“It’s all going to burn”
Notes on Old Writing
I wrote this when I was twenty-two. It formed a component of a thesis. Whilst reading the work back I cut out all the references to Simon Reynolds, Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun - more out of embarrassment for my take on their writing then anything else. I’m not sure I ever quite got to the heart of what I saw, and occasionally still see, in Bresson (or the Cinema of Sensation). The Haneke chunk is funny, I don’t think it makes a whole lot of sense. If I had to posit a guess, I think I was excited by the idea of a psycho-geography grating against technology in Haneke’s films. I also loved that people found Haneke disagreeable. Apart from the obvious shortcomings - such as the rewind scene in Funny Games - I’ve always liked him. If I were to re-write parts of this now I think I would have focused on literature more heavily, particularly Pierre Guyotat. I don’t know how that would have improved the piece but I get the sense that the missing link in all of my writing at that time was literature. When I wrote this piece it felt massively consequential, and reading back over it now I can hear that (apologies!).
The inspiration behind posting this is to reach zero with my old writing. I’d like it to live somewhere other than on a hard-drive, but I also hope to burn its’ reusability. The truth is, other than Haneke, Denis, Dumont and Assayas, the films of NFE just aren’t very good. I maintain that the true movement of that period, if there is one, is the cinema of sensation - and that in spite of all its’ pitfalls it is still worthy of attention. As an aside, throughout writing this piece I was desperate to see Sitcom (1998) by Francois Ozon, which I finally saw recently (it was impossible to find a copy of for years).
~~Quick~ Sidenote: I’m not sure I dislike Francois Ozon. However, there is no way Peter Von Kant is good. The film that gender flips, and reimagines, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant must be one of the most unnecessary films of the 21st century (even without seeing it). ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sitcom (1998) is about a bourgeois family that slowly descends into various forms of violence and insanity. If ever there was an encapsulation of why that period of French filmmaking is generally disappointing it is Sitcom. Sitcom represents the quintessential dilemma of French Gen X auteurs (the extremely-online of the pre-internet era) - how might we account for the history of cinema within the postmodern culture of the nineties? The answer that I found whilst writing this piece, as a very impassioned and misguided honours student, was repetition. For better, or worse (mostly for worse), many of the directors arrived at the same conclusion.
Old Writing
Spectrality, Postmodern Aesthetics and New French Extremity.
Derrida’s Specters of Marx is the author’s attempt to grapple with the inheritance Deconstruction owes to Marxism, and the spectrality of Marxism post-1989. The work locates the Marxist project in relation to a series of critiques and represents Derrida’s most articulate attempt to reappraise Marx. The question that underpins Derrida’s work elucidates how collective cultural mourning can account for the spectrality of Marxism post-1989, as well as the importance of this specter’s appearance in the interstices between life and death. Derrida writes:
Inheritance is never given, it is always a task. It remains before us just as unquestionably as we are heirs of Marxism, even before wanting or refusing to be, and, like all inheritors, we are in mourning. In mourning in particular for what is called Marxism. To be, this word in which we earlier saw the word of the spirit, means for the same reason, to inherit.
In this passage Derrida elucidates the character of cultural mourning as a mode of sorrow that confronts a simultaneous inheritance. The Marxism contained in ‘Specters of Marx’ is one in which a cultural subject has to bear witness to a form of inheritance, whilst concurrently grappling with the failings of the project’s original form. The persistence of an apparition, or specter, highlights the failings of the past as well as the death of imagined futures. Derrida suggests: “we can only bear witness to it. To bear witness would be to bear witness to what we are insofar as we inherit, and that - here is the circle, here is the chance, or the finitude - we inherit the very thing that allows us to bear witness to it”. The irreducibility of a specter, and the nature of cultural witnessing on display in the films can be traced through Derrida’s tradition of Deconstruction, and his earlier conception of différance. This construct is exemplified in Derrida’s deconstruction of the Marxist project, and further articulated in an interview in ‘Positions’ (1972):
To do justice to this necessity is to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand. To deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment. To overlook this phase of overturning is to forget the conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition.
This oppositional hierarchy, indebted to classical Platonism, highlights the characteristic overturning and violent restructuring of dualisms by Deconstruction. It is in this movement between terms, and relationships of power, that Derrida formulates Différance. Différance describes the space in-between these dualistic relations. By bearing witness to the hierarchical positioning of terms, such as life and death, or presence and absence, the subject experiences a phenomenal awareness of the privileged term. However, this awareness is only ever constituted through a series of absences on the part of the other term. In Deconstruction, Derrida seeks to destroy this binary and reshape the tradition of metaphysics and philosophical discourse since Plato. The notion of Différance provides form to the interstices of a dualistic relationship, and destabilises the power dynamic by recognising the series of absences that constitute the dominion of the privileged term. Thus, the privileged term exists on a spectrum in which its opposite is immanent and irreducible to its own existence.
