February
24, 2011 Thursday
15:30-16:30
FASS 2034
The New York Times
reviewer of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival underlines the common ingredient that
brings together the majority of the award-winning films: “Violence Reaps
Rewards at Cannes Festival” (05/25/2009). While the best director award winner
Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay (Slaughter)
shows a brutal rape and dismembering of a prostitute at length, the best
actress award went to Charlotte Gainsbourg of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, a film with graphic scenes
of torture and genital mutilation. Similarly, bloody scenes of beating and
murders dominate Jacques Audiard’s Grand Prix
winner prison drama A Prophet. The
striking synchronicity of these films suggests a new trend in European
art-house cinema where graphic scenes of violence become not only a convenient
tool to further audience affect but also a means to reinforce the reality
effect. In the light of anthropological literature on violence, this lecture
analyzes the narrative possibilities opened up by
stylistic violence in cinema: possibilities such as providing a commentary on
the disposability of bodies under a neo-liberal economy obsessed with
efficiency and adaptability. This talk also
inquires into the narrative limits of the above award-winning films that
reflect violence as an eruptive force that speaks to the liberal imagination. I
explore how films commenting on neo-liberal biopolitics simultaneously and
paradoxically produce a “violent-chic”.
