The critic truffle-snuffing for trends might call it the New French Extremity, this recent tendency to the willfully transgressive by directors like François Ozon, Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux—and now, alas, Dumont. Bava as much as Bataille, Salò no less than Sade seem the determinants of a cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement. Images and subjects once the provenance of splatter films, exploitation flicks, and porn—gang rapes, bashings and slashings and blindings, hard-ons and vulvas, cannibalism, sadomasochism and incest, fucking and fisting, sluices of cum and gore—proliferate in the high-art environs of a national cinema whose provocations have historically been formal, political, or philosophical (Godard, Clouzot, Debord) or, at their most immoderate (Franju, Buñuel, Walerian Borowczyk, Andrzej Zulawski), at least assimilable as emanations of an artistic movement (Surrealism mostly). Does a kind of irredentist spirit of incitement and confrontation, reviving the hallowed Gallic traditions of the film maudit, of épater les bourgeois and amour fou, account for the shock tactics employed in recent French cinema? Or do they bespeak a cultural crisis, forcing French filmmakers to respond to the death of the ineluctable (French identity, language, ideology, aesthetic forms) with desperate measures? –James Quandt, Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema (2004) via artforum

James Quandt is a Canadian film critic associated with the Cinematheque of Ontario. He is a connoisseur of French director Robert Bresson.

Digression: I recently viewed Bresson’s Pickpocket and Au hasard Balthazar and although I really wanted to, I could not get into them. The reason I viewed these films is that a number of people who’s opinions/films I respect (Austrian director Michael Haneke, American director Paul Schrader, film critic Girish Shambu and American writer Dennis Cooper) are self-proclaimed fans of Bresson. There is no accounting for taste and I only do appreciative criticism, but a reason for my not really liking Bresson is that the two films I’ve seen lack a certain sensationalism that I appreciate in the films of – for example – Haneke. To conclude this post, I’d like to quote French film critic Ado Kyrou:

They can keep their Bressons and their Cocteaus. The cinematic, modern marvelous is popular, and the best and most exciting films are, beginning with Méliès and Fantômas, the films shown in local fleapits, films which seem to have no place in the history of cinema.