From Spectacle to Affect:

Contextualizing Transgression in French Cinema at the

Dawn of the Twenty-First Century

Adrienne Angelo

French cinema at the dawn of the twenty-first century will perhaps be

most remembered for a vast number of productions that pushed the
boundaries of cultural taste. The release of what are now considered
landmark films such as Seul contre tous (1998), Sombre (1998),
L’Humanité (1999), Baise-moi (2000), À ma sœur! (2001), Trouble
Every Day (2001), Dans ma peau (2002), Irréversible (2002), La Vie
nouvelle (2002), Anatomie de l’enfer (2003), Haute tension (2003) and
Twentynine Palms (2003) charged critics and scholars with the task of
defining and classifying this array of artfully horrific and horrifically
artful films. Born in the late 1990s, this spectacular corpus would
continue to taunt, tantalize and affectively tyrannize throughout the first
decade of the twenty-first century. While these films elicited polarized
responses — ranging from critical acclaim to outrage — and although a
number of them differ greatly with regard to theme, form and the amount
of abject gore contained therein, one word has continually resurfaced
in critical dialogue: transgressive. This article, first, contextualizes
the concept of transgression at this juncture of French filmmaking to
suggest that the move from cinematic spectacle to spectatorial affect
finds its roots in modernist aesthetics from the early twentieth century.
Second, through an analysis of Gaspar Noé’s Seul contre tous, this article
extends the notion of transgression to consider the changing modalities
of spectatorship as they are enacted in his film. If, generally speaking,
transgression means to rebel against existing norms in an assertion of
liberation, these transgressive films (and filmmakers) in fact impose a
more authoritative hold on the spectator, thereby altering the spectator’s
position and expectations of his or her role in the cinema.
IJFrS 12 (2012)
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The labels that have since been attached to this cinematic trend
— from New Extremity, to Ginette Vincendeau’s 2007 definition of the
New Extremism, Tim Palmer’s cinéma du corps, brutal intimacy and
‘cinema of the flesh’, Martine Beugnet’s notion of Cinema of Sensation,
Dominique Russell’s cinéma brut, James Williams’s Extreme Realism
or contemporary shock cinema — connote corporeality but also and
especially the body’s sensorial world.1 However, the weight given to
graphic, on-screen physical and sensorial depictions of sexuality and
gore bleeds out to other considerations of spectatorial reactions. This
crossing of limits between spectacle and spectator, which is always
centred on shock, sensation and the visceral, is already by nature
transgressive and plays at the limits of representation at this fin-de-siècle
period. As Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall write in their introduction
to The New Extremism in Cinema, one of the only book-length studies
on this topic:

In their concerted practice of provocation as a mode of address,

the films of the new extremism bring the notion of response to the
fore, interrogating, challenging and often destroying the notion
of a passive or disinterested spectator in ways that are productive
for film theorising today.2

In addition to the daring thematic preoccupations of these films

— including taboo subjects such as murder, incest, the monstrous and
1. James Quandt, ‘Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema’,
Artforum, 42.6 (2004), 24–27; Ginette Vincendeau, ‘The New French Extremism’,
in The Cinema Book, ed. by Pam Cook (London: BFI, 2007), pp. 204–06 (p. 205);
Tim Palmer, Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 2011); Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French
Film and the Art of Transgression (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
2007); Dominique Russell, ‘Introduction: Why Rape?’, in Rape in Art Cinema, ed.
by Dominique Russell (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 1–12; James Williams,
‘His Life to Film: The Extreme Art of Jacques Nolot’, Studies in French Cinema, 9.2
(2009), 177–90.
2. Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall, ‘Introduction’, in The New Extremism in Cinema:
From France to Europe, ed. by Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2011), pp. 1–17 (p. 2).
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cannibalism — I contend that the destabilizing formal elements of

these films equally serve as the hallmark of contemporary cinematic
transgression. Broadly speaking, it seems that what makes a number
of these films particularly shocking, provocative or otherwise difficult
to watch lies in the polarized display of seemingly incommensurate
senses: that is, the ostensibly incompatible link between the possibility
of representation — that which can be shown, hence seen — and affect
— that which must be experienced, or felt. But is this ‘new extremism’
particularly new? As Horeck and Kendall point out:

[The] extremity evinced by these films is often as much a matter

of asserting particular filiations with artistic, cinematic, literary
and philosophical forebears as it is of breaking new taboos. […]
The term the new extremism, then, reflects this bridging position
between newness and indebtedness to the past, to a history of
transgression and provocation that is renewed and given a
visceral immediacy for the present.3

