Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression by Martine Beugnet (review)

First published in hardback in 2007, Cinema and Sensation rapidly established itself as a major intervention in contemporary French cinema studies. Its theorizations of the technologies and materialities of recent film-making in France have become as invaluable a resource to film scholars working on tactility, embodiment, affect, and the sensorium, as the work of Laura U. Marks, Vivian Sobchack, and Emma Wilson. The volume’s publication in paperback attests its scholarly popularity and will prove a relief to the many scholars who have been profoundly influenced by it. Beugnet offers a deep critical perspective on the current cultural and political dynamics of France, via a perspicacious study of contemporary French art cinema. She was one of the first to analyse with full scholarly rigour the period in the late 2000s tha saw the rise of pornocratic and hyper-violent film-making in France, named pejoratively by James Quandt as ‘The New Extremism’ (in ‘Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema’, Artforum International, 42.6 (2004), 126–32). In Cinema and Sensation Beugnet explores the implicit and explicit cultural imaginaries that subtended that moment in image-making, uncovering geopolitical critiques of the gendered, sexualized, degraded, and eviscerated bodies on screen in films by Catherine Breillat, Bruno Dumont, Philippe Grandrieux, Vincent Dieutre, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, and others. A detailed and culturally specific philosophical framework of contemporary French thought, which also gestures beyond a purely French or francophone remit, informs Beugnet’s critique. She intertwines readings of Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille with contemporary art theory from October Group critics Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois, and Hal Foster on formlessness. Incisive readings of Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of becoming, visagéité, hapticity, and (with Félix Guattari) immanence are united with recent scholarship from Laura U. Marks, Barbara M. Kennedy, and Rosi Braidotti. Psychoanalytic theory informs the hinterland of Beugnet’s conceptual frameworks, yet beyond Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva she also integrates post-Lacanian scholarship from Nicole Brenez and Stephen Shaviro. Phenomenology, too, is a structuring signpost for the complex relationships between embodiment and disembodiment, subjecthood and objecthood, world and body that unfold in Beugnet’s delicate negotiations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writing with more recent film-phenomenological discourses from Vivian Sobchack and Stanley Cavell. The most striking and eloquent aspect of this volume, however, is the evocative manner in which Beugnet writes about the films themselves. Her senses are attuned — invested even — in the intimate, otherworldly proximity of filmic images and sound; this she communicates with grace as she winds sinuously through a labyrinth of non-dualistic thinking, and hybrid, materially self-aware cinema. Drawing on Jean Epstein’s claim that the image thinks, she writes: ‘Films do not just provide life-like testimonies on their contemporary world; as flowing, embodied forms of thought, they can help us imagine ways out of the dead ends down which dual thinking leads us’ (p. 17). Artaud’s ‘third path’ (p. 22) between cinematic abstraction and psychological realism is precisely the location of Cinema and Sensation: it is both a way out and a way forward for film theory and cultural critique.