Martine Beugnet,
Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
ISBN: 978 0 7486 2042 5
US$65.00 (hb)
208pp
(Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press)

Anyone observing the fluctuating trends in recent French cinema will have noticed the emergence of a corpus of films that thrives on unsettling the audience on a visceral, violent level. This development of an aggressive cinéma du corps, whose agenda ‘is an on-screen interrogation of physicality in brutally intimate terms’[1] and whose narratives blend the high art elements associated with its auteur directors (Philippe Grandrieux, Claire Denis, Gaspar Noé) with images of the pornographic and the abject, provocatively explore issues of sexual, gender, and body politics within a global post-modern culture and seek to engage in new modes of conceptually dynamic film-making. Films like La Vie Nouvelle (France 2002), Trouble Every Day(France/Germany/Japan 2001) and Irréversible (France 2002) not only wallow in formal chaos and bodily abjection but also graft their discomfiting metaphors of border porosity, domestic invasion, and male-female power struggles onto their narratives of excess. James Quandt terms it the ‘New French Extremity’, a “cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement”.[2] So far, so épater les bourgeois. But is there something else going on here? Something emerging out of the purely sensational and moving towards the transcendental and the sensuous?

In Martine Beugnet’s remarkable new book, this re-emergence of filmmaking practices (and, by extension, of theoretical approaches) that has given precedence to cinema as the medium of sensation is analysed through the prism of contemporary French films released between 1998 and 2006. Beugnet suggests that this cinema does not reproduce images of ‘body horror’ in the traditional sense, but instead embraces images of the corporeal and the abject in order to interrogate issues such as sexual violence, female emancipation, and the crisis of masculinity. These films have been frequently lumped together as examples of a distasteful new tendency of French auteur cinema – critic Philippe Muray dismisses the corpus as an “appalling sampling of formal and avant-garde strategies used as blackmail” (quoted on 35) – but Beugnet’s achievement is to engage with these films on their own terms, formulating a new set of critically discursive frameworks to better critique and interrogate this new cinematic development.

A specific sense of momentum comes from the release, in close succession, of a series of films that betray a characteristic awareness of cinema’s sensory impact and transgressive nature, and a willingness to exploit cinema’s unique capacity to move the spectator both viscerally and intellectually. Beugnet looks at, among others, such bêtes noires as Baise-moi (France 2000), Demonlover (France 2002) and Trouble Every Day, as well the ne plus ultra of French art house fare such as Beau Travail (France 1999), L’Humanité (France 1999) and Vendredi soir (France 2002). Beugnet rejects traditional genre categorisations (despite Quandt’s best efforts, these remain essentially unclassifiable films) and focuses on the crucial and fertile overlaps that occur between experimental and mainstream approaches, as well as the ‘genres of excess’ (pornography and horror). She demonstrates how the films, explored as forms of embodied thought, offer alternative ways of approaching those questions that are at the heart of the most burning socio-cultural debates. The growing supremacy of technology, globalisation, exclusion, ethnic diversity and national identities and the blurring of gender and genre definitions – such are the issues that, rather than being addressed in the narrative/representational mode, appear literally embedded in the ‘flesh’ of the film, imprinted in the very texture and combination of its images and sound. The book’s ultimate focus, then, is on quantifying what Beugnet calls an aesthetic of sensation, where “the material dimension of a cinematic work is initially given precedence over its expository and mimetic/realistic functions” (p. 14). This is directly opposite to general assumptions about French cinema, with its long-standing scenario-based and dialogue-driven mode of filmmaking. For Beugnet, the film format today has become standardised – plot then character then narrative then identification. What this new raft of French films exemplifies is a purely tactile, sensual medium whereby spectators engage with the images and sounds of the film as compositions; film as the object of perception.

