andrews, David, 8, 13, 17, 18, 47–48 Angelo, Adrienne, 170 Angelopoulos, Theo, 140 Animal Love (Tierische Liebe, 1996), 152 Antares (2004), 69, 90, 141, 146, 146 Antichrist (2009), 3, 34, 46, 54–55, 58, 69, 83, 162, 164, 190 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 115 apaches, Les (2013), 69, 90 APT (Apateu, 2006), 131 Araki, Nobuyoshi, 186 Arang (2006), 131 Arang, The Ghost (Ryeong, 2004), 131 art, 7, 44, 61, 148; and academic scholars, 166, 171; and Baise-moi, 3; and BBFC, 116; cinema’s standing as, 214–215n19; and Clark, 186–187; and Continental European cinema, 124; and critics, 33, 34, 166; and cynicism criticism, 38, 39, 40; and distributors, 15, 92; economics of, 20; and exploitation, 4, 115, 183, 203; and extreme cinema, 8; and film festivals, 47; and Film Forum, 86; and filmmakers, 17; and funding, 20; and interpretation of transgression, 22; and Invincible Pictures, 74; and mainstream, 20; and moral agnosticism, 23; and moral violence, 26; and purity of intention, 44; and ratings, 96; and real sex, 173, 174, 177; and transgression, 20. See also aesthetic embrace Artaud, Antonin, 40 art films/cinema, 3, 4, 18, 33, 41, 49, 56, 67, 75–76, 78, 82, 83, 90, 92, 169, 206, 209;

academic discourse about, 161–177; and Austrian film, 141, 145–146; and BBFC, 101, 102, 106, 107, 114, 117, 119; commercial imperatives and artistic remits of, 219n25; and cynicism criticism, 40; demographic of, 89; differentiation of from mainstream film, 6; and distinction, 21; earnings of, 190–191; and exoticism and risqué content, 5; and extreme cinema, 8; and film festivals, 48, 68; hardcore, 3, 160–177, 178–205; and Hollywood, 16; as institution, 8; and interpretation, 11; and Kael, 43; marketing and advertising of, 190–204; as media industry, 12, 15; and MPAA, 106–107; and Murray, 77; as niche product, 6; of 1950s and 1960s, 42; programmers of, 84, 85; and pornography, 160, 161, 203–205; and provocation, 6; and Quandt, 41; and ratings, 96; real sex in, 161, 171; seminal theories of, 6; and sexual content, 8; soft-core, 6; as supergenre, 7; theatrical release of, 88; and transgression, 6, 16–17, 210; and violent content, 8 art for art’s sake (art pour l’art), 14, 44 Artforum (journal), 41 Arthaus, 197 arthouses, 8, 10, 89, 90, 122, 130, 148; and academics, 166; patrons of, 81; reputation of, 86; selection by, 11; and sexual content, 4–6; and Tartan, 128, 129 Artificial Eye, 69, 70, 90 Artisan, 99 artistic criteria/intentions, 9, 15, 17, 44, 179–182, 185, 189; and aesthetic embrace, 189; and arthouse sex films vs. pornography, 178–189; autonomy of, 44; and BBFC, 108, 116; and film festivals, 52, 60; and Noé, 25; and regulation, 120–121. See also auteurism artists: disinterestedness of, 20; romantic myth of, 17; virtuosity of, 174, 179, 185. See also auteurs Artsploitation Films, 3, 14, 75–79, 80–81, 83, 128, 209 Ashley, Thomas, 71–75, 81, 91 Asian cinema, 52, 134, 156, 157; as aberrant, 15; and film festivals, 64; horror, 125–136; and Hyland, 36–37; and melodramas,

Index • 267

comedies, and romances, 134; and Quandt, 41; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 126–136. See also orientalism Asia Extreme. See Tartan Asia Extreme Attenberg (2010), 47, 58, 157 audiences, 7, 10, 13, 30–33, 37, 65–66, 128, 135, 172, 247n35; and aesthetic embrace, 36; and age groups, 128; and anti-censorship orientation, 32; and appeals to leave, 25; and art film vs. pornography, 183, 184; and Artsploitation Films, 76, 77; attraction of, 31; and Austrian film, 145, 149; and bad-taste orientation, 31–32; bravado of, 31–32; cinephiles, 32; and distributors, 71, 79; empirical examination of, 31–33; and exoticism, 124–125; film festivals’ goals for, 56–58, 60; filmmakers’ discourse vs., 17–18; and Haneke, 25; identification with victims by, 29; and Invincible Pictures, 72; middle-class, 82, 89, 107, 108, 114, 128; and Miike, 125; niche, 74, 76, 81, 82, 89, 119; and private viewing, 91; and real sex, 173; reediting and renaming for, 5; and solitary viewing, 89; studies of, 11; targeting of, 89; taste of, 21; and transgression, 32; underclass, 128; urban sophisticates as, 5; working-class, 107, 128; youth of, 89, 129. See also advertising; British Board of Film Classification (BBFC); marketing; Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); publicity Audition (Ōdishon, 1999), 69, 83, 86, 87, 128, 133, 149 Australian Classification Board, 55–56, 61–62, 94, 95 Austria: Bundesministerium für Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur, 143; cinemas in, 141–142; DVD consumption in, 142; Filmstandort Austria, 143; market share of films produced in, 142–143 Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF), 143, 145 Austrian Cultural Forum, 53 Austrian Film Commission, 141 Austrian Film Institute, 143, 144, 145 auteurism, 17, 36; and aesthetic embrace, 37; and BBFC, 117, 118; and cynicism criticism, 41. See also art; artistic criteria/ intentions

auteurs, 161, 202, 208; and aesthetic embrace, 44; earnings of, 191; and film festivals, 50, 64; and Quandt, 41; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 135. See also artists authenticity, 92, 172; and arthouse sex films vs. pornography, 179; and cinephiles, 32; and filmmakers’ intentions, 15, 186, 187, 188, 189; and marketing, 201. See also realism auto-erasure, 150, 151, 156, 157 auto-ethnography, 150–151, 155, 156, 157 auto-exoticism, 151, 157. See also exoticism avant-garde, 40 Avatar (2009), 143 Axiom Films, 69, 70, 199 Bad Guy (Nabbeun namja, 2001), 133 Baise-moi (2000), 38, 42, 94, 160, 162, 247n33; and art vs. exploitation, 34; and art film vs. pornography, 172, 182; and audience responses, 31; and BBFC, 108, 112, 113, 116; earnings of, 190; as feminist statement, 3; and French film, 124, 135; marketing of, 197, 199, 200, 203; and power, 170 Balfour, Eric, 195 Balio, Tino, 5, 13 Bangkok Dangerous (2000), 128 Barker, Martin, 31–33, 108, 124, 125, 175–176, 247n35 Barney, Matthew, 116 Barrett, Beth, 52, 54, 55, 57, 60–61, 64, 225n48 Bataille, Georges, 19, 22, 31, 42, 162, 184 Battle in Heaven (Batalla en el cielo, 2005), 46, 49, 55, 69, 130, 173, 187, 210; earnings of, 190, 191; marketing of, 197, 203 Battle Royale (Batoru rowaiaru, 2000), 129, 130, 133–134 Battle Royale 2 (Batoru rowaiaru II: Chinkonka, 2003), 130 Baudrillard, Jean, 29 Baumann, Shyon, 47, 219n25 Bava, Mario, 92 Bavaria (film company), 81 Bazin, André, 29, 189 BBFC. See British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) BDSM orientation, 32

268 • Index

Beamish, Lindsay, 181 Béart, Emmanuelle, 174, 175, 204 Becker, Howard S., 10–11, 17, 20, 72, 210, 211 Beinex, Jean-Jacques, 110, 114, 117 Bell, Jaime, 1 Belle de Jour (1967), 6, 96, 115 belle noiseuse, La (1991), 175, 204 Bellucci, Monica, 3, 175–176 Benny’s Video (1992), 27, 152 Bergman, Ingmar, 82, 127, 135, 137–138, 204 Berlin International Film Festival, 1, 14, 24, 47, 49, 50, 62, 64, 65, 66, 84, 197; Talent Campus, 65; World Cinema Fund, 65 Bernhard, Thomas, 141, 147, 152 Bernstein, Matthew, 123–124, 134, 140 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 43, 140, 162, 182, 191 Betty Blue (37°2 le matin, 1986), 109–110, 112, 114, 116–117, 124, 160 Betz, Mark, 5, 8, 13, 215n29 Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948), 5 Bin Putech, Mansor, 64–65, 66 Black Panty Chronicles—Vol. 2 (2006), 203 Black Swan (2010), 117 Bleibtreu, Moritz, 143 Blockbuster (video store chain), 91, 98 Blow-Up (1966), 96, 115 Blue Is the Warmest Color (La vie d’Adèle, 2013), 15, 33, 46, 49, 69, 166; and art film vs. pornography, 180–181, 187, 204; controversy over, 159–160, 173; distribution of, 90, 91, 99; earnings of, 190 Blue Valentine (2010), 117 Bonello, Bertrand, 182, 250n13 Bong Joon Ho, 89 Boston Globe, 42 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10, 20, 21–22, 23, 44, 221n9 Boys Don’t Cry (1999), 117, 175 Bradshaw, Peter, 154 Brakhage, Stan, 18 Brando, Marlon, 43, 162 Breathing (Atmen, 2011), 145 Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), 42 Breillat, Catherine, 6, 41, 102, 187; and aesthetic embrace, 34; and art film vs. pornography, 181–182, 184; as artist, 29; as artist-scientist, 26, 27; and BBFC, 109; and dark tones, 170; and differentiation, 207; and Field, 57; and Film Forum, 86;

