Extreme Cinema: Revisiting Body Genres

Abstract

This chapter outlines the topography of extreme cinema: what it is, and the films that are discussed in the book. The initial chapter outlines the existence of a trend in post-millennial international cinema toward extreme cinema, which in some cases turns away from conventional narrative structure and its appeal to our emotions, favoring instead a cinema of physical affect. The chapter situates these trends within the longer tradition of what Linda Williams termed “body genres”: films of genres such as horror, melodrama, and pornography that are designed to elicit a response in the bodies of spectators. Further, building off of Williams’ relation between the “numbers” in musicals and in pornography, this chapter argues that the structure of extreme cinema tends to be episodic. Its power lies not in narrative, but rather in episodes of great spectacle: in scenes of tremendous violence and explicit sex.