brown - monstrous cinema

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Monstrous cinemaWilliam Brown aa Department of Media, Culture and Language, University ofRoehampton, London, SW15 5PU, UK

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Monstrous cinema

William Brown*

Department of Media, Culture and Language, University of Roehampton,London SW15 5PU, UK

This paper explores the concept of cinematic monstrosity, as derived fromwork by Jean-Luc Nancy, and links it to monstration, a term typicallyreserved for considerations of early (pre-1907) cinema. The paper proposesthat all cinema monstrates, or shows, as much as it tells, or narrates. Drawingagain on Nancy, the paper then explores the concept of cruelty, arguing thatthe cruelty, or monstrous nature, of cinema is made most clear not onlyin films that deploy monstrative techniques, but also in films that exploremonstrous and cruel themes.

Keywords: cruelty; Andre Gaudreault; monstration; monstrosity; Jean-LucNancy

In this paper, I shall explore the concept of monstrosity, as derived from work by

Jean-Luc Nancy, in relation to cinema. In particular, the paper seeks to establish

links between monstrosity and monstration, a term typically reserved for

considerations of early (pre-1907) cinema. In short, the paper proposes that all

cinema monstrates, or shows, as much as it tells, or narrates. Drawing again on

Nancy, the paper then explores the concept of cruelty, arguing that the cruelty, or

monstrous nature, of cinema is made most clear not only in films that deploy

monstrative techniques, but also in films that explore monstrous and cruel themes.

The monstrosity of images

In Au fond des images, Nancy writes that every image is a monstrance: The

image belongs to the order of the monster: monstrum, it is a prodigious sign that

warns us (moneo, monestrum) about a divine threat (2003, 47; my translation).

Nancys argument would seem to suggest that, like monsters, images are other.

Earlier in his book, Nancy develops this concept of otherness through the

notion of the sacred; that is, images are distinct, or separated from reality (for

want of a better term) by marks (2003, 12). The creation of images is the

creation of the other, a making sacred, or a sacri-fice (14). Moreover, that which

is sacrificed is that which is excessive, or which exceeds/comes to exceed the

ISSN 1740-0309 print/ISSN 1740-7923 online

q 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2012.666455

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*Email: [email protected]

New Review of Film and Television Studies

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world. In exceeding the world, images come, as Nancy would have it, from the

heavens which we should not confuse with heaven in the religious sense (18).

If Nancy defines the monstrous image as a prodigious sign, we might infer

from this that the image has meaning (it is a sign of something). However, Nancy

argues that the image is outside of the world, outside of language and outside of

meaning: the image is evidence of the invisible (2003, 30; my translation). We

can understand this as follows: the image is not that which it represents, nor is it

a signifier representing a signified (as we might conventionally understand signs

to be). Rather, the image makes visible not the objects that are the images

content, but the force that these objects possess, a force that enables change, or

affect. The image makes this force visible, meaning that this force is proper to the

image and is otherwise invisible.

Violence is the result of forces power to change. Moreover, force, by making

things distinct/other/sacred (by sacri-ficing), is irrational and stupid. In other

words, violence destroys the established order and thus makes truth. For truth

also destroys the established order, and truth, like violence, is revealed through

monstration: violence is exposed as a formwithout form, amonstration, a showing

(ostension) of that which has no face (Nancy 2003, 38; my translation). The truth,

like violence, can refer only to itself, it is self-evident (automonstratif):

The truth cannot simply be, and in a certain sense it is not at all: its beingconsists entirely in its manifestation. The truth shows itself or is shown (and even ina demonstration, in the logical sense of the word, there is necessarily showing(ostension) and the demonstration of force). (Nancy 2003, 456; my translation)

Nancy continues in his description of truth as a monster in a later text:

The truth is a singular monster, like all truths: it is at once true of the most tenderkiss, as well as of the most horrendous slaughter; it is tenderness and crueltycombined in a fearsome chimera, exchanging their roles, almost like tender flesh(fresh raw meat) and the splendour of blood (cruor, blood spurting forth, versussanguis, blood flowing in the organs). (Nancy 2008, 163)

Monstrosity, therefore, is a concept that links together images, violence, truth and

cruelty. Furthermore, cinemas images are monstrous in that they show. It is not

so much the contents of the images that are important as the fact of the images:

their otherness, their sacred nature, their distinction, is excessive, violent, truthful

and cruel, showing us raw (cru in French) images that wemust then work hard to

understand or of which we must make sense, often with the help of the filmmakers

themselves (who make narratives with these images in order to do so). Between

filmmakers and viewers, we must create narratives (or tellings) to cope with

the otherwise incomprehensible experience of senseless presence, the violent

showings that always exceed the meaning of signs (Nancy 2003, 55). Cinema and

its images are capable of affect, an affect that is not always intellectual, but

which takes place, rather, on a plane before sense-making (pre-sense/presence),

and which is, as various studies of cinema have tried recently to make clear,

haptic.1 Cinema and its images touch us. Cinema, in Nancys terms, has skin: it is

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an exposed, or ex-peau-sed, little skin, or pellicule (2008, 163). Cinema has

a presence, a pre-sense, that we see, but which we also feel. In short, the experience

of images involves sensation before sense.

