Extreme Cinema

Front matter

Affective Strategies in Transnational Media

Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp

Affective Strategies in Transnational Media

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

2 Hearing: With a Touch of Sound—The Affective Charge of Audio

Chapter I Introduction: What Is Extreme Cinema?

What is extreme cinema? That is the question we intend to explore. In the decade leading up to the millennium, and in the years since then, we have witnessed the emergence of films that have pushed against, if not breached, conventions regarding the treatment of sex and violence in the cinema. For instance, self-appointed morality police, exasperated film scholars and critics decried films such as Eli Roth’s 2005 film Hoste/—charging the film with being too excessive, and dismissing it as “pornographic,” “sadistic,” or both. If nothing else, the near hysterical response to extreme cinema reveals that it appeals to the visceral experience of the viewer. And repeatedly, these films are accused of disregarding narrative conventions in favor of grandiose spectacles of gore and violence that play to the spectator’s baser senses. Extreme cinema, then, is frequently associated with excessive brands of horror, or trends, for instance, in contemporary French cinema (or “New French Extremity” as James Quandt called it) featuring elements of brutal violence sometimes coupled with graphic sexual imagery.! We have no intention of disabusing the reader of these presumptions regarding extreme cinema, but would add to this, among other things, humor—the kind that makes one laugh so much it hurts. Furthermore, while the content of extreme cinema attracts considerable attention, and might be its most obvious feature, in many instances these films also experiment with form—composition, audio design, editing strategies. We survey here a wide range of international films that might be associated with extreme cinema.”

We take Linda Williams’s landmark essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” as something of a touchstone.* Williams positions melodrama, horror, and pornography as the tripartite group of films that constitute the body genres. In all cases the spectator is invited to viscerally share in the experience of ecstatic screen-bodies. Melodrama might elicit tears, pornography intends to sexually arouse, and horror might startle us, making us jump from our seats, gasp, cringe, or avert our eyes at the sight of gore. In contemporary American horror, dubbed torture porn—Saw and Hostel being the most representative films of this type—bodies are torn asunder, wrenched, and contorted. Spectators obviously are not subjected to grievous bodily injury, but they are nevertheless compelled to mimic onscreen violence—flinching, tensing up, wrenching the body away from the depiction of pain. There is in that sense a degree of violence inflicted upon the viewer.

A number of scholars have taken up the subject of horror’s, and extreme cinema’s, capacity to affect spectators’ bodies in ways that explicitly and implicitly engage Williams’s concept. For instance, Angela Ndalianis’s concept of the “horror sensorium” is rooted in her argument that films enable us to “extract meaning from our bodies.”* Indeed, one of the most common threads running through many of the edited volumes on extreme cinema is the interaction between the images onscreen and the bodies of spectators. What we wish to emphasize in particular, though, is the different types of responses that these films can elicit for different spectators. Take for instance the phenomena of “reaction” videos posted on YouTube (or some other hosting service)—where usually a static camera is trained on a small group of people recording their reaction to a film. In Watching “A Serbian Film” (Reaction Video), posted on the TwistedChimp YouTube channel, three young men sit on a couch to watch, as the title suggests, Srdjan Spasojevic’s 2010 extreme film A Serbian Film.® To start, the young men share playful fraternal banter, but as Spasojevic’s film progresses (which is offscreen) the young men become increasingly agitated—anxiously bouncing their legs, mouths falling gaping open, hands thrown up over their mouth and eyes, the young man to the far right, his arms tightly folded, rocking back and forth before he retreats altogether. Reaction videos such as this exemplify the sensorial experience associated with extreme cinema. But sensorial experience is hardly a uniform phenomenon; some spectators respond quite differently—with laughter, for instance. Reaction videos frequently have nothing to do (or very little) with the films screened, but rather intend to record the visceral responses to the films. And insofar as reaction videos are preoccupied with capturing “involuntary bodily responses” on video, as Helen Hester argues—despite the fact that the “offending” material is offscreen—these might nonetheless be considered pornographic because they record the involuntary spasms of the body.’

Films, and this is particularly true of extreme cinema, potentially manipulate the viewing body (as documented in reaction videos), and we have established colloquialisms that express the implicit violence inflicted upon us: we refer to the weepie as a “tear jerker,” in cruder terms we might say that a horror film “scared the shit out of me,” and, as Williams adds, with pornography “some people might be inclined to ‘jerk off.’”® Where we part company with Williams is her exclusion of humor from the body genres. She argues that body genres necessitate a degree of identification with the character in the throes of sensation. Comedy, Williams argues, usually features a character that we are invited to laugh at, not mith. We accept Williams’s position, and we would not presume to “correct” her, that is not our intention. For our purposes here we are largely concerned with the viewing body, and the ways in which extreme cinema affects it—suffice it to say that humor, and particularly its more grotesque forms, can be deeply affecting, causing the spectator to “roll” with laughter, cry, or to bend over in involuntary spasm.

