Screening the Unwatchable
Also by Asbjørn Grønstad TO BECOME THE SELF ONE IS: A Critical Companion to a Saloonkeeper's Daughter (co-edited with Lene Johannessen) TRANSFIGURATIONS: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema COVERSCAPING: Discovering Album Aesthetics (co-edited with Øyvind Vågnes)
Screening the Unwatchable Spaces of Negation in Post=Millennial Art Cinema Asbjørn Grønstad Palgrave macmillan
* Asbj0rn Gr11mstad 2012 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-24894-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-32064-6 DOI 10.1057/9780230355859 ISBN 978-0-230-35585-9 (ebook) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 21 20 19 7 6 5 18 17 16 4 15 3 2 14 13 1 12
For Željka
Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Against Commodification: Unwatchable Cinema and the Question of Ethics 2 Entropic Cinema, or Trouble Every Day 3 Bodies, Landscapes, and the Tropology of Inertia 4 Spaces of Impropriety 5 The Metapornographic Imagination 6 "Be Here to See This:" Haneke's Intrusive Images Postscript Selected Filmography Selected Bibliography Notes Index viii ix 1 15 43 57 84 121 ISO 163 165 166 177 204 vii
List of Illustrations 1.1 Ulrich Seidl, Hundstage (2001) 33 1.2 Ulrich Seidl, Hundstage (2001) 33 3.1 Bruno Dumont, Twentynine Palms (2003) 72 3.2 Bruno Dumont, Twentynine Palms (2003) 74 3.3 Bruno Dumont, Twentynine Palms (2003) 74 3.4 Bruno Dumont, Twentynine Palms (2003) 76 3.5 Bruno Dumont, Twentynine Palms (2003) 76 3.6 Bruno Dumont, Twentynine Palms (2003) 77 3.7 Bruno Dumont, Twentynine Palms (2003) 77 3.8 Bruno Dumont, Twentynine Palms (2003) 80 3.9 Bruno Dumont, Twentynine Palms (2003) 80 4.1 Michael Haneke, La Pianiste (2001) 107 4.2 Michael Haneke, La Pianiste (2001) 108 4.3 Michael Haneke, La Pianiste (2001) 108 4.4 Claire Denis, Trouble Every Day (2001) 114 4.5 Claire Denis, Trouble Every Day (2001) 115 4.6 Claire Denis, Trouble Every Day (2001) 115 5.1 Ming-liang Tsai, The Wayward Cloud (2005) 133 5.2 Ming-liang Tsai, The Wayward Cloud (2005) 135 5.3 Ming-liang Tsai, The Wayward Cloud (2005) 135 5.4 Ming-liang Tsai, The Wayward Cloud (2005) 136 5.5 Ming-liang Tsai, The Wayward Cloud (2005) 137 5.6 Ming-liang Tsai, The Wayward Cloud (2005) 137 5.7 Lukas Moodysson, A Hole in My Heart (2004) 139 5.8 Lukas Moodysson, A Hole in My Heart (2004) 146 5.9 Lukas Moodysson, A Hole in My Heart (2004) 147 5.10 Lukas Moodysson, A Hole in My Heart (2004) 148 viii
Acknowledgments For their various contributions to this book, I owe a debt of gratitude to numerous individuals and institutions. Initial research was undertaken with the support of The Research Council of Norway, which granted me a postdoctoral fellowship for the period 2004-7. This allowed me to commence work on what turned out to be a series of pilot studies for this book and to publish a number of articles, some of which have been refashioned for this book. I would like to thank The English Department at the University of Bergen (which has later morphed into the Department of Modern Languages), for hosting me at an early stage of the research process, as well as The Department of Information Science and Media Studies at University of Bergen, for asking me to join their ranks as a postdoctoral fellow early in 2004, an invitation I somewhat tardily accepted the following year. Special thanks go to the then-chair ]ostein Gripsrud for gracefully negotiating this transition, which also involved another colleague. While working on this project I have been fortunate enough to be invited to some exceptionally inspirational research environments in Europe and the United States. Thus, I wish to thank Eloe Kingma and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis for inviting me as a visiting scholar to the University of Amsterdam in the spring of 2005; Carol Clover and the Film and Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley, for inviting me as a visiting scholar for the 2006-7 academic year, and finally Mark Sandberg for inviting me to yet again be a visiting professor in the Department of Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley, in the spring and summer of 2011. Thanks also to the Pacific Film Archive for their excellent and swift assistance. The superb research facilities and unique intellectual atmosphere in Berkeley cannot be praised enough, and I consider myself extremely privileged to have been able to spend all this time here during vital stages of my research. This book was completed in the Doe and Moffitt libraries, the coffee shops around Shattuck and Telegraph (Tully's and Royal Ground in particular), and in our house on Ward Street. I am furthermore indebted to The Department of Media, Culture and Society at the University of Stavanger, which appointed me a professor of Visual Culture in the fall of 2007. Part of the research for the book was ix