and Hawkins, 135; and initiation scenario, 165; and Kermode, 106; and marketing, 199; and pornography, 205; and Quandt, 41; and real sex, 172; and Rosen, 58 Bresson, Robert, 41 Brigade Marketing, 82 Brilliantlove (2010), 106, 119, 199 Brisseau, Jean-Claude, 199 British Board of Film Censors. See British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), 4, 10, 12, 14, 62, 77, 121, 124, 205, 231n6, 236n88, 236n91, 237n102; and aesthetic embrace, 113–121; and Baise-moi, 108, 112, 113, 116; and Bonello, 250n13; and censorship, 100–101, 108, 118, 119; and film festivals, 55; and foreign films, 106, 107–113; and French cinema, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 124; and home video releases, 96; and The Idiots, 102, 106, 111, 112, 119, 205; and In the Realm of the Senses, 100, 108, 112, 113; and Noé, 25; and pornography, 101, 106, 116, 118, 182; as protective, 121; and public relations, 95, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106; ratings policies of, 95, 97, 99–121; and Romance, 99, 102, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 117, 119; and Sense and Sensibilities, 104–106; and A Serbian Film, 110–111, 119; and sex, 101–102, 103, 104–105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 116, 118, 124; and sexual violence, 95, 100, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 116; and violence, 95, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 116; written classification guidelines of, 102–106 British Social Attitudes Survey, 103 British Video Recordings Act, 95 Brody, Richard, 160 Bronson (2008), 69 Brood, The (1979), 128 Brooks, Xan, 3, 33–34, 209–210 Brown, Simon, 107 Brown Bunny, The (2003), 15, 46; actors in, 173, 174, 175, 176; and art film vs. pornography, 182, 183–184, 203–204; and Carey, 55; earnings of, 190; and graphic sex, 173; precursors of, 185 Brownian Movement, The (2010), 47, 164 Brunette, Peter, 41–42

Index • 269

Bundy (2002), 128 Bunny Game, The (2010), 119 Buñuel, Luis, 4, 25, 185 Burnt House, The (2009), 71 Burton, Richard, 175 Caldwell, John T., 10, 11 Call Girl (2012), 166 Call Girl, A (Slovenka, 2009), 69 Cammell, Donald, 127–128 Campion, Jane, 42 Cannes International Film Festival: and BBFC, 110, 113; and Blue Is the Warmest Color, 159; and The Brown Bunny, 174; and controversy, 46–47, 62; and cynicism criticism, 48; and Funny Games, 43; and Invincible Pictures, 71, 73; L’Atelier du Festival, 65; and liberalism and cosmopolitanism, 56; and Maggiore, 84; and national cinemas and auteurs, 64, 141, 152, 153; and Nymphomaniac, 3; and Oldboy, 40; and scandal films, 49; and sexuality, 67; and transgression, 54–55; and von Trier, 1, 14, 20 Captivity (2007), 21 Carey, Michelle, 55, 58, 60, 61–62 Carmen, Monica del, 163 Carnal Sins (2001), 203 Cassell, Vincent, 175–176 Caterpillar (2010), 47 Celebration, The (Festen, 1998), 150 Celluloid Dreams, 81 censorship, 7, 9, 62, 94, 170; and aesthetic embrace, 37; audience responses to, 32; and BBFC, 100–101, 108, 118, 119; and claims of artistic value, 33; and cultural context, 77; and distributors, 74; economic function of, 121; and extreme cinema, 8; and film festivals, 55, 56, 60, 63, 121; interpretation by, 11; and Japanese film, 139; and MPAA, 99, 117, 118; and Murray, 77; national boards for, 125; and Noé, 25; and Nymphomaniac, 1, 3; and ratings, 97; and real sex, 177; in United States, 78. See also classification boards; classifications/ratings; regulation Center of the World, The (2001), 99, 147, 162–163, 190, 192, 198

challenging content, 22, 47, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 67, 73. See also provocation; shock; transgression Chariots of Fire (1981), 156 Chen, Kaige, 140 Chéreau, Patrice, 162, 180, 182 chien andalou, Un (1929), 4, 185 child pornography, 28, 206; and Sala, 73, 74, 175 children, 3, 188; and Film Forum, 85, 208; and MPAA and BBFC, 121; and Sala, 111 Choi Min-sik, 130 Chow, Rey, 151 Cinema 16, 80–81 cinéma du corps, 3, 37 CineMart, 65 Cinémathèque française, 92 Cinemax, 203 Cinestyria Filmcommission & Fonds, 143 Cine Tirol Film Commission, 143 Clark, Larry, 116, 126, 186, 200, 201 Clark, Sue, 111 Clarke, Alan, 25 Class, The (Klass, 2007), 157 Classification and Rating Administration (CARA), 94–95, 117, 118. See also Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) classification boards, 19, 39, 125; and ratings, 94, 95, 96; and real sex, 177; and real vs. simulated sex, 171. See also Australian Classification Board; British Board of Film Classification (BBFC); Irish Film Classification Office (IFCO); Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft (FSK); Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); regulation classifications/ratings, 9; and classification boards, 94, 95, 96; 18 classification, 8, 97, 109, 113, 118, 119–120, 159; NC-17 rating, 8, 14, 96–99, 106–107, 117, 119, 159, 192; PG-13 rating, 99; R18 classification, 95, 100, 101, 106, 118, 119; R rating, 8, 14, 96, 97, 99, 109, 117, 121; Unrated rating, 99; X rating, 96, 97–98, 106–107. See also sexual content Clip (Klip, 2012), 55, 60, 62, 75, 78, 79, 80, 166 Clockwork Orange, A (1971), 4, 27, 97 Cohen, Michaël, 174, 175

270 • Index

Cold Fish (Tsumetai nettaigyo, 2010), 36 Columbine High School, 96 commerce/commercial issues: and BBFC, 108; and censorship, 94; and cynicism criticism, 38; differentiation from, 21; and distributors, 92; and film festivals, 47, 57; and Invincible Pictures, 74 Commitment, The (2004), 131 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 177 Control Z Films, 150 controversy, 209; and Artsploitation, 78, 79; and audience motives, 32; and BBFC, 96; and distributors, 71; and extreme cinema, 7, 8; and film festivals, 48; and Invincible Pictures, 72, 73; and legitimation, 17; and Tartan, 130. See also provocation; transgression Cooke, David, 110–111, 112, 113, 116 Cooper, Karen, 84, 85, 86 Corliss, Richard, 160 corporations, 53, 57, 59, 61, 63–64 cosmopolitanism, 52, 56, 57, 124 Cousins, Mark, 34 Cowan, Noah, 51, 55, 57–58, 59, 62, 63, 67–68, 225–226n48 Crash (1996), 38, 42, 83, 99, 128, 168 Craven, Wes, 108 Crimes of Passion (1984), 6, 252–253n59 Crist, Judith, 42–43, 80 critics, 7, 10, 17, 30, 33–45, 47, 166; and aesthetic embrace, 34–38; aesthetic evaluations by, 202; and art vs. exploitation, 34; and art film vs. pornography, 180, 182; and arthouse sex films vs. pornography, 179; and audience motives, 32; and institutionalized regard, 37; and MPAA, 106; and Nymphomaniac, 1; and orientalism, 134; and pornography, 205; quotations of in marketing, 198–200; and real sex, 175; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 126; taste of, 21. See also academics; journalists; scholars Cronenberg, David, 42, 168 crowd-sourcing campaigns, 76 Cruise, Tom, 175, 191 Crying Game, The (1992), 81 cult films, 7, 18, 21, 83, 89, 92 cultural imperialism, 135, 157

culture, 10, 12, 20, 44, 47, 53; and academic scholars, 171; and Austria, 155–156; and Austrian film, 145, 147; and BBFC, 108, 116; and disgust, 125; and Film Forum, 85, 92; foreign, 130; and Frenchness, 39; and Hyland, 36; national, 9, 151; recognizable markers of national, 150; and regulation, 125; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 130; and taste, 11, 13, 14; Third World, 156. See also exoticism; national cinemas; orientalism Currimbhoy, Hussain, 50, 52, 53, 57 Curzon, 90–91; Curzon Home Cinema, 90–91, 254n7; Curzon World, 90, 208. See also Artificial Eye cynicism criticism, 13, 48, 80; approach of, 38–45; and BBFC, 115; and Dumont, 49; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 134–135; and transgression, 121 Daiei (studio), 139 Daily Mail, 38 Dalí, Salvador, 40 Dargis, Manohla, 40, 42, 45, 74, 159, 160 Dark Asia (Anchor Bay Entertainment), 126, 131 Darwin’s Nightmare (Darwins Alptraum, 2004), 144 Dauman, Anatole, 139 Day of the Dead (1985), 128 Days of Thunder (1990), 191 Dead or Alive (Deddo oa araibu: Hanzaisha, 1999), 86 Death Race 2000 (1975), 89 Deep Throat (1972), 96, 162 Defoe, Willem, 3, 164 Denis, Claire, 37, 250n13 de Rossi, Alessandra, 240n35 Despentes, Virginie, 3 Destricted (2006), 112, 116 de Valck, Marijke, 13, 48–49, 50, 56, 67 Devil in the Flesh (Diavolo in corpo, 1986), 160, 172 Devils, The (1971), 6, 62, 110, 115, 233n21, 236–237n100 Devil’s Rejects, The (2005), 21 discourse analysis, 11, 18 disintermediation, 93, 118 distinction, 19–29, 172, 173; and aesthetic embrace, 34, 171; and BBFC, 100, 101,

