The Feel-Bad Film . By Nikolaj Lübecker

Abstract

In this book Nikolaj Lübecker offers an astonishing engagement with contemporary trends in European and avant-garde cinema. He cuts through recent discussions of new French extremism to offer a scintillating, urgent, and original take on the subject. The book opens by conjuring two scenes, from Alain Resnais’s Muriel (1963) and Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), that can be seen as both unpleasant and disconcerting. Evocation of these scenes leads Lübecker towards his formulation of ‘the feel-bad experience’: ‘the film produces a spectatorial desire, but then blocks its satisfaction; it creates, then deadlocks, our desire for catharsis’ (p. 2; original emphasis). In so doing, he argues, films raise political and ethical questions. Lübecker identifies a series of strategies that allow him to distinguish between the works and feelings of different directors, and thus nuance and stratify his discussion. Informing the project is a wide-ranging analysis of ideas about spectatorship and reception in moves from Aristotle to Brecht. A provocative Introduction leads to a series of scintillating readings that, with unstinting intellectual courage, take the reader close to demanding material. The early chapters on Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke are perhaps the most brilliant with expert, controlled close readings. Lübecker suggests that in these films we experience ‘unbearable intimacy’ with scenes that are ‘excruciating’ in their emotional charge (p. 26), yet we are also invited to engage intellectually with the material. He argues: ‘on the one hand, we are not given the distance that Brecht recommends; on the other, we are deprived of the cathartic release that Artaud and Bataille aim for. This is the source of the “feel-bad” experience; this is how von Trier puts a deadlock on catharsis’ (p. 27). The book offers a very rich compendium of film references and associations, whilst allowing a major argument to emerge. There is discussion of Redacted (dir. by Brian De Palma, 2007) through Georges Didi-Huberman and Boris Groys, a reading of Elephant (dir. by Gus Van Sant, 2003) through Merleau-Ponty and Bataille, and of Claire Denis through Butler. Lübecker is also passionately engaged with the work of other critics. His rereadings are achieved in a fearless move to confront uncertainties and in an acknowledgement of our vulnerability as viewers. His book is unremittingly open to contradictions. Even as he thinks about the ethical in film, he refuses to see this cinema as only ethically efficacious, writing, close to the end: ‘So even if it is true that cinema can be an excellent partner when we seek to make sense of the world (an excellent partner also because no “answer” it gives will be definitive), it is equally true that cinema can help to make life opaque and strange’ (p. 174). There is something gripping, tonic, and assaultive in Lübecker’s writing. What he has done here is to track, explain, imagine the force of and reason for contemporary cinema’s multiple and varied encounters with distress, sickness, and contradiction.