The essence of Différance is its ability to infiltrate binary relationships between terms, ideologies and concepts in order to provide a heterogeneous territory. This territory is neither entirely positive (the privileged term) nor negative (the subordinated term) and provides a way of examining “what issues the history of philosophy has hidden, forbidden, or repressed”. It is in this spirit that Derrida arrives at his notions of spectrality and hauntology. These constructs account for the territory between life and death, and the reappearance of “ghosts” of past cultural epochs. Hauntology and spectrality serve the same function as Différance, in that either construct reveals the hidden, forbidden or repressed elements of history. As Pierre Macherey notes hauntology is a “science of ghosts, a science of what returns. One could just as easily say a science of ‘spirit’, insofar as this is profoundly what returns in the manner of an inheritance”. Spectrality and hauntology expand upon the interstitial significance of Différance by providing form to the figures, concepts and landscapes which occupy the territory. As such, the ‘specter’ of Marx refers to the persistence of a figurative spirit of Marxism that exists after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of Communism during the late 1980s, and early 1990s. In applying the constructs of ‘spirit’, ‘apparition’, ‘specter’ or ‘ghost’ to cinema, the cultural inheritance of dead figures, landscapes and ideas can be examined for their cultural significance and provide a way of interrogating epochal themes in history.
Derrida’s hauntology, and his reappraisal of Marx, provide form to the phenomenal experience of historical cultural phantoms. Hauntology functions in three ways. Firstly, it provides form to the anachronistic, postmodern, context of the films. Derrida writes: “The present is what passes, the present comes to pass (se passe), it lingers in this transitory passage (Weile), in the coming-and-going, between what goes and what comes, in the middle of what leaves and arrives, at the articulation of what absents itself and what presents itself”. This present-time historical flux renders the cultural idols on display in New French Extremity, and reflects a cultural propensity to reengage particular periods from French history within an abstract postmodern milieu. Secondly, hauntology promotes an emotional response from a cultural subject. The notion of a ‘specter’ and its emotional significance is identified by Derrida in a correlation between Marx’s pronouncement that “a specter is haunting Europe” and “the terror that this specter inspires in all the powers of old Europe”. Here, Derrida establishes a relationship between a ‘specter’ and its emotional resonance. ‘Terror’ results from a subject’s situatedness, and the act of bearing ‘witness’ to ghostlike cultural phenomena. New French Extremity establishes a thematic criterion through the phantasmic reappearance of figures, landscapes and concepts in order to exploit the viewer’s cultural embeddedness and provide social critiques of postmodern France. Finally, once a cultural subject has borne witness to the emotive historical flux on display in the films, she/he must grapple with how best to interact with the revenant figure of historical matter. Derrida discusses this final stage, when he writes:
The question deserves perhaps to be put the other way: Could one address oneself in general if already some ghost did not come back? If he loves justice at least, the ‘scholar’ of the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech.
This final stage challenges the subject to confront the unsettling and traumatic reappearance of specters, and the repressed elements of history, in order to facilitate a ‘future’. This ‘future’ can be best understood in a comparison between Derrida’s ‘le futur’ and ‘l’avenir’. Helen V. Petrovsky notes that ‘le futur’ refers to, “the future as it is commonly understood—as the result of events arising out of the conditions of the present. In other words, it is considered a sequence of causal relations. We can also say that it is a projection of the present”. Thus, ‘le futur’ refers to a future which is conditioned by the contextual present and as such is a product of the spectral repetition of history. By contrast, the author identifies ‘l’avenir’, as a radical future, and one in which “We do not know what is coming—consciousness, self, identity, male, female, plant, animal, or stone—and are never ready for this coming, which, moreover, may never come”. The final stage of reckoning for a cultural subject is grappling with the dichotomy between these modes of futurity and the consequence of hauntological perpetuation in cinema. By reaffirming the construct of ‘le futur’, and obfuscating the potential of ‘l’avenir’, the postmodern trend of reengaging historical figures establishes a perpetual mourning characterised by inescapable repetition.
The Derridean framework provides a way of interrogating primary cultural sources as sites of historical tension. By applying the notions of hauntology and spectrality within the dissertation, New French Extremity demonstrates the consequential nature of this form of reengagement, both for the period in which the films are made, as well as periods from which the historical figures, spaces and concepts are reanimated. As Saviour Cantania suggests, “Jacques Derrida’s trenchant reflections on Hamlet as a Shakespearean psychic detective wrestling with his paternal phantom could be profitably appropriated to illuminate the parallel trajectory of the film adaptor contending with the spectre of ancestral authorship”. I examine, the notion of ‘ancestral authorship’ through the reappearance, and reengagement, of figures, landscapes and concepts in the cinema of New French Extremity. The dissertation’s hauntological examination focuses on the uncanniness of ‘transgression’ and Georges Bataille’s reappearance in the films of New French Extremity, as well as the movement’s reengagement with modern French landscapes within a postmodern context. As Antonio Negri notes “[t]here’s neither place nor time - and this is the real. Only a radical ‘Unheimlich’ remains in which we’re immersed”; this brilliantly captures the phenomenal experience of the films, and the tension between the spectral authorship of history and its contemporary depiction in New French Extremity.
