Corporeal violence in art-house cinema: Cannes 2009

Abstract

Taking 2009 Cannes Film Festival as a case study this article explores the narrative limits and possibilities of a global movement in art-house cinema: the portrayal of extreme corporeal violence – a movement that ranges from new French extreme to Asian extreme cinema. Cannes 2009 housed a collection of films that display extreme bodily violence, showing acts ranging from brutal rape and dismembering of the body to graphic scenes of torture, genital mutilation and murders. The analysis of a selection of festival films provides an opportunity to track a transnational movement in which graphic scenes of violence become not only a convenient tool to further audience affect, but also a means to reinforce the reality effect. This study, on the one hand, explores how films that display extreme bodily violence as an eruptive force seek memorability in the competitive art-house film market. On the other hand, it suggests that on the eve of the 2009 global financial crisis, showing corporeal affect alludes to the disposability of bodies under a neoliberal economy obsessed with efficiency and adaptability. Hence, the ethical impulse that seeks the production of sympathetic bodies in the audience often goes hand in hand with the marketing of sensationalism.