To illustrate this fascinating thesis, Beugnet starts by focussing on two opening sequences in films deemed paradigmatic of the aesthetic of sensation, Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre (France 1999) and Vincent Dieutre’s Leçons de ténèbres (France/Belgium 1999). She highlights the synaesthesia of the image and the soundtrack in both sequences, and argues that this new aural-visual fusion is emblematic of a new kind of spectatorial experience offered by these films. The book use these openings as the starting point for a wider set of perceptual and phenomenological interrogations of the medium of the moving image, for, as, she argues,

[r]ather than establish an informative context and give viewers the elements necessary to orientate themselves and piece together the beginnings of a story, these early sequences focus on those fundamental qualities of the cinema that come before, yet tend to be overruled by its representative and narrative functions: those variations in movement and in light, in colour and sound tonalities that make up the film’s endlessly shifting compositions. (p. 3)

To chart these ‘endlessly shifting compositions’, Beugnet splits the book into three parts. The first, ‘A Third Path’, examines cinema’s intricate history with materiality, sensationalism and transgression to argue for an alternative filmmaking practice. In ‘The Aesthetics of the Sensation’, she develops the notion that films elaborate processes of synaesthesia and correspondence to destabilise the relationship between the subjective body and the objective world, while the final part, ‘Film Bodies (Becoming and Embodiment)’ argues that the films in question evoke the uncertainty of identity through the vulnerability of the body and suggest that the body is reduced to a representative performative state that is in a constant process of metamorphosis.

Each chapter is refracted through the lens of some rather dense philosophical concepts, combining primarily Deleuze’s notion of immanence, Bataille’s evocation of the ‘formless’, and Artaud’s call for a ‘third path’ of cinema, alongside references to Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Sade and Baudelaire. Yet, first and foremost, Beugnet develops her arguments from the films themselves, from the comprehensive description of specific sequences, techniques and motifs which allows us to engage with the works as material events and as thinking processes. It is testament to her incisive and highly eloquent prose that her core argument is never obscured by dense theorising or hijacked by all-too-obvious straining for academic profundity. In fact, her use of the Deleuzean notion of ‘becoming’, that “endless process of metamorphosis through contagion/proximity” (p. 129) and its applicability to the relentless shifting perceptual nature of the cinematic image is a perfect example of how philosophy and film analysis can be mutually beneficial in extracting meaning and appreciation. As such, those who still remain inured to (or unconvinced by) Deleuzean film analysis would do well to dip into this book, so lucidly does it present complex arguments. Who would have thought, for instance, that Zidane, A 21stCentury Portrait (Gordon & Parreno, 2006), an audio-visual poem portraying the talismanic footballer during a Real Madrid match could be held up as a vital aspect of this ‘cinema as sensation’, exploiting the physical and sensory experience of a football match to create a version of Deleuzean ‘becoming’? The film “constructs distinctive new assemblages that combine the body as flesh […] and as abstract entity” (p. 175) that exemplifies this new attempt to rethink the relationship between body and mind. Her approach to this film, and the many others dealt with in detail or in passing, represents the best kind of close textual analysis.

This ‘cinema of sensation’ approach to film analysis has intriguing possibilities that can be applied to other comparable filmmakers like Lynch, Ferrara, Argento and Kar-Wai.  Early on, Beugnet invokes Laura U. Marks’s comments on the haptic gaze, and relates them into her own reading of contemporary French films: “Haptic images can give the impression of seeing for the first time, gradually discovering what is in the image rather than coming to the image already knowing what it is” (quoted on 3). Cinema and Sensation finally resembles a radical new manifesto for looking at and appreciating film, for returning to this sensuous and transgressive series of films and looking at them with new eyes.

Ben McCann,
The University of Adelaide, Australia.

Endnotes

[1] Tim Palmer, ‘Under your skin: Marina de Van and the contemporary French cinéma du corps’, Studies in French Cinema, vol. 6 (3), 2006, p. 171.
[2] James Quandt, ‘Flesh & blood: sex and violence in recent French cinema’, Art Forum, February 2004. Also available at http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_6_42/ai_113389507 [accessed 20 May 2008].

Created on: Wednesday, 17 September 2008