In light of these comments, I claim that one of the main

representatives of this ‘new’ extremity, Gaspar Noé, has recourse to
an earlier generation of filmmakers for whom the concept of pure
representation became the mechanism on which a number of avant-
garde manifestos were based. By exploring several formal cinematic
echoes of horror and avant-garde film aesthetics in Noé’s Seul contre
tous, I will situate this contemporary example of transgressive cinema
alongside previous forms of representation — namely, Surrealist art and
avant-garde theatre — and earlier theoretical paradigms which stress the
performative aspect of these experimental examples as they relate to the
spectator. This article thus places Noé, as one of the founding fathers of
the New French Extreme, on a continuum of transgression, to support
an argument in relation to key theoretical essays and manifestos from
the early twentieth century, especially the writings of Breton, Artaud
and Eisenstein.
3. Horeck and Kendall, The New Extremism in Cinema, pp. 5–6.
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Categorizing these fin-de-siècle films, two critics in particular

offered differing though equally important considerations of the
emergent trend of New Extremism in 2004. James Quandt, in his
Artforum article, was the first to attempt a definition of this corpus.
This article has curried most favour with critics looking for a term on
which to hang their analyses; as Quandt puts it ‘[the] critic truffle-
snuffing for trends might call it the New French Extremity, this recent
tendency to the willfully transgressive’. Quandt’s piece solidified the
New Extremity specifically within the art-house French cinematic
tradition.4 Quandt refers to the ‘shock tactics’ of these films within the
context of national cinema and ultimately concludes that such visual
‘aggression’ actually marks a ‘grandiose form of passivity’ in the wake
of a ‘collapse of ideology in a society traditionally defined by political
parity and theoretical certitude’.5
In his response to Quandt’s article, the film critic Jonathan
Romney goes a step further than Quandt in his own attempts to
trace the genealogy of such transgressive films. Both Quandt and
Romney have articulated the French specificity of transgression and
transgressive art. Romney, in particular refers not only to Surrealism
(specifically Bunuel’s and Dalí’s 1929 film Un chien andalou) but also
to Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du monde as well as to
more literary examples of extremism ranging historically from Sade
to Lautréamont through to Bataille’s philosophical writings. Romney,
moreover, contests Quandt’s claim that the New Extremism is a result
of some kind of political apathy in the face of what Quandt suspects to
be a ‘collapsed ideology’.6 For Romney, ‘the new films can hardly be
accused of lacking a political drive’ but respond in fact ‘to a professional
numbness in France, where a regimentation of workplace practices […]
creates a tightly gridded society that gives rise to violent responses’.7
4. Quandt, ‘Flesh and Blood’, 24–27 (p. 24).
5. Quandt, ‘Flesh and Blood’, 24–27 (p. 25)
6. Quandt, ‘Flesh and Blood’, 24–27 (p. 26). Quandt writes, ‘[One] begins to suspect a
deeper impulse at work: a narcissistic response to the collapse of ideology in a society
traditionally defined by political parity and theoretical certitude.’
7. Jonathan Romney, ‘Le Sex and Violence’, The Independent, 12 September (2004).
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What has stayed with me, and what I would like to consider at greater
length in the article that follows, is an association that Romney has
made between the filmmakers of the New Extreme and a theatrical
manifesto by Antonin Artaud, in which Artaud outlined a concept of the
theatre wherein the audience would be engaged with (and provoked by)
a performance on an affective level. According to Artaud:

Le Théâtre de la Cruauté a été créé pour ramener au théâtre la

notion de vie passionnée et convulsive; et c’est dans ce sens de
rigueur violente, de condensation extrême des éléments scéniques
qu’il faut entendre la cruauté sur laquelle il veut s’appuyer.
Cette cruauté, qui sera, quand il le faut, sanglante, mais qui
ne le sera pas systématiquement, se confond donc avec la notion
d’une sorte d’aride pureté morale qui ne craint pas de payer la vie
le prix qu’il faut la payer.8

Although Romney does not delve further into this association

between Artaud’s provocative manifesto and this period of French
cinematic production, Artaud’s concept of Cinema of Cruelty seems
particularly appropriate as a springboard for a discussion of cinematic
transgression and spectatorship, particularly regarding the affective
appeal to spectators. While the coining of the term ‘cinema of cruelty’
is often attributed to André Bazin, Brent Strang takes both Bazin and
Truffaut to task for their ‘indiscriminate’ application of the term in
relation to Artaudian theory.9 Strang notes, for instance, that Bazin’s
text lacks any specific reference to Artaud. For this reason, Strang
reasons that Bazin’s work instead ‘coheres more to a loose conception
of “cruelty in cinema” than anything resembling Artaud’s theories’
<http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/le-sex-and-
violence-6161908.html> [accessed 8 August 2012].
8. Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre et son double (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 189.
9. For Bazin’s thinking on the Cinema of Cruelty see André Bazin, Le Cinéma de la
cruauté: De Buñuel à Hitchcock (Paris: Flammarion, 1975) which was edited and
contains an introduction by François Truffaut. For Strang’s critique see Brent Strang,
‘Beyond Genre and Logos: A Cinema of Cruelty in Dodes’ka-den and Titus’, Cinephile,
4 (2008), 29–35 (p. 30), hereafter BGL in the text.
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(BGL 30). In his rearticulation of a specific Cinema of Cruelty, Strang

argues that cinematic ‘cruelty’ can only be termed ‘cruel’ in Artaud’s
sense if it ‘severs our connection to rational dominion […] [and]
stirs up sensations in our bodies that have not yet been harnessed and
assimilated under thought’ (BGL 30). In this specific usage of a Cinema
of Cruelty, then, cruelty hinges foremost on its powers to rouse the
spectator. In Strang’s comments below, the discomfort afforded by
viewing such ‘cruel’ cinema lies precisely in the transgressive nature of
an Artaudian-based filmmaking practice. Strang writes:

As normalised and logocentric viewers, we bring to the cinema

our ideological filters, consumptive proclivities, and habits of
receiving, decoding, and interpreting narrative. What makes
Artaud’s theory so compelling, and at the same time so challenging
in practice [sic], is that it recognises the weight of these forces that
bind and narcotise in the film/viewer inter-relationship. A radical
counterforce is then required to break through and seize spectators
in their utmost vulnerability, where pre-conditioning offers no
refuge and rational dominion cannot compute. (BGL 30)

To Strang’s clarification of this concept, I would add that if these

films shock, they also undoubtedly possess the power to rile the film
viewer and thereby (to rephrase Artaud’s above comments) ‘ramènent
au [cinéma] la notion de vie passionnée et convulsive’. Moreover, as
Artaud specifies above, this ‘cruelty’ shall only be ‘extreme’ (‘sanglante’)
‘quand il le faut’. Hence, we ought additionally to ponder the cultural
specificity of these cinematic transgressions that are directed first and
foremost at the spectator. Of course, as Martine Beugnet has noted,
and as Strang’s aforementioned comments above illustrate, one can
only attempt to make sense of the body of the film by experiencing
the film as an embodied spectator. Beugnet writes that ‘to open oneself
to sensory awareness and let oneself be physically affected by an art
work or a spectacle is to relinquish the will to gain full mastery over it,
 FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 163

choosing intensity and chaos over rational detachment’.10

In Transgressions: The Offences of Art, Anthony Julius proposes
a re-contextualization of the notion of transgression in visual arts dating
from 1860 to the present. While Julius does not specifically refer to this
French cinematic trend, he raises important issues that these films, too,
have resurrected. First, after exploring the different valences attached
to this very term from its first entry in the English language during
the sixteenth century until the present day, Julius finds four distinct
significations: ‘the denying of doctrinal truths; rule-breaking, including
the violating of principles, conventions, pieties or taboos; the giving of
serious offence; and the exceeding, erasing or disordering of physical
or conceptual boundaries’.11 It is clear that these types of films and this
type of filmmaking practice are concerned above all with violating
conventions and expectations precisely in order to disturb, and hence
offend, the spectator. Moreover, given the graphic nature of any number
of these films, their transgressive forms and themes also remind us that
cinema, like any art, is liable to policing measures (e.g. censorship) by
structures of social order. Second, Julius reminds us of the celebratory
nature of transgression promoted as a utopian ideal by Bataille, an
ideal that is nonetheless unattainable in its re-inscription of borders that
are crossed.12 What we might take from this second point, then, is the
potential of transgressive cinema to represent a similarly transgressive
utopia for the turn of the twenty-first century. As a whole, Julius’s work
recasts the visual arts in the light of transgression and indirectly raises
the question of the relationship between transgression and aesthetics.
While I consider this point in greater detail below, in my analysis of
Noé’s film, another aspect of this ‘offensive’ art lies in the dichotomous
blend of high- and low-brow categorizations that are fused together in
any number of films from this period.
Take, for instance, the case of Bruno Dumont. Commenting on the
10. Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), p. 3.
11. Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002), p. 19.
12. Julius, Transgressions, p. 23.
164 ANGELO

curious mélange of institutionalized accolades and public disapproval

following Dumont’s triple win at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival for
L’Humanité, Caroline Verner writes that ‘Dumont had committed
the ultimate in cinematic transgressions: he had mingled art-house
prestige with sensationalist trash, and been commended for it.’13 Verner
suggests that the films of the New Extreme were born out of ‘the radical
restructuring of France’s film industry’ during Mitterrand’s socialist
government (B 31). In other words, the shock value of these films was
meant to draw box-office appeal to boost France’s waning film industry
during the 1990s. Further, these films have elicited a ‘paradigm shift
within the French horror genre’, a shift that has paved the way for ‘a
more corporeal, transgressive, and confrontational cinema’ (B 31).
For Verner, ‘the character of transgression has been re-inscribed by
the noted paradigm shift, and works to amplify these codes through a
more intellectualized system of meaning’ which, in turn, signals, ‘the
increasing interchangeability of high and low culture codes’ (B 31).
Verner’s comments attest to our (spectator’s and critic’s) need to make
sense of these often unpleasurable films; however, to some extent at
least, this move to order or to compartmentalize these affective films
on an intellectual level also speaks to a normative recuperation of the
films themselves.
Another aspect of this cinematic tendency concerns the historical
specificity of these transgressive productions. Certainly, a number of up
and coming auteurs at this time (Gaspar Noé, François Ozon, Philippe
Grandrieux and Bruno Dumont among others) gained notoriety for
their first films made during this period of cinematic unrest. However,
it should be noted that not every filmmaker who contributed one or
even several films to this trend necessarily continued to do so. This
is certainly the case for Claire Denis and her bloody, quasi-vampire
tale Trouble Every Day. At the other extreme, we might cite the case
of Catherine Breillat, an auteur who has on numerous occasions been

