Extreme Cinema : : The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today's Art Film Culture / / Mattias Frey.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter RUP eBook-Package 2016
• VerfasserIn: Frey, Mattias,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2016]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (298 p.) :; 25 photographs, 3 tables

Received an Honorable Mention for the 2017 British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) Best Monograph Award From Shortbus to Shame and from Oldboy to Irreversible, film festival premieres regularly make international headlines for their shockingly graphic depictions of sex and violence. Film critics and scholars alike often regard these movies as the work of visionary auteurs, hailing directors like Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier as heirs to a tradition of transgressive art. In this provocative new book, Mattias Frey offers a very different perspective on these films, exposing how they are also calculated products, designed to achieve global notoriety in a competitive marketplace. Paying close attention to the discourses employed by film critics, distributors, and filmmakers themselves, Extreme Cinema examines the various tightropes that must be walked when selling transgressive art films to discerning audiences, distinguishing them from generic horror, pornography, and Hollywood product while simultaneously hyping their salacious content. Deftly tracing the links between the local and the global, Frey also shows how the directors and distributors of extreme art house fare from both Europe and East Asia have significant incentives to exaggerate the exotic elements that would differentiate them from Anglo-American product. Extreme Cinema also includes original interviews with the programmers of several leading international film festivals and with niche distributors and exhibitors, giving readers a revealing look at how these institutions enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the "taboo-breakers" of art house cinema. Frey also demonstrates how these apparently transgressive films actually operate within a strict set of codes and conventions, carefully calibrated to perpetuate a media industry that fuels itself on provocation.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Transgression and Distinction: Filmmaker Discourses -- 2. The Aesthetic Embrace and the Cynicism Criticism: Reception Discourses -- 3. The Rhetoric and Role of Film Festivals -- 4. Discourses and Modes of Distribution -- 5. The Interpretations of Regulation -- 6. The Added Value of International Distribution -- 7. Sex, Violence, and Self-Exoticization -- 8. Aesthetic Innovation and the Real: Academic Debate over Sexually Graphic Art Films -- 9. A Discursive Approach to Hardcore Art Cinema -- Afterword -- Notes -- Select Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author