Cinematic monstration

I shall return to various of the concepts outlined above in later parts of this paper.

However, having proposed, after Nancy, that images are monstrous in the sense

that they are violent, truthful and cruel I should like now to introduce a second,

quasi-homonymic term, monstration, into the argument, not least because

monstration is a term commonly used in relation to cinema, particularly early

silent cinema (from the period before 1907).

Tom Gunnings notion of the cinema of attraction (1986), later re-developed

as the cinema of attractions (1990), has become a cornerstone of recent film

studies, in particular, through its relevance to the spectacular cinema of special

effects (see Strauven 2006), as well as through the way in which attractions can

help us to re-think the assumed dominance of cause and effect-driven narrative in

cinema (see Martin-Jones 2011, 2365). However, while Gunnings work has

(not undeservedly) received the lions share of recent academic attention, it has

perhaps overshadowed the work of Gunnings fellow scholar of early cinema and

sometime writing partner, Andre Gaudreault.

Gaudreault argues that early silent cinema shows as much as it tells.

Gaudreault terms this process of showing monstration, which he in turn

distinguishes from the process of telling, or narration (1990, 276). In his recently

translated From Plato to Lumie`re: Narration and Monstration in Literature and

Cinema (2009 [1988]), Gaudreault furthermore charts a history of narratology

from Plato and Aristotle, through to A.-J. Greimas and Gerard Genette, before

explaining that, in contrast to narration, monstration has only recently begun to

take hold as a way to describe and identify this mode of communicating a story,

which consists of showing characters (in English, monstrance) who act out rather

than tell vicissitudes to which they are subjected (2009, 69).

For Gaudreault, monstration in particular characterises a period in film history

during the early silent cinema (which was, Gaudreault contends, never silent), and

before the rise of cinematic narratives. That is, in a fashion not dissimilar to the

cinema of attraction(s), early cinema simply showed events and did not necessarily

tell, or narrate, a story. There is, for example, no narrative or story typically

associatedwithLa sortiedes usines Lumie`re/Workers Leaving the Factory (1895)or

Larrivee dun train a` la Ciotat/Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896); instead, they

simply show, ormonstrate,workers leaving a factory and a train arriving at a station.

Furthermore, the monstrative qualities of early cinema are made more clear

when we consider, as Gaudreault does, that lecturers would stand alongside a

screen to explain to spectators what it was that they were seeing because without

an informed lecturer offering interpretations of the images, audiences did not

understand themeaning of the succession of images presented to them (2009, 131).

New Review of Film and Television Studies 3

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In other words, it is only when language (or the language-like) accompanies

images that they make sense: the lecturer is on a continuum with intertitles (text

inserted into films to explain, or at the very least to imply, their meaning) and

with editing, which Gaudreault understands as being the way in which a narrator

insinuat[es] itself among the images in order to present and order them (2009,

132). That is, even though cinema is not a language in the strict sense of the term

(see Currie 1995), it is the relations between images which we can conceive

literally as the edits that lie between images established by editing that allow

films to become comprehensible, or language-like, without specifically

linguistic/verbal means. In the monstrative mode, such relations do not exist.

There remain subtleties to pick apart. For example, the transition from

monstration to narration is not linear, but runs in fits and starts:Gaudreault explains

how chase films were popular between 1904 and 1907, and that these included

spatial and temporal matching shots (2009, 130), which by extension were

already narrating, while between 1906 and 1908, audiences regularly

complained about not understanding the films presented to them (131), suggesting

the persistence of monstration.

Furthermore, while early monstrations might not obviously have a story, this

does not mean that they are entirely without narrative elements; as Gunning

suggests (2004, 43), narrative perhaps never disappears entirely from cinema.

