Genitals on Screen: Extremism and the Crisis of Representation

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Abstract The article examines the international phenomenon of extreme art cinema with explicit genital content, with a particular focus on Lukas Moodysson’s A Hole in My Heart (Sweden 2004), Srdan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film (2010), Michael Winterbottom’s 9 songs (UK 2005), and György Pálfi’s Hungarian Taxidermia (2006). The paper sets up three main understandings of these films, distinguishing between those that lack narrative justification for the in-your-face representation of genitals; films in which the pornographic content is integrated into narratives about a crisis in domestic relations, and, finally, films that use the explicit highlighting of genitals as a cornerstone in allegorical representations of broader social-cultural and political contexts.