There has long been the perception of art cinema and the avant-garde as something belonging to high culture and horror belonging to low culture. Joan Hawkins argues that the relationship between art cinema, experimental film and the avant-garde, and horror or low forms of cinema is much more complicated than that, arguing that “the lines between arthouse (high culture) cinema and trash (exploitation, horror, soft porn etc) have never been as clear-cut...The midnight screenings and “grindhouses… that once enlivened Times Square”... were historically the site where high art and trash cinema commingled in the United States.”i Arthouse cinema or more particularly alternative cinemas to that of the Classical Hollywood Cinema have been always been marked as being outside of traditional cinema and at this level, both art cinema and horror share this position outside the mainstream. It can also be argued that art cinema and horror share the same thematic concerns and demand similar responses from the spectator, particularly in the ways in which both art cinema and horror treat images of the body. Indeed, I first viewed Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's
Un Chien Andalou (1928) and Maya Deren's
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) in a course examining the development of the horror genre. Though this has been met with surprise from academics and fellow students alike, it is not so strange when considering that both art cinema and horror often focus on explorations of the body and its representation onscreen, and often rely on eliciting a bodily response from the spectator. I would argue that it is the main aim of both the avant-garde and art cinema and horror to challenge traditional notions of narrative and therefore provide a space for an alternative experience of the cinema. But the question remains, for what purpose does each cinema achieve this?
Bryan Frye argues that at the heart of experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage's work, in particular his Pittsburgh Trilogy, is a concern with “with metaphysical questions of Being:”ii
The three films:
Eyes,
Deus Ex, and
The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, document the police, a hospital and a morgue, respectively. All focus on the mechanics of the body: how it is ordered in life, how it is repaired when broken, and what remains when the person who animates it has perished.iii
The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes has a particular focus on the body. As Frye describes, the film is set in a morgue and chronicles the process of an autopsy. Hawkins suggests that the film “encourages an uncomfortably visceral reaction in the spectator,”iv while Amos Vogel offers a slightly different perspective on the film's subject matter and Brakhage's possible intent with the work, arguing that “[the film] dispassionately records whatever transpires in front of the lens: bodies sliced length-wise, organs removed, skulls and scalp cut open with electrical tools.”v While the camera may be recording dispassionately, Brakhage, arguably, is not and demands a similarly passionate response from the viewer, especially if, if Frye is correct, Brakhage sought to represent in his work not reality, but the act of perceiving the world. A spectator of
The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes is surely being asked to meditate on the human condition, to bear witness to the decay of the body. While this may not be quite the same intent of the horror film, there is still a focus on the decay of the body, with a demand that the spectator contemplate the demise of their own body.
Many of Brakhage's films, including
The Dead (1960) and
Sirius Remembered (1959), reflect on the decay of the body, and what happens after we die. The Dead, filmed in Le Cimitiere du Père Lachaise in Paris, uses images from the tombs of the dead, while Sirius Remembered uses images of the decay of a family dog after its death. In what way does Brakhage's analyses of death and decay echo the horror film's analysis of the same themes of mortality and human frailty?
In an article published in The Guardian,
Shaun of the Dead writer Simon Pegg had this to say on the subject of zombies:
As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.vi
While Pegg may not be relating this from a perspective of art cinema, what he is suggesting echoes Frye's analysis of Brakhage's Pittsburgh Trilogy – the exploration of death and the decay of the body, and the question of what happens after we die. Not only that, but both Brakhage's films and zombie films such as Edgar Wright's
Shaun of the Dead (2004), George A. Romero's
Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Michele Soavi's
Dellamorte Dellamore (1994) reveal our fear of death and the complex relationship we have to our body – the desire to, and simultaneous fear of, witnessing the body in decay. Not only that, but they also offer an insight into the rituals and processes involved in death. For example, in Romero's film there is a theme of the improper attitude toward the dead – the film opens with a brother and sister visiting the grave of their father. The brother's lack of respect for his father's memory results in his attack by a member of the undead, resulting in him cracking his skull on a tombstone. More than anything else, for the spectator at least, the zombie film is characterised by the human fear of death, and of seeing our mortality and that of our loved ones, but as R.H.W Dillard notes:
The idea of the dead's return to a kind of life is no new idea; it is present in all the ancient tales of vampires and ghouls and zombies, and it has been no stranger to films...All these tales and films spring from that ancient fear of the dead.vii
As Brakhage's films and their release prior to Romero's
Night of the Living Dead will attest, it is not simply Hollywood or even narrative cinema in general that has examined these themes of death and mortality – as an alternative to narrative cinema, the art film can engage directly with the spectator on these themes and privilege emotion and sensation rather than the intellectual processes of film spectatorship. However, as Kyle Bishop points out, the zombie is primarily a visual manifestation of the human fear of mortality, and thus can engage the spectator in a similar way to that of Brakhage and his peers, arguing that “because zombies do not speak, all their intentions and activities are manifested solely through physical action. In other words, because of this sensual limitation, zombies must be watched.”viii What Bishop suggests is that because the zombie is limited to the sensual, so must the spectator. There is virtually nothing to do but watch the degradation of the human body, and watch it attack the living as an extreme metaphor for mortality. Again, this echoes Frye's estimation of the images in Brakhage's
The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes:
The key image of
The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes is quite likely the bluntest statement on the human condition ever filmed. In the course of an autopsy, the skin around the scalp is slit with a scalpel, and in preparation for exposing and examining the brain, the face of each cadaver is literally peeled off, like a mask, revealing the raw meat beneath. That image, once seen, will never leave you.ix
Not only that, but Brakhage also limits his images to the realm of sensation, by not using sound in these particular films. Once again, both the zombie film and Brakhage's exploration of the body both demand a purely visual and emotional response from the spectator at the sight of the body's decay. Though one is placed within a traditional narrative framework, the slow-moving advance of a silent being onscreen arguably disrupts the narrative and goes beyond it – as it asks for nothing more than a sensational response.
