Profoundly disturbing: The aesthetics of violence and the everyday in European art cinema

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, critics and scholars have sought to account for a new trend in European art cinema typified by graphic violence, explicit sex and self-reflexive modes of address aimed at involving spectators in uncomfortable and challenging ways. This tendency towards provocation has attracted a variety of labels, including the “new European cinema” (Falcon 1999), “new French extremity” (Quandt 2004), “cinema du corps” (Palmer 2006), “cinema of sensation” (Beugnet 2007), “new extremism” (Horeck and Kendall 2011) and “unwatchable” (Gronstad 2007, 2012), and has been subject to formalist, phenomenological, ethical and audience-based approaches. This thesis intersects with these studies, recasting critical focus to examine a crucial and overlooked aspect: the everyday.Theorisation of the everyday in philosophy, cultural studies, and film studies, tends to figure conceptions of the quotidian on a spectrum. On the one hand the everyday is seen as negative (a mundane and repetitive sphere of alienation from which we should long to escape), while on the other it is conceived positively (as the container of intrinsic human truths if only we attend to its microstructures). Between these two poles, however, is what Michael Sheringham calls the quotidian’s “fruitful indeterminacy” (Everyday Life 30)—the everyday is both self-evident and elusive. Engaging with these conceptions, and treating the everyday in relation to, rather than separate from, moments of extremity, this thesis articulates disturbing affect as the product of an identifiable aesthetic mechanism in a group of films that divorces violent representation from the meaning with which to reconcile it. It argues that like the understanding of the quotidian as indeterminate, depictions of horrific violence intruding on the everyday point towards the profound. These paroxysmal moments suggest the potential to reveal something about human nature, and yet the consequence, message or meaning of this violence remains undefined. This thesis considers these films as existing on a continuum of disturbing cinema, which employs aesthetic strategies in the representation of the everyday to preclude closure. These include involving viewers in hermeneutic problems that cannot be adequately solved, paring back style to withhold cues that would typically prepare viewers for moments of violence or guide their response, orienting viewers’ expectations only to radically usurp them, and structurally embodying the temporal quality of the everyday’s combination of seemingly interminable monotony and moments of disruption.In order to examine the style, structure and temporality of films including Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pasolini 1975), The Seventh Continent (Haneke 1989), Fat Girl (Breillat 2001) and Michael (Schleinzer 2011), the project employs close analysis in the tradition of scholars such as Victor Perkins, George M. Wilson, and George Toles. These analyses reveal an enduring dynamic between the extreme and the everyday that is fundamental to an understanding of how the films examined generate what is here termed disturbing affect. This thesis offers an alternate approach to a compelling tendency in recent European art cinema and investigates the affective potential of films that disturb viewers, stir controversy and provoke censors. Further, it seeks to illuminate the key aesthetic qualities that continue to inform a growing body of disturbing European art cinema.