When Bruno Dumont’s L’humanité won three major awards at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, the audience’s outrage was decidedly off-putting for the director. The thunderous wave of boos and catcalls intimated more than mere disapproval over the jury’s decision; the film’s tribute was perceived as both a perversion of modern art cinema by the shock tactics of Hollywood’s horror franchise, and a threat to the nation’s ceremoniously political tradition since the dawn of the French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague). With his intimate close-ups of an 11-year old blood-spattered rape victim, shattering the cool, idyllic vistas of the French countryside, Dumont had committed the ultimate in cinematic transgressions: he had mingled art-house prestige with sensationalist trash, and been commended for it.
There is something supremely abject about the violation of limits that Dumont and other so-called controversial filmmakers have been experimenting with since the radical restructuring of France’s film industry by the Mitterrand government’s socialist policy. Now touted as the New Extremism (or New French Extremity) by such critics as James Quandt, Martine Beugnet, John Wray, Kerstin Bueschges and Sarah Barrow, this paracinéma – or cinéma du corps – has brought about a kind of paradigm shift within the French horror genre, one that consists of a move toward a more corporeal, transgressive, and confrontational cinema than has ever graced the “silver screen.” As the label suggests, the convulsive violence and sexual explicitness that characterize this body of films is nothing short of excessive, but beneath their fanaticism—which has, for the most part, been devalued as a superficial exercise in style and gore—lurks a fascinating critique of the binary oppositions still operative in film scholarship, specifically those aimed at distinguishing between mainstream American genericism and left-leaning French intellectualism. Arguably, this New Extremism embodies more than a reactionary discourse against the aesthetic traditions of France; it hyperbolizes the sociopolitical reality of the globalization process and its impact on cultural artifacts, however monstrous a shape those representations might take.