Index • 271

106, 107, 110, 111, 116; and filmmakers, 13; institutionalized rhetoric of, 16, 17; from pornography, 21, 38, 100, 101, 116, 167, 171, 178, 179–185, 201, 203; rhetoric of, 17; and taste, 20–22, 177 distribution, 9, 44, 69–93, 149; digital, 70, 85, 90, 93; and film festivals, 67; international, 122–136; mainstream vs. arthouse, 70; niche, 130 distribution rights, 65 distributors, 3, 7, 8, 69–93, 208, 209; and art, 15, 92; and arthouse sex films vs. pornography, 179; and audiences, 71, 79; and BBFC, 118; benefit of ratings system to, 121; and censorship, 74, 94; and commercial issues, 92; and controversy, 71; and cynicism criticism, 45; and DVDs, 90; and earliest cinema history, 4; and exoticism, 14–15; and exploitation, 92; and film festivals, 84; and Film Forum, 85; and filmmakers, 15, 71; and finance, 70; independent, 88; as institutions, 19; interests of, 14; and legal spheres, 71; and marketing, 71, 190–203; and markets, 70, 71; motives of, 10; and MPAA, 107; nature and characteristics of, 70–71; and NC-17 films, 97, 98, 99; and Netflix, 91; and postwar cinema, 5; and professional relationships, 74, 81, 84; and ratings, 96; and real sex, 173; rhetoric of, 11; and sales agents, 84; as shaping reception, 92–93; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 129, 130; and transgression, 121. See also advertising; Artsploitation Films; Invincible Pictures; marketing; publicity; Tartan Films Dobermann (1997), 236n91 documentaries, 85, 144–145, 156, 171, 172, 180 Dog Days (Hundstage, 2001), 141, 147 Dog Flesh (Carne de perro, 2012), 60 Dog Food (Azucena, 2000), 125 Dogma 95, 149–150, 187–188 Dogtooth (Kynodontas, 2009), 46, 55, 58, 69, 157 dolce vita, La (1960), 5 Dorolita’s Passion Dance (1897), 4 Drake, Philip, 88 Dreamers, The (2003), 98, 99, 190, 191

Driller Killer, The (1979), 117 Dubai International Film Festival, 47, 53, 62 Ducey, Caroline, 165 Duchamp, Marcel, 40 dumbing-down, 3, 9, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 74 Dumont, Bruno, 6, 24–25, 29, 34, 37, 41, 42, 48–49, 58, 186 Dumplings (Jiao zi, 2004), 125, 130 Durkheim, Émile, 19 Duval, Robin, 99–118 DVDs, 74, 75, 88, 90, 91, 121, 203; art and artsploitation series of, 8; and arthouse sex films vs. pornography, 179; and Austrian film, 146; and BBFC, 77, 95, 119; Blu-ray discs, 90; consumption of, 142; and marketing, 6, 79, 192–194, 195, 197–200; and ratings, 99; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 3, 129, 130–133, 134; uncut, 121; in United Kingdom, 77–78. See also marketing East End Film Festival, 52, 53, 55, 58, 60, 62, 74 Eastern Edge (Columbia Tri-Star Home Entertainment), 3, 126 Ebert, Roger, 172 economics, 12–13, 29, 211; of art, 20; and Bataille, 184; and film festivals, 53, 55, 57, 60; and real sex, 171, 177. See also distributors; funding Ecstasy (Ekstase, 1933), 4, 204, 252–253n59 Edison, Thomas, 4 Effi Briest (1974), 156 Eisenstein, Sergei, 127 Electric (cinema), 128 Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), 4 Elle (magazine), 200 Elles (2009), 69 Elsaesser, Thomas, 68, 156 Emmanuelle (1974), 83, 165, 236n88 emotion, 22, 23, 101, 124, 151–152, 181–182, 187 Empire (magazine), 200 ennui, L’ (1998), 69, 160, 162, 195, 197 Entertainment Weekly (magazine), 200 Enter the Void (2009), 46 épater le bourgeois, 40 Eraserhead (1977), 83 European Film Market (EFM), 65

272 • Index

European Union, 118; MEDIA, 53 Exarchopoulos, Adèle, 159 Execution of P, The (Kinatay) (2009), 46, 54–55 exhibition, 19, 44; and distributors’ agreements, 70; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 129. See also exhibitors; Film Forum; Nitehawk Cinema exhibitors, 7, 11, 45, 71, 87; and art cinema, 4; and arthouse sex films vs. pornography, 179; and censorship, 94; and cynicism criticism, 45; and foreign films, 122; and legitimation, 92; and niche audience, 14; and regulation, 95, 118; and transgression, 8, 80 Exorcist, The (1973), 106 exoticism, 5, 14–15, 149, 151, 156, 157; as aesthetics of decontextualization, 122–123; and BBFC, 106; and British audiences, 124–125; and Hollywood, 124; and orientalism, 123–124; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 129, 130, 132, 134, 135. See also orientalism; Otherness exploitation, 7, 42, 44, 127, 192, 209; of actors, 175, 201; and aesthetic embrace, 34, 38; and art, 4, 115, 183, 203; and BBFC, 108; and critics, 34; and distributors, 92; and marketing, 201; reframing of, 13 exploitation films, 4, 5, 21, 83, 207–208; and mainstream, 208; and ratings, 96 extreme cinema: definition of, 7–8 “Extreme Cinema” (Channel 4 film series), 83 Eye, The (Gin gwai, 2002), 36 Eye, The: Infinity (Gin gwai 10, 2005), 130 Eye 2, The (Gin gwai 2, 2004), 130 Eyes Wide Shut (1999), 175 Face (Peiseu, 2004), 131, 132 Facebook, 58, 87, 89, 206 Falcon, Richard, 40, 221n5 Fantasia International Film Festival, 71 Fassbender, Michael, 164, 191 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 25 Fatal (Kashi-ggot, 2010), 60 Fat Girl (À ma soeur!, 2001), 31, 83, 165, 170, 182 feel-bad cinema, 6, 140–141, 147, 152, 154 Fell, Chris, 50, 60

Ferman, James, 99, 100, 103, 106, 236n91 Ferrara, Abel, 106, 117 Festival del film Locarno, 57, 65 Field, Simon, 53, 54, 57 Filmakademie Wien, 147 film festival directors, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 73 film festival programmers, 3, 10; and aesthetic embrace, 37; and aesthetic quality, 86; and Austrian film, 149; and funding, 152; goals for audiences of, 56–58; and personal taste, 84; relationship with journalists and filmmakers, 49; selection by, 11; and transgression, 8; variety of, 52 film festivals, 46–68, 82, 92, 135, 150, 207, 209; and Anglophone world, 12; and art film vs. pornography, 182; and artistic criteria, 60; and Austrian cinema, 144, 148, 156; and BBFC, 113; and business models, 47; and censorship, 121; commercial interests of, 74; and community, 57, 58; and corporate sponsorship, 61, 63–64; and cosmopolitanism, 67; culture in locations of, 55–56, 62–63; and cynicism criticism, 41; and defiance of conventional tastes and controversy, 54–56; and directors, 65; and distribution, 67; and distributors, 84; and diversity, 52, 53, 61; economic factors affecting, 63–64; and extreme cinema, 7, 8; extreme cinema as endemic to, 14; and filmmakers, 47, 49, 57, 65; and funding, 65–66; goals for audiences of, 56–58, 60; and graphic sex in art films, 160; as institutions, 19; and Invincible Pictures, 71, 74; and Japanese film, 140; as key matchmakers, 65; and liberalism, 66–67; and marketing, 200, 201; as marketplace, 67–68; as matching sponsors to films, 64; and midnight movies, 83; and Murray, 77; as nonprofit organizations, 74; and press, 61; and production, 67; proliferation of, 9, 47–48; and publicity, 62; and quality and personal taste, 58–61; and scandal films, 47–50; and tourism, 57; and training programs for young filmmakers, 65; and transgression, 14, 61 Filmfonds Wien, 143, 144

Index • 273

Film Forum, 83–88, 89, 92, 208 FilmFour, 83 filmmakers, 7, 8, 16–29, 17, 30, 48, 209, 212; and aesthetic embrace, 37; and art, 17; and arthouse sex films vs. pornography, 178–189, 201–202; artistic intentions of, 24, 178–189, 201–202; and Artsploitation Films, 76; audiences’ discourse vs., 17–18; and auteurism, 37; and authenticity, 15; and BBFC, 118; and cynicism criticism, 38, 45; and distributors, 15, 71; and extreme cinema, 8; and film festivals, 47, 49, 57, 65; and Film Forum, 85; and funding, 64, 65; intentions of, 13, 21; interpretation by, 11; moral agnosticism of, 23; motives of, 10; non-Anglophone, 15, 122; and pornography, 15; and press attention, 49; and realism, 15; and real sex, 173, 174, 177; relationship with film festival programmers, 49; rhetoric of, 11; and taste and distinction, 13; and TLA Releasing, 76; and transgression, 17, 20, 24, 25, 42, 54, 121 Film Movement, 69, 88, 90 film piracy, 118 First Amendment, 99 First Desires (Premiers désirs, 1984), 175 FlixFling, 82, 91, 209, 254n7 foreign films, 78, 97, 134, 137, 208; and BBFC, 106, 107–113, 117; and exoticism, 14–15; and MPAA, 106–107, 117; and sexual content, 4–6; and titillation, 5 foreignness, 125, 140, 156; and expectations, 124; and Tartan, 128 Fortissimo, 81 Foucault, Michel, 218n8 Fox, Kerry, 162, 173 Fox Lorber Films/Off Line Releasing/Win Star TV & Video, 193–194 Fox Searchlight, 99 Free Will (Der freie Wille, 2006), 197 Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft (FSK), 95 French, Philip, 153 French Cultural Institute, 53 Friedman, David, 5 Friedrich, Georg, 143 Frimmel, Rainer, 153 Fritzl, Josef, 152, 153, 154, 155

