The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas, by Elena del Río, and Bodies in Pain: Emotion and the Cinema of Darren Aronofsky, by Tarja Laine

Abstract

While graphic extremism in the cinema is certainly not new and can be traced back to the oeuvres of twentieth-century auteurs—such as Luis Buñuel, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Rainer Warner Fassbinder—a more recent urgency to characterise and define the parameters of extreme cinema has been inspired by James Quandt’s coining of the intentionally pejorative term “New French Extremity”. In a polemical review, published in Art Forum in 2004, Quandt critiqued a seemingly gratuitous emphasis ina number of recent films by contemporary French filmmakers—such as Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat and Claire Denis—on the body, sensational physicality, graphic sexuality and violence. Since Quandt’s controversial writing, however, many film scholars have been keen to embrace the new extremism and to recognise it as a properly global cinematic trend. Two recently published books, Elena del Río’s Grace of Destruction and Tarja Laine’s Bodies in Pain, contribute to this recent body of literature while also marking what is perhaps a new phase of theoretical discussions on extreme cinema, which brings particular attention to issues of spectatorial affects and the ethics of film viewership.

Keywords

• graphic extremism
• extreme cinema
• negative images
• film viewership
• ethics
• new french extremity
• spectatorial affects
• deleuzian affect theory
• film phenomenology
• graphic representational violence
• sexuality