I Don’t Know It When I See It: Catherine Breillat’s Pornography

Abstract

While many theorists of extreme cinema are content to note the associated filmmakers’ ties to pornography and horror, and Linda Williams goes as far as establishing extreme cinema as a subgenre of pornography, naming it “hard core art”—a term that has never quite “caught on”—few wish to study the production trend from the perspective of these genres. If extreme cinema is simultaneously pornographic and horrific while also displaying a disregard for these genres, the trend has much to offer genre theory. The author first argues that Breillat’s films play with the semantic and syntactic components of pornography. Her approach has less to do with the adult entertainment industry as it currently stands than with developing “broader conceptualizations of porn[ography],” an undertaking similar to that of Helen Hester in Beyond Explicit. Unlike Hester, who demonstrates that the term “pornographic” no longer applies only to sexually explicit displays and that we should therefore do away with the notion of porn as a genre, this chapter demonstrates the genre’s shifting terrain and the merits of including Breillat within it.