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I expect an artist to show me the edge. And to show me that edge, they must go over a bit to the other side.
-Bruno Dumont
AS AN ART FORM AND A PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE, cinema thrives on its ability to induce forceful, vivid sensation-a tendency that in some cases is taken to extremes. Yet while the majority of world film engages its viewers to convey satisfaction or gratification, there occasionally emerges an opposite tendency, aggressive and abrasive forms of cinema that seek a more confrontational experience. It is in this context that we can begin to gauge the impact of a group of high profile French-language filmmakers, notably Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, and Caspar Noé. Polarizing recent films such as Denis's Trouble Every Day (2001), Dumont's Twentynine Palms (2003), and Noe's Irreversible (2002) have, in fact, already become icons of notoriety in international film culture. To some, this group and the related projects of certain French contemporaries embody filmmaking at the cutting edge: incisive, unflinching, uncompromising. To others, such cinema is as indefensible as it is grotesque, pushing screen depictions of physicality to unwelcome limits, raising basic issues of what is acceptable on-screen. Either way, forty years on from the NewWave, French cinema is once more in the global critical spotlight.
Unlike the movement embodied by Godard, Truffaut, and their Cahiers du cinéma contemporaries (Neupert 2990 -304), this is a group connected more loosely, through commonalities of content and technique. The recent work of Denis, Dumont, and Noé, a trio best thought of as filmmaking figureheads or catalysts, offers incisive social critiques, portraying contemporary society as isolating, unpredictably horrific and threatening, a nightmarish series of encounters in which personal relationships-families, couples, friendships, partnerships-disintegrate and fail, often violently. But at the center of this cycle, a focal point most famously emblematized by Trouble Every Day, is an emphasis on human sexuality rendered in stark and graphic terms. The filmmaking agenda here is an increasingly explicit dissection of the body and its sexual behaviors: unmotivated or predatory sex, sexual conflicts, male and female rape, disaffected and emotionless sex, ambiguously consensual sexual encounters, arbitrary sex stripped of conventional or even nominal gestures of romance. Forcible and transgressive, this is a cinema of brutal intimacy.
But there is...