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New French Extremity

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.

2. NFE is a Cinema of resistance, not an avant garde cinema

Replacing the word architecture with the word cinema in a provocative


passage from the late experimental architect Lebbeus Woods essay
Thoughts on Architecture of Resistance:
[Cinema] of resistance is different from avant-garde [cinema]. The avant-
garde is just that: the vanguard of the majority, scouts leading the way for
most peoplethose already in agreementto follow. The avant-garde is a
projection of the main tendencies in society, the values, practices, the
aspirations of the majority, and cannot separate itself from them. The avant-
garde is the mainstream, a manifestation of where it wants to go.
[Cinema] of resistance is quite different. It does not believe in progress, that
is, in the additive, cumulative, linear progression of history, or in the extension
of a narrative of inevitability. Instead, it seeks to be effective in the present, for
the sake of those who find themselves without a place to be themselves. This
includes, among others, its [filmmakers], who resist received notions of what
[cinema] is and does.
[Cinema] of resistance begins with [a filmmaker] who resists.
Immediately this definition of the avant garde is provides a powerful clue to
the critical distaste the NFE has inspired. The avant garde presents positive
and engaging challenges for critics to interpret as they lead audiences
forward into an otherwise uncertain future. Resistance, on the other hand, is a
less pleasant, less engaging element in the constellation of art-making and
art-reception. Resistance, fundamentally, disengagespushes back against
engagement.

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.

3. NFE employs richly experimental visual aesthetics and narratives

Here we must first separate the idea of aesthetics from that of


aestheticization. While the latter is confined to simply making things appear
beautiful, the former contains within it concepts that range from beauty to
ugliness, and from sublimity to absurdity. We might usefully draw a parallel
here to the difference between sincere, heartfelt sentiment, and maudlin or
saccharine sentimentality.
There is a general narrative simplicity in NFE films, and this simplicity
provides an ideal container for experimentation. Breillats Anatomy of Hell
transpires largely in a single room. Bustillo and Maurys Inside transpires
almost entirely in a single home. Dumonts Twentynine Palms has a main
cast of only two even though they road trip though many physical locations.
Nos Irreversible is an otherwise somewhat conventional rape/revenge story
that draws much of its unique strength from being told in reverse.
Deliberate avoidance of narrative complexity is far from being unique to the
NFE. It is routinely used as a technique for producing the Brechtian
distancing effect preventing the audience from immersion in the story, and
instead forcing more conscious critical attention onto the ideas in narratives
and onto the manner of their conveyance. This opens up possibilities for a
fascinating push/pull effect when narrative distancing is combined with the
often hypnotic and detailed precision of NFE visual (and auditory) aesthetics.
In Philippe Grandrieuxs documentary about Japanese filmmaker Adachi
Masao It May Be that Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve, Adachi is
gradually revealed as an artist whose ideas resonate powerfully with
Grandrieuxs. Adachi says something early in the film that could easily come
from Grandrieux himself, or any number of other NFE filmmakers. I felt that I
could actually visualize things I couldnt understand. Yes that must be it. I
dont know what to do I dont even know what to do with all the things I
dont understand. But I carried on. It had to be what I wanted. () What am I
supposed to do? Thats why I make films. I can only express this with films.
The aesthetics of many NFE films stand at this frontier of not understanding
things. It is unsurprising then, in Grandrieuxs film Sombre, that long moments
pass in near total darknessat this literal frontier of revelation. This idea is
even built into the films title itself, which translates as Darkness.

Grandrieuxs films make a clear effort to translate raw, intense human


experiences into moving images and sound in a way that has next to no
connection with what we usually call drama. In La Vie Nouvelle dialog scenes
are rigorously structured to avoid photographing characters in shot/reverse
shot as they speak. Grandrieux resists this tendencymore natural-feeling as
it is to audiencesreplacing it with long takes in which both characters (often
wordlessly) interact with each other within or at the edges of the frame.
Clearly motivated reaction shotswhich would also feel more familiarare
replaced by long takes during which characters, alone within the frame,
appear to be reacting to something or someone that is firmly kept out of the
frame. In some cases what they react to may be out of the physical space of
the scene entirelya character having already left the room, for example.
As in Sombre before it, in La Vie Nouvelle Grandrieux provides a skeletal plot
as a framework to explore the raw experiences of his miniscule cast of barely
drawn characters, as they flicker across the often dark, occasionally
quivering, and sometimes even unfocused frame.
We are provided with just enough visual coding of the characters and setting
a jewelled ring on the finger of one pimp, a fur-lined coat and hat on
another, a red-lit strip club, bare hotel rooms and an open field with a cage full
of muzzled attack dogsto recognize that this is a story about prostitution
(perhaps even human trafficking) in which a young man (perhaps an
American) becomes obsessed with purchasing the freedom of (or perhaps
just purchasing) one of the women who belong to a small crew of vicious
pimps in a ruined East European city (perhaps somewhere near Kosovo).
The viewer arrives on a frontier where what could be called communication in
narrative terms falls away into an abyss of visualized experiences that are so
debased both in their objective content and in the aesthetics of their
presentation that they genuinely defy understanding. While obviously these
visualized experiences are mediated to us through the screen, this mediation
is radically lacking the familiar dramatic conveyances of audience
identification, character motivation, development arcs, plot points, etc.
This frontier of understanding is similarly visualized in the opening moments
of Fabrice Du Welzs Vinyan. For a period that lengthens uncomfortably, the
entire frame contains nothing but layer upon layer of fine bubbles in black
water. Slowly this dense field of bubbles becomes tinted blood red and what
appears to be a head of long, flowing black hair appears as a cacophony of
choked screams fills the audio track to increasingly piercing volume. The only
explanation the film later provides for this shot is that the protagonist couple
lost their son in a tsunami that hit Thailand (referring to the devastation there
in 2004).
Like almost all information provided in the film, even this most basic piece of
exposition is released to us in this extraordinarily oblique way. Repeatedly,
this forces us to understand things (or not) alongside the protagonists
themselves as they descend into oblivion.
So extreme in their aesthetics are many NFE films that their achievement is,
in part, simply the fundamental challenge they present to watchability itself.

