While various ‘realist’ orientated films have been regarded as grotesque from an evaluative critical standpoint in which the grotesque is used as a means to symptomatically redress the representations and content of certain films, realist films have not been explored and analyzed for engendering strategies of the grotesque from an aesthetic standpoint. Although there are points in which there is crossover between the concept of the grotesque as a means of critical evaluation and the grotesque as aesthetic concept, there is distinction in the emphasis. The point of emphasis largely rests on the way in which the imagery is aesthetically engaged and addressed. Is the imagery being aesthetically engaged as a symptom that is indicative of a prevailing politics in which the critic employs the grotesque as a critical concept adjectivally or adverbially in an attempt to redress some issue revolving around the politics of representation? Or, is it being aesthetically engaged from a more art historical standpoint in which the grotesque is regarded as a distinctive aesthetic category or tradition – a style, a form, a genre, a means, a mode – that intertextually shares a lineage and a past with other works of art and culture? While there are points in which these two approaches bleed into one another, the emphasis of this thesis is firmly entrenched with the latter of the two approaches.
This thesis approaches its subject matter largely from a formal perspective which tends to focus on the film as art and filmmakers as intentionally motivated creative agents. I draw heuristically on a number of formally orientated approaches, methods and theories to assist my exploration of the grotesque and realist aesthetics of Clark’s and Korine’s oeuvre. The assorted approaches that I employ to assist my exploration largely revolve around the various methods outlined in the previous subsection above.
Moreover, I accept the general view that the moving image remains more capable than other art forms to “render accurate, life-like representations of places, people, and objects: visible, everyday reality.”145 I also recognize, in some cases, like
Bazin argued, that the art of the moving image not only sometimes depends on the “exploitation of the close connection” between the imagery and the referent, that is, which the image represents and depicts, it also exploits the power of the moving image to capture and reflect the social, cultural, and historical fidelity and verisimilitude of its subject matter audiovisually.146 With that being said, the moving image is still a medium, an art, which is crafted – shaped, organized, structured, and manipulated – using tools and materials by filmmakers and technicians, which is conceived through their imagination and vision before being realized through their techniques and skills. Even the most sober and gritty realist has to utilize a proverbial palette in order to manipulate the conditions in such a way that their work adheres to aesthetic, cultural, and historical expectations of that mode and form of filmmaking. A realist film, while in some ways understated in its perceptible style, is achieved formally and is as stylized as a surrealist film, a psychedelic film, or a science-fiction or fantasy film. Thus, not only do I primarily approach the films being discussed and examined from a broadly formal perspective, I also engage the films with formativist assumptions.147
Moreover, while in the wider context of contemporary narrative filmmaking these films are unconventional and experimental, they did not emerge from an artistic or cultural vacuum. These films and filmmakers share an artistic, industrial, as well as a cultural past, and while the focus of this thesis are the films nominated above, I do adduce a number of other films from outside the designated time period from film history – primarily, but not entirely, from the contemporary or modern era in the wider sense of the term – that have influenced, inspired, or appear to share a tradition with the films that are the centerpieces of this research project.
145 Op. Cit., Allen and Gomery 68. 146 Ibid., 68, 70.
147 Ibid., 68-69. For an explanation and detailed discussion of ‘formativism’ see Dudley Andrew’s, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1976. 11-103).
I approach the grotesque in films quite similarly to some of the predominant approaches to Surrealism in film with regards to what constitutes a Surrealist film rather than an otherwise non-Surrealist film that has surreal moments or inflections. The presence of the grotesque in cinema tends to be manifest in moments rather than across the majority, let alone the entirety, of a whole film. That is not to say that an entire film cannot be considered grotesque but such a consideration will be the consequence of the power of those moments, or even moment, of the grotesque rather than solely through a statistical ratio of grotesque to non-grotesque moments. Similarly, many of the film critics and historians whose locus of study is Surrealist film tend to agree that there are very few films that are wholly Surrealist, but that many films incorporate surrealist elements in otherwise realist films. Linda Williams attributes Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (France, 1929) and L’Age d’Or (France, 1930) as the centerpiece works of the Surrealist canon, yet observes a strong presence in the films of Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Louis Feuillade, and Georges Méliès, whom Williams acknowledges as instantiating the “Surrealist essence of cinema”.148 In addition to the films of Buñuel, Thomas Sheehan
also identifies the films of Jean Cocteau and Alain Resnais as Surrealist filmmakers proper. Similarly, although Sheehan falls just short of attributing the slapstick and farcical comedy films of Chaplin, Keaton, and the Marx Brothers as being surrealist, he does acknowledge that their films were of great influence and inspiration to the Surrealist filmmakers. In addition to this, Sheehan asserts that even aspects of films such as The African Queen (Huston, U.K., 1951) is imbued with “moments” of “pure surrealism” in the way that the films conveys the “comical-magical absurd” earnestly and without any sense of self-reflexive irony.149 Whereas William Earle
corroborates the films of Buñuel and Cocteau as representing the “perfect” Surrealist films, he also includes the films of Alain Resnais, René Clair, and Man Ray amongst the canon.150 And like Williams and Sheehan, Earle observes that while the films of Keaton,
Chaplin, and the Marx Brothers are themselves not Surrealist films per se, they are
148 Linda Williams, “The Critical Grasp: Buñuelian Cinema and Its Critics” (Ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli. Dada and Surrealist Film. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987/1996. 200).
