Everyday Style

Where chapter two deals with ordinary moments in extraordinary films, chapter three explores another aspect of the spectrum of the everyday in cinema: the concept of the everyday as a film style, and its relationship to the everyday as subject matter. This chapter examines the way the everyday as film style has been theorised—predominately as an aesthetic sensibility that privileges the undramatic and routine as a conduit to the profound or transcendent. Chapter three asserts that while this scholarship has been useful in illuminating positive representations of the everyday, its attempts to quarantine the everyday from the dramatic are problematic and ultimately reductive. Instead, through detailed case studies of Bresson’s Money (1983) and Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989), the chapter presents an alternate approach that allows for a more nuanced appreciation of everyday aesthetics, allowing for films which do not treat the everyday as strictly positive. These films are unsettling precisely for their lack of authorial guidance on how to respond to horrific narrative events; film style is pared back in such a way that moments of violence are afforded the same aesthetic weight as the representation of ordinary and mundane routines.

Looking Back

The conclusion pulls together the key arguments presented throughout Troubled Everyday considering the way the melding of violence and the everyday in European art cinema has us reflect upon our own everyday outside of the cinema. In a world fraught with the violent and unexpected disruptions of terrorism, is it any wonder that films that call attention to the potential for sudden rupture to our everyday experience and understanding are so affecting? Examining Gaspar Noé’s reverse-running rape-revenge film Irreversible (2002), the conclusion offers some final reflections upon the relationship between violence and the everyday both in the cinema and outside of it.

Return to the Everyday

In contrast to the films examined in earlier chapters, which tend to culminate in events of violence, and end abruptly thereafter, chapter five turns to films which draw attention to the endurance of the everyday, and the persistence of violence within it. Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone (1998) and Markus Schleinzer’s Michael (2011) offer insight into what a return to the everyday following violent disruption might look like. What is potentially most troubling about these films is their implication that violence and the everyday are perhaps not mutually exclusive. In varying ways, both films depict violence as something that might be absorbed into the very fabric of the ordinary. Drawing on theoretical conceptions of everyday time as both measured and perpetual, eventful and repetitious, this chapter argues that these films frustrate our desire for coherence by making explicit the fallacy of the narratives we construct to make the everyday meaningful. Chapter five posits that by undermining our attempts to understand on-screen violence with legible meaning, these films extend their potency by calling attention to the meaning we project on life outside the cinema; I Stand Alone and Michael challenge us to question just what is at stake in acknowledging the everyday as indeterminate.

Everyday Moments

Chapter two seeks to reframe the way in which we approach the affective potential of extreme cinema by investigating an implicit dynamic at work in its reception: the distinction between an immediate visceral response, and a more pervasive enduring kind of affect. Arguing that the triangulation of disturbing affect, the violent, and the everyday is not purely a recent phenomenon, chapter two traces two lines of continuity between past and recent extreme cinema. The first thread is a “discourse of immediacy”: the tendency of critics and scholars to privilege immediate visceral responses such as shock, outrage and disgust when articulating the kinds of affect extreme films produce. Secondly, the chapter reveals that the aesthetic tension between the extreme and the everyday is observable in films prior to the new extremism, albeit in more discreet ways. This latter argument is demonstrated through detailed studies of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) and Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985). Significant not only for their notoriety as extreme, but because despite their seeming incongruence with the everyday, their subtle gestures towards it at key moments is crucial to their affective quality, these films signal that the distinction between the extreme and the everyday is not necessarily clear cut.

Everyday Structures/Everyday Language

Chapter four expands on both the aesthetic tendency to refuse guidance in relation to depictions of violence, and the need in the critical discourse that surrounds extreme cinema to impose coherence on violent representation. Where the films in chapter three stylistically equate moments of extreme violence with the banal, chapter four considers films in which the intrusion of violence into the everyday is marked as a definite rupture. Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl (2001) and Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2003) establish familiar patterns and worlds only to break them with paroxysms of violence in their final minutes. Disoriented by these seemingly illegible shifts, critical and scholarly responses tend to interpret them in terms of a shift in genre, or dismiss them as an authorial misstep. Unpacking these responses, and considering issues of authorship, genre, and aesthetics, chapter four argues that it is the films’ broader orienting structures that pave the way for disturbing affect. This chapter considers the ways in which Breillat and Dumont’s films involve us by establishing proximate and alienating structures congruent with the theoretical distinctions between positive and negative conceptions of the everyday.

‘A lightning that illuminates the banal’: Violence and the Everyday

Chapter one establishes and justifies the link between a compelling tendency towards extremes in violence erupting out of the everyday in recent European cinema. It argues that while it is the nature of the everyday to be a kind of backdrop – taken for granted, imperceptible, and uneventful, it is in fact a crucial and under examined aspect in several extreme films. This is evident in terms of the films’ subject matter and setting (the prevalence of family, home, school, workplace), and/ or aesthetics (the Bressonian paring back of performance and playing down of the eventful). Drawing on the notorious instant of graphic on-screen suicide in Haneke’s Hidden, chapter one highlights what the book takes to be a central dynamic present in varied ways across the body of films under examination – an aesthetic strategy that attempts to provoke an experience of discomfort by preventing viewers from containing moments of violence with a coherent meaning or motivation. This introductory chapter argues that by attending to the ordinary as well as the extreme, we might better understand the affective grip of these films.