Indeed, we might suggest that something like an ongoing storyline emerges

during Workers Leaving the Factory quite simply by virtue of there being change

over time, or movement, by recognisable figures (human beings) in a recognisable

space (next to factory gates), and the directionality of whose movement we can

comprehend. Indeed, we can even infer before they have finished their sortie that

the workers will continue leaving the factory rather than turn around and go back

in (although how much this inference is shaped by our knowledge of the films

title arguably muddies this final assertion, while also reaffirming indirectly that it

is language or, in the case of editing, the language-like that gives sense to images

even language that, in the case of a films title, does not necessarily appear

directly in the film itself, be that in spoken or written form).

The inescapable intermingling of monstration and narrative is also suggested

by Gaudreault himself when he says that monstration and narration are two

modes of communicating a narrative (2009, 150), the implication being that

narrative is inherent to cinema. Indeed, monstration perhaps emerges as inferior

to narration for Gaudreault since intertitles and editing give to film literary

wings (163).

Cinematic excess

While I do not have the space to elaborate more fully on Gaudreaults separation

of both monstrators and narrators into profilmic, cinematographic and mega-

levels, I do wish to argue against his suggestion that monstration is ultimately a

mode of narrative, as well as against both his seeming hierarchy of modes

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(narration over monstration) and his confinement of monstration to early silent

cinema (when he discusses a non-silent era film, namely, Nikita Mikhalkovs

Dark Eyes [1987], Gaudreault writes only of different narrators in the film; see

2009, 13546).

It is not that monstration has disappeared from cinema through the

development of narrative via editing (an implication if not an explicit argument in

Gaudreault). Rather, monstration is always at work in cinema. If Gaudreaults

research, particularly his analysis of lecturers in early silent cinema, implies that

cinema is an incomprehensible monstration before it is a comprehensible

narrative (if cinema shows before it tells), then this shares common ground with

Nancys concept of monstrosity. That is, all cinema touches us in a pre-linguistic

and violent manner because all images are other, or monstrances.

However, ifmonstration is at work even in narrative cinema, this does notmake

it part, orwhatGaudreaultwould termamode, of narrative. Indeed, as I have argued

elsewhere (Brown 2011), monstration is pre-narrative not simply in the historical

sense (pre-1907), but also in a psychophysiological sense: images possess what

Nancy defines as presence, or pre-sense, in that there is always a (slight) delay

between light hitting the retina and the (re)cognition of colours, which themselves

are perceived before form and movement (i.e. before the image can make sense).

While in that essay I draw upon neurocognitive literature to mount an

argument for the pre-narrative monstrosity of images, here I wish to take a

different approach. Cinematic monstration is not inferior to narration, or narrative

as a whole, but an important and overlooked quality of cinema. However, it is easy

precisely to overlook cinematic monstration because, while it shows, impossibly

it cannot be seen. That is, if cinematic images exceed the world, and if they exceed

meaning, then it becomes very difficult for us to pin down precisely what

monstrosity is; indeed, if the monstrosity of images is pre-linguistic, as Nancy

suggests, then we cannot name it as such, but rather we can only talk around it. In

this way, monstrosity is akin to a black hole: we cannot directly perceive it (since

in the case of a black hole, no light escapes from it), but we can see its effects or its

force. In other words, the monstrosity of images their violence, their force,

their truth exceeds language. If this is so, then how can we describe it?

Incessant excess

In her now-classic definition of cinematic excess, Kristin Thompson (1977)

explains (in a fashion that anticipates Nancys definition of images as

monstrances) that excess is all that which exceeds meaning. That is, when

watching a film we prioritise and invest meaning in certain aspects of the image

and/or we privilege some images and sounds over others in order to find meaning

in, or attribute meaning to, the film. All that we discard, or perhaps better, all that

we do not notice, is the excess of cinema.

I am not defining cinematic excess here as that which lies beyond the frame or

the screen, or as that which literally exceeds the image. I am, after Thompson,


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defining excess as that which lies very much within the frame, that which is

incessant, or certainly incessive (it lies within the frame), but which exceeds our

perception not because invisible (out of frame) but in spite of being visible (in the

frame). This incessant excess is visible; we see it in that it is before our eyes.

However, it is also invisible; we do not see it in such a way that it comes to our

attention. We do not notice it or find it meaningful.

To a certain extent, monstration is a moment of cinematic excess as Thompson

defines it. By this I mean that monstration is the moment when the film does not

make sense, when the film exists before us as presence and image, as opposed to as

absence and text in that language takes us away/absents us from the thing itself

that the word names. Superficially, this bears some resemblance to Christian

Metzs argument that I must perceive the photographed object as absent, its

photograph as present, and the presence of the absence as signifying (1986, 57).

