The Sensuality of Presence in “Body Horrors”: Rethinking Body Genres in Documentary and Experimental Film

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 My notion of the viewer and the film viewing experience is based on Vivian Sobchack’s concept, according to which the film viewing experience is both a carnal and a conscious experience and the viewing itself is a dynamic activity. The viewer is “communicatively competent” (1992, 6) and takes part in “the embodied activity of perception and expression.” (1992, 8).

2 I do not consider abstract or found footage films made by fiction films to be documentaries, however I consider found footage films made by archive materials or other documentaries to be non-fiction films.

3 It should be noted here that theories of abjection, body genre, haptic visuality and presence/absence—all relevant for this present study—are grounded in disparate theories of the subject.

4 Respectively, Joan Hawkins in Cutting Edge. Art-Horror and The Horrific Avant-garde (2000) discusses certain avant-garde films within the context of Williams’ concept of “body genre.” Although she has already argued that works such as Brakhage’s Act Of Seeing … could be seen as horror films, considering her argument, she questions the hierarchy between high and low culture as she mainly focuses on the comparison of European art films and Hollywood cinema.

5 For these reasons this component will not be considered an integral part of body genres and will not be incorporated in the present definition of “body film.”

6 Not a simple intellectual but a complete bodily resistance.

7 This scene is reminiscent of one of Kurt Kren’s films from 1965: the self-mutilation of Günter Brus (10/65 Selbstverstümmelung). Brus’ body is covered with a white clayish material and as he crawls on the floor in his great agony, it feels as if he were almost peeling away his own skin either with his bare hands or with razors, scissors and other sharp objects. The viewer can feel his pain, suffer with him and nearly screams, all the while looking at his silent howl.

8 However, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam use a completely different approach in their book, Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media (1994). In the chapter “Esthetics of Resistance,” they describe a tendency of the Brazilian avant-garde called “cannibalism.” In this sense, Brazilian artists and intellectuals consume and incorporate imported cultural products, take advantage of them and use them as raw material for a new compound. In this way they reverse the transformed product and turn it against the colonizer. Although it is a kind of cultural cannibalism in a different context, it seems to be somewhat connected to what Issei did with the French woman Renée. He incorporated and consumed her, she became a part of his body (and mind). Parts of her took their position in his fragmented identity. Thus for him, speaking in French appears to be a gratuitous but natural choice.

9 In the case of Titicut Follies, this was the much respected ethnographer, John Marshall.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bori Máté

Bori Máté is a Hungarian experimental filmmaker and currently a doctoral candidate at the Department of Media Theory of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She publishes articles in both Hungarian and English in such journals as ACTA, Millennium Film Journal or Metropolis. Her films have been screened in such festivals as Berlin Critics’ Week, Jihlava IDFF and International Film Festival Rotterdam.