Fuji, Tatsuya, 162 funding, 9, 19, 37, 76, 143–144, 145, 148, 149, 152, 156, 157, 207, 210; and art, 20; and BBFC, 95, 119; and CARA, 95; corporate, 53, 57, 59, 61, 63–64; and festivals, 14, 55, 59, 61, 64, 65–66; and filmmakers, 65, 140, 150, 151; and government subsidies, 57. See also economics Funny Games (1997), 69, 83, 130, 141, 147, 154, 236n91; and audience motives, 32; and distinction, 21; and Film Forum, 86; and high vs. low, 17–18; pretensions of, 43–44; and titillation, 27 Funny Games U.S. (2007), 25, 128 Gainsbourg, Charlotte, 1, 32, 164, 199 Gallo, Vincent, 173, 174, 175, 176, 204; and art film vs. pornography, 183–184; and artistic virtuosity, 185; and pornography, 205 Galt, Rosalind, 8, 13 Game of Thrones (cable television series), 87, 207 Gamera—Guardian of the Universe (Gamera daikaijū kuchu kessen, 1995), 85 Gandu (2010), 75, 79 Gans, Herbert J., 40, 41 Garrett, Stephen, 5 Gate Notting Hill (cinema), 128 Gaut, Berys, 216n33 genres, 75, 76, 87, 129; crossing of, 8; divisions of, 177; subversion of, 171; transgression of, 173 Geyrhalter, Nikolaus, 141 Ghost of Mae Nak (2005), 131 Gillam, David, 52, 57, 58, 60 Girls’ Club (Club de femmes, 1936), 4, 252–253n59 Glawogger, Michael, 152 Gleiberman, Owen, 194, 199 Godard, Jean-Luc, 18, 42, 48, 195, 250n13 Goethe Institut, 53 Goldstein, Bruce, 84, 85 Gomery, Douglas, 13 Good News (Good News: Von Kolporteuren, toten Hunden und anderen Wienern, 1990), 152 Google, 58, 63 Google Play, 91

274 • Index

goths, 129 GQ (magazine), 200 Grandrieux, Phillippe, 41 Grayling, A. C., 108 Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, The (2005), 21 Grissemann, Christoph, 145 Grove Press, 80–81 Guardian, The, 33–34, 49, 200 Guiraudie, Alain, 62 Hail Mary (1985), 48, 61 Hallam, Julia, 189 Halle, Randall, 66 Hamilton, David, 175 Hampton, Howard, 160 Haneke, Michael, 6, 28, 128, 199, 236n91; and aesthetic embrace, 34, 166; and British audiences, 125; and critical spectatorship, 25; and cynicism criticism, 42, 43–44; and differentiation, 207; and distinction, 167; and domestic culture, 152; and ethical representation of violence, 27–29; fans of, 18; and Filmakademie Wien, 147; and film festivals, 65; and Film Forum, 85–86; followers of, 32; and funding, 144; and Lim, 141; and Mes, 36; as model, 148; and obscenity vs. pornography, 27, 28; and reputation, 20; and Schleinzer, 153–154, 155; and transgression, 20; and transgression and familiarity, 149; “Violence and the Media,” 27 Hanley, Pam, 104, 105, 106 Hard Romantiker (Hādo romanchikkā, 2011), 75, 79 Hausner, Jessica, 147, 148, 154 Hawkins, Joan, 13, 17–18, 83, 135 Hays Code, 5 Heffernan, Keith, 80 Heffler, Brad, 71, 73 Heffner, Richard, 117 Heirloom, The (Zhai bian, 2005), 131 Heller, Eva, 130 Hemel (2012), 47, 75, 79, 164, 195 heritage films, 156, 157 Hernandez, Marcos, 173, 187 Hesmondhalgh, David, 212 high art, 17–18 highbrow films, 42, 43, 160, 170, 200, 205. See also high vs. low; lowbrow films

high-concept projects, 191, 192, 194 High Tension (2003), 98 high vs. low, 17, 42, 171, 172, 177 Higson, Andrew, 12 Hillier, Jim, 151 Hilton, Paris, 204 Hiroshima mon amour (1959), 43 History of Violence, A (2005), 46 Hitchcock, Alfred, 84 Hitler, Adolf, 152, 155 Hjort, Mette, 150 Hoad, Phil, 141 Hoberman, J., 199 Hodgkiss, Ros, 100–101, 236n91 Holden, Stephen, 154 Hole in My Heart, A (Ett hål i mitt hjärta, 2004), 183, 190, 191 Hollywood/Hollywood films, 110, 149, 151, 157, 169, 231n6; and art cinema, 16; competition with, 6; and cynicism criticism, 40; and differentiation, 21, 207; and exploitation films, 207, 208; and Hays Code, 5; and Kael, 43; and MPAA, 106; and Quandt, 41; representations of East in, 123–124 Hollywood Video, 91 Hong Kong–Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF), 65 Horeck, Tanya, 30, 31, 170, 222n24 horror films, 27, 128, 164, 207; and aesthetic embrace, 34; Asian, 125; and Audition, 86, 87; and BBFC, 106; and cynicism criticism, 43, 44; and disgust, 24; East Asian, 125; and ethics, 29; and high-art works, 18; and midnight exhibitions, 83; and Quandt, 41; splatter, 7; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 129 Hostel (2005), 18, 21, 23 Housemaid, The (Hanyo, 2010), 69 House on the Edge of the Park, The (La casa sperduta nel parco, 1980), 31 Huber, Christoph, 143 Huggan, Graham, 122–123 Hüller, Sandra, 164 Human Centipede, The (2009), 21, 39 Human Centipede II, The (Full Sequence) (2011), 38, 119 Humanité, L’ (1999), 34, 41, 49 Hyland, Robert, 36–37

Index • 275

I Am Curious (Yellow) (Jag är nyfiken—en film i gult, 1967), 6, 42, 80, 81, 88, 96, 128, 205 Ichi the Killer (Koroshiya 1, 2001), 31, 35, 36, 86, 92–93, 125 Idiots, The (Idioterne, 1998): and BBFC, 101–102, 106, 111, 112, 119, 205; and cultural context, 63; and cynicism criticism, 40; and Dogma 95, 150, 187–188; earnings of, 190, 191; as hardcore art, 160, 161; marketing of, 192; and MPAA, 99; and pornography, 204; and regulation, 94 If (1968), 96 If These Walls Could Talk (1996), 125 If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000), 175 Ihara, Saikaku, 139 Illegal Operation, The (1962), 125 I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (Ssa-i-bogeu-ji-man-gwen-chan-a, 2006), 128 Import/Export (2007), 46, 116, 141, 146 In Bed (En la cama, 2005), 157, 162, 197 Independent Television Commission, 103 Infection (Kansen, 2004), 130 initiation scenario, 165–166 Inland Empire (2006), 89 innovation/novelty, 17, 48, 166, 168, 209; and aesthetic embrace, 35; and film festivals, 47, 50, 65; and marketing, 203; and Mes, 36; and Quandt, 41; and transgression, 19–20 Inside (À l’intérieur, 2007), 58 Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), 116 institutional factors, 7, 9, 11, 12, 15, 18–19, 20, 33, 93, 147, 148, 149, 154, 157, 211, 212; and art cinema, 6, 8, 12, 16, 207, 209, 210; and distinction, 17, 18, 21, 23; and distribution, 70, 71, 82; and film, 10; and film festivals, 14, 62, 65, 66, 67, 68; and Film Forum, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89; and novelty, 19; and regulatory bodies, 95, 99, 112, 118; and transgression, 17, 18, 20 Interior. Leather Bar. (2013), 60 internationalism, 37, 52, 53; and autoexoticization, 151; and film festivals, 52; and Japanese film, 139. See also transnational production/reception internet, 15, 89, 91; and Film Forum, 87; forums on, 8, 92; and pornography,

205; and ratings boards, 118; snuff films on, 38 interpretation, 11, 113–114. See also aesthetic embrace; artistic criteria/ intentions In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korīda, 1976), 4, 160, 170, 251n30, 252–253n59; and amour fou, 161, 162, 163; and art film vs. pornography, 184–185; and BBFC, 100, 108, 112, 113; formal features of, 168; and national identity, 139, 156; and pornography, 139, 184–185, 204, 205; as reference point, 185–186, 199 Intimacy (2001): and art film vs. pornography, 180, 182; and Australian Classification Board, 94; and BBFC, 108, 111–112, 113, 205; earnings of, 190; as hardcore art, 160; marketing of, 195, 199; and pornography, 166–167, 170; real sex in, 171, 172, 173; story of, 162 Into the Mirror (Geoul sokeuro, 2003), 131 Invincible Pictures, 3, 14, 71–75, 76, 78, 81–82, 83, 90, 91, 208–209 iPhone, 91 Irish Film Censors Office. See Irish Film Classification Office (IFCO) Irish Film Classification Office (IFCO), 94, 95 Irreversible (Irréversible, 2002), 3, 39, 46, 67, 69; and appeals to leave, 25; and art vs. exploitation, 34; and audience responses, 31, 32; audience walkouts from, 30; and BBFC, 108; higher purpose of, 170; and MIFF, 55; and MPAA, 99; provocation by, 48, 49; real-life couple in, 175–176; and Tookey, 38 Isle, The (Seom, 2000), 133, 234n52 I Stand Alone (Seul contre tous, 1998), 25, 38, 39, 86, 101, 111, 121, 185, 190 It Begins with the End (Ça commence par la fin, 2010), 174, 175, 192 It Happened Just Before (Kurz davor ist es passiert, 2006), 148 iTunes, 71, 91 Iwabuchi, Koichi, 123, 136 Jacob, Gilles, 54 James, Nick, 34, 40, 46–47, 48 Jang Sun-Woo, 184, 194, 199, 205 Japan Foundation, 53