However, where Metz tries to understand images as a language, I am arguing that

images are pre-linguistic and that the presence of images constitutes an absence of

signification. Monstration is the moment of seeing rather than reading, and as

such, monstration takes place when cinema exceeds our understanding, when it

exceeds our ability to understand. Monstration, then, is monstrous, in that

monsters, too, can be defined by their inexplicability: they are so alien that we are

incapable of understanding them. We cannot recognise them or fit them into any

pre-existing logic, even if they are visible to us; their sheer novelty terrifies us.

Monstrous content

Others have tried to define cinemas tendency towards monstration, or showing.

Andre Bazin (1967) might call it the myth of total cinema: a cinema that shows

everything. Jean Baudrillard might call this an obscene cinema: nothing is left to

the imagination as instead everything is shown (1987, 26; mentioned in Darley

2000, 65). Fredric Jameson, meanwhile, speaks of the essentially visual mass-

cultural pornography of the contemporary Western world (1998, 125). Traces of

the idea seem also to be found in Stanley Cavell (1979), and the recent use of his

work by D.N. Rodowick (2007), in the sense that cinema shows or exposes to us

the world not necessarily as narrative but as world. Linda Williams (1990) may

characterise this as a frenzy of the visible, while Garrett Stewart has specifically

appropriated the term monstration in his description of cinema as a death mask

of the world in time (2007, 128).

However, in spite of all of the afore-mentioned alternatives (and off-shoots),

I want to argue that monstrosity remains an appropriate term, because, even

though so far I have written not about the monstrosity in images, but about the

monstrosity of images, cinemas most famous monsters including King Kong,

Frankenstein and his Bride, the revivification of the Jurassic, the Mummy and

Norman Batess mummy all serve as physical, or literal, as well as more or

less powerful, manifestations of monstration. Within images, these and other

monsters precede sense through their otherness in the same way that images

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themselves precede sense (are pre-sent) when they are shown (monstrated) to us

(even if only for the first time, since repeated exposure surely leads to a

weakening of affect).

In other words, if cinema, before it is narrative (or at the very least at the same

time as it is narrative), is monstration, then some cinema tries (or some cinemas

try) to enact, or tomake clear, an implicit awareness of this idea. That is, all images

may bemonstrous, in that they show beforewe canmake sense of them, but cinema

also has ways of reflecting upon its own monstrous nature as seen in cinemas

long history of monsters on screen. Returning to Nancy, we can see monstrosity

not just in monster movies, but in films that feature cruelty, the spilling of blood

(cruor), and violence. It is by considering certain cinematic depictions of

violence, especially sexual violence, that I should like to elaborate ways in which

cinema can become not just monstrous, then, but self-consciously monstrous.

William Blum (1971) has appropriated Antonin Artaud in his description of a

cinema of cruelty, using Sam Peckinpahs Wild Bunch (1969) to explain how

watching extreme violence (bloody cinema, the cruelty of flowing blood cruor

again) requires courage on the part of the viewer, and an ability to contemplate

the idea that all humans have the potential, or the force, to be violent. This cinema

of cruelty does not shun those aspects of man that we prefer to bury or make

invisible; it shows man as capable of evil as much as he (sic) is capable of

goodness: man as complex in his potential for destruction as well as creation. It

shows us the force of man.

However, it is not just a question of simply showing violence, a violence

that in content mirrors the violence that I argue here is inherent in the image tout

court in the same way that it is not just a question of showing monsters, even if

monsters function in cinema as a projection of, as a target for, and as an inflictor

of mankinds potential for extreme violence.

Rather, there is also an aesthetic aspect to a cinema that is self-consciously

monstrous; there is a how to depict extreme violence in such a manner that we

become conscious of the violence of the image.

Cruel form

In charting the shift from the movement-image to the time-image, Gilles Deleuze,

after Robert Lapoujade, identifies an equal transition away from montage and

towards montrage (2005, 40). Montrage: cinema shows (montrer in French), and

in such a way that narrative, that is, the editing system first developed by D.W.

Griffith, is downplayed in favour of other techniques, which are centred not upon

cutting and upon the reconstitution of images in such a way that a story is told,

but, as per the actualities or monstrations of early cinema, upon continuity of time

and space.

For the purposes of this paper, I should make clear that continuity of time and

space does not necessarily mean real time or real space or indeed extreme

duration. A Peckinpah slow motion proves clearly that one does not need


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to respect real time in order to make monstrous or cruel the violence that

humans inflict upon each other. Furthermore, as I have written elsewhere, there is

monstrosity in the extremely long but entirely digital takes that see the virtual

camera drift at great length through the digitally animated world of films such as

Beowulf (2007) (see Brown 2009). Both show continuous times and spaces,

even though the former is slowed down and the latter a digital simulation.