Postmodern Aesthetics: Sensation and Force
The dissertation examines the aesthetic significance of the films for the ways in which they promote the phenomenal experience of dread, desolation and fatalism. This examination focuses on the forces exercised over bodies and spaces in the films. Bruno Dumont’s emphasis on amateur actors highlights the forces exercised over a postmodern body, and in particular the conditioning forces of postmodernity in rural France. This focus on sensation highlights how environmental factors of postmodernity, such as the rise of neoliberalism, globalisation and technology, condition experience within the films. ‘Sensation’ provides a framework for understanding the forces exerted over bodies, spaces and concepts that appear in New French Extremity. This inquiry distinguishes the force of dread, desolation and fatalism and the ways in which these constructs allow historical specters to appear, and speak, in the films. These postmodern cultural factors include the commodification of transgression in Martyrs and Ma Mère, the incorporation of the Eurostar in the narrative of L’Humanité (the train connection between England and France) and the importance of intermediality and digital videocamera footage in Caché. For instance, the spectral arrival of Georges Bataille is constituted through the taboo of Ma Mère (2004), the fatalism associated with trauma and modern French landscape is carried out by the violence of the Bruno Dumont’s character’s in L’Humanité (1999). The force of sensation within the films is constituted by the directors and their cinematographic techniques. The notion of ‘force’ is applied in New French Extremity in order to render fatalism, desolation and dread sensational through such cinematic tropes as spatial movement, editing techniques and non-resolutory conflict.
New French Extremity incorporates diverse cinematic landscapes including urban and regional space. The treatment of these spatial designations within the films provide a form of cinematic fatalism, which incorporates the movement’s postmodern context and the nation’s spectral history. Cinematic fatalism refers to the spatio-historical significance of trauma and memory contained in Bruno Dumont’s and Michael Haneke’s films. Both directors create an atmosphere which subscribes to an overarching inevitability, characterised by the desolation of modern French landscapes in Dumont’s L’Humanité (1999) and the impressions of historical trauma on the Parisian cityscape in Haneke’s Caché (2005). The nature of landscape in New French Extremity represents a radical exteriority which is conditioned by the intersections of postmodernity and historical spectrality. These spaces capture the remnants of modernity in postmodern France. By identifying urban and rural landscapes within the films these spaces capture and reveal the hauntological significance of their French context. The investigation of landscape in Dumont and Haneke’s films highlights the relationship between modern landscapes and their postmodern manifestations. The critical reception of the films illuminates the residual hauntological engagements that dominate the postmodern landscapes of New French Extremity. Haneke’s Caché captures an urban postmodern landscape, endowed with hauntological significance. Haneke explores the implications of cultural trauma and the spectrality of modern France within the cityscape of Paris. The director’s aesthetic considerations highlight the preeminence of the digital image as well as the medium’s interrelation with hauntological space. Dumont’s L’Humanité grapples with the desolation of modern French landscapes in a postmodern setting. The director portrays the changing face of French rurality, and exemplifies the traces of modern, hauntolgical, space. The genealogical significance of these modern tropes can be traced in traditions of French painting and the ‘Cinema of Sensation’, which Dumont reengages as a means of identifying the (non)presence of French history in the films. The speed of cross-cultural movement and technology, two constructs of globalisation, elucidate the postmodern context of the films. Globalisation shapes, and affects, the way characters interrelate within these national landscapes. The cultural spaces invoked in the films allow for a dissection of the French movement between modern and postmodern epochs and provides a framework for grappling with the residual hauntological engagements that are rife within the films.
The fatalism of New French Extremity is engendered by the historical intersections which Dumont and Haneke establish within the films. Fatalism refers to the lifeworlds which the directors create and the inevitable realisation of hauntological reengagements within such spaces. Seminal examinations of this construct in cinema have focused on the connection between melancholia and fatalism, and the interplay between the two concepts. Doru Pop notes the connection between the two sensations in Romanian cinema, by elucidating the relationship between the nation’s cultural history and its contemporary cinematic manifestation. He notes that Romanian cinema subscribes to melancholic and fatalist themes often by referring to ancestral stories, and cultural myths such as the ‘Miorita’, which became associated with a ‘mioritic attitude’. He argues that Romanian cinema has
a tendency to accept the fatality of life, which appears to be manifested in numerous contemporary movies. Such connections allowed film critics to conclude that an overall fatalistic view of the world is an indicator for the Romanian cinematic-thinking. Of course, when quickly looking for external manifestations of this presumed archetypal characteristic of the national psyche, the Romanian cinema is replete with such examples. It would be only too easy to identify situations, narratives or characters that qualify as “fatalistic”. From La moara cu noroc (1955), the adaptation of the moralizing novel written by Ioan Slavici, where the weak willed innkeeper navigates between life and death, to the acceptance of the punishment at the end of Pădurea spânzuraților (1964), the marks of resignation are recurrent in national cinema. Perhaps the quickest connection can be made when watching a movie like Moartea domnului Lăzărescu (2005), where several blatant connections can be made, from the fact that the ambulance nurse is called Mioara (another diminutive of the ewe lamb, Miorița) to the resignation of the old man confronted with imminent death.