13. Caroline Verner, ‘Beyond the Guillotine: Theorizing the New Extremism in
Contemporary French Cinema’, Cinephile, 6.2 (2010), 31–34 (p. 31), hereafter B in
the text.
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considered transgressive. It could be argued, perhaps, that the notion

of ‘transgression’ comes to signify something more personal in their
respective cinematic endeavours. While Denis’s films do consistently
privilege the experiences of marginalized characters, Trouble Every Day
stands out for its extreme focus on the abject female subject. It could
be that this overarching trend in French cinema (with its predilection
for graphic depictions of visceral corporeality) laid the groundwork for
Denis to take on a specific portrait of female monstrosity in all its gory
glory. Breillat’s films, on the other hand, have repeatedly been subject
to controversy (and, in some cases, censorship) as much as twenty
years before the New Extremism came to the fore. However, few would
disagree that Anatomie de l’enfer, Breillat’s cinematic adaptation of
her own novel, Pornocratie (which is itself a re-writing of Marguerite
Duras’s La Maladie de la mort), has come to represent the apogee of
her extreme endeavors.14
In Romney’s seminal article, he includes Breillat’s comments
which foreground the transgressive freedom this particular film allowed
her:

[Anatomie de l’enfer] was an attempt to go beyond accepted

limits, Breillat says: ‘It’s about watching what is unwatchable.
I wanted to make a film about obscenity. There are laws against
obscenity, but I wanted to know what it was about from the point
of view of an artist — not from the point of view of the law which
forbids you to be an artist.’ In Anatomy, Breillat contends, ‘I’m
trying to present people with something they can’t bear, so as to
make them see how miserable it is to be able to bear so little.’
(SV 5)

14. Following a three-year hiatus from filmmaking, resulting from a stroke in 2004,
Breillat’s return to cinema in 2007, with the release of Une vieille maîtresse, showed
a new aspect of her otherwise autonomous and shocking cinema: a move toward
adaptations of canonical literature. The year 2009 marked the beginning of yet another
stage in her filmography — her fairy tale trilogy — which includes Barbe bleue, La
Belle endormie (2010) and La Belle et la bête (currently under contract with ARTE).
166 ANGELO

Breillat’s most ‘shocking’ production, then, — Anatomie de

l’enfer — coincides with the New Extremism, and her above comments
evoke transgression — going ‘beyond accepted limits’ — specifically
in terms of its effects on the spectator. Her remarks on ‘watching what
is unwatchable’ resonate especially with the transgressive nature of the
affecting cinematic spectacle in this trend in French cinema; moreover,
our engagement (as viewers) with these ‘unwatchable’ films relies on
a certain willful transgression. If one watches the unwatchable, one is
not only bridging a divide but also, potentially, crossing the limits of
what is acceptable or, in an extreme case, ethical. Asbjørn Grønstad’s
Screening the Unwatchable is a key text in this regard. In this text,
Grønstad focuses on ‘relational aesthetics’ in his consideration of these
films, which ‘problematize new modes of social existence, and share in
common an apprehension of a deepening rupture, existential and moral,
between society and the individual, participation and isolation, politics
and aesthetics’.15 The very ‘unwatchability’ of these films, in Grønstad’s
view, re-directs modes of vision and expands our limits of thought.
In Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde, Joan
Hawkins recalls André Breton’s definition and example of the ‘simplest’
Surrealist act: ‘“The simplest Surrealist act”, André Breton once wrote,
“consists of dashing into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as
fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd”.’16 Hawkins links Breton’s
statement to the collapse of political action and art in the Surrealist
tradition and posits that this statement is illustrative of the transgressive
tendencies of avant-garde aesthetics in the twentieth century: ‘the
breaking of taboos surrounding the depiction (and performance) of sex
and violence, the desire to shock (épater) the bourgeoisie, and the willful
blurring of the boundary lines traditionally separating life and art’.17

15. Asbjørn Grønstad, Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-Millenial

Art Cinema (London: Palgrave, 2012), p. 5.
16. Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 117,, originally in André Breton, ‘Second
Manifesto of Surrealism’ in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver and
Helen Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 125.
17. Hawkins, Cutting Edge, p. 117.
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Breton’s statement suggests making a spectacle of random violence

which removes this action from a logical context and renders the action
motiveless and so, presumably, unanswerable to the law and useless.
However, as Hawkins also notes, this call to Surrealist action especially
illustrates a disregard for those in the crowd and in fact ‘demonstrates
a certain willingness to sacrifice bystanders; it demonstrates a certain
stated need for victims’.18 It is with these ideas, and the repercussions
of this victimized spectatorship, that I turn to Noé’s Seul contre tous, a
film that should be regarded as one of the first of this cinematic trend.
As such, Noé’s work ought to be considered a paradigmatic exploration
of this Cinema of Cruelty, particularly as it pertains to the spectator.
To recall Strang’s aforementioned argument, in which he redefines an
Artaudian-based Cinema of Cruelty, this type of cinema:

recognises the weight of these forces that bind and narcotise in

the film/viewer inter-relationship. A radical counterforce is then
required to break through and seize spectators in their utmost
vulnerability, where pre-conditioning offers no refuge and
rational dominion cannot compute.’ (BGL 30)

