One leading reason for contemporary French cinema’s rising profile is a group of films that together constitute a highly transgressive cinéma du corps/cinema of the body (Palmer, Brutal Intimacy 57-93). Figurehead productions, some disproportionately notorious, are films like Romance (Catherine Breillat 1999), Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis 2001), Irreversible (Gaspar Noé 2002), Demonlover (Olivier Assayas 2002), and Dans ma peau ([In My Skin] Marina de Van 2002); the tendency has more recently been extended by Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé 2009), La Sentiment de la chair ([The Sentiment of the Flesh] Roberto Garzelli 2010), and Hors Satan ([Outside Satan] Bruno Dumont 2011). This cinéma du corps consistently attracts scrutiny among—usually skeptical, often hostile—respondents for its stark treatment of sexual behaviours and corporeal processes, the blank or primitivist psychology of its unreadable protagonists, its recourse to abrupt and grisly violence, a proclivity for radical stylistic devices, and a lingering but never quite fully articulated sense of social despair. Undeniably these films do traffic in confrontational materials: rape, murder and assault, self-harm, carnivorous sex, bodily compulsions that are destructive and/or atavistic. In broader terms, moreover, part of the cinéma du corps’s extremist reputation comes from its categorical evasiveness, its refusal to shape its textual resources into either coherent socio-political interventions or horror film norms. The films, by consequence, are indigestible, alienating both leftist/academic/socially polemical writers as well as populist/mainstream/genre aficionados.
My aim here is to nuance this cinéma du corps template by discussing a related fellow traveller case study, Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s Des filles en noir ([Young Girls in Black] 2010). Des filles en noir will let us explore the guiding principles that underpin much of the cinéma du corps, beyond the customary attention paid only to such films’ aggressively graphic content. Instead, I will represent Des filles en noir through its conceptual agenda, its cinematic engagements, its interactions with mainstays of recent French filmmaking. As such, both this film and the proximate cinéma du corps exist as a catalytic strand of cinematic practice, meticulous and oftentimes antagonistic within contemporary France’s ecosystem of film aesthetics, industry, and culture. By result, Civeyrac’s approach becomes thus: (1) to revive but inflect Impressionist theories of photogénie outlined by film writers and filmmakers in the late 1910s and 1920s; (2) to adopt but likewise strategically overturn (or cannibalize) French cinema’s conventional coming-of-age narratives, especially texts based upon the rites of passage of female adolescents; (3) to promulgate such techniques through pedagogical channels, crucially the film school circuit in Paris; and (4) to position the resulting product, through venues like the Cannes Film Festival, as a cutting-edge cultural asset in the competitive marketplace of French cinema. Related to these four points, in addition, this article seeks to boost the English-language profile of Civeyrac himself, an underregarded figure abroad, a lecturer-critic-filmmaker whose work recalls the similarly multi-faceted approach of 1920s icons such as Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, and Jean Epstein. What especially unites these figures is the formative notion of applied cinephilia, the shared belief that intensive, heightened critical film study—a fixation upon stylistic minutiae—should be vital not only for the writings of impassioned critics, but also, concomitantly, for making discoveries in cinematic expression to augment the work of progressive filmmakers (Palmer, Brutal Intimacy 195-215).