276 • Index

Jarmusch, Jim, 89, 140 Jaws (1975), 191 Jelinek, Elfriede, 141, 147, 152 Jenks, Chris, 19–20, 25, 32 Jesus, You Know (Jesus, du weißt, 2003), 147 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, 124 Jinga Films, 73 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 83 Jodorowksy’s Dune (2013), 87 Jofroi (1934), 5 Johnson, Beth, 170, 171, 247n31 Jolie, Angelina, 175 Jones, Nick Freand, 83 Jones, Tommy Lee, 204 Jørgensen, Bodil, 188 journalists, 67; and actors and real sex, 173, 175; and aesthetic embrace, 34, 44; and art vs. exploitation, 34; and Austrian cinema, 149; and BBFC, 107, 113; and cynicism criticism, 42, 44; and film festivals, 47, 48–49; and funding, 152; and hardcore art cinema, 160; and legitimation, 66; and marketing, 197; and personal taste, 33; and real content, 201; and scandal, 49, 56; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 126. See also critics; media; press Kaas, Nikolaj Lie, 188 Kael, Pauline, 43, 44, 48; “Fantasies of the Art-House Audience,” 43 Kampusch, Natascha, 152, 153, 154, 155 Kang Hye-jeong, 130 Kauffmann, Stanley, 154 Kechiche, Abdellatif, 159–160, 181, 187, 189 Kelly + Victor (2012), 106, 119, 162, 192, 195 Kendall, Tina, 30, 31, 222n24 Ken Park (2002), 69, 94, 126, 166, 171, 186; marketing of, 195, 197, 199, 200–201, 203 Kermode, Mark, 34, 83, 106, 108, 119 Kersh, Adam, 82 Key Largo (2004), 203 Kickstarter, 76 Kidman, Nicole, 175 Kids (1995), 175 Killer Inside Me, The (2010), 26, 47 Kim Ki-duk, 42, 64 King of New York (1990), 106 Kino Lorber, 69, 81, 82 Kino Video, 199

Kiss, The (1896), 4 Kleinhans, Chuck, 125 Klimt, Gustav, 147 Korean Cultural Center, 53 Korine, Harmony, 128, 183, 200 Kracauer, Siegfried, 189 Krzywinska, Tanya, 79, 165, 166–167, 169, 170–171, 172, 173, 201 Kubrick, Stanley, 4, 27, 186, 251n31 Kurosawa, Akira, 138–139 Kyo, Machiko, 139 LaBeouf, Shia, 1, 2, 24, 197 LaBruce, Bruce, 56 Lachman, Ed, 200, 201 Lady Chatterley trial, 107 Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi, 2005), 130, 131, 240n35 Lalapipo (2009), 69 Landmark Theatres, 82, 208 Last House on the Left, The (1972), 108 Last Tango in Paris (Ultimo tango a Parigi, 1972), 6, 43, 96, 97, 100, 139, 160, 161, 163, 168, 169, 182, 185, 199, 204 Last Year in Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad, 1961), 42 law, 67, 99, 106, 113, 140; and distributors, 71, 73, 74, 78, 91; and festivals, 48, 62; and obscenity, 11, 78, 92, 94, 100, 184; and regulation and classification, 95, 96, 100, 102, 105, 106–107, 118. See also censorship; regulation Lealand, Geoff, 89 Leap Year (Año bisiesto, 2010), 69, 149, 163– 164, 163, 211; and distinction, 21; earnings of, 190; marketing of, 192, 195 Lee, Jang Ho, 140 Lee, Sook-Yin, 165 Leeds International Film Festival, 14, 50, 53, 55, 60, 74 lesbians, 50, 75, 77, 159, 165, 166, 191, 197, 199, 203 Let’s Make Money (2007), 144 Lev, Peter, 5 Lewis, Herschell Gordon, 127 Lewis, Jon, 4, 97, 120–121, 171–172, 173, 177, 190 LGBT audiences and market, 50, 75, 77 Lies (Gojitmal, 1999), 160, 167–168, 171, 184, 186, 193; and art vs. exploitation, 203;

Index • 277

DVD release of, 193–195; earnings of, 190; marketing of, 192, 197, 199, 200 Lie with Me (2005), 195 Life of Jesus (La vie de Jésus, 1997), 41 Lim, Dennis, 140–141, 147, 194 Limosin, Jean-Pierre, 186 Linklater, Alexander, 173 Lionsgate Entertainment, Lionsgate Films, 70, 99 Lisa and the Devil (1972), 92 Littlerock (2010), 63 Locarno. See Festival del film Locarno London Film Festival, 62 Long Tail economics, 209, 254n7 Love (2015), 203 Love Exposure (Ai no mukidashi, 2008), 69 Lovely Rita (2001), 148 Lover’s Guide, The (1991), 100 lowbrow films, 21, 38. See also highbrow films; high vs. low low-concept films, 192, 194 Lust, Caution (2007), 190 Lynch, David, 83 Machin, David, 18 MacKenzie, Scott, 160 Macnab, Geoffrey, 70 Mädchen in Uniform (1931), 165 Mader, Ruth, 147, 148 Maggiore, Michael, 84–88 Magnolia Pictures, 69, 73, 82, 88, 91, 208 Maid, The (2005), 131–132, 240n35 Maid, The (La nana, 2009), 157 Man Bites Dog (C’est arrivé près de chez vous, 1992), 128 Maniac (2012), 58 Marebito (2004), 131 marketing, 7, 8, 190–203, 252–253n59; and arthouse sex films, 178; and Artsploitation Films, 77; of Asian films as aberrant, 15; and audience motives, 32; and Austrian film, 146; and differentiation, 207; and distinction, 21; and Film Forum, 85, 88; grassroots, 85, 88; iconography of, 193; and interpretation, 11; and orientalism, 135; and product life cycle, 208; and real sex, 176; and sexual content, 4–6; and Tartan, 128–129, 132-133, 134, 135, 138; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 130–133,

138; theatrical exhibition as, 88. See also advertising; distributors; DVDs; posters; publicity; trailers Martin, Daniel, 133–134, 138 Martin, Stacy, 1 Martin-Jones, David, 151 Matheou, Demetrios, 26, 30–31 Matsuda, Eiko, 162 Mayer, Arthur, 4 Mayr, Andrea, 18 McAlpine, Hamish, 76, 126–128, 127, 130, 134 MCA-Universal, 97 McQueen, Steve, 117 Medem, Julio, 162 media, 3, 12; and aesthetic embrace, 36; and BBFC, 96, 102, 105, 109; and censorship, 94; and distribution, 78; and early film, 4; and film festivals, 14, 47, 48, 49, 54, 56, 61, 65, 67; and Haneke, 44; and Nymphomaniac, 1; and regulation, 96, 98; studies of, 9–10; and transgression, 20, 24; and violence, 28–29, 36, 44. See also critics; journalists; press; publicity; social media Meehan, Eileen R., 211 Melancholia (2011), 46 Melbourne International Film Festival, 14, 55–56, 58, 60, 61–62, 83, 121 Memento (2000), 42 Merchant-Ivory Productions, 152 Mes, Tom, 36, 37 Metro-Tartan Distribution, 126 Michael (2011), 46, 49, 141, 153–155, 155 Microsoft, 57 Midnight Cowboy (1969), 96, 97, 185 midnight movie movement, 82–83 Mifune, Toshiro, 139 Miike, Takashi, 6, 7, 24, 29, 36, 86, 127, 129, 138 Mikey (1992), 115 Miller, Geoffrey, 31, 32 Milos, Maja, 79 Miramax, 81, 97, 99, 107, 237n109 Miss Violence (2013), 47, 91, 157 Mister Lonely (2007), 128 Mistique Productions, 203 Mitchell, John Cameron, 181, 182 MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York), 83–84 Momentum Pictures, 69, 198 Moodysson, Lukas, 183, 184, 205

278 • Index

morality/ethics, 5, 17, 23, 24, 26, 29, 44, 154; and art film vs. pornography, 181; and Breillat, 27; and earliest cinema history, 4; and James, 48; and Kael, 43; and Mes, 36; and moral agnosticism, 23; and real sex, 173; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 134; and transgression, 22; and violence, 27–29 Mosco, Vincent, 10, 212 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 10, 12, 14, 119, 231n6, 237n109; and aesthetics, 117; and BBFC, 102; and film festivals, 55; and Murray, 78; as protective, 121; and ratings system, 94–95, 96–99, 106–107 MUBI, 207 Mucky Malcolm’s Misadventures 3 (2008), 203 Mulligan, Carey, 164, 191 Murphy, Stephen, 233n21, 236n88 Murray, Raymond, 75–79, 81, 89, 128, 191, 192, 209, 230n57 Mushkadiz, Anapola, 173, 187, 197 Muybridge, Eadweard, 4 My Best Enemy (Mein bester Feind, 2011), 143 Nagata, Masaichi, 139 narrative formulas, 161–166 Nathalie . . . (2003), 175, 204 national cinemas, 6, 43, 122, 134, 135, 148, 149, 151, 156–157, 212; and BBFC, 108, 111, 116, 118; differentiation from, 21; as exotic, 137, 140; and film festivals, 52, 64, 65; and negative self-representation, 15. See also regional cinemas national-cultural organizations, 53 nationality, 125; and achievement, 48; and BBFC, 107–113, 114; characteristics of, 36, 49, 124, 137, 150; and culture, 9, 151; defiance of frameworks of, 140, 155; and expectations, 124; and film festivals, 50; markers of, 150, 151; and reception, 157 Natural Born Killers (1994), 27 Nazism, 1, 154–155, 156 Neale, Steve, 8, 12, 16–17; “Art Cinema as Institution,” 6 Needham, Gary, 134 Netflix, 71, 74, 90, 91, 230n57, 254n7 New Film History, 13, 212 New German Cinema, 156 Newsweek (magazine), 200