149 William Earle, Surrealism in Film: Beyond the Realist Sensibility (New Brunswick: Precedent, 1987. 9, 65-
76).
filmmakers much “beloved” by the Surrealists proper.151
While there is relative agreement as to the filmmakers and films that belong to the canon of Surrealist filmmakers amongst historians and critics, the pantheon of filmmakers and films that faithfully or expertly incorporate surrealist elements or principles are far more varied according to the same critics and historians. The grotesque in film is quite similar, albeit there is no established canon. However, if there were, I would venture to suggest that the canon would be even more infinitesimal than that of Surrealism. There are very few films that I would ascribe as being unequivocally ‘grotesque films’ or films that are almost entirely grotesque. Indeed the filmmaker and handful of films that has the strongest case for being argued as qualifying as such are a number of films from Jan Švankmajer’s oeuvre such as The
Last Trick (Czechoslovakia, 1964) and Dimensions of Dialogue (Czechoslovakia, 1982).
Švankmajer integrates a variety of artisanal mediums including puppetry, stop motion animation, as well as conventional live action filmmaking. But arguably, while many of Švankmajer’s films are exemplars of grotesque films, they are not solely grotesque insofar that they also incorporate other aesthetic styles and modes such as surrealism, satire, and the uncanny, quite often in equal measure.
What many films have are grotesque elements, pregnant moments which are undeniably grotesque situated amongst content and subject matter that would not otherwise be considered grotesque. Andrew Spicer’s observations regarding the widely diffused and dispersed presence of surrealism, observed particularly in British cinema, is transferable here in relation to my own observations regarding the grotesque.152 This tends to be manifested in one of two ways: either the presence of the grotesque in cinema is far more often than not a momentary and occasional quality or feature rather than a persistent or overarching one that dominates the content of a film, such is the case in the majority of gory horror films and gross-out comedies respectively; or the grotesque is a constant aspect of a broadly realist melodramatic
151 Ibid., 65.
152 Andrew Spicer, “An Occasional Eccentricity: The Strange Course of Surrealism in British Cinema” (Eds.
Graeme Harper and Rob Stone. The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. 113).
film in which a severely deformed character which is entirely sympathetic struggle in their attempts to attain some sense of ‘normality’. This includes films like The
Elephant Man (Lynch, U.S.A., 1980) and Mask (Bogdanovich, U.S.A., 1985).
Michael Richardson similarly points out the way in which the pervasiveness of surrealism has resulted in filmmakers regularly eliciting “surrealist effects” by employing what Richardson just stops short of referring to as canned or cliché surrealist strategies.153 Again, this also reflects the general status of the grotesque in
film and the way in which it is aesthetically employed within narrative filmmaking. Intriguingly, Richardson elaborates another point regarding surrealism that has parallels with the grotesque, which relates to the tenuous, or “amorphous ‘thing’” as Richardson puts it, that surrealism has become, which has eroded its status as an accurate or adequate descriptor, let alone as a distinctive category. He points out that the term is often “attributed by critics to certain films or directors” because of the convenience it serves in facilitating a particular line of analysis in which they want to follow.154 The grotesque is no different in this sense. Whereas the grotesque has a
dynamic and multifarious aesthetic history in both literature and the visual arts, it is also a concept that has come to be drafted in by critics for evaluative purposes. Most commonly, it is a term used to pejoratively describe something that elicits an extreme sense of abnormality, disgust, or moral approbation in the symptomatic critical analysis of representation that relates to some external social reality. In these cases the use of the grotesque does not always correspond to the objective status of the thing in question inasmuch as it does the politicized subjective inclinations of the critic’s own tastes, judgments, and/or world view. This is something that will be addressed in more detail in my chronicling of the grotesque in cinema, which will be CHAPTER 4.
However, while the surreal or grotesque moments of a film may not dominate a film quantitatively, as with many films that have memorable surrealist passages or a multitude of surrealist moments in a prevailingly non-Surrealist film, they can
153 Michael Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006. 72). 154 Ibid., 72.
nevertheless become the most memorable, even the defining aspect of a film. Again, Richardson observes that, by extension, a prevailing sense of the surreal can be texturally integrated amidst other perceptible aesthetic elements so that its:
…surrealist elements are striking precisely because they cannot be reduced to surrealism. One cannot say of it ‘this is a surrealist film’ because the surrealism is layered into it and inseparable from its overall impact, but represents a surrealism extended and contagiously present within something that is at the same time other than
surrealism.155
Likewise, when the grotesque moments of an otherwise non-grotesque film are plentiful or emblematic of a film in a memorable way, the film will often qualify as a grotesque film in the same way that this occurs with films being ascribed as surrealist. Many films that have a prevailing sense of the grotesque are texturally integrated amidst other perceptible aesthetic elements and textures that invoke or refer to other styles, forms, or movements. For example, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychedelic counterculture films – El Topo (Mexico, 1970) and The Holy Mountain (Mexico/U.S.A., 1973) – have a prevailing sense of grotesque and the surreal; John Waters’ low-budget melodramas – Pink Flamingos (U.S.A., 1972), Female Trouble (U.S.A., 1974), and
Desperate Living (U.S.A., 1977) – have a prevailing sense of camp and kitsch in
conjunction with the grotesque; David Cronenberg’s films portraying symbiosis or synthesis between organic and non- organic life forms – Shivers (Canada, 1975), Rabid
(Canada, 1977), and Videodrome (Canada, 1983) – have a prevailing sense of the grotesque, the horrific, and the erotic; the slapstick gore of the early films of Sam Raimi – The Evil Dead (U.S.A., 1981) and Evil Dead II (U.S.A., 1987) – and Peter Jackson
– Bad Taste (New Zealand, 1987), Meet the Feebles (New Zealand, 1990), and Dead
Alive (New Zealand, 1992) – have a prevailing sense of the grotesque, the horrific,
and the comic; while the films of Clark and Korine have a prevailing sense of the grotesque that is texturally situated in conjunction with a prevailing sense of realism.