Pop discusses this brand of cultural fatalism in relation to the idea of a ‘Romanian cinematic mind’. However, rather than extrapolate the significance of melancholia and fatalism through reductionist cognitive film theories, an examination of the connection between historical specters and their contemporary manifestation offers a framework for extrapolating New French Extremity’s residual historical engagements. This form of analysis, which prefaces the creation of cinematic worlds, is reflected in Francesco Sticchi’s discussion of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia:
Melancholia (2011), in particular, is entirely based on the conceptual association of personal depression with cosmic and ontological failure. Since the beginning of the film, the viewer is forced to accept this dimension, which is powerfully communicated through several conceptual images, vivid abstractions that criticise the positivist and illusory trust in human possibilities to control and comprehend life rationally. We will see that this general feeling of the experience is mostly conveyed through the breakdown of the source-path-goal schema, which produces a sense of desperation because it communicates the impossibility of accomplishing the expected results of reaching one’s goal, or of fulfilling desires.
Furthermore, Sticchi notes:
This aesthetic situation configures the mood and semantic domain of the film, which is immersed in an ontological sense of negation, and works as the whole container or the emotional plane where all the characters as individual parts rely. Moods, as we have discussed, pervade perception and consequently frame and influence our experience by inserting sensations and ideas in a complex affective/intellectual ontological dimension
As such, fatalism in New French Extremity refers to the ways in which Dumont and Haneke establish the speed of postmodern culture in L’Humanité and Caché as a means of offering a critical commentary on the contemporary lifeworlds that the characters occupy, in order to expose the inevitable hauntological reckoning of France’s national past.
The emotional resonance which emerges from the intersection between postmodernism and hauntological landscapes promotes a perceptive fatalism associated with the evolution of space. Recent scholarship has investigated the use value of ‘cultural legibility’ in cinema, and the ways in which certain settings provoke a familiar aesthetic in order to provide a limit for narrative possibility. Victoria L. Smith’s notes that the films Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and Monster (2004) share a common aesthetic which allows the audience to relate to the landscapes and mise-en-scène which surrounds the narrative of the film. Smith uses Bakhtin’s concept of ‘chronotype’ as a means of highlighting the significance of the ‘highway’ and the ‘road’ in the development of the film’s themes and progression: “It offers specific settings where stories can ‘take place’ and thus, “limit narrative possibility [and] shape characterization. The road as chronotope offers a place where one can encounter all sorts of people and where fates collide in a sort of boundaryless space”. The landscapes of New French Extremity operate in an inverse capacity. Recognisable landscapes in New French Extremity retain forms of modernity, and the spaces are always depicted as in between recognisable and non-recognisable place(s). This dichotomy results from the intersection between postmodernity and France’s cultural history. Subsequently, those modern elements that are retained by the landscapes, and appear in a (non)present capacity, are juxtaposed with the characters and their contemporary context. As a result, a slippage occurs between the ghost(s) of modernity, which haunt the painterly composition of Dumont’s films, and the amoralism of characters such as Pharaon in L’Humanité. New French Extremity’s purposeful preoccupation with illegible, yet partially present, ‘modern’ constructs reaffirms an amorphous relationship between the characters and the nation’s cultural history. This hauntological relationship promotes the emotional resonance of fatalism. The significance of hauntological landscape(s) is further articulated in Jean Ma’s work surrounding the dissemination of Chinese cinema. Correlating cinematic landscapes with the perpetuation of hauntological significance, Ma notes:
Navigating a landscape of shifting temporalities and mutating identities, their films eschew the legitimizing assurances of a “search for origins” in order to explore the points of breakage through which leak the ideals of national belonging, collectivity, and progress.
By establishing an interplay between shifting temporalities, both Haneke and Dumont expose the fatalistic reappearance of historical specters and the contemporary cultural constructs which summon them.
Globalisation: Speed and Abstraction
Speed and abstraction, two tenets of globalisation, promote the fatalistic and desolate qualities of New French Extremity’s cinematic landscapes. As Thomas Hylland Eriksen notes: “Acceleration is an important dimension of globalization. Faster transportation and communication have been preconditions for the current globally interconnected world”. These tenets account for the desolation of landscape in Dumont’s cinema and the importance of the digital image/technology in Haneke’s Caché. Speed refers to the rate at which postmodernism facilitates cultural exchange, and in particular the infrastructural symbols of a globalised world, such as transportation and the digital image. The speed of postmodernity and cultural exchange can be observed in the films as a foreground to the backdrop of hauntological landscapes and space. From this convergence emerges a fatalistic cinematography, which seeks to offer a critique of contemporary French culture. This fatalistic phenomenon is similarly reflected in other European cinema, particularly contemporary cinematic movements which reengage a mythologised or romanticised national past. An examination of desolation in L’Humanité elucidates the space between the idealised, hauntological, landscapes and the accelerant nature of a globalised French context. Dumont incorporates foreign ‘witnesses’ in L’Humanité, as a way of highlighting shifting cultural parameters and identifying the toxic malaise and despair of the rural ‘French’ characters. Boaventura de Sousa Santos notes: “Strangely enough, globalization seems to combine universality and the elimination of national borders, on the one hand, with rising particularity, local diversity, ethnic identity and a return to communitarian values, on the other”. Dumont explores this dichotomy in L’Humanité by incorporating the ‘Eurostar’ as a symbol of postmodern abstraction. The intersection of hauntology and globalisation in Haneke’s Caché provides insights into the preeminence of technology and the digital image (surveillance technology and handheld video cameras) in postmodern culture, and further reifies the hauntological significance of the Parisian cityscape. Michalinos Zembylas and Charalambos Vrasidas note “increased use and reliance on new information and communication technologies (ICT)” within globalisation. The fatalism of Caché is revealed by the speed and immediacy of the digital image and technology's ability to expose the remanence of familial and national trauma through such mediums/devices.