New York Film Festival, 61 New York Magazine, 42 New York Times, 200 Nichols, John, 107 Night Porter, The (Il portiere di notte, 1973), 6 9 Songs (2004), 3, 46, 55, 58, 69, 185; and art vs. exploitation, 203; and art film vs. pornography, 179, 180, 182; and Australian Classification Board, 94; and BBFC, 106, 112–113, 116, 119; and distinction, 21; earnings of, 190; formal features of, 167, 168, 169; marketing of, 192, 197–198, 199; and pornography, 204; and realism, 189; and real sex, 171, 172–173 Nitehawk Cinema, 89, 90, 208 Noé, Gaspar, 29, 34, 37, 42, 86, 116, 121, 135, 186, 203, 209; and aesthetic embrace, 34; appeals to leave by, 25; and artistic virtuosity, 185; and differentiation, 207; “I’m Happy Some People Walk Out during My Film,” 25; and James, 48; and Quandt, 41; and Rayns, 39; scandal in career of, 49; and Tookey, 38; and transgression, 20 nouvelle vague, 5, 41, 42 Novo (2002), 186, 203 Nowhere to Hide (Injeong sajeong bol geot eobtda, 1999), 128 Nymphomaniac (2014), 1, 2, 11, 165, 173, 196; and audience motives, 32; and distribution, 69, 88, 90, 91; and film festivals, 47, 62, 63, 67; marketing of, 195–196, 199; media coverage of, 33–34; and pornography, 24, 204; promotion of, 24; reception of, 1–3, 49 O’Brien, Kieran, 173, 180, 197 obscenity, 28, 167; and art film, 185; and BBFC, 101; pornography vs., 27, 28, 167, 180, 184–185; in United Kingdom, 95, 100, 101 obscenity laws, 11, 78, 92, 94, 100, 184 Oldboy (Oldeuboi, 2003), 40, 46, 49, 55, 69, 129, 130 Old Dog (Khyi rgan, 2011), 63 Oliver! (1968), 85 Olsen, Mark, 154 Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), 89 Ophüls, Max, 108

Index • 279

Opinion Research Corporation, 102 Optimum Releasing, 69, 197, 199; and Optimum Asia, 126 ORF. See Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) orientalism, 15, 64, 66, 123–124, 151, 157, 238n6; and Japanese film, 139; and marketing, 135; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 133–135. See also Asian cinema; culture Oshima, Nagisa, 4, 139, 140, 156, 184–186, 199; “Theory of Experimental Pornographic Film,” 184–185 Ossard, Claudie, 137 Otherness, 66, 123, 139, 140, 156. See also exoticism; foreign films; orientalism Our Daily Bread (Unser täglich Brot, 2005), 144 Our Hitler (Hitler—ein Film aus Deutschland, 1977), 156 Ozon, François, 41 Ozu, Yasujiro, 138–139 Pagnol, Marcel, 5 Palisades Media Corporation, 126 Palisades Tartan US and UK, 126 Palmer, Tim, 30, 37, 49–50, 170, 222n24 Pan Asia Film Festival (of London), 52 paracinema, 83 Paradise: Faith (Paradies: Glaube, 2012), 3, 47, 49, 60, 141, 147, 152 Paradise: Hope (Paradies: Hoffnung, 2013), 47, 60 Paradise: Love (Paradies: Liebe, 2012), 46, 60, 141 Park Chan-wook, 40, 42, 64, 65, 128, 209 Parker, Molly, 162 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 18, 185, 250n13 Patriot, The (Die Patriotin, 1979), 156 pay-per-view, 88 peer-to-peer networks, 118 Peirce, Kimberly, 117 Pence, Bill, 67 Peranson, Mark, 57, 81 Performance (1970), 6 Perren, Alisa, 70, 71 Petley, Julian, 119 Petrie, Duncan, 149 Philadelphia Film Festival, 75 Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, 75

Photoplay (magazine), 175 Piano, The (1993), 42 Piano Teacher, The (Die Klavierspielerin, 2001), 27, 42, 141, 144, 146, 147, 152, 153, 166, 170; earnings of, 190; marketing of, 195, 199, 200 Pierrot le Fou (1965), 110 Pieta (2012), 36, 60 Pinkerton, Nick, 154 pink films, 7, 92 Pitt, Brad, 175 Plastic Planet (2009), 144 Pola X (1999), 162, 190, 195 politics, 24, 44, 63, 80, 152, 212; and art cinema of 1950s and 1960s, 42; of autoethnography, 150; and BBFC, 99, 107, 110, 111, 114, 118, 119; and cynicism criticism, 38; and film festivals, 50, 54, 55, 57, 62, 63, 64, 66; and Film Forum, 84; and French cinema, 41; and globalism, 149; and Hyland, 36–37; identity, 172; and Lewis, 120, 121; and MPAA, 95, 99; and orientalism, 123, 136 Poolside Orgy (2003), 203 PornHub, 23, 204 porno chic, 41 Pornographer, The (Le pornographe, 2001), 113, 121, 182, 195, 197, 199, 250n13 pornography, 3, 7, 34, 49, 55, 113, 173, 185, 200, 209; and academic scholars, 166–169, 170–171; aggregators of, 204; and art cinema, 160, 161; and art vs. exploitation, 203; and arthouse filmmakers’ artistic intentions, 178–189; and BBFC, 99, 101, 106, 116, 118; and Bonello, 250n13; and differentiation, 207; distinction from, 21, 38, 100, 101, 116, 167, 171, 178, 179–185, 201, 203; and filmmakers, 15; hardcore, 99, 100, 106; and hardcore art films, 203–205; and high-art works, 18; and Japanese film, 139; and national stereotypes, 137; nature or allure of, 183; and NC-17 rating, 97; and Nymphomaniac, 1, 24; obscenity vs., 27; and Oshima, 186; proliferation of, 204–205; and ratings, 96; soft core, 100, 106; and Sontag, 22, 42; and Tookey, 38; in United Kingdom, 100

280 • Index

postcolonial theory, 123 posters, 4, 15, 92, 139, 179, 207; design of, 194–195, 196, 197, 200, 202; marketing through, 191, 192; and Tartan, 129, 132. See also advertising; marketing postmodernism, 29 post-porn, 3 Premier Asia (Contender Entertainment), 126 press, 33, 38, 209; and BBFC, 103, 118; and distributors, 71; and film festivals, 53, 61; and Film Forum, 87; and Invincible Pictures, 73; and Nymphomaniac, 24; and real sex, 173, 174, 176. See also journalists; media; publicity Prince, Richard, 116 Principles of Lust, The (2003), 195 provocation, 6, 8, 38, 209. See also challenging content; controversy; scandal; shock; transgression psychoanalytic criticism, 9 publicity, 200; and distributors, 70; and film festivals, 62; and Film Forum, 85; and Invincible Pictures, 73–74; and real sex, 173; and scandal, 78; in social media, 70; and transgression, 54. See also advertising; distributors; marketing; press; scandal public opinion, 96, 125; and BBFC, 102, 103–104, 106, 118, 237n102; and classification boards, 118 Public Toilet (Hwajangshil eodieyo?, 2002), 125 Puffball (2007), 116 pure gaze, 21, 22 Pusan International Film Festival, 47, 50 Pusan Promotion Plan (PPP), 65 Pyramide, 81 Q (2011), 69, 165, 166, 195, 203 Quandt, James, 41, 42, 134–135 Ramos, Charles E., 99, 237n109 Randy Housewives (2001), 203 rape, 3, 125, 170; and aesthetic embrace, 38; and audience responses, 32; and BBFC, 100, 105; and Dumont, 48; and Noé, 25; and real sex, 176; and Tookey, 38 rape-revenge films, 29 Rashomon (1950), 138–139

ratings. See classifications/ratings Rayns, Tony, 39, 86 realism, 15, 130, 145, 186–189, 201; and academic discourse, 15, 171–177; and art film vs. pornography, 167, 169; and arthouse sex films vs. pornography, 179; and Brunette, 42; double standard of, 189; and filmmakers, 15; and marketing, 201; and Nymphomaniac, 1; and pornography, 205; psychological, 171; and real sex, 174; and Sontag, 22; transgressive, 24; as truth telling, 189. See also authenticity; sexual content: real/unsimulated reality TV, 209 Real Young Girl, A (Une vraie jeune fille, 1976), 160, 165 reception, 9, 10, 30–45; distributors as shaping, 92–93; historical, 11; and national origins, 157; and real sex, 176. See also audiences; critics; film festival programmers; journalists recording medium, film as, 172, 177, 180, 189 Regal (cinema chain), 128 regional cinemas, 6, 21, 36, 70. See also national cinemas regulation, 9, 10, 61, 94–121, 192; and distributors, 74; and government, 95; in United Kingdom, 77–78. See also British Board of Film Classification (BBFC); censorship; classification boards; classifications/ratings; Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) Remains of the Day (1993), 156 Remstar, 197, 200 Renoir, Jean, 5 Resistance Cosmopolitanism, 140, 152, 156 Resnais, Alain, 43 Reygados, Carlos, 187 Riefenstahl, Leni, 67 Ringel, Eleanor, 48, 61 Ringu (1998), 128, 133, 134 Ritzy (cinema), 128 Roeg, Nicholas, 116 Roku, 91 Romance (1999), 15, 149; and amour fou coupling scenario, 165; and art vs. exploitation, 203; and art film vs.