Extreme cinema hosts the body at the far reaches of the human experience— from the ecstasy of pleasure to excruciating pain. And it is precisely because these experiences mark the extremities of the human sensorial spectrum that they also tend to fall outside the bounds of coded systems. Laughing is an embodied utterance without a signified, as is a furrowed brow, or the aversion of one’s eyes—these are “expressions” of the body. Sexual ecstasy is expressed in animalistic terms—grunts, panting, “uh”—and if discernible words are uttered they might be “empty” of meaning as such—an expletive (“fuck,” “shit,” “oh god”) heavily laden with artifacts of the body (guttural). Sex is frequently described as an experience where one loses one’s self, the temporary effacement of boundaries—the French, as is often cited, refer to orgasm as /a petite mort (the small death).

Robert Stam, in his application of Bakhtinian ideas, suggests that the erotic encounter can be viewed as a “conversation” between bodies—physiological arousal, the involuntary spasms and eruptions might be characterized as the language of the body. And this exchange is not limited to those within the diegetic universe, but anticipates the spectator’s contribution to the “conversation” as well. The erotic film invites an “interplay of sexually speaking (or listening) subjects, persons engaged in literal or metaphorical dialogue.”? Stam pushes this further, asserting that “sex itself can be regarded as a kind of language. If we take seriously Bakhtin’s idea that all human acts, including non-verbal ones, are ‘potential texts’” then the possibility for a language of the body opens up. “Within the body, transmitters speed across synapses, neurons signal, and messages race from the erogenous zones to the brain and back again. Even corporeal secretions are communicative, constituting transmissions from the inner self to the outer body and to the other.” The body’s reflexive responses to what the subject finds arousing, while not “properly” signifying, then, nonetheless speak the body and “say” something. Stam continues, “The body in arousal exhibits indexical signs of desire; it sweats, stretches, reaches out, opens up, lubricates, thereby making way for erotic dialogue.” ”

At the other end of the spectrum is pain, but it shares similar characteristics in its corporal expressions. “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it,” Elaine Scarry insists in the opening of her book The Body in Pain, “bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”!! Screams, grunts, crying, the utterances associated with pain, like laughter or sex, signify within the sensorial system, and thus “voice” nothing. The cinematic, with its aesthetic arsenal, might “articulate” or elicit that which has no intelligible “voice,” through the form of the medium (color, audio design, composition, editing), rather than through conventional communicative modes (narrative). These ruptures of the expressive body in the narrative are some of the things that we would like to highlight in the present volume. And it is not necessarily as simple as documenting copulation, or presenting the spectator with a “disgusting object” that elicits the sensorial experience; rather, it might include the mobilization of cinematic aesthetics—in a word, stylized.'? But to be clear, this is not to mean that there is an extreme style as such.

We might suggest, then, that what differentiates the films that we call “extreme cinema” from that which is merely violent or pornographic is an emphasis on cinematic form. Consider for a moment why Julia Kristeva gives Louis-Ferdinand Céline considerable attention. It is not simply that Ceéline’s writing is filled with violent imagery, and laced with vicious anti-Semitic hatred; rather, what Kristeva calls our attention to is the form that Céline’s writing takes—brimming with hyper-stylized passages. It is not just what Céline says, but kow he says it that matters; abjection resides in form, it is not simply content that is at stake. Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine is a brilliant introduction to Kristeva’s theory of abjection—and her landmark text undeniably helped to popularize the application of Kristeva’s approach to that which prompts dread, or horror. To stop at Creed’s text, though, does Kristeva’s theory a fundamental disservice. As an introduction The Monstrous- Feminine is immensely helpful, but to locate the nuance of the abject requires that one go beyond Creed’s application of it. The explanatory power of Creed’s text derives from its localization of the abject in things, in representations—blood, menstruation, the undead, a corpse.! The abject is not a thing, nor is it a representation; it is a non-object, a feeling without a signified. It is not the corpse that prompts abjection, but rather how the corpse is presented. The Monstrous-Feminine invites us to ask the wrong question. It is not what is abject? Rather, what we should be asking is, kow is it abject? The abject is not found in content; rather, it is found in form. Thus, we should take careful stock of the form that extreme cinema utilizes. It is not simply that extreme cinema includes highly graphic scenes of sex and violence, but rather that in certain instances these films render excessive elements in highly stylized manners. To put this into the language of Deleuze, extreme cinema operates according to the “violence of sensation.”