The Sensational Landscape
The landscapes of New French Extremity offer a lamentation upon modern space and trauma, within a postmodern context. The reappearance of modern French landscape(s), and their fractured representation within a contemporary context, in still in the films a fatalistic tone which seeks to portray the historical remnants of trauma and its contemporary perpetuation. The forms of landscape representation originating from post-revolution France, through the impressionism of Claude Monet, to Robert Bresson’s cinema of sensation encapsulate the development of the modern ‘picturesque’, and lays the foundation for ascertaining the significance of New French Extremity’s engagement with historical landscape depiction. This genealogy elucidates the revelatory function of hauntological space on display in the films, and the trauma which ensues in Dumont's and Haneke’s films.
The tradition of landscape representation in post-revolution France was associated with an ethical and political role and was commonplace in the Paris Salons. As Steven Adams notes, “After 1789, the social and political fabric of the nation changed so radically that new spaces – some material, others imagined – came into being, expanding the material, ideological, psychic and aesthetic constituents of landscape representation”. The development of landscape painting post-revolution represents a shift in the French national zeitgeist, which sought to identify, endow and reflect space with socio-cultural significance. This tradition is reappraised by modernist painting as a result of the developments in perspective throughout the period, and in an attempt to gesture at the sensorial significance of the landscape and the viewer’s situatedness. Monet’s impressionism represents a movement away from the nation’s cultural landscape painting into the realm of modernism and sensation. Impressionism marks a shift in the collective consciousness of landscape and the nature of the modern ‘French’ gaze. Moshe Barasch notes that impressionism is “an art that embodies specific pictorial values, and is devoted to them alone”. The development of impressionism represents a turn in the aesthetics of painting toward a medium which captures ‘sensational’ experience, both for its subject and viewer. The core tropes of impressionism are concerned with
the effects of sunlight and atmosphere, the fascination with the phenomenon of reflection (in water and other materials), and the development of a particular technique of painting in perceptible, sometimes contrasting brush strokes and dabs of color. Impressionistic doctrines, whether articulated openly or only implicitly suggestive, make some specific assumptions with regard both to what we see and experience in the world around us.
Impressionism seeks to create a sensational experience for the viewer through the gesture of the artist’s brush-work and colouration. Monet’s ‘Poppies’ represents an attempt to create a sensational experience of French rurality, by gesturing at the viewer’s and subject’s relationship to the landscape of the work (see Figure 4).
This painterly rendering of the French countryside sought to explode the precision of previous forms of painting by gesturing at the sensational experience of the wind, or the soft sway of the poppies in the field. The sensational experience of the landscape provided a window into the nature of the ‘modern’ gaze and a modern subject’s experiential viewing of a ‘French’ landscape. As James Koranyi and Tricia Cusack note, “nationalist ideology rests on an enormous quantity of representational and performative labour. The abstract concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ have been attached to recognisable ‘national landscapes’, for example through tourist guides and travel writing, literary, and visual art”. The experience of a ‘national landscape’ was developed in various impressionistic forms to render a sensorial quality to traversing and occupying ‘French’ space. The importance of Impressionism in the development of New French Extremity’s various intersections between postmodernism and hauntological space is found in the movement’s ability to capture viscerality through form. The phenomenal experience of Monet’s impressionism highlights the historical antecedents of viewing landscape as a source of emotional resonance. Furthermore, the tradition of Impressionism, and the medium’s sensational gestures, are inherited in the cinema of the French New Wave and offer an insight into the development of the interrelation between landscape and emotion in French cinema.