Index • 281

pornography, 182; and Australian Classification Board, 94; and authenticity, 187; and BBFC, 99, 102, 106, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 117, 119; dark tone of, 169; and distinction, 21; earnings of, 190; as hardcore art, 160; marketing of, 192, 195, 197, 199, 200; and MPAA, 99; real sex in, 171, 172 Romanian Cultural Institute, 53 Rome, Open City (Roma, città aperta, 1945), 4, 82, 88 Romney, Jonathan, 34, 153, 154 Ronde, La (1950), 6, 165 Room in Rome (Habitación en Roma, 2010), 69, 162 Rosen, Rachel, 51, 52, 57, 58–59, 63 Ross, Andrew, 22 Rossellini, Roberto, 5 Rotterdam International Film Festival, 14, 47, 50, 53, 57, 65, 86; Hubert Bals Fund, 65 Roud, Richard, 48, 61 Roxy Screening Rooms, 75 R-Point (Arpointeu, 2004), 130 Russell, Ken, 62, 110, 115, 117, 252–253n59 Rylance, Mark, 162 sadism, 38 sado-masochism, 1, 27, 168 Said, Edward, 123, 124, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 151, 152, 157, 238n6 Sala, Ángel, 73, 74 sales agents, 71, 76, 81, 84 Salò (1975), 6, 17–18, 108, 185 Salomonowitz, Anja, 147, 148 Samsung, 91 Sandy Hook Elementary School, 96 San Francisco International Film Festival, 14, 50–51, 57–59, 59, 62–63, 65–66, 225–226n48 San Sebastián International Film Festival (Festival de San Sebastián), 55, 83; Film School Meeting, 65 Sarsgaard, Peter, 162 Save the Green Planet! (Jigureul jikyeora!, 2003), 85 Saw (2004), 18, 21, 23 scandal, 33; and advertising costs, 78, 80; and Artsploitation, 78; and film festivals, 65;

and Invincible Pictures, 73; and publicity, 78. See also provocation; publicity; shock scandal films, 47–50, 61, 66, 174 Scarecrow Video, 64 Schaefer, Eric, 4, 13, 138, 207–208 Schein, Harry, 138 Schleinzer, Markus, 141, 147, 152–155 scholars, 11, 12–13, 17, 30, 34, 67. See also academics; critics Schoonover, Karl, 8, 13 Schütte, Wolfram, 43–44 Schwartz, Vanessa, 47, 56, 67 Schwedenfilm, 138 Schweighofer, Martin, 141, 149 science fiction, 29, 76, 83, 87, 129 Scotland Yard, United Kingdom, 100, 105 Scott, W. Richard, 11 Seattle International Film Festival, 14, 47, 52, 55, 56, 57, 60, 64, 65–66, 83, 224n14, 225n48; African Pictures Program, 225n48 Secret Things (Choses secrètes, 2002), 165, 190, 197, 199, 203 Seidl, Ulrich, 3, 49, 116, 141, 147, 148, 149, 152, 154 Selfe, Melanie, 32–33, 108, 109, 125 self-essentialism, 152 self-exoticization/autoexoticization, 136, 137–157, 149 self-orientalism, 136, 150–151, 156 self-reflexivity, 21, 36, 169, 170, 171, 172, 178, 203, 210 Sen, Mrinal, 140 Sennentuntschi (2010), 72, 91 Serbian Film, A (Srpski film, 2010), 24, 38, 58, 60, 80, 82, 91, 92; and BBFC, 110–111, 119; and Invincible Pictures, 72, 73–75, 90 Serbis (2008), 190 Seventh Continent, The (Der siebente Kontinent, 1989), 152, 154 Sevigny, Chloë, 173, 174, 175, 176, 204 Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), 81, 146, 147 sex addiction scenario, 164–166 Sex and Lucía (Lucía y el sexo, 2001), 160, 190, 191 Sex Drugs Guns (2009), 71 sex education videos, 100 sexploitation films, 208 sex shops, 95, 100, 106, 118

282 • Index

sexual content, 1, 7, 8, 22, 206, 209; academic debate over, 159–177; aesthetic appreciation of, 23; American attitudes toward, 124; and amour fou scenario, 161–164; and art cinema, 8, 171, 172; and art cinema of 1950s and 1960s, 42; and art vs. exploitation, 203; and art films, 159–177; and art film vs. pornography, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183–184; and artistic intentions, 179–182, 185; and artistic virtuosity, 186; and Artsploitation Films, 76, 79; and audience motives, 31, 32; and Austrian cinema, 141, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151–152, 157; and BBFC, 101–102, 103, 104–105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112–113, 114, 115, 116, 124; and Blue Is the Warmest Color, 159–160; and Breillat, 27; and Brooks, 34; and Brunette, 42; and classification bodies, 171; and Continental European cinema, 124; and Crist, 42–43; and critics, 33; and cynicism criticism, 39, 40, 41; and distinction, 21; and Dumont, 48–49; and early cinema, 4–5, 7; as exploitative, 23; and film festivals, 48–49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 60, 62, 63, 64–65; and filmmakers vs. audiences, 18; and flirtation with real, 49; and French cinema, 124; and funding programs, 66; and Haneke, 27; and human dignity, 181; and initiation scenario, 165–166; and Invincible Pictures, 71, 73–74; and Japanese film, 139; and Kael, 43; and marketing, 4–6, 191–192, 194–201, 203; moral agnosticism toward, 23; morally and artistically sanctioned representations of, 29; and MPAA, 117; and national characteristics, 151; and national stereotypes, 137; pathological, 162; and pornography, 205; and ratings, 96, 99; and real-sex dramas, 94; real/ unsimulated, 1, 3, 15, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 113, 161, 162, 167, 168, 169, 171–177, 178, 182, 187, 188–189, 205; and sex addiction, 164–165, 166; simulated, 171; and Swedish film, 137–138; and Tartan, 126, 128, 134; and Tookey, 38; transgressive representation of, 8; and Winterbottom, 26. See also classifications/ratings sexual penetration, 94, 165, 187; and art

cinema, 161, 171, 172; and BBFC, 100, 101–102, 116; and marketing, 201; and Nymphomaniac, 1 sexual violence, 3, 162; and academic scholars, 170–171; and artistic value, 33; and audiences, 31, 32; and Austrian film, 148, 149; and BBFC, 95, 100, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 116; and extreme cinema, 7; and French films, 124; and Japanese film, 139; and Miike, 125; moral agnosticism toward, 23. See also rape; violent content Seydoux, Léa, 159, 180–181 Shame (2011), 15, 47, 69, 117, 164–165, 190, 191 Sheffield Doc/Fest, 50, 55, 57 Shin, Chi-Yun, 128, 133, 134 Shindo, Kaneto, 186 Shiri (Swiri, 1999), 133 Shoard, Catherine, 34 shock, 34, 39, 201, 208; and cynicism criticism, 40; and Dumont, 48; and film festivals, 48; and Quandt, 41; and Tartan, 130. See also challenging content; provocation; scandal; transgression Shortbus (2006), 15, 69, 99, 119, 186, 247n31; and art vs. exploitation, 203; and art film vs. pornography, 181; earnings of, 190, 191; and initiation scenario, 165; marketing of, 197, 199; and real sex, 171; and selfreflexivity, 170 shunga ( Japanese erotic art), 139 Siffredi, Rocco, 172 Sight and Sound (magazine), 34, 40, 46, 102, 200 Silicon Valley, 58 Silver Linings Playbook (2012), 82 Simijonovic, Isidora, 79 Simpson, Andrew, 52, 53, 55, 58, 60, 62 Sitcom (1998), 40 Sitges Film Festival, 73, 74 Six, Tom, 38, 39 Sleeping Beauty (2011), 166, 190 Smart TV, 90, 91 Smith, Andreas Whittam, 99, 117, 119, 236n91 Smith, Ian Robert, 245n71 Smith, Lauren Lee, 195 Smith, Paul, 129, 239n23 Smoodin, Eric, 9

Index • 283

Snake of June, A (Rokugatsu no hebi, 2002), 133 Snowpiercer (Seolgungnyeolcha, 2013), 89 social media, 70, 71, 85, 88, 119, 207 Soda Pictures, 199 soft core, 100, 137, 175, 177 Soledad Montañez, María, 150, 151 Sontag, Susan, 42; “The Pornographic Imagination,” 22 Sopranos, The (cable television series), 85 South by Southwest Film Festival, 24, 71 Spacked Out (Mo yan ka sai, 2000), 125 Spasojevic, Srdjan, 24–25, 29 spectator. See audiences Spence, Carl, 52 Spielmann, Götz, 141, 147, 149 Spring Breakers (2012), 47, 183, 195, 200, 202, 203 Stallybrass, Peter, 238n6 Starz, 91 State of the Nation: Austria in Six Chapters (Zur Lage: Österreich in sechs Kapiteln, 2002), 152 Stigsdotter, Ingrid, 13, 124 Stilley, Margo, 180, 197 Stockholm Film Festival, 62 Stone, Oliver, 27 Story of Marie and Julien, The (Histoire de Marie et Julien, 2003), 204 Story of O, The (Histoire d’O, 1975), 97–98 Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac, 2013), 61–62 Straw Dogs (1971), 106 Stringer, Julian, 50 Struggle (2003), 141, 147, 148 Sturminger, Michael, 152 subversion, 3, 17, 19, 206; and academics and critics, 166, 170; and aesthetic embrace, 38, 203; and art film vs. pornography, 184; and distinction, 20; and distributors, 92; and film festivals, 50; of genre, 171; and Hyland, 36; and marketing, 203; of pornography, 183–184, 189, 203; and real sex, 178; and Sontag, 22. See also transgression Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika, 1953), 33, 137–138 Sundance Film Festival, 66, 71, 84 Sunday Mirror, 200

