Even hardcore cinephiles inured to navel-gazing noodlings can sometimes find them difficult to sit through. But, if hours of action-free footage weren’t punishing enough, auteurs have figured out a surefire way of making their films even more of an ordeal: the insertion of gruelling violence, taboo-busting perversion and ridiculously pessimistic worldviews.
Caniba, the latest documentary from Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, combines the best of both worlds. Or worst, depending on your point of view. There are no establishing shots, only extended out-of-focus closeups of Issei Sagawa as he obliquely reflects on his 1981 murder of Renée Hartevelt, a fellow student at the Sorbonne who had rejected his advances and whose corpse he partly devoured.
After what seems like several lifetimes, Sagawa’s maunderings about forbidden desire are interrupted by glimpses of him giggling at his own manga visualisation of the atrocity and the revelation that the out-of-focus brother who has been caring for him since his stroke gets his own jollies by way of barbed wire and fistfuls of kitchen knives.
There were walkouts when Caniba was screened at film festivals in Venice (where it won a Special Jury prize) and Toronto, though there is no way of knowing if the escapers were fleeing out of disgust, nausea or sheer boredom. The film withholds judgment, but does force audiences to confront their own feelings about cannibalism, if only because there’s not much else for them to do for 90 minutes. But then Cannibal Holocaust did that, too, and was just as hard to watch.
The present king of “ordeal arthouse” is Michael Haneke, who never met a grim situation he couldn’t make even grimmer with some strategically inserted unpleasantness. Harrowing home invasion with none of your upbeat catharsis nonsense? Right you are, let’s have both German and US versions of Funny Games! A pent-up piano teacher with parent issues and sadomasochistic proclivities? Bring on the auto-mutilation! Even in a more audience-friendly outing such as Hidden, Haneke can’t resist the sort of shock-horror moment that had arthouse regulars shrieking en masse (or at least they did at the screening I attended). But he taught them a lesson about colonialism, right?
Haneke likes his audiences to suffer; if they start enjoying themselves, he’s clearly doing something wrong and they’re not learning their lesson.
None of this is new, of course. Pier Paolo Pasolini comprehensively goosed the film-going bourgeoisie in 1975 with his last film, Salò, Or the 120 Days of Sodom, which turned the Marquis de Sade into two hours of remorseless sex’n’violence, albeit not without moral purpose on the part of the film-maker by fearlessly sticking it to Italy’s fascists. Go back even further, to 1928, and you have Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, making audiences share its heroine’s in-your-face suffering for what feels like hours.
It’s only a short step from Dreyer to Mel Gibson’s equally gruelling though more explicitly gruesome The Passion of the Christ, and thence to the unflinching ghastliness of Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs, an unapologetic horror movie without the arthouse seal of approval. But arthouse and horror have more in common than aficionados of either type of film would care to admit. I found A Serbian Film just as agonising to sit through as anything by Jean-Luc Godard in his Maoist phase.
Yorgos Lanthimos is doing his bit at the moment to discombobulate filmgoers with The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which, after a glimpse of open-heart surgery, features little outright gore, but definitely puts audiences through the wringer. Nicolas Winding Refn had one of his characters cough up an eyeball in The Neon Demon. And then there was Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, with its ominous woods and orgy of genital mutilation making it a horror movie in all but name.
And it is all about name. Once film-makers have been typecast as arthouse darlings, they can show any amount of grisly ultraviolence and still get taken seriously by critics and festival curators. On the other hand, a genre specialist such as, say, George A Romero will for ever be dismissed as a zombie director, no matter that his films juggle serious issues just as much as, if not more than, his counterparts in the more critically acceptable arty or social realist arenas.
You have only to turn David Cronenberg’s career back to front to see that “respectable” latterday offerings such as Maps to the Stars and A Dangerous Method would have laid the groundwork for the more lurid genre delights of Videodrome or Scanners to be classified as arthouse artefacts with Something Important to Say. And they do have something important to say. Whatever deep-dish themes auteurs think they’re dipping into with their forays into ultraviolence or extreme pessimism, I’ll wager these have already been explored, at one time or another, by a horror movie.
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