Description
Book SynopsisFilm 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. In this provocative new book, Mattias Frey offers a different perspective, exposing how these films are calculated products, designed to achieve global notoriety.
Trade Review"
Extreme Cinema is an outstanding addition to the body of works that investigate the intersection of art cinema, sex, and violence and the intricate relationships among the three."— Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, College of Staten Island, CUNY
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Extreme Cinema enlightens the reader by example … Frey has given film connoisseurs a text book worthy of examination that may even inspire self examination."— Genreonline.net
"[The book] arrives at a juncture in which one form of extreme cinema studies is perhaps at its end. Frey convincingly demonstrates how scholars’ appeal to an ideal spectator, use of unrefined affect theories, and overemphasis on aesthetics often generates tautological conclusions."— Canadian Review of Comparative Literature
"Frey’s well researched and precise discursive analysis on extreme cinema laid the first stone to further industrial and aesthetic investigations."— Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
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Extreme Cinema delves into what it is that motivates these film makers and our general fascination with this body of film works that exploit sex, violence, and art in an almost voyeuristic way."— Horrornews.net
“In this lively, detailed analysis of ‘taboo cinema,’ Mattias Frey views ‘extreme cinema’ from an entirely new angle, offering rich insights into contemporary violence and cruelty on the screen.”— Wheeler Winston Dixon, author of Black and White Cinema: A Short History
Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1 Transgression and Distinction: Filmmaker Discourses2 The Aesthetic Embrace and the Cynicism Criticism: Reception Discourses3 The Rhetoric and Role of Film Festivals4 Discourses and Modes of Distribution5 The Interpretations of Regulation6 The Added Value of International Distribution7 Sex, Violence, and Self-Exoticization8 Aesthetic Innovation and the Real: Academic Debate over Sexually Graphic Art Films9 A Discursive Approach to Hardcore Art CinemaAfterwordNotesSelect BibliographyIndex