Although the present volume is contextualized geographically—a transnational survey of extreme cinema—we have elected not to organize it according to national cinemas, or regional cinemas, but rather to consider these films under thematic headings. Admittedly this is in part an effort to sidestep the rather thorny questions of national origins.'* Roughly following Williams’s example, we have elected to partition extreme cinema thematically: the body in pain (horror), graphic depictions of sex (pornography), and crying (melodrama). In addition to this we add body-genre-inspired themes of audio design (hearing), and (grotesque) humor in extreme cinema.

EXTREME CINEMA AND AFFECT

One of the defining tropes of extreme cinema is its affective charge. As a result, in many instances extreme cinema is not governed according to narrative conventions (narrative arcs driven by character motivation), and instead emphasizes spectacles. This is certainly not true in every case, but we have found that extreme films tend to be more episodic—stringing together a series of highly embellished sequences. If not episodic in structure, then, extreme cinema might host abrupt ruptures in the diegetic narrative—experiments in form and/or composition (editing, extreme close-ups, visual disorientation, sounds that straddle the boundary between non-diegetic and diegetic registers), the exhibition of intense violence, acute intimacy with bodies in the throes of sex.!> Like episodic forms such as the musical or pornography, extreme cinema frequently showcases set cinematic numbers that flood sensory channels with auditory and/or visual stimuli.'® Whether an individual extreme film is episodic in nature, or plays host to a rupture in the cinematic narrative, these “breaks” generally are meant to elicit the sensual experience in the viewer. Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2010 film Kokuhaku (Confessions) is particularly emblematic of this turn toward the episodic—relaying a string of confessions about the murder of a child. Strikingly similar in form, Lars Von Triers Nymphomaniac Volume I and Volume IT (2013) unfolds also as a series of confessions, or if not confessions, then “tell-all” accounts of the central character’s sexual history.

Williams is particularly productive in our discussion of extreme cinema, not only for her work on horror, but also for her foundational work on pornography.!” In Hard Core, Williams carefully distinguishes between hardcore porn and horror, for hardcore is “the visual (and sometimes aural) representation of living, moving bodies engaged in explicit, usually unfaked, sexual acts with a primary intent of arousing viewers.”!® Though heterosexual hardcore pornography, which Williams spends the bulk of her book analyzing, is typically oriented toward male spectators, it is the spectacle of female bodies that is the genre’s focus. This is a trait that hardcore shares with horror, in which the target audience tends to be male, and the victims female, as epitomized by Carol Clover’s concept of the “final girl.”!? As Clover argues, however, the nature of arousal in horror is complicated, for the male spectator’s identification fluctuates between the monster/killer and the “final girl,” the woman in peril who ultimately takes control of her destiny and audience identification. Williams describes this as an “oscillation between masochistic and sadistic poles.””° This reference to sadism and masochism lends itself to an exploration of torture porn and extreme cinema, but first we shall look further at the distinction Williams draws between pornography and horror.

The primary impulse behind early hardcore pornography, Williams argues, was to make visible that which had previously been unseen: “the desire of the male performer and viewer to probe the wonders of the unseen world of the female body.”! Ultimately, this leads to attempts to document the female orgasm. This accounts for why the female body becomes the visual and aural focus of hardcore, despite the fact that it has traditionally been geared toward heterosexual male viewers. The key to hardcore is the “unfaked, unstaged mechanics of sexual action . . . [which] is shaped . . . by techniques of confession that are applied first and foremost to female bodies.””” This “confession” of the female body is similar to the involuntary spasms that the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot documented in female patients who, he claimed, suffered from hysteria.” In other words, central to the pleasure of hardcore is the viewer bearing witness to the involuntary movements of women’s bodies, confessional spasms of pleasure derived from physical stimulation. Torture porn and extreme cinema seem to work in a related way, in that they revolve around the spectacle of bodies convulsing with spasms of pain. Furthermore, by focusing on bodies being ripped apart, sometimes showing internal organs in extreme detail, torture porn also seems to “probe the wonders of [an] unseen world.” There are key differences, however: in torture porn, the bodies are more likely to be male than female,”* and the torture in these films is all simulated.