The ramifications for such an extreme filmmaking practice will

undoubtedly need to go beyond conscious states of viewing. Thus, this
consideration of a Cinema of Cruelty also finds validation in considering
Artaud’s earlier conception of cinéma brut or ‘raw cinema’.
As one of the earliest avant-garde critics who wrote in favour of
mining the cinema for its potential to visualize dreams, thus to visually
represent the dreamlike writings of l’écriture automatique, Artaud
promoted the concept of cinéma brut — a term that by now will have
assumed a slightly different definition with regard to more extremist
tendencies in twenty-first-century film. However, in 1927, what was
brut, bare or essential to cinema, Artaud urged, was not only the power
of the image on screen but, perhaps more importantly, that the film-
going experience should come to mimic the process of dreaming.
18. Hawkins, Cutting Edge, p. 117.
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J’ai toujours distingué dans le cinéma une vertu propre au

mouvement secret et à la matière des images. Il y a dans le cinéma
toute une part d’imprévu et de mystère qu’on ne trouve pas dans les
autres arts. […] Le cinéma brut, et pris tel qu’il est, dans l’abstrait,
dégage un peu de cette atmosphère de transe éminemment favorable
à certaines révélations. Le faire servir à raconter des histoires, une
action extérieure, c’est se priver du meilleur de ses ressources, aller
à l’encontre de son but le plus profond.19

The deeper function of this type of cinema, then, resided in the

pure image devoid of narrative context or development, an emptying
out of synchronous logic that would be not only unsettling to the
average spectator but would perhaps serve as a type of visual assault.
Consider, for instance, Artaud’s further comments regarding the ‘force’
of the image and the ensuing ‘shock’ that is sparked in the spectator:

On en est à rechercher un film à situations purement visuelles et

dont le drame découlerait d’un heurt fait pour les yeux, pris, si
l’on ose dire, dans la substance même du regard, et ne proviendrait
provenant pas de circonlocutions psychologiques d’essence
discursive et qui ne sont que du texte visuellement traduit.20

Noé’s reputation as a transgressive cinematic pariah was

concretized with his second feature-length film Irréversible, a film
which begins with an intense opening scene of a supposed rapist getting
his head bashed in with a fire extinguisher. It also contains a nearly nine-
minute rape sequence during which time the camera never cuts away
from the action and essentially holds the spectator hostage. However,
it is Noé’s first feature-length film, Seul contre tous, that I propose to
discuss here on the grounds that it carries significant weight in terms of
affective spectatorship and the Surrealist legacies Noé references and
appropriates. Noé’s homage to avant-garde and Surrealist art of the early

19. Antonin Artaud, Œuvres complètes 26 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1956–1961), III, pp. 79–80.
20. Artaud, Œuvres complètes, III, p. 22.
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twentieth century is reflected in various threads in this film: the dream-

like sequence of murder, an often intense and seemingly irrational focus
on specific objects, a juxtaposition of extraordinary — indeed extreme
— realism with what Breton calls the ‘merveilleux’, and, of course, the
antibourgeois morality espoused by the butcher — a protagonist whose
cinematic lineage can be traced to a number of earlier ‘art’ films such
as Artaud’s La Révolte du boucher (1930), Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes
(1949) and Chabrol’s Le Boucher (1970).
Noé’s landmark film above all underscores what Grønstad
regards as the unwatchable potential of this transgressive cinema.
This unwatchability may be illuminated through a consideration of
Martin Harries’s discussion of Artaud’s text, ‘La Mise en scène et
la métaphysique’, which proposes a reading of Lucas van Leyden’s
painting Lot and his Daughters (1530). Harries explores the history
of what he has termed ‘destructive spectatorship’ in his examination
of this painting and its place in theoretical concepts of the gaze in the
twentieth century. For Harries, the subject of the painting remains the
notion that the sight of historical catastrophe can destroy the spectator.
Harries’s analysis centres on what he considers a blatant gap in Artaud’s
consideration of the painting. He writes:

With a certain amnesia — whether symptomatic or strategic —

Artaud actively forgets much of the biblical text that provides the
viewer one [sic] way to decode the shipwreck and destruction of
cities on the right. He represses what everyone remembers and
remembers what most forget: he chooses to remember the incest
and represses the fate of Lot’s wife.21

Harries’s comments are especially helpful when considering Seul

contre tous in light of Artaud. Noé, too, not only remembers, but insists
on the visualization of the memory of incest, the main taboo around
which his film is constructed.

