Monstrous cinema

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of cinematic monstrosity, as derived from work by Jean-Luc Nancy, and links it to monstration, a term typically reserved for considerations of early (pre-1907) cinema. 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.

Keywords:

• cruelty
• André Gaudreault
• monstration
• monstrosity
• Jean-Luc Nancy

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Warren Buckland for his support, feedback and help in improving 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 Panton Street in London, UK, in the hopes of seeing Gypo (2005), the British dogme 95 film directed by Jan Dunn. I arrived after the film had started and so asked what else was on. Just starting was Robert Carmichael, a film I knew absolutely nothing about. The film is harrowing even to those who have been prepared, or have had the film ‘told’ to them, in advance – be that by friends, by online, print, television and/or radio reviews, by posters, taglines and various other (predominantly linguistic) means. Knowing nothing about the film, however, made it even more shocking to me. I don't necessarily 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 the world, humanity and myself. Although I laud and encourage contextualised viewings of films (in knowing their historical and geographical context, we can better understand a film), I wonder that films are most powerful precisely when taken out of context. This allows their monstrative elements to come to the fore. As my students will tell me, after I have shown them some seemingly ‘irrelevant’ film such as Man with a Movie Camera (1929), showing films without context, or allowing films to show 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 have still not seen Gypo.)

5. I should note that an earlier version of this paper was presented at The New Extremism: Contemporary European Cinema Conference at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, 24–25 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 the monstrous, a coping mechanism that helps us to understand through pre-existing forms (here, gender) that which is otherwise new, and therefore in the first instance incomprehensible to us.

7. In fact, pre-empting many of the terms used here, Bazin (1982, 3–12) also praised Erich von Stroheim for rejecting Griffithian narrative, for showing instead of telling, for embracing continuity and for creating a cinema of cruelty.