One might wonder then if “porn” is really an adequate descriptor for this particular cycle within the horror genre. Indeed, as Williams points out, part of the charge of hardcore is its indexical nature, its connection to the real. The viewer of hardcore pornography witnesses actual sex acts: real bodies in ecstatic movement, and through the “money shot,” the cinematic staging of the male orgasm, the genuine “confession” of a (male) body. But the viewer of torture porn knows that the mutilation and gore, however realistic it might be, is nothing more than “movie magic.” These are actors, and the carnage is created with make-up and special effects. Perhaps the key, then, is in the focus on non-narrative elements—the spectacle of bodies in pleasure/pain—and in the way that the films affect the bodies of spectators. As we will explore in

Chapter 2, sound design plays an instrumental role in giving audiences this affective charge, but so too does the presentation of the body.

The violent numbers in torture porn draw on the choreography of the pornographic genre to stage acts of extreme violence. In addition, like the episodic structure of pornography, torture porn films, as some critics and scholars are so keen to point out,” are little more than a string of violent vignettes with hardly a shred of narrative motivation. Following the contours of pornographic choreography, torture numbers generally begin with taunting (foreplay), the infliction of grievous bodily injury (meat shot), and culminate with the ejection of bodily fluids, usually blood (money shot). The body, which is subject to torture, is seen to writhe out of control—the victim screams, cries, pleads. And this finds certain affinities with the performances in pornography, where ecstatic bodies thrash about and vocalize verbal and non-verbal utterances. Although torture numbers are frequently devoid of sexual content, what this discloses is that the affective is not simply the product of content, but cinematic syntax—the form: “The frenzy of the visible, which Williams positions at the heart of her analysis of the pornographic,” Helen Hester observes, might therefore be viewed as being connected less with sexually explicit images than with generalized depictions of the out-of-control body, and might be associated less with physiologic arousal than with the experiencing of a broader spectrum of intense affective responses. That is to say, some varieties of adult entertainment at times both represent and seek to elicit nongenital forms of intensity.”

Torture numbers capitalize on the pornographic regime to captivate its audience.

Of course, torture porn, unlike pornography, stages scenes that are simulated, and any blood spewed is not actually a physical response to stimulation (as in the “money shot” of male ejaculation). An example of extreme cinema that maintains pornography’s documentary charge, unapologetically displaying the release of real bodily fluids, is Lucifer Valentine’s Slaughtered Vomit Dolls (2006). The film, along with its counterparts in the so-called “Vomit Gore Trilogy,” is regularly referenced on horror fan sites touting the “most disturbing” or extreme films.” Indeed, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls is an exemplary piece of extreme cinema, a work that seems destined to offend and/or elicit a physical response in practically any spectator; the movie showcases virtually every aspect of extreme cinema that this book attempts to trace.

Slaughtered Vomit Dolls contains scenes of tremendous violence, copious amounts of nudity (it is rare for the female performers to be wearing clothing), and, indeed, a substantial amount of vomit. The narrative—insofar as one can be pieced together—seems to revolve around a young woman named Angela Aberdeen who ran away from home as a young teenager and turned to prostitution and stripping as a means of survival (there are the fragments of a crude melodrama somewhere in here). She suffers from bulimia, claims to have once set fire to a church, and professes her devotion to satanism. These details can be gleaned intermittently from fragments of dialogue, as Angela talks frequently to the camera, or at least to the character who supposedly operates it. The film consists entirely of POV footage (though it is not necessarily clear to the audience precisely whose point of view is being offered) and, as such, bears a superficial resemblance to the “found footage” subgenre of horror that has been so prominent in recent years.”* It would be more accurate, though, to say that S/aughtered Vomit Dolls adopts the cinematic syntax of “gonzo” pornography and the snuff film. Unlike the films of these categories, of course, Slaughtered Vomit Dolls is not a documentary as such: the women whom the audience sees brutally murdered are actors, and not actually killed (as in snuff films), and there are no hardcore sex acts like those in pornography or in the films explored in Chapter 5. Stylistically, Valentine’s film also differentiates itself from documentaries and from “found footage horror” through its liberal—or perhaps “aggressive” might be a more accurate term— experimentation with form.