Robert Bresson’s oeuvre represents a seminal articulation of the connection between viscerality, form and cinema. As a major figure within the French New Wave movement, Bresson’s aesthetics offer a lamentation on the nature of the modern gaze and represent an attempt to render the sensational significance of impressionism within film. As R. J Cardullo notes, a major formative influence of Bresson’s was his study of painting. The importance of the director’s early years as a painter establishes a genealogical link between French modernism and cinema and the transference of style from the canvas to filmmaking. Raymond Watkins notes that “Bresson insists in a number of interviews, he never left painting to become a filmmaker, rather, he transported a painterly aesthetic to cinema”. Bresson’s work offers an insight in to the corporeality of ‘sensation’ in cinema and qualifies the ‘essence’ of a subject or cinematic body. Laura McMahon explains that: “the cinema of Bresson is grounded in an interest in the sense of touch. His films explore touch in both formal and thematic terms, privileging the texture of sounds and images as well as literal images and sounds of touch”. The director renders a sensational experience of bodies in Pickpocket (1959) in order to portray the experience of a ‘modern’ subject. The film follows Michel, a pickpocket, who occupies his days stealing from spectators at a racetrack. The film examines the notion of touch, as the border between Michel’s apprehension and freedom. Bresson establishes the sensorial experience of touch for the viewer through the implication of Michel’s actions and the space which the character occupies. McMahon discusses the phenomenal experience of pickpocketing in Pickpocket, suggesting that Bresson instigates a slippage, in order to highlight the corporeal sensation of a ‘body’ and its occupation of modern space. By dislocating the victim’s ability to recognise the touch of Michel, the slippage that occurs within perception provokes ethical, political and spatial questions about the nature of the modern body. Contrastingly, Dumont and Haneke elucidate the means by which space dislocates, or promotes, sensational experience in order to guide the fatalism which emerges from the reappearance of hauntological specters.
“Brutal Visibility”: Landscape and Postmodernism
Dumont and Haneke capture modern French landscapes within a postmodern milieu in order to identify and reveal the hidden tension(s) which arise in the intersections between these two constructs. This exploration formulates a postmodern ‘Cinema of Sensation’ which displaces the role of the individual, symptomatic of modern formulations, in order to highlight and criticise contemporary cultural conditions. The directors explore this negative phenomenon through the slippage of a transitionary period, between modern and postmodern epochs, which Derrida refers to as ‘Weile’. This territory between presence and absence, and its associated emotional resonance, is compounded by the cinematic symbols of postmodernism that render it visible. The reception and reviews of New French Extremity focus on this emotional, and sensory, experience as it pertains to hauntological landscapes within a postmodern milieu. Caché utilises the digital image, and recording technology, to capture Georges Laurent’s Parisian apartment. Mark Poster discusses the importance of the connection between technology, globalisation and postmodernism, contending that “a critical understanding of the new communications systems requires an evaluation of the type of subject it encourages, while a viable articulation of postmodernity must include an elaboration of its relation to new technologies of communication”. Throughout the film Georges Laurent and his affluent family receive threatening video tapes in the mail, which document through video footage his apartment from the street. These videotapes are always attached to a drawing, seemingly drawn by a child (see Figure 5). The film alludes to the fact that the images and videotapes have been created by Majid, Georges’ estranged adopted brother. As the film’s events unfold, Georges begins to suspect that Majid is threatening his family due to an event which occurred in childhood between the two brothers. The film reveals that Majid’s parents, of Algerian heritage, were killed in the Paris Massacre of 1961. This component of the story refers to a massacre which occurred at a rally held by the FLN (National Liberation Front), an Algerian nationalist political party campaigning for an end to France’s occupation of Algeria and the independence of the nation. Haneke reveals that upon Georges learning of Majid’s parents’ death, and his subsequent adoption, the character framed his adopted brother for animal cruelty and prompted his parents to have Majid removed by French social services. The final scene takes place between Georges’ son, Pierrot, and Pierre, Majid’s son. The ending leaves the origins of the tapes ambiguous. However, an implied connection is made between Georges’ son and the tapes/drawings, which would suggest that the child was responsible for revealing his father’s sorrowful past. The postmodern gaze, and visual significance of intermediality, are picked up in Jennifer Burris article on the intersections in Caché, between the hauntological landscape and surveillance in a postmodern context. The reviews and scholarly analysis of Caché similarly privileged an examination of Haneke’s treatment of the Algerian War. The revelation of Georges’ abuses, and France’s sorrowful colonial history, is achieved through the incorporation of digital technology and the spatial settings of the film.