4. NFE boldly depicts blood, gore and the visceral experience of


human physical injury, as differentiated from sanitized, balletic (or
aestheticized), and even giddy, gross-out horror violence

Theres quite a bit of violence in a great many contemporary films.


Mainstream filmmakers even have it down to a science regarding what they
can show on either side of the PG-13 / R boundary line. Violence in most
movies is largely confined to incorporation as a narrative device (protagonist
injures others or is injured thereby propelling or slowing down the progress of
the plot).
If were lucky and things get a bit deeper, violence might form a metaphoric
exploration of an idea like honor, loyalty or duty as in, for example, almost
every Hong Kong action movie ever made. In the case even of much
contemporary horror movie and TV violence, there is an aestheticization done
in the service of producing either OH GROSS! campiness, or OH WOW!
spectacle.
Through the NFEs radical aesthetics of mediating raw human experience,
however, the unflinchingly gruesome, deliberately repellent violence in movies
like Marina de Vans In My Skin and Pascal Laugiers notorious Martyrs folds
the viewer into the violence itself. Not, however as something exciting or
entertaining. Here instead is a violence that is poetic and deeply
communicative, and operates beneath its surface to implicate spectators
themselves in the psycho-social landscape of violation. We must again
differentiate this from aestheticization which serves a different purpose: to
generate spectacle.
In My Skin uses violence to illuminate the inverted reality of the supposedly
liberating effects of market capitalism. Sifting through the critical attention the
film has received, not everyone seems concerned with the fact that Esther,
the films titular protagonist who is also played by its writer/director, is
specifically positioned within the story as a marketing executive. This
specificity is important because it is one of the few expository details we are
given.
As Esther struggles with increasingly obsessive and bloody effortsshown
with graphic, lingering bluntnessto exert control over her own body through
acts of self-mutilation, this conflict escalates in direct proportion to her rising
position within the firm for which she works.
The world of the film conspires, in what seems to be an increasingly literal
way, to take her body away from her even as she works with increasing fervor
to reassert her own agency. With the meticulous violence she performs upon
her own body, she enacts the films thought that capitalism turns us into the
very instruments by which it enacts its violence upon us.

Here might be a good place to propose, as an aside, a general rule of


analysis that is especially useful to apply to films that appear unusual.
Because of the great effort that goes into filmmaking, it is valuable to consider
that every detail in a film is important. This becomes particularly important if
something feels out of place or somehow not quite right. With films that might
be experienced as lacking entertainment value, or that seem especially
opaque or peculiar, it is always valuable to hold in ones mind the touchstone
questions Why was this made in exactly this way? and What meaning
might that detail (of technique, setting, performance, etc.) communicate?
Martyrs presents us with multiple layers of deeply distressing and disorienting
violations of the human body. The derangement of Lucies (Mylne Jampano)
PTSD-fueled, chaotic violence in the films first half (for added effect, the feral
creature that haunts Lucie is played by real-life circus contortionist Isabelle
Chasse) is precisely countered by the clinically utilitarian inventiveness of the
violence in the films second half.
This shift in the aesthetics of the films violence drives the films thematics
forward as we are drawn inexorably toward the icy truth underlying the gut-
wrenching horrors. In Martyrs the seeds of violence are, at each turn of the
films double plot, planted by characters who represent social, scientific,
political and/or economic power. These seeds are in this case personified,
unlike the more free-floating ideological ones in In My Skin, but they are
conceptually similar.
Even at the junction where the muddy waters of the NFE feed into the rush of
the mainstream, Alexandre Ajas High Tension and Xavier Gens Frontier(s)
from Luc Bessons powerhouse production company EuropaCorp attempt
(with only limited success) to present narratives that hope to interrogate either
the madness of patriarchy (High Tension) or the long history of modern socio-
political pressures (particularly xenophobia) that maintain deadly divisions
between people (Frontier(s)). Unfortunately both films devolve largely into
bloody action set-piece spectacles, but their pretensions to social critique
through violence make them worthy to a degree.

5. NFE engages in deep and adventurous probings of the human


psyche

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.

Many NFE films cycle through an alternation between the energies of


sexuality and death within this broad space of human embodiment. While
death is often depicted violently, at other times it is given more tender, even
spiritual treatment. About a third of the way into Vinyan, Thaksin Gao (Petch
Osathanugrah) has smuggled Jeanne and Paul Bellmer (Emmanuelle Bart
and Rufus Sewell) into Burma to search for their son Joshua. At night Gao
explains to Jeanne the floating paper lanterns people are lighting all along the
beach:
When someone dies a bad death, their spirit becomes confused. It does not
know where to go or what to do.The spirit becomes angry; it becomes
vinyan.
What do the fire lamps do?
Light is to help guide the vinyan home to the house of the dead. So vinyan
can rest. Each light is for one spirit.
Jeanne looks up into the night sky, Theres so many
You can light one.
Joshuas not dead.
Not for Joshua, for me Light one for me.
This brief exchange hangs, foreboding, over the remainder of the film.

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