Furthermore, while duration does have a role to play in monstrous films, there is

monstrosity in a shot that crosses a continuous space very rapidly in the same way

that there is monstrosity in a take that is static but very long, since one shows the

continuity of space (crossing, rather than cutting), while the other shows the

continuity of time (no cutting). As per Gaudreaults understanding that editing is

the privileged means by which the film narrator is manifested (2009, 85),

monstrosity is here the absence of, or the moments when, a film does not cut. If

monstrosity is in all images, shots that are markedly continuous, be they in terms

of movement or duration, help to constitute a conscious aesthetics of monstrosity.

Ifmonstrosity is linked to continuity, Peckinpah is perhaps not the best example

of monstrous filmmaking, since The Wild Bunch containsmore cutting thanmany

conventional Hollywood films, particularly of that period (over 3000 shots,

compared to the supposedly average 600). The high number of cuts in The

Wild Bunch reflects the violent nature and contents of the films images; indeed

rapid cutting might typically be considered an apt aesthetic/technical decision

for depicting violence. However, I wish to propose that fragmentation via editing

here in the form of rapid cuts is not a technique that is monstrous (even if

filmmakers are free to edit films in anyway that theywish, and even if all images are

monstrous anyway). Cuts, even the increased number of cuts that David Bordwell

(2002, 2006) correctly identifies in contemporary cinema, may be deployed in

a continuity style, but for cinema to foreground its monstrosity, continuity is the

key, even if, as per the Peckinpah slowmotion, continuity is not in real time (or in

real spaces, or of extreme duration). Why is continuity specifically important for

cinema to realise its own monstrous nature? Because continuity allows us to

see the truth of what we see, or at least brings us closer to an illusion of truth,

while editing, for present purposes at least, foregrounds narrative and the making

sense of images.

In a follow-up to The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich (2002)

bridges the cinema of attractions of the Hollywood mainstream and the DV

realism of the independent sector by saying how digital technology enables both

of these aesthetics, spectacular special effects and DV realism, and how both have

their roots in early cinema (special effects after Melie`s, realism/actualities after

Lumie`re). Garrett Stewart (2007), meanwhile, also bridgesHollywood andEurope

in his consideration of the shared aspects (not least the digitality) of what he terms

the ontological gothic (Hollywood) and the cinema of interpsychic trespass

(Europe). I would similarly argue, not least because I am contending that all

images are monstrous before they are narrativised or understood/made sense

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of, that the concept of monstrosity bridges the mainstream and the independent

sectors, Hollywood and Europe and other cinemas alike.

I would also argue that this can be seen by the continuity, intensified in no

small part by digital technology, which has crept into cinema even if not in the

Bordwellian sense of more cuts. Continuity everywhere: films that last for 90 plus

minutes without a cut (TimeCode, 2000; Russian Ark, 2002); the rise of the long

take more generally (Ten, 2002; Five Dedicated to Ozu, 2003); films that see the

camera move from planet Earth to deep space in one single and continuous

movement (Contact, 1997; Event Horizon, 1997); films that move in one

continuous sequence from inside a human being to outside a human being, or

through brick walls, as if they were not there (Fight Club, 1999; Enter the Void,

2010); photorealistic monsters that occupy the same continuous space, apparently

share the same ontological status as, and interact with their profilmic human

counterparts (Jurassic Park, 1993); more pertinent to this paper, films that depict

extreme violence as unfolding in a continuous time and space, films that

challenge our conceptions of what is allowed to be seen or that which is normally

kept invisible, often in terms of violence and sexual violence (Irreversible, 2002;

The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, 2005).

Sidestepping indexicality

There are inherent paradoxes to the above argument, which take us in the direction

of the indexicality of the image, or whether or not the image is an imprint of real

people and places that were before the camera at the time of the images taking

(as opposed to being a digital animation forwhich there is no real-world referent, or

original). An elaborate long take is as much if not more constructed than

a sequence that is cut together through continuity editing. A film that features

a virtual camera passing through simulations of walls is as much if not more

constructed than a scene featuring cuts that take us from one space to the next.

We know that dinosaurs are not real (anymore) and that it is an illusion that allows

them to be there on screen with those humans. However, I would argue that while

we can on certain levels tell that dinosaurs are not real (anymore) and that a cosmic

zoom is created through digital special effects, even if these are photorealistic and

perceptually convincing, these films employ different levels and types of

continuity to present as continuous and thus coherent the times and spaces inwhich

these unlikely events occur.