The postmodern significance of digital technology is rendered through its depiction of the landscape, which is both the setting of Majid’s parents’ death and the site of Georges’ fatalist reckoning. This is reflected in the reviews which focused on the nature of the postmodern gaze, and visibility of the perpetuation of trauma within postmodern culture. Haneke’s vision unearths the hauntological significance of Paris by establishing spaces within the city which are symbolically correlated with Georges’ and Majid’s characters and their history. The director makes this associative link in order to offer a commentary on the historical impressions that linger in the spaces the characters occupy, as well as expose the ghostlike modern tropes which exist within a postmodern context. The major hauntological form in Caché is modern France’s occupation of Algeria, and the massacre of 1961. A pivotal component of the film’s subtext is Haneke’s uncharacteristic incorporation of ‘flashback’ scenes and their relationship to the digital long-takes contained on the tapes which arrive at Georges’ house. As Christopher Rowe notes, “the director’s realist aesthetic, which is invested in preserving ambiguity, precludes the use of the flashback as plot device. In Caché, several apparent flashbacks are included, yet they remain highly ambiguous”. The interplay between the short, violent, flashbacks in the film and the steady long-takes of Georges apartment, creates an interrelation between the pacing of the intermedial video tapes and Georges’ dreams. The interplay between memory and the digital image of the video recordings functions as a purposeful correlation between the speed of technology and the irrepressible presence of the past. Furthermore, the intermedial aspects of the film reify the characterisation of Georges, by capturing the character at work (as a television host) and at his apartment. This connection elucidates the significance of the postmodern context, and its various technological artefacts, and the hauntological awareness of (non)present trauma. A pivotal connection is made between digital representation of space and the hauntological significance of Paris. This connection is captured in the long takes which follow Georges as he attempts to locates Majid’s apartment on the outskirts of Paris. Haneke portrays the movement from inner-city Paris to its surrounding suburbs through a long shot which follows Georges’ aimless search for Majid’s apartment. The significance of this drive is the way George's movement reverses the events of October 1961, by moving from inner-city Paris to the city’s outer suburbs. As Maria Flood notes: “On the night of 17 October 1961, 30,000 Algerians gathered for a demonstration that took them from suburbs like Nanterre and Gennevilliers on the outskirts of Paris towards the centre, in protest against a recently imposed curfew that prohibited the movement of French-Algerians between the hours of 8.30PM and 5.30AM”. Haneke effectively establishes the revelatory function of Paris through the use of the digital image and by instigating the Laurent family’s movement through different spaces within the city. This intersection between the postmodern context of the films and the hauntological spaces accounts for the prevalence of fatalism which emerges in the film’s characters and viewers.
Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanité follows the exploits of an array of characters in rural Northern France. The film serves as a rural counterpoint to Haneke’s vision of a hauntological cityscape. The films extend this hauntological examination into the realm of desolation, and provides a window into the slow dissolution of the connection between French landscape and meaning. Dumont articulates this dissolution by framing the nihilistic amoralism of his characters with ‘picturesque’ modern landscape(s). Dumont allows the hauntological landscapes to be recognised by the audience, rather than the characters, in order to promote a fatalistic and emotional response in the viewer.
L’Humanité incorporates the ‘Eurostar’, the train connection between France and England, as a way of offering a critique of postmodern culture and its interplay with hauntological landscapes. Pharaon, the police officer in charge of investigating the rape and murder of a girl in rural France, is tasked with interrogating the English passengers on the Eurostar who may have witnessed the murder from the train. The film follows the fallout from this incident and the eventual revelation that the superintendent is in fact guilty of the crime. The ‘Eurostar’ is incorporated in the film as comment upon the nature of postmodern culture, and the abstract effect of postmodern progress on the interrelation of characters within the film. The notion of speed and cultural connectivity is exemplified by the ‘Eurostar’. The symbolic use of this globalised form of travel is contrasted with Pharaon’s brutal attack, and his recognition of the literal speed with which cultural movements take place within a postmodern milieu (see Figure 6). The allegorical use of speed dislocates and depersonalises the movement through the French landscape, to such an extent that the passengers are unable to identify Pharaon as the murderer. Furthermore, the interplay within Dumont’s cinema between the slow-paced, picturesque, cinematography which captures the sensation of the landscape and the speed of postmodern culture, symbolised by the ‘Eurostar’, provides a critical commentary on the nature of morality and violence within contemporary culture. For instance the famous sequence from the beginning of the film is a slow steady-shot of Pharaon as he crosses two hills of the French countryside. This painterly composition by Dumont establishes the film’s reverence for the French landscape from the outset in order to create a perceptual awareness of the hauntological significance of landscape in the audience. As Steven Allen and Kirsten Mollegard’s note, “nostalgia for what is perceived as an idyllic, harmonious, and homogenous past also influences how national and personal identities are constructed in the present, even when agonizing historical trauma suggests otherwise”. Furthermore, this romanticised sequence is followed by slow-panning, extremely explicit, shots of the dead body in the same landscape. Dumont’s technique of splicing the painterly composition and the brutality of the murder scene together reflects the way the characters have defiled the spaces which surround an engulf their lives, as well as the director’s nihilistic critique of contemporary life. This is reflected in Raymond Watkins’ discussion of the connection between Dumont’s films and Bresson’s aesthetic, which focuses in particular on the development of the cinema of sensation in the 1990s. Observing the perceptual dissolution of an ‘idealised’ landscape, the audience is confronted by a void of meaning, and nihilistic discontent, in once significant spaces. As such, this sensory experience of hauntology and mourning acknowledges “the relevance of the embodied act of viewing and the sensory experience of moving images by exploiting the possibilities of the “haptic” gaze collapsing the distance between spectator and image”. Dumont invokes a ‘modern’ tradition only insofar as the audience observes its present time desolation. Similarly, the identification of a ‘picturesque’ aesthetic is identified in Saige Walton’s work. The author notes:
Dumont's characters often find themselves engulfed by the physicality of their surroundings or subject to violent actions that lie beyond their own control. In these terms, the director's self confessed shock tactics frequently test our ability to look without looking away- from viscerally charged scenes of human violence, rape and suffering that take place within his beautifully detailed worlds.