x Acknowledgments conducted during my brief tenure there. Around the same time, The Bergen Research Foundation appointed me principal investigator and director of a new research center in Visual Culture. The foundation was instituted in 2004 through an extraordinary donation from Trond Mohn, and its generous grant allowed me to establish the Nomadikon project and center in the fall of 2008. This funding has been instrumental not only in providing me with research time to write this book but also in stimulating the growth of a prolific and wonderfully resourceful environment for visual culture studies in Bergen. Screening the Unwatchable is the first book-length Nomadikon publication. I also wish to express my gratitude to The Faculty of Social Science at the University of Bergen, for kindly co-financing the Nomadikon project, and I would like to extend my thanks to the incomparable administrative staff at both faculty and department levels: Hege Hansen, Ase Netland Rolland, and Gunnar Storeb0 from the former, and Dag Elgesem, Wenche Fmre, Gjatmd Kalas, Rune Arntsen, Einar Fiskvik, Eirik 0rn, and 0ygunn Friestad from the latter. This project has generated a number of academic papers, given at various conferences around the world, and I am grateful for all the input provided by numerous commentators. I also want to acknowledge the valuable insights and suggestions contributed by Palgrave Macmillan's anonymous reviewers, which truly helped shape my own arguments and ideas. I would also like to thank Emily Salz, for first approaching me about submitting a manuscript to Palgrave Macmillan, as well as the publisher's other associates who so expertly have overseen the development of the project at various stages: Vicky Lee, Christabel Scaife, Felicity Plester, and Catherine Mitchell. Finally, I want to thank my friends and colleagues in Bergen and around the world for their fraternal spirit and many contributions both academic and social: my Nomadikon teammates 0yvind Vagnes, Tonje Haugland S0rensen, Henrik Gustafsson, Pauline Hoath, and Synn0ve Vik; the members of the research group in Visual Studies and Media Aesthetics, among them Hilde Arntsen, Rolf Halse, Kristine Jorgensen, ]ens Kjeldsen, Rune Klevjer, Leif Ove Larsen, and Erlend Lavik; the affiliates of the Nomadikon project, Mieke Bal, W. ]. T. Mitchell, Martin Jay, Marquard Smith, Joanne Morra, Arild Fetveit, and ]ann Matlock; Linda Williams for her comments and advice; and last but not least some colleagues who also happen to be my good friends: Ruben Moi, Zeljka Svrljuga, Knut Kolnar, Charles Armstrong, and, once again 0yvind Vagnes, for their enduring friendship. While working on this project I have experienced the unparalleled joy of watching my family grow from two members to five. Sunniva was
Acknowledgments xi born in 2005, as the research was in an early phase. Sebastian arrived in 2008, just two weeks before the launch of the Nomadikon project. Joanna came in 2010, just as this book neared its completion. It is no exaggeration to say that the gestation of this research project has been accompanied by a constant profusion of diapers, spittle, and sleepless nights. We have however been lucky enough to have our own unique helper; I owe many thanks to Bodil Pedersen for looking after the little ones so that their parents may get some more research done. My deepest thanks go to Sunniva, Sebastian, Joanna, and Stephanie, for giving me so much happiness. Fragments of this manuscript have been previously published in a different form. A slightly altered version of Chapter 2 has appeared as "On the Unwatchable" in The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe, eds Tanya Horeck and Tina Kendall, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. The part on Catherine Breillat's Anatomie de l'enfer in Chapter 4 was published as "Abject Desire: L'anatomie de l'enfer and the Unwatchable" in Studies in French Cinema, 6.2, 2006. Another segment of the same chapter was published as "Tact and Tactility: On Jane Campion's In the Cut," in American, British and Canadian Studies, 10, 2008. Finally, Chapter 6 has been published as "Downcast Eyes: Michael Haneke and the Cinema of Intrusion," in Nordicom Review, 29.1, 2008. The author would like to extend his thanks to these publishers and editors for their kind permission to reprint this material. Berkeley, April 1, 2011.