That is, some readers will feel that the simulated nature of the images in

Jurassic Park means that we cannot believe them/find them convincing (even

though I am tempted to make accusations of disavowal, not least based upon the

increased and increasing understanding of cognition and the pseudo-experiences

that take place in the human brain as a result of the firing of mirror neurons2).

However, indexicality, or the ontology of the image (whether it is analogue

or digital), is not the issue here something with which Gaudreault would

seemingly agree when he says that images are not reality, but filmic reality,


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whether they are disguised as reality or not (2009, 150). Instead, I would argue

that a film like Jurassic Park employs techniques of continuity in the services of

monstration: to show as if real, real because continuous, rather than to foreground

constructedness. Montrage, not montage. A frenzy of the visible (an association

already made between neo-baroque spectacles and pornography by Angela

Ndalianis 2000).

If indexicality can be sidestepped in this way, however, there are seemingly

corollary effects of locating the action of films in continuous (even if virtual, even if

reversible, even if stretched or shrunk) times and spaces. In some respects, there is a

diminution of the importance, or a decentring, of the human as agent within such

films, something that is key to certain kinds of time-image cinema for Gilles

Deleuze (2005). This has the effect of showing (monstrating) that humans are not

the primarymotivating factors in these times and spaces (monstrosity as challenging

humans conception of self as their own gods). In fact, beyond what Blum says of

cruelty in Peckinpah, I would contend that this also shows us as being limited in our

bodily abilities, confined by the meat of our flesh, which itself is corruptible, which

falls apart, breaks, is pierced, which retains reason in the skin of an animal. In other

words, monstrosity brings us towards the post-humanist conception of humans as

mere meat (discussed in relation to film by Vivian Sobchack 1995).

A further corollary effect is that the continuity of times and spaces also

foregrounds time and space themselves as participatory, perhaps even primary

motivating factors in the action that unfolds within them (showing/monstrating

time and space themselves as threats to human significance/meaning). Aylish

Wood has explored this foregrounding of time and space as agents in contemporary

cinema through her investigation into timespaces (2002).

Sexual violence

In the case of films featuring extreme violence, particularly sexual violence, these

films have an added element of rawness and cruelty: seeing men penetrating

women in Baise-moi (2000), or lingering at great length on the scenes of sexual

violence in Irreversible, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, A Hole in my

Heart (2004) and Import/Export (2007), involves the showing (admittedly in

a gendered fashion/in a fashion in which gender plays an extremely important

part) of real acts that not only depict violence but also enact violence on the

viewer because both explicit and interminable, not only excessive, but also

incessant, excessive because incomprehensible, incessant not least because on

screen, because shown (they do not exceed, but rather in-ceed the frame, even

if, in the case of Irreversible and Robert Carmichael, these acts are partially

obscured). They involve the frenzy of the visible in Linda Williams sense of the

term (1990), except not involving the image of contractual agreement that the

porn film typically tries to establish between the sex acts participants.

Rather than cutting in order to give a sense of the violence of these moments,

a technique that would foreground the technological construction of the violence,

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Irreversible and Robert Carmichael use predominantly static camera angles that

frame events in the middle distance. In the former film, Alex (Monica Bellucci) is

raped and sodomised in a subway by a homosexual called Le Tenia (Jo Prestia).

Robert Carmichael, meanwhile, features two rape scenes, the first of which

involves a young girl being raped by a group of youths in a bedroom that we can

see through a door that remains ajar beyond Robert (Daniel Spencer), who sits

with his back to us, watching television and listening to loud techno music.

During this scene, the camera slowly tracks through the room before assuming

what we might call a theatrical viewpoint behind Robert. Meanwhile, the films

horrific second rape features Robert raping Monica Abbott (Miranda Wilson),

before penetrating her with a champagne bottle and a spike ripped from a

barometer while she is held down by his friends and while her husband, Jonathan

(Michael Howe), looks on bound and gagged. Again, this moment is shot from a

static angle, with the action taking place in the middle distance.

The framing in these moments recalls the monstrative actualities of early

silent cinema, as described by Gaudreault and others. However, assuming the

framings similarity to early cinema is coincidental, the static camera (or, in the

case of Robert Carmichaels first rape scene, the slowly moving camera) and the

temporal continuity/duration of the events depicted still render them monstrous.

They become monstrous because they do not use the techniques of narrative

cinema to show events, but instead they depict through continuity, or what I am

terming, after Deleuze/Lapoujade, montrage.

