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For about twenty years now several directors in and near France have been
making some of the most formally interesting, thematically dark, and in many
cases just plain difficult to watch films in the world. Together these films are
known as the New French Extremity. They are challenging and often
misunderstood.
There are other lists on this site that include or are devoted entirely to these
films. The five ideas below, each central to the NFE, will cut deeply into these
films and reveal the dark, glistening heart that beats within them.
1. NFE is one of the only (if not the only) readily definable cinematic
movements currently producing films in the world today
What is a cinematic movement in the first place, and why should we care
about such a thing?
Our starting point here will be Steven Soderberghs definition of cinema
from his keynote at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival:
Cinema is a specificity of vision. Its an approach in which everything
matters. Its the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as
unique as a signature or a fingerprint. () It means that if this filmmaker
didnt do it, it either wouldnt exist at all, or it wouldnt exist in anything like this
form.
Its rare enough these days to find individual directors making cinema by this
definition. Even worse, long gone are the days of revered cinematic
movements in which multiple directors were each striving for this specificity
of vision Soderbergh describes. Such movementsfrom Italian neorealism
(Rossellini, De Sica, ) and the French New Wave (Godard, Truffaut, ); to
ones more loosely defined like New Hollywood (Cassavetes, Coppola, );
and even to ones named after many of their major works had already been
created like Film Noirare defined by common ideas and aesthetics as much
as by the specific directors whose work falls within their boundaries. Directors
who are commonly grouped into the NFEmuch like those often grouped
into the so-called American avant-garde (Deren, Brakhage, ) produce
their work separately and individually, but explore common thematic and
aesthetic concerns.
In the vigorously, almost outlandishly derogatory Artforum essay by James
Quandt in which he coins the term New French Extremity, he quotes director
Franois Ozon as saying, What I am interested in is violence and sex,
because there is a real challenge in rendering the strong and powerful, as
opposed to the weak and trivial. I like something that asks moral questions.
This quote well summarizes the movement, except that it leaves out the
bluntness and, perhaps we could say, flattened intensity (which is rendered
no less intense by this flattening) of the NFE.
In his diatribe, Quandt describes Claire Denis film Trouble Every Day as
having a shadow plot that is both cursory and ludicrous. Hes not wrong
either, and that description could similarly apply to any number of other NFE
films. But his error is his incapacity to push past his derision to see the
possibilities for real depth and beauty that can be opened in skilled hands by
shadow plots that are both cursory and ludicrous.
A useful comparison can be made here to the harsh noise subgenre of
experimental music, particularly considering that at least one NFE film is
actually scored by musicians with decades of history working close to this
subgenre (Philippe Grandrieuxs La Vie Nouvelle scored by tant Donns).
On the face of it, for example, pressing the blades of a metal fan against the
strings of a guitar and setting those blades spinning is an act both cursory
and ludicrous. However, in the hands of seminal harsh noise artist Boyd Rice
(performing as NON) this so called roto-guitar generates a nuanced intensity
of sound that is first brutally flat as it approaches white noise, then also
somehow vibrantly alive in the hypnotic complexity of its deliberate
cacophony.
Such transgressive provocation opens doors. The choice, then, is ours to
step through with eyes and ears open to discover what lies in wait.
The call for papers for a conference titled The New Extremism:
Contemporary European Cinema defines its longer, academicized revision of
Quandts simpler term as, [A] growing body of films featuring extreme and
graphic representations of sexuality and violence, seemingly designed with
the chief aim in mind of shocking or provoking spectators.
Perhaps as years pass and the NFE gets more thoughtful attention because
of its apparently steadfast refusal to disappear, even directors who disavow
the NFE label will come to embrace it. More likely, however, they will continue
to resist it.
This idea of resistance explains, in part, NFE directors disavowal of the term
with which they are lumped together. These are filmmakers who do not want
to be categorized. They want each film to be taken on its own. They want the
individual artistry of their work to be respected above casually being lumped
in with others. This idea of resistance also opens up the horizon of the
transgressions that NFE filmmakers make aesthetically, narratively, and in
terms of the subjects they dwell on.
Here we see the embrace of representing:
a. Raw emotional expression, which as spectators we are neither carefully
prepared for nor reassuringly debriefed from in the ways that traditional
narratives take care of us as we absorb them.
b. Obscenity, as usefully (re)defined by French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard,
here summarized by Paul A. Taylor in The Baudrillard Dictionary: The
obscene denotes much more than a simple moralistic condemnation. The
prefix ob refers to the idea of hindering or being against. The ob-scene
therefore expresses the collapse of distance in our social experience and the
deleterious effect this has on our ability to experience reality in a non-
mediated state.
This ob-scene is thus wielded within NFE as a precisely calibrated tool. With
it the filmmakers, in a sense, turn the aesthetic possibilities of film (the
mediator of reality) against the medium itself to reinstall in us this lost
sensitivity to and appreciation of non-mediated reality. In other words, NFE
pits its perversions of the tools and traditions of mediation against mediation
in the hope of creating a new kind of mediation that approaches the direct
communication of raw experience.
At its best, this paradoxical battle with mediation is driven by resistance to:
a. Narrative complexity
b. Character depth
c. Visual determinacy
d. Standard cinematic codes of scene blocking, camera position, lighting,
editing, etc.
In one way or another, every film mentioned above functions to explore some
aspect of human experience. This is true of all art, but NFE goes further out
onto the edges of human experience. Often these are experiences that might
either be taboo to explore openly (severe mental illness in Martyrs, crime
from the perspective of the criminal in du Welzs Allluia, or extreme drug
intoxication in Nos Enter the Void), or seldom discussed with such
penetrating insight (the horrors of both victimization by and revenge for
violence the rape that sets Irreversible in motion, or the car accident that
does so for Inside).
Perhaps more than any other group of films being made today, NFE films
reside in uncomfortable ambiguities; firmly resisting tidy endings in favor of
open, indeterminate ones that mimic the messiness of human experience.
They build this same indeterminacy into the overall unspooling of their
running times, leaning always toward the Brechtian distancing effect by
remaining firmly ambivalent towardpersistently resisting direct judgement of
characters and their predicaments.
One major thematic space explored in the NFE is the space of human
embodimentthe grounding of our existence in our physical bodies. Of
course the violence performed upon bodies in NFE films is a part of this, but
other aspects of embodiment are also present.
In La Vie Nouvelle Grandrieux draws a network of links between gestural
(non-verbal) communication; dance driven by pulsating music; loss of bodily
control in intoxication (and surrender of this control to the commands of
another); repetitive animalistic movement (which is, at times, linked to
sexuality, and to the partial disappearance of conscious agency in the heat of
passion); the physical contortions of despair; and finally even stillness. A five
minute sequence toward the end of the film is shot with black and white
infrared film, which finally reduces the films moving bodies to pure heat
energy that has left its impressions on the exposed celluloid.