Kent Jones notes in his review of L’Humanité Dumont’s ‘masterful’ cinematographic treatment of the French landscape, whilst also criticising the amoral, and basic, characterisation of Emmanuel Schotté’s ‘Pharaon’. This criticism of the basic characterisation yet masterful treatment of the landscape is echoed in Tony Rayn’s review. By employing the guilty Pharaon as the audience’s main attachment to the French landscape, Dumont manipulates the painterly gaze in order to offer a stark and fatalistic comment on the nature of morality, culpability and individual existence within an abstract cultural condition. The reception of Dumont’s films reifies the hauntolgical significance of landscape as well as the viscerality of the characters’ actions. The invocation of the modern picturesque landscape within Dumont’s oeuvre highlights the hauntological significance of this cultural space and its irreconcilable exteriority, given its inaccessibility to the characters of the films.
Dumont’s and Haneke’s lamentations on hauntological landscapes and postmodern culture establish fatalistic atmospheres within both films as a means of critiquing postmodern subjectivity and situatedness. An exploration of urban and regional space reveals the spectrality of French cinematic landscapes and offers a commentary on the irrepressibility of cultural trauma in postmodern culture.
Conclusion
While the New French Extremity movement is widely considered to have ended in early 21st century, the engagement with French cultural history and postmodernity that characterised the movement persists in contemporary French cinema. Michael Haneke’s Happy End (2017) examines the interrelation between the European refugee crisis, technology in a globalised world and the hauntological sorrow which haunts the ‘Laurent’ family. Haneke uses the Laurent moniker (originally from Code Unknown (2000) and Caché) for separate characters’ and familial trauma in Happy End. The film engages transgressive behaviours and the picturesque landscape of Calais in Northern France as a means of examining the stark interrelation between the European refugee crisis, and the sorrowful reckoning of the bourgeois Laurent family. The film ends with Georges Laurent, wheelchair bound and submerged above his neck in Calais’ blue water. Eve, Georges’ granddaughter, has aided her grandfather’s suicide, and proceeds to film the events on her smartphone. The endemic thematic criterion of New French Extremity emerges in this contemporary addition to Haneke’s canon. This offering from recent French cinema offers crucial insights into the perpetuation of New French Extremity’s themes, and the present existence of cinematic intersections between hauntology and postmodernism. This phenomenon can be extrapolated in relation to Eric White’s discussion of Derrida’s conception of futurity and in particular White’s reflections on the construct of ‘l’avenir’. White notes that deconstruction, and its genealogical concepts of hauntology and spectrality, must
facilitate a way out of the impasse of the present toward the unforeseeable future signified by l’avenir. Derrida therefore proposed to practice deconstruction as a form of writing ‘liable to the other, opened to and by the other, to the work of the other; it is writing working at not letting itself be enclosed or dominated by [the] economy of the same.
In this formulation both Derrida and White elucidate the task of the postmodern viewer, and filmmaker, as one in which cultural history can either be reengaged on the basis of giving life back to the ‘other’/specter, or in which the viewer/creative welcomes the unknown of ‘l’avenir’. New French Extremity is an attempt by a school of filmmakers to give voice back to French cultural history by mediating that speech through a contemporary postmodern present. As such, attempts made throughout the 1990s and early 2000s to reengage historical idols within extreme French cinema were fraught in nature and subscribed to the commodification, and late capitalist logic, of the films and their marketability. Happy End reifies the prevalence of these themes within recent French cinema, and exhibits the persistence of the movement’s cultural engagements.
The title, Happy End, can be interpreted as either prefacing a cynical commentary on the nature of contemporary French culture or providing a full circle conclusion to Haneke’s socio-cultural concerns from the early 2000’s. Whether as a nihilistic comment on the drowning of Georges Laurent in Calais, or as a pronouncement about the repetitive perpetuation of trauma, Haneke reifies the utility of dread, desolation and fatalism in revealing the hidden tensions between cultural specters and postmodern actuality. The film reflects the importance of cinema as a cultural artefact, and particularly the medium’s ability to capture the interrelation between historical periods and contexts. Happy End’s final scene is a shot taken by Eve’s smartphone of Anne and Thomas Laurent running to the aid of their father, who is submerged in the crystal blue Calais water. The final sequence fades to black, leaving the audience to ponder if Georges Laurent was pulled from the surf, and whether the fate of a watery death would be less painful than further dining experiences with the unapologetically bourgeois Laurents. Haneke leaves the audience with two final questions: what continues to become of historical spectrality within a contemporary cultural epoch, and how does cinema reveal these tensions and offer cultural subjects a way forward into the future?
The films of New French Extremity portray various expressions of dread, desolation and fatalism within a contemporary milieu, offering a stark commentary on the nature of postmodern actuality and hauntological engagements which continue to pervade French culture. The movement reveals that historiography and critical theory can offer new insights into the importance of film as a cultural ‘artefact’, in which the (non)presence of historical matter is informed both by the contextual present and a re-engaged past.