In addition, what we might call the calmness of the camera at these

moments, in contrast to the violence depicted, reinforces the meaninglessness of

the violence, its excessive nature perhaps surpassing our ability to comprehend it,

but which perhaps also allows us to contemplate the potential for cruelty that we

ourselves possess. One might even say that the static or artistically moving

camera does violence to the violence by not foregrounding it in a shocking

manner, but letting it play out in the middle distance, as if the camera were a

passive or neutral spectator.

Mediated violence

A big claim that I am not making here is that these films are immediate. These

rape scenes are of course moments of precisely mediated violence. However, by

refusing to narrate these moments through cutting, and by choosing instead to

monstrate them through continuity, these moments involve meditations on

violence that do become foregrounded as meditations, not mediations. That is,

they are meditations on violence as image, on the violence of the image, as much

as they are narrative representations of violence.

Quoting Henry David Thoreau, Stanley Cavell (2005, 24) implies that the

monstrous, in particular death, is proof of a surabundance of life. Jean-Luc Nancy

similarly says that violence is excessive (2003, 55). The violent sequences

mentioned above are images of death 24 times a second not in the sense that they


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provide us with an ability to master or comprehend what we see, but in the sense

that they are excessive, that they surabound with life in an overwhelming manner.

We cannot master them, but instead struggle to comprehend them, in the sameway

that early cinema audiences required the lecturer to comprehend the otherwise

incomprehensible images before them. By showing us monstrous human acts

(monstrum as atrocity) in the monstrative manner defined by Gaudreault, these

moments constitute a monstrous cinema that is, perhaps, deeply cinematic.

Laura Mulvey (2006, 1732) identifies the mastery over the image that DVD

technologies allow, in that now we can regard those details of cinematic images

that previously were excessive in Thompsons terms, and begin to make sense of

them, to find meaning in them, through the ability to pause and playback.

Concomitant to the widespread adoption of DVD as the main means of

audiovisual consumption, there has been the rise of increasingly complex films,

as identified by studies of complexity and contemporary cinema.3 Much has been

made of the making of documentary (e.g. Hight 2005) and DVD directors

commentaries (e.g. Parker and Parker 2004), both of which serve to reinforce the

idea that films do still need the contemporary equivalent of lecturers in order

to explain to viewers what it is that the films sounds and images mean. This in

turn reinforces the notion that, without these and other verbal guides, viewers

cannot comprehend images, instead finding them monstrous, the products of

a monstrative cinema. Deprived in the cinema of such interpretative guides, it

would indeed appear that a film like Robert Carmichael uses violence in order to

foreground monstration and to locate monstration as a more strongly cinematic

process, since here viewers have no recourse to explanatory materials or a pause

or skip button, and are instead faced with the violence of the images themselves.4

This extreme cinema, which I would characterise as the dark counterpart to

the Hollywood blockbuster, foregrounds a move towards monstration, a move

that is or has been understood as a rejection of Hollywood-style narrative. While

I contend that this monstrosity via new techniques of continuity has crept into

Hollywood as well, I am not saying that narrative via editing has disappeared

from films. Indeed, it still plays a major part in Hollywood and other cinemas that

use narrative to tell stories, to make sense of their images. I am not saying that

monstration, as an aesthetic beyond the monstrosity that I see as inherent in

images, will or should replace narrative. I am simply trying to place greater

emphasis on the monstrative elements of cinema. And in the European (and other)

extreme(s),5 the use of violence shot in a monstrative manner foregrounds

monstration not as an external other (monsters as others or as superhumans), but

as a monstrosity that lies within humans. Humans as monsters; monsters as

humans. In other words, in these cinemas the content (monstrous acts) reflects the

form (monstrative cinema, a cinema defined by continuity and showing), which

in turn reflects the monstrosity, violence, presence and pre-sense of images

themselves.

By way of addressing a likely contention: in the same way that in the horror

and thriller genres we often are given a sense of the monstrous feminine (Creed

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1993), gender may well come to play a key role in our understanding of cinematic

monstrosity in recent extreme cinema: these films (Baise-Moi, Irreversible,

Robert Carmichael, etc.) more often than not show monstrous men committing

monstrous crimes. In the iterations of monstrosity as characterised by extreme

cinema (a genre dominated by sexual violence perpetrated by and large by

men), we see the monstrous masculine. However, the point I wish to make here

is that if images themselves are monstrous before or at the same time as they are

narrative, then this is given literal expression in cinema by the depiction of

humans as monsters (in some cinemas, these are coded as feminine, after Creed;

in other cinemas, these are coded as masculine, as here the combined effect

being that both men and women, i.e. humans, have the capacity to be monstrous).