Sunrise (1927), 33 Suspiria (1974), 83 Swedish Film Institute, 138 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Boksuneun naui geot, 2002), 130, 131 Tabak, Vincent, 39 taboo breaking, 4–5, 6, 54, 55; and BBFC, 106, 119; and film festivals, 14; and Japanese film, 139; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 138 taboos, 171; attraction of, 31; and realism, 189; and transgression, 19, 20 Tale of Two Sisters, A (Janghwa, Hongryeon, 2003), 131 Tarantino, Quentin, 186, 251n31 Tartan Films, Tartan Asia Extreme, 3, 6, 14–15, 40, 69, 76, 81, 121, 126–136, 138, 186, 195, 197, 199, 203 taste, 23, 206; and arthouse programmers, 84; and Austrian cinema, 152; bad, 31–32; and BBFC, 103; and Brooks, 33; cultural theories of, 11; and cynicism criticism, 40, 44; and distinction, 20–22; and distributors, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 87, 93, 135; and film festivals, 47, 54–56, 57, 58–61, 62, 67; and Film Forum, 87; and filmmakers, 13; and Mes, 36; and New German Cinema, 156; popular, 21, 37; pure, 21–22; and recording function, 177; and Said, 123, 133; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 130; and Tezuka, 140 Taviani, Paolo, 140 Taxidermia (2006), 46, 55, 130 Taylor, Elizabeth, 175 Taylor-Wood, Sam, 116 television, 47, 83, 119, 208, 209 Telluride Film Festival, 67 Terhechte, Christoph, 50, 51, 52, 57 Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), 69, 85, 86 Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992), 69 Tezuka, Yoshiharu, 139–140, 156, 244–245n67 Theater of Cruelty, 40 ThinkFilm, 99, 195 Third Window Films, 69, 70 13 Assassins ( Jūsan-nin no shikaku, 2010), 69, 86 Thomas, Kevin, 194

284 • Index

Thurman, Uma, 32 Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (Atame!, 1989), 81, 106–107 Time (magazine), 200 Time of the Wolf (2003), 153 Times Square, New York City, 18 TLA (Theater of the Living Arts): TLA Entertainment Group, 75; TLA Releasing, 75, 76, 77, 191; TLA Video, 75 Toad Road (2012), 75, 76 Tony Manero (2008), 69, 157 Tookey, Christopher, 38–39, 40, 45 Topo, El (1970), 83 Toronto International Film Festival, 14, 47, 58, 71, 84 torture porn, 21, 34, 38, 73, 207, 209 Tower Hamlets council (London), 55 trailers, 15, 179, 192, 200–201. See also advertising; marketing; publicity transgression, 16–29, 37, 44, 178, 206–207; and academic scholars, 172; and aesthetics, 23; and art, 20; and art cinema, 6, 16–17; artistic engagement with, 189; and Artsploitation, 79; and audiences, 32; and Austrian film, 149; and Bataille, 184; bravura, 37; and Clark, 186–187; commercial risks of, 49; defined, 19; and film festivals, 14, 54–57, 61; and filmmakers, 20, 24, 25, 54, 121; generic, 173; and innovation, 19–20; interpretation of as art, 22; and Invincible Pictures, 72, 74; and Mes, 36; and reception aesthetic, 6; and regulation, 121; reliability of, 210; rhetoric of, 17; and taboos, 19, 20; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 129. See also challenging content; controversy; provocation; shock; subversion transnational production/reception, 9, 11, 124, 125, 137; and Asian film, 123, 139; audiences of, 139, 140; and Austrian film, 148; and auto-ethnography, 151. See also internationalism Travers, Peter, 117 Trevelyan, John, 107–108, 115 Tribeca Film Festival, 71 Trimark, 195, 199 Trinh Thi, Coralie, 3 Trouble Every Day (2001), 30

Truffaut, François, 84 Turistas (2006), 21 Twentynine Palms (2003), 24, 30–31, 41, 48–49, 67 2929 Entertainment, 208 Twitter, 58, 206 Two Lane Blacktop (1971), 204 UK Film Council, 128 UltraViolet, 91 Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst (Vienna), 147 Untold Story, The (Bat sin fan dim: Yan yuk cha siu bau, 1993), 125 Valenti, Jack, 97 Vanishing Waves (Aurora, 2012), 77, 79 VCD, 88 VCRs, 75 Venice International Film Festival, 47, 48, 50, 64, 67, 138, 141, 152 Vesth, Louise, 195–196, 196 VHS generation, 89 Victim, The (Phii khon pen, 2006), 131 Video Nasties, 96 video on demand (VoD), 70, 71, 72, 82, 87–88, 90–91, 192, 208 video-order catalogs, 18 Vidora, 91 Village Voice, 200 Vincendeau, Ginette, 39, 41 violent content, 26, 129, 206; and aesthetic embrace, 23, 36; and art cinema, 8; and art films, 163–164; and audience motives, 31, 32; and Austrian cinema, 141, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151–152, 157; and BBFC, 103, 104, 105, 107; and Brunette, 42; in comedy, 29; controversy over, 209; and critics, 34; and cynicism criticism, 39, 41; and distinction, 21; and Dumont, 48; and earliest cinema history, 4; ethical representation of, 27–29; as exploitative, 23; and extreme cinema, 7, 8; and film festivals, 50, 54, 56, 60, 63, 64–65; and filmmakers vs. audiences, 18; and funding programs, 66; and Haneke, 25, 44; indulgence of, 22; and Invincible Pictures, 71, 73–74; and Miike, 24, 125; moral agnosticism toward, 23; and morality,

Index • 285

26; morally and artistically sanctioned representations of, 29; and MPAA, 117; and national characteristics, 151; and Noé, 25; and Nymphomaniac, 1; as palatable, 28–29; and respect for victims, 29; in satire, 29; and spectator and perpetrator, 27; and Tartan Asia Extreme, 126, 129, 134; and technology, 27–28; and Tookey, 38; transgressive representation of, 8; and Winterbottom, 26. See also rape; sexual violence Virgin (36 fillette, 1988), 165 Virilio, Paul, 29 Visitor Q (Bijitā Q, 2001), 24, 125 Vixen (1969), 96 Vizio, 91 VoD. See video on demand (VoD) Vogel, Amos, 80–81, 217n3 von Trier, Lars, 1, 2, 3, 6, 29, 106, 164, 165; and art vs. exploitation, 34; and BBFC, 101; and Brooks, 34; and differentiation, 207; and Film Forum, 86; followers of, 32; and marketing, 195–196; and pornography, 24; and realism, 187–188, 189; and reputation, 20 Waldheim, Kurt, 152, 153 Wales One World Film Festival, 52 Walker, John A., 20 Wal-Mart, 98 Wang, Wayne, 163 Warehouse Cinema, 89 Wasko, Janet, 211 Wasson, Haidee, 13 We Feed the World (2005), 144 Weinstein brothers, 126 Weinstein Company, 73, 81; Dragon Dynasty, 126 Wenders, Wim, 140 White, Allon, 238n6 White Ribbon, The (Das weiße Band, 2009), 143, 153 Whores’ Glory (2011), 144

Wild Bunch (distributor), 81 Wild Side (1995), 128 Wilinsky, Barbara, 4, 13, 219n25 William Morris Agency, 175 Williams, Linda, 124, 139, 161–162, 168–173, 204, 251n30 Williams, Linda Ruth, 33, 102, 119, 168, 177, 204 Windows, 8, 91 Winterbottom, Michael, 3, 29, 112, 113, 167, 169, 199; and art film vs. pornography, 179, 180; and artistic virtuosity, 185; and differentiation, 207; and moral violence, 26; and realism, 188–189 women, 165; and Austrian film, 147; and European films, 5; female, 193; images of, 201; misogyny toward, 54; and pleasure, 117; and sexuality, 5; violence against, 26; and Winterbottom, 26 women’s bodies, 131–133, 197, 198, 199; and marketing, 193, 194, 195, 203 Wong, Cindy, 13, 50, 54, 56, 64, 65 Wood, Elijah, 76 Workingman’s Death (2005), 144 Works, The, 197 WR: Mysteries of the Organism (W.R.— Misterije organizma, 1971), 6, 83, 110, 111, 113–114, 160 Wyatt, Justin, 191, 192, 194 Xbox 360, 91 Yahoo Connected TVs, 91 Young Adam (2003), 98, 190 Young & Beautiful (2013), 190 Young & Wild ( Joven y alocada, 2012), 157 YouPorn, 23, 169, 204 YouTube, 32, 196, 206 Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), 117 Zombie, La (2010), 56, 61–62 Zontar, the Thing from Venus (1966), 18 Zoo Productions, 128

About the Author MATTIAS FREY is a reader in film studies at the University of Kent, managing director of the Centre for Film and Media Research, and an editor of the journal Film Studies. His books include Postwall German Cinema: History, Film History, and Cinephilia (2013); Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship (co-edited with Jinhee Choi, 2014); The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism: The Anxiety of Authority (2015); and Film Criticism in the Digital Age (co-edited with Cecilia Sayad, 2015).