Extreme Cinema

The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today's Art Film Culture

By Mattias Frey

Rutgers University Press

Honorable mention, 2017 Best Monograph Award from the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS)

From Shortbus to Shame and from Oldboy to Irreversible, film festival premieres regularly make international headlines for their shockingly graphic depictions of sex and violence. Film critics and scholars alike often regard these movies as the work of visionary auteurs, hailing directors like Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier as heirs to a tradition of transgressive art. In this provocative new book, Mattias Frey offers a very different perspective on these films, exposing how they are also calculated products, designed to achieve global notoriety in a competitive marketplace.

Paying close attention to the discourses employed by film critics, distributors, and filmmakers themselves, Extreme Cinema examines the various tightropes that must be walked when selling transgressive art films to discerning audiences, distinguishing them from generic horror, pornography, and Hollywood product while simultaneously hyping their salacious content. Deftly tracing the links between the local and the global, Frey also shows how the directors and distributors of extreme art house fare from both Europe and East Asia have significant incentives to exaggerate the exotic elements that would differentiate them from Anglo-American product.

Extreme Cinema also includes original interviews with the programmers of several leading international film festivals and with niche distributors and exhibitors, giving readers a revealing look at how these institutions enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the “taboo-breakers” of art house cinema. Frey also demonstrates how these apparently transgressive films actually operate within a strict set of codes and conventions, carefully calibrated to perpetuate a media industry that fuels itself on provocation.

Extreme Cinema is an outstanding addition to the body of works that investigate the intersection of art cinema, sex, and violence and the intricate relationships among the three. Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, College of Staten Island, CUNY

In this lively, detailed analysis of ‘taboo cinema,’ Mattias Frey views ‘extreme cinema’ from an entirely new angle, offering rich insights into contemporary violence and cruelty on the screen. Wheeler Winston Dixon, author of Black and White Cinema: A Short History

Extreme Cinema enlightens the reader by example … Frey has given film connoisseurs a text book worthy of examination that may even inspire self examination. Genreonline.net

Extreme Cinema delves into what it is that motivates these film makers and our general fascination with this body of film works that exploit sex, violence, and art in an almost voyeuristic way. Horrornews.net

Frey’s well researched and precise discursive analysis on extreme cinema laid the first stone to further industrial and aesthetic investigations. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

[The book] arrives at a juncture in which one form of extreme cinema studies is perhaps at its end. Frey convincingly demonstrates how scholars’ appeal to an ideal spectator, use of unrefined affect theories, and overemphasis on aesthetics often generates tautological conclusions. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature

MATTIAS FREY is the managing director of the Centre for Film and Media Research, an editor of the journal Film Studies, and a reader in film at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author or coeditor of several books, including The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism; Cine-Ethics; and Film Criticism in the Digital Age (Rutgers University Press).

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Transgression and Distinction: Filmmaker Discourses

2 The Aesthetic Embrace and the Cynicism Criticism: Reception Discourses

3 The Rhetoric and Role of Film Festivals

4 Discourses and Modes of Distribution

5 The Interpretations of Regulation

6 The Added Value of International Distribution

7 Sex, Violence, and Self-Exoticization

8 Aesthetic Innovation and the Real: Academic Debate over Sexually Graphic Art Films

9 A Discursive Approach to Hardcore Art Cinema

Afterword