Moreover, this monstrosity of humans is reinforced, or is something that we come

to contemplate, through a cinema of monstration or montrage. In other words:

images are monstrous, but some cinemas reflect the monstrous nature of images

by showing monstrous humans and/or in a monstrative manner.6

And what of this extreme cinema, so easy to dismiss as gratuitous? By

contemplating the potential for monstrosity, the monstrous force within us, the

monstrous cinema of the new extremes continues, albeit not in an obvious

manner, the humanist project that involved the rejection of narrative as conceived

by Andre Bazin in his writings on the Italian neorealist movement (1971, 16

101).7 Rather than the (predominantly) utopianmonstration enacted in Hollywood

(a sublime monstration, in which we pass impossibly through walls or across

galaxies in long, continuous shots), the new extremes foreground the violence of

images by showing us violent images in a bid to make us recognise that the

violence does not belong to an external other on to whomwe can project our desire

for annihilation, but to ourselves. Monstrosity allows us humans to see ourselves

more clearly. The incomprehensibility of images reminds us that certain things are

beyond our understanding, while monstration as an aesthetic, particularly

depicting violent, irrational, animalistic humans as mere meat, shows humans in

all their animal weakness/frailty, rather than mythologising through narratives

the wished-for grandeur of the human enlightenment project and rationality.

Cruel, violent and monstrous, the images of extreme monstration, as typified

in films like Robert Carmichael, serve an anti-hegemonic if most troubling

purpose: they touch us and do violence to us in such a way that we can begin to

question the too-easy sense of the world, the violation, perhaps, that images

perform on us. Excessive, exceeding comprehension, extreme images require

explanation. Without the help of the lecturer, the cinematic monstrous forces us

to search for answers ourselves, rather than relying on those given to us by others.

To take up a common refrain in film studies, these (and all) images shock us into

thought not an automatic and unthinking vision of images as representations of

the world, but a cruel presentation of otherness that requires thought for there to

be any understanding. In thinking, we can hope to realise change, and to bring

about a new way of seeing images and the world itself.


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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Warren Buckland for his support, feedback and help inimproving this suggestive paper.

Notes

1. See, for example, Laura U. Marks (2000).2. See Gallese et al. (1996).3. See, inter alia, Staiger (2006) and Buckland (2009).4. It is perhaps worth mentioning an autobiographical element with regard to my viewing

The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael. In late 2006, I went to the Odeon on PantonStreet in London, UK, in the hopes of seeing Gypo (2005), the British dogme 95 filmdirected by Jan Dunn. I arrived after the film had started and so asked what else wason. Just starting was Robert Carmichael, a film I knew absolutely nothing about. Thefilm is harrowing even to those who have been prepared, or have had the film told tothem, in advance be that by friends, by online, print, television and/or radio reviews,by posters, taglines and various other (predominantly linguistic) means. Knowingnothing about the film, however, made it even more shocking to me. I dontnecessarily like Robert Carmichael (and have only dared to watch it once again since),but it consistently gives me pause for thought regarding my assumptions about theworld, humanity and myself. Although I laud and encourage contextualised viewingsof films (in knowing their historical and geographical context, we can betterunderstand a film), I wonder that films are most powerful precisely when taken out ofcontext. This allows their monstrative elements to come to the fore. As my studentswill tell me, after I have shown them some seemingly irrelevant film such as Manwith a Movie Camera (1929), showing films without context, or allowing films toshow themselves, is cruel and violent to their narrative-soaked sensibilities. However,it can perhaps lead us more clearly to a thoughtful discussion. (By late 2011, I havestill not seen Gypo.)

5. I should note that an earlier version of this paper was presented at The NewExtremism: Contemporary European Cinema Conference at Anglia RuskinUniversity, Cambridge, UK, 2425 April 2009. For essays from that conference,see Horeck and Kendall (2011).

6. I might also say that to define the monstrous as feminine (Creed) or as masculine(new extreme films discussed in this paper) is a means of making sense of themonstrous, a coping mechanism that helps us to understand through pre-existingforms (here, gender) that which is otherwise new, and therefore in the first instanceincomprehensible to us.

7. In fact, pre-empting many of the terms used here, Bazin (1982, 312) also praisedErich von Stroheim for rejecting Griffithian narrative, for showing instead of telling,for embracing continuity and for creating a cinema of cruelty.

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brown - monstrous cinema

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