21. Martin Harries, Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 26.
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This film provides insight into the bleak existence of one man:
a jobless (and nameless) butcher whose anger and violence drive him
to assault his wife, kill their unborn child and move back to Paris in
the hopes of finding work and his institutionalized daughter, Cynthia,
whom he murders in a fantasy sequence and with whom he carries
out an incestuous relationship. Seul contre tous was constructed as a
feature-length sequel to Noé’s short film Carne (1991), a film which
introduced us to the protagonist, a figure that can be read a sort of anti-
Everyman in Noé’s cinema.
Noé conceived of his film mainly as a provocation made, he has
said, to ‘dishonour France’.22 Considering that this Argentinean-born
director chose to make an anti-French movie in the French language,
thus presumably for the French public, it is rather obvious that this
film lies on the margins of any concept of unified nationhood whilst
depending on the notion of a fixed national identity for its scandalizing
effects. Noé, as Tim Palmer has noted, like a number of transgressive
contemporary filmmakers, has relied on ‘an ingeniously crafted barrage
of visual and aural techniques’.23 This ‘barrage’, via an unrelenting
quasi-military percussion soundtrack in this film, further offsets the
notion of nationhood against which Noé projects his narrative. The
soundtrack, as well as the animated mapped image of France at the
film’s opening, and the two intertitles, ‘Moralité’ and ‘Justice’, call to
mind nationhood, political action and, in light of the narrative events of
the film, a redefinition of these ethical terms. Noé’s I Stand Alone (the
English-language translation of the title) or One Against All (a more
direct translation) might be read, then, as another manifesto of sorts, one
that foregrounds an isolationist view of humanity — the title hinging as
it does on the term ‘against’. Noé’s insistence on the force of exclusion
and abjection is one that can be read in extremity both thematically and
formally as we enter the (hi)story of one’s man journey into hell. From
22. Liese Spencer, ‘Cinema to Dishonour France’, The Independent, 14 January
1999 <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/cinema-to-dishonour-
france-1046932.html> [accessed 12 April 2012].
23. Tim Palmer, ‘Style and Sensation in the Contemporary French Cinema of the Body’,
Journal of Film and Video, 58.3 (2006), 22–32, p. 23.
 FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 171

the very beginning of the film, the spectator is asked to identify with
an individual who places himself outside and against social norms — a
fugitive on the run, a misanthropic racist who bemoans the current state
of society, a transgressive loner. Yet we remain trapped as it were within
his twisted psyche — via his interior paranoid rants in voiceover.
Noé’s (de)construction of sound is one that aggressively addresses
the spectator and is most evident with his inclusion of gunshots that
disrupt the soundtrack, an aural reminder, I would suggest, of Breton’s
aforementioned act of arbitrary and shocking violence. Moreover, the
sound/image disjunction between scenes, as Matt Bailey has noted,
seems to hark back to Godard’s more politicized cinema.24 Godard’s
anti-establishment filmmaking practices of course began with a À Bout
de souffle (1959), hailed by many as the founding film of the French New
Wave, an anti-movement that began in response to high-budget studio
productions with resounding appeal and formulaic story lines. In À Bout
de souffle, Godard, too, relied on similar distancing effects, especially
jump cuts and post-synchronized sound manipulations. As his career
proceeded, however, and undoubtedly fuelled by the demonstrations
of May 1968, Godard removed himself further from the New Wave
and explored experimental filmmaking practices in films that were
more political in nature. Ici et ailleurs (1976), for example, directed by
Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, made during his video period in the
Dziga Vertov group, eschewed narrative cohesion altogether in favour
of showcasing diegetical film viewing. In this case, Godard focused
on two families (one French and one Palestinian) watching footage
from Godard’s equally political Jusqu’à la victoire (1970). Another
Godardian echo of formal manipulation found in Noé’s film is the
intertitle. Although an in-depth analysis of the changing form and use
of intertitles in Godard’s cinema lies outside the scope of this article, it
is nonetheless important to mention that their evolution could be said to
mirror the political drive of these later films, and thus these intertitles
serve first and foremost as Godard’s engagement with his contemporary
24. Matt Bailey, ‘Gaspar Noé’, Senses of Cinema, 28 (2003) <http://sensesofcinema.
com/2003/great-directors/noe/#7> [accessed 8 August 2012].
172 ANGELO

public in promoting his radical ideas. Weekend (1967), though, perhaps

best represents a clear parallel between Godard’s films and the
experimental practices incorporated into Noé’s film. As discussed above
in the example of Seul contre tous, Weekend too begins with a warning
that the film is not ‘appropriate’ for general viewing: ‘Interdit aux moins
de 18 ans’. Moreover, the film declares itself — via the intertitle — to be
‘égaré dans le cosmos’. Indeed, as Shana Macdonald observes, Weekend
‘critically [engages] the spectator through a politically invested formal
approach [and uses] rape as a means of critiquing oppressive social
systems developed under capitalism’.25
I will argue, however, that Noé’s film goes a step further than
Weekend not only in its embrace of antagonism and in its conflation of
rape and incest but also and especially in its ‘cruel’ address to the viewer.
As discussed above, Noé similarly includes intertitles at various points
in the film: in the opening sequence in which ‘Moralité’ and ‘Justice’
are projected, to be defined by an anonymous man in a café as he
brandishes a handgun; while two other titles, ‘Vivre est un acte égoïste’
and ‘Survivre est une loi génétique’, are projected before the butcher
goes to the asylum to pick up his daughter. Clearly these intertitles have
no bearing on the narrative and are directed at the spectator. The most
significant visual and narrative break in the film, however, comes in
the form of a direct (and timed) address to the spectator: a real-time
warning to leave the screening of the film, a forewarning that what will
follow — in story-time — might be too much for one’s senses. Noé
provides the spectator with a chance to leave before it is too late, before
it becomes too much. This visual and narrative break collapses story and
spectacle while working in tandem with Artaud’s theoretical conception
of cruelty and the spectator’s visceral reactions. Formally, this device
can be read in theatrical terms as Brechtian distantiation but it also has
an interesting role to play in the spectator’s choice to stay and watch.
At the same time that we are warned about what we are about to see,