Michael Koller writes that within his work, Luis Buñuel reveals perhaps an intention to “shock and insult the intellectual bourgeoisie.”x The film opens with the title
Il etait une fois (Once Upon a Time), then we cut to the image of a barber, played by Buñuel himself, sharpening a razor. He walks outside and looks up at the full moon. We then cut to the barber holding a woman's head in place. Drawing the razor up to her eye, he holds it open. Then, we cut to the full moon being sliced by a cloud, and it seems the spectator can make the assumption that the slicing of the woman's eye will not be shown, the cloud cutting the moon acting as the visual metaphor for what is about to happen to her. Instead, Buñuel cuts back to an extreme close-up of the woman's eye as the razor slices through it, spilling open the contents. It is also worth noting that the eye slicing, for all intents and purposes, is real. Buñuel used a dead calf's eye in place of the woman. This is also not the only scene to feature dead animals – in a later scene a man drags a grand piano piled with dead donkeys.
While this opening image is indeed shocking in its immediacy and proximity to reality, and many fellow students loudly exclaimed with shock and surprise during the viewing in our class on the horror film, there is also another dimension to this scene in the film. This is the boundary between the the body that is seen, and the body that is unseen. There are films in which this boundary is revealed to be flimsy at best and nonexistent at worst. Clover argues that this is also part of the fascination audiences have with the horror film, citing examples from Tobe Hooper's
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974):
Beyond that, the slasher evinces a fascination with flesh or meat itself as that which is hidden from view. When the hitchhiker in Texas Chainsaw 1 slits open his hand for the thrill, the onlookers all recoil in horror – all but Franklin, who seems fascinated by the realisation that all that lies between the visible, knowableoutside of the body and its secret insides is one thin membrane, protected only by a collective taboo against its violation. It is no surprise that the rise of the slasher film is concomitant with the development of special effects that let us see with our own eyes the opened body.xi
Clover argues that the horror film and the slasher film in particular has opened up a new way of seeing the unseen – and that this has changed the way spectators regard depictions of violence onscreen, arguing that in the modern horror film “we see heads being stepped on so that the eyes pop out, a face being flayed, a decapitation, a hypodermic needle penetrating an eyeball in close-up, and so on.”xii Indeed, it appears that she can also add 'eyeballs being sliced with a razor' to the list. She argues that this is a new trend within the cinema and especially the horror film, and that these advances in technology engender a new, more complex spectator response:
With this new explicitness also comes a new tone. If the horror of
Psycho was taken seriously, the “horror” of the slasher films is of a rather more complicated sort. Audiences express uproarious disgust (“gross!”) as often as they express fear, and it is clear that the makers of slasher films pursue the combination.xiii
While Clover's main focus is on the development of the horror film and the pattern of representation of gender within it, she may have overlooked that this phenomenon in film is not limited to the horror film, and neither is it mutually exclusive with advancements in special effects technologies. In 1928, Buñuel and Dali were employing the same techniques that later makers of the slasher film would employ, and it is an effect still experienced in the present. Koller argues that the opening image of Un Chien Andalou is still shocking today, and the reaction of my classmates in the viewing of the film would seem to testify to this. This onscreen fascination with revealing the inner workings of the body produces a particular effect in the spectator and again, the kinds of audience response to these images in both art films such as The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes and Un Chien Andalou in particular is again linked inextricably to the horror film.
