In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The End of Extreme Cinema Studies
  • Troy Michael Bordun
Kerner, Aaron Michael, and Jonathan L. Knapp. Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016. Pp. vii+179.
Frey, Mattias. Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today's Art Film Culture. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers UP, 2016. Pp. viii+298.

Despite critic James Quandt's insistence that "extreme cinema" had been effectively ended by Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void (2009) (Quandt 212), both filmmakers and scholars continue to work in and on this 21st-century art cinema production trend. 2016 marked the appearance of two scholarly volumes on extreme cinema. Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp's Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media investigates the affective potential of the trend, that is, by assessing a number of films' graphic and explicit representations and the implications these representations have for spectatorship theory. Conversely, Mattias Frey's Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today's Art Film Culture unravels the production trend in terms of its "industrial systems, regulatory systems, [and] reception" (9). Frey's research includes but is not limited to extreme films' exhibition at festivals, their home-market distribution, and importantly, a homogeneous discourse from directors, critics, and academics. Although there is no denying that extreme films share affinities with horror, pornography, and exploitation fare, Frey observes that each of the players in extreme cinema discourse mark the trend "high art" rather than one of the so-called low genres.

On the one hand, Kerner and Knapp rehearse theoretical arguments found in much extreme cinema scholarship over the last decade or so and, on occasion, acknowledge the tension between high and low genres. Frey, alternatively, shifts the focus of recent scholarship: his empirical study of the industrial workings of the trend is a direct [End Page 122] response to the speculations of authors such as Kerner and Knapp.

I

Each volume begins by defining extreme cinema. Kerner and Knapp concede to the definition of extreme cinema as a body of international films with little narrative momentum that nevertheless make use of "abrupt [narrative] ruptures" which include heightened displays of "brutal violence" and "graphic sexual imagery" (1). Strangely, for a trend that is apparently not too concerned with narrative, these two authors will summarize and assess film narratives at great length. Kerner and Knapp also expand the heretofore applied definition of the trend as a body of international art cinema films to include "extreme" representations in comedy films, animated comedy programs, reaction videos, and online pornography of (perhaps) the most disgusting sort. With this addition to the repertoire of extreme cinema, the volume is neither explicitly about art cinema nor auteurism, an institution and a theory often studied by extreme cinema scholars. A few chapters in Extreme Cinema focus on films and directors associated with the production trend as defined by Quandt and the authors in Tina Kendall and Tanya Horeck's edited volume The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe (2011), also published by Edinburgh UP. However, for their study, Kerner and Knapp provide no justification for their use of "extreme cinema" and repeatedly confuse a number of trends and subgenres such as "torture porn" and international art house fare.1

It is worth quoting Horeck and Kendall here, for already in 2012 extreme cinema scholars were beginning to think beyond the observed negative affects a single film may have on an ideal spectator. In their introduction to the Cinephile special issue on "Contemporary Extremism," Horeck and Kendall present the following warning:

A key task for scholarly work on extreme cinema is to think through fine-grained distinctions between the range of spectatorial dynamics that underpin [the recent] shift from art house extremism to multiplex or horror film festival circuit extremisms. While these [latter] films might share a desire to push the boundaries of the watchable, they are addressed to different audience demographics, and operate according to their own distinctive narrative and genre paradigms, to produce dissimilar affective responses. Again, while recognizing affinities between films that seek to test the spectator's mettle through relentless exposure to graphic horror, it is vital to recognize...

pdf

Share