25. Shana Macdonald, ‘Materiality and Metaphor: Rape in Anne Claire Poirier’s Mourir
à tue-tête and Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend’, Rape in Art Cinema, ed. by Dominique
Russell, pp. 55–68 (p. 56).
 FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 173

and are thus cautioned to turn away, an implicit (and yet patently false)
appeal is made to our free will. As the seconds elapse, we are asked to
make a hasty decision about our participation in watching or refusal
to watch what will most probably be ‘extreme’ cinema. However, if
we did not continue to watch, we could never confirm the accuracy or
veracity of the on-screen warning. This spectatorial conundrum, which
Noé has built into his film, functions to attract rather than to deter the
viewer. The curious blend of repulsion and attraction is particularly
characteristic of the experience of viewing his cinema and suggests an
opening towards the spectator, or a break in the fourth wall, wherein
the extreme thematic elements at the heart of his films — murder, rape,
incest — serve as a visualization of the repressed and one explicitly
linked to affect.
To return to the idea of a Cinema of Cruelty, Lee Jamieson
identifies several ways in which Artaud had used the term ‘cruelty’, two
of which, I think are specifically suitable to Noé’s cinema: cruelty as a
device for describing a nihilistic view of the universe that mirrors the
essence of human existence, and cruelty as theatrical presentation.26 In
the first instance, associated with a grim and pessimistic view of life, we
can understand cruelty as the dominant narrative theme of Noé’s Seul
contre tous. It is, however, it is the second instance, cruelty as spectacle,
that has the greatest implications for spectators. As Jamieson writes,
‘Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience
into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a
place where the spectator is exploded rather than protected, Artaud was
committing an act of cruelty upon them.’27 And so, too, Noé commits
similar acts of cruelty on his spectator through a relentless gunshot
that runs across the soundtrack and camera work that Dion Tubrett has
termed Noé’s ‘assault on the viewer’.28

26. Lee Jamieson, Antonin Artaud: From Theory to Practice (London: Greenwich
Exchange, 2007), pp. 28–31.
27. Jamieson, Artaud, p. 37.
28. Dion Tubrett, ‘Love Hurts: Redemption within the Bowels of Seul contre tous and the
Cinema of Aggression’, CineAction, 62 (2003), 34–40 (p. 36).
174 ANGELO

With Un chien andalou, Buñuel and Dalí deliberately planned

their film to provoke and shock in order to transport the spirit of the
Surrealist Revolution into the world of cinema. The provocations and
multiple symbolic meanings were targeted at disrupting the accustomed,
rational logic implicated in traditional spectatorship. In what will be
remembered as one of the earliest images of cinematic violence directed
at the spectator, we watch what we think is the cutting of a woman’s
eye. This now iconic scene is one that has no narrative context (even
given the Surrealist nature of the film) and so it is especially unexpected,
hence shocking. While I do not wish to enter directly into the multiple
critical readings of this well-cited image, I am particularly struck by
the visual echo and formal construction of the close-up image of the
eye in Noé’s film that both opens and closes what is arguably the most
shocking moment of his film — the butcher’s imagined murder and
actual molestation of his daughter. The framing of this scene, as I have
suggested, immediately calls to mind the tendency among Surrealist
filmmakers to focus on objects and dreamlike states — here, in fact, the
close-up image of the man’s eye — suggesting our entry into his taboo
fantasy world.
In this scene, the butcher has just picked up his daughter from
the institution with the ultimate goal of killing her and himself. They
enter the aptly and ironically named Hôtel de l’Avenir, where they go
to the very room in which his daughter was conceived. The spectator’s
claustrophobia, evoked by the spatial construction, is reinforced by the
paranoid cacophony of the butcher’s mad rants, wherein he provides
a litany of reasons for not wanting to live and that justify murder. Our
understanding of what is real and imagined becomes equally distorted.
This blurring of violent fantasy and equally grim reality is visually
underscored in a Surrealist manner as we see clear (and disorienting)
cuts between time and space. At the moment when the butcher’s
fantasy dominates the narrative, the camera cuts to a semi-undressed
(and off-camera) Cynthia getting up from the floor (and returning to the
screen space) while the voiceover proclaims: ‘C’est fait.’ In this way,
the spectacle of sex (incest) is here eclipsed in favour of the spectacle
 FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 175

of violence with a close-up of the butcher shooting his daughter as

blood and brains spatter on the screen. The knock on the door and the
proprietor’s calls to the butcher seem to address only the spectator who
is now placed in a difficult position between passive witness to the
crime and active observer of the butcher’s suicidal diatribe.
The concept of embodied spectatorship necessarily depends on
a visual representation of affect, or, alternatively, elements that would
provoke a primal reaction from the spectator. Linda Williams notably
categorizes ‘body genre’ films as those with an intense focus on the
body and its on-screen visceral response to various stimuli. According to
Williams, ‘what seems to bracket these particular genres from others is
an apparent lack of proper esthetic distance, a sense of over involvement
in sensation and emotion’.29 In both Carne and Seul contre tous, Noé
certainly insists on flesh in a number of ways. For example, Noé’s
protagonist is in fact a butcher (by definition a personage whose tactile
proximity to meat invests him with sensation); we briefly see images of
meat on a cutting board; Noé includes snippets of a pornographic film
(a body genre par excellence) that the butcher watches without emotion;
finally, and most graphically, we see violence enacted on the human
body. Additionally, there are several cinematic jolts formally evidenced
through the use of sound and camera movements, which function to
create the sense (for the spectator) of ‘being electrified, like an epileptic
seizure’; Gavin Smith’s comment emphasizes the corporeality and
visceral response that Noé seeks to provoke.30
Matt Bailey, in his biographical entry on Gaspar Noé for Senses
of Cinema, rightly evokes both Sergei Eisenstein and Tom Gunning to
explore the ‘cinema of attractions’.31 Bailey’s evocation of earlier film
theory is, of course, on target with this contextualization of transgression
in contemporary French cinema and, especially, this move from pure
spectacle to affective spectatorship. To build on Bailey’s ideas, then, it is

29. Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess’, Film Quarterly, 44.4
(1991), 2–13 (p. 5).
30. Gavin Smith, ‘Live Flesh’, Film Comment, 34.4 (1998), 6–7 (p. 6).
31. Bailey, ‘Gaspar Noé’.
176 ANGELO

important to revisit the notion of ‘cinema of attractions’ as Tom Gunning

has considered it in his analysis of pre-1906 cinema. For Gunning,
the ‘cinema of attractions’ is one wherein the ‘harnessing of visibility
[…] directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and
supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle and recreations of
shocking or curious incidents’.32 Undoubtedly, part of the novelty of
these early films stemmed from the experience of watching a medium
so unlike anything seen before; hence, the spectator’s primal response
to the image was not necessarily tied to the narrative. Indeed, before
the advent of sound and for reasons of technical limitations, early films
contained a relative paucity of narrative by today’s standards. Bailey
draws, then, on Gunning’s cinematic theory and links it to Eisenstein’s
application of the term ‘attractions’ in relation to the performing arts,
specifically, in Eisenstein’s consideration of theatre:

In his 1923 essay on theatre, ‘The Montage of Attractions’,

Eisenstein proposed a system of ‘attractions’ — aggressive actions
in the presentation of a theatrical work — that subjected the
audience ‘to emotional or psychological influence … calculated
to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator’.33

The idea came from the presentational performances of the Grand

Guignol and the traditional circus — low forms of entertainment in
opposition to the high art of realist representational theatre.34 The
concept of attractions in theatre was motivated out of a desire to make
the political message of the theatrical piece clearer, more direct, and
without the trappings of narrative including melodrama, allegory and
audience identification with the characters or their situation.

32. Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-
Garde’, in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. by Thomas Elsaesser and
Adam Barker (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 56–62 (p. 58).
33. Matt Bailey, ‘Gaspar Noé’. Bailey is citing from the following work, Sergei Eisenstein,
‘The Montage of Attractions’ in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. by Richard Taylor (London:
BFI, 1998), pp. 29–34 (p. 30).
34. Eisenstein, ‘Montage’, p. 30.
 FROM SPECTACLE TO AFFECT 177

Both Gunning’s and Eisenstein’s comments on spectacle and

spectatorship — though applied in a different context to be sure
— continue to hold sway in this particular example of a Cinema of
Cruelty. What is perhaps also striking in any contextualization of these
transgressive films, and what is implicit in Eisenstein’s comments on
the divide between low and high art forms — specifically European
art films or avant-garde cinema — are the disparate qualities evoked
by, and the extreme divide between, high-brow authored films and
what others have termed the ‘trash aesthetics’ of low-brow art. Joan
Hawkins perhaps most thoroughly makes the case for the collapse
of these boundaries.35 Specifically in the context of New Extremism,
however, it is precisely the all-too-real depiction of contemporary
reality (high art realism) that in these films obliges the contemporary
spectator to identify with the bodies (and bodily experiences) on screen.
Thus, the merging of more ‘base’ forms of entertainment (which would
normally provide a form of distraction for the spectator) with high art
(an art meant to be discussed and intellectualized) creates a harrowing
experience for the spectator. While Noé’s films do not belong to the
horror genre, although they undoubtedly showcase horrific elements,
the critical reception of Seul contre tous, like so many contemporary
transgressive films, remains similarly split and extreme. Some hail the
artistic achievements, or focus on the obvious ‘high brow’ qualities of a
film ‘signed’ by the auteur Gaspar Noé. Others reject the graphic display
of visceral corporeality (including sexuality, violence, and other visual
manifestations of the abject in relation to the physical) in extreme terms:
it is unbearable, unwatchable and, quite simply, too much. This acute
divide among critics reflects the multiple layers of division in Noé’s
film that allow us to consider the transgressive force of his cinema: the
division between the conscious and the unconscious, life and survival,
love and hate. He thus provokes and shapes our viewing experience,
allowing theoretical paradigms to be brought to bear on his work by
responding to and engaging with previous cinematic and avant-garde
35. The collapse of boudaries forms the basis of Hawkins’s thesis. See Hawkins, Cutting
Edge.
178 ANGELO

legacies in a contemporary take on the role of ‘cruelty’ and its place in

transgressive cinema at the turn of the twenty-first century. The New
Extremism, as exemplified in Noé’s work, illustrates the importance
of the use of transgressive form as well as transgressive content and an
engagement with the legacies of Surrealism, the Theatre of Cruelty and
the Cinema of Attractions.
Auburn University, USA