In her article 'Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess,' Linda Williams relates that she and her young son look to view films that “promise to be sensational, to give our bodies an actual physical jolt.”xiv These are films often categorised as being 'gross', and she identifies these 'gross' films as belonging to a wider genre she calls body genres. These are films that trade almost exclusively on images designed to elicit a bodily response from the spectator:
What are the pertinent features of bodily excess shared by ...'gross' genres? First, there is the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion...The body spectacle is featured most sensationally in pornography's portrayal of the orgasm, in horror's portrayal of violence and terror, and in the melodrama's portrayal of weeping.xv
For Williams, what separates these genres from other film genres that elicit a physical response from the spectator, such as comedy, is the idea that there is too much emphasis on the physical response on the spectator, and indeed too much emphasis on the spectacle of the body, and this is why they are deemed 'gross': their focus on sensation rather than narrative is what evokes disgust. Not only this, but Williams argues that because of this, spectators feel manipulated by body genre films – they feel they are being, in effect, forced to have an emotional and bodily connection to the images onscreen.xvi
One may suggest, from this, that while avant-garde filmmakers such as Brakhage, Buñuel, Dali, and Deren may on the surface reflect the same thematic concerns and engagement with the spectator as makers of horror films such as Romero, Pegg, Wright, and Hooper, the intention is completely different; artist filmmakers do not seek to manipulate the spectator, but only ask for an alternate way of experiencing the cinema. As Joan Hawkins notes, so the argument goes that films like The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes “use sensational material differently than many body genre films do...[and] are deemed to have a higher cultural purpose, and certainly a different artistic intent.”xvii The first response to that argument is that in the study of spectatorship the emphasis is on the way in which the spectator interprets the images, and not an examination of the intent of the filmmaker. And whether the artistic intent or cultural purpose is different or not, as Joan Hawkins observes, film audiences tend to feel similarly toward art cinema as they do toward horror:
Clearly designed to break the audience's aesthetic distance, the films encourage the kind of excessive physical response that we would generally attribute to horror. Furthermore, their excessive visual force...mark them as subversive. Banned, marginalised through being screened exclusively in museums and classrooms, these are films that most mainstream film patrons will never see.xviii
And while the former is elevated to a higher cultural status than the latter, film audiences traditionally feel a certain amount of frustration with both, because of their existence outside the boundaries of narrative. They are both either banned from public theatres, or restricted to viewing in galleries. Both can be difficult to access for people interested in these films. This frustration with the art film's apparent refusal to have an easily accessible meaning or structure would arguably lead to a similar feeling of manipulation or disgust with the images the spectator is presented with.
Buñuel and Dali both argue that
Un Chien Andalou is a conscious attempt to reject meaning, with Buñuel himself stating that “our only rule was very simple: No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.” Buñuel went even further, explaining that “We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why.”xix This statement is interesting, because when it comes to the cinema and the spectator, it is almost impossible for the consumer of an image not to attempt to make meaning from the images, despite the aim of the producer of the image. The simple act of viewing a film involves deriving meaning from a set of seemingly randomly assembled images. What causes perhaps an alternative viewing experience when the spectator views a film such as
Un Chien Andalou is the refusal of the film's images to allow for meaning or narrative structure, and the spectator's natural desire to derive meaning from the images. Koller asserts that due to the nature of the film and the intent of filmmakers Buñuel and Dali, the film is “open to a myriad of interpretations, rendering such analyses redundant.”xx
The film appears to provide a space in which to contemplate two aspects of the cinema and its engagement with the spectator; the desire to see the unseen, and the extent to which a film can evoke a response from the spectator at a bodily level. The experience of viewing
Un Chien Andalou is apart from that of a narrative film, and this is heightened, perhaps ironically, through the use of the conventional editing techniques of narrative cinema, most notably, devices for the structuring of time (titles such as Once Upon a Time, and 8 Years Later). Dali asserts that the aim of the film is “to disrupt the mental anxiety of the spectator,” and we can already see that the film demands a particular kind of viewing experience separate from traditional narrative films.xxi The film demands an emotional and bodily response, as an intellectual response is refused at all points both within the film and by the filmmakers themselves. In this way, the link between the film and horror is clear. These techniques all serve to evoke a response from the spectator that deals primarily in sensation, not interpretation.
Williams notes that all forms of cinema are characterised by their opposition to conventional narrative cinema:
The repetitive formulas and spectacles of film genres are often defined by their differences from the classical realist style of narrative cinema. These classical films have been characterised as efficient action-centred, goal-oriented linear narratives driven by the desire of a single protagonist, involving one or two lines of action, and leading to definitive closure.xxii
Both art cinema and horror films most often operate outside of the 'classical realist style of narrative cinema.' In this regard we can consider them as belonging to a cinema with an alternative system of constructing meaning from sets of images. Both art films such as
The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes and
Un Chien Andalou and horror films such as
Night of the Living Dead and
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre use images of the body in order to challenge the spectator and evoke an alternative response from them. According to Aristotle, "objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies."xxiii All of the aforementioned films use the reality of the body in such a way as to allow the spectator to witness and reflect on mortality and the unseen parts of the body and in that way also push the boundaries between the cinema screen and the audience. And as Hawkins argues, these can be used to both “challenge and titillate:”xxiv
...one kind of audience pleasure – doesn't necessarily preclude the other. It is possible for someone to be intellectually challenged and physically titillated; and it is possible for someone to simultaneously enjoy both the intellectual and physical stimulation.xxv
Arguably, it is a testament to the power of alternative forms of cinema such as art cinema and body genres such as horror that they can produce both of these sensations in a way that stands apart from the more traditional forms of cinema, and this goes beyond questions of high and low culture and perhaps even gender, as it is a phenomenon that takes place entirely in the body of the spectator engaging with the images onscreen. The images these films produce must not only be watched – they must be felt, too.
So....there are endnotes, but I can't copy them on my computer. They will be here soon, promise.