As we explore throughout this book, extreme cinema often demonstrates only a tangential interest in narrative, instead staging spectacular scenes of violence and/or sex in a manner that recalls the “numbers” of musical and pornography. S/aughtered Vomit Dolls consists of a few different numbers, of sexualized, nude or scantily clad women who are mutilated and murdered in a variety of ways, with the camera, which is supposedly held by the murderer and is therefore part of the diegesis, practically burrowing into the carnage. These scenes are constantly intercut with similar footage of Angela, who possibly took part in the killings. Or perhaps she is hallucinating them? Or is she merely another victim? (She does appear to die at the end.) It is important to highlight questions such as these not because the film invites us to try to understand the narrative that seems to be unfolding in fits and starts, or because Valentine’s cinema demands serious contemplation, but rather because the act of asking of these questions is something of a rhetorical gesture. Slaughtered Vomit Dolls is fundamentally incoherent—and this is central to its appeal, if one wants to call it that. To be sure, there are small shards of narrative that can be gathered from the imagery and the fragments of dialogue—and they undoubtedly become clearer and perhaps even congeal upon repeated viewings. There is a line of dialogue that Angela repeats twice, presumably to the man who perpetrates the gruesome mutilations seen onscreen, but it sums up the spirit of the whole enterprise, as if the elements of the film itself were speaking to filmmaker and spectator alike: “I don’t know what’s left of me, but you can fuck it if you want. I don’t know what I am.” And, indeed, practically every image and sound in the film is manipulated such that the very form of narrative cinema is pushed to its limit. This is cinematic form that can only be characterized as “extreme.”

The cross-cutting mentioned above, between footage of Angela and the various numbers in which other women are brutalized, is frenetic and jagged. It can be difficult for the viewer to discern who or what is being seen, as the handheld cinematography adheres strongly to the first part of Williams’s famous description of pornography—“frenzy”—but only just barely to its object: “visible.””? Flickering, shuddering black and white footage from a scratched filmstrip suddenly jumps to grainy color video, with harsh white light washing over the frame—and back again. This is not to say, however, that gore is invisible in the film. On the contrary, violence is shown in extreme detail: eyes are gouged, flesh is stripped, throats are slit, brains are eaten. But this gore—this violence of representation—is always accompanied by the violence of sensation. To be clear, Valentine’s aggressively gruesome film is a far cry from the refined form of painting violence—“painting the scream”— that Gilles Deleuze praised in the work of Francis Bacon.*” Nevertheless, Valentine constantly attacks the very form of his film—doing violence to, and with, image and sound. In addition to the constantly moving camera, jagged editing, and murky imagery, the film also employs visual devices such as freeze frames and slow motion, not as tools to create dramatic tension but rather as a means of further disorientation. As in the films discussed in Chapter 2, noise is a prominent feature of the soundtrack, both literally and figuratively, as that which disrupts the signal, the source of communication and meaning. Characters, particularly Angela, talk repeatedly to the camera, but their statements, as a result of the editing, are fragmentary and jumbled. Moreover, speech and other diegetic sounds are distorted, slowed down, played backwards, and subjected to all manner of manipulation. Subterranean rumbles, scrapes, and beeps saturate the soundtrack; these non-diegetic noises shoot in and out, overwhelming image and sound alike.

Through these many layers of visual and audio grime, the spectator sees an acute attention to the body. This is particularly true of the female body, as women’s breasts, lips, and labia are all displayed prominently and repeatedly. As stated above, though, S/aughtered Vomit Dolls does not contain any explicit scenes of penetration. Where the film most clearly approaches the choreography of pornography—with the display of its “meat shots” and the “physical evidence” of pleasure coming through the “cum shot” of male ejaculation—is in its obsession with bodily evidence of a different sort. Vomit is spewed constantly throughout the film: bulimic characters stick their fingers down their throats, gagging and hurling viscous chunks, while others hack up blood. There is an extended sequence of vomiting that is notable for several reasons.

IO EXTREME CINEMA

Most obviously, it is the first scene to focus primarily on a man, who may or may not be the man responsible for all the carnage that has preceded (it is not clear). The scene also features relatively linear editing and, as such, seems more oriented toward display than the majority of the film. After having hacked off a woman’s arm, the man begins vomiting, inducing this bodily spasm by sticking the dismembered limb’s fingers down his throat. Vomit mixes with the blood from the arm, and it becomes difficult to differentiate between the liquid from his body and the dead woman’s body. The bloody, milky substance flows—in seemingly endless supply—away from his body into a plastic-lined box below and, most notably, into a beer mug that he holds out in front of him. The man drinks his vomit, which of course induces further vomiting—and the cycle continues, with the entire image at points being enveloped in vomit. This is the point in the film where, for this viewer at least (Knapp), involuntary spasms of disgust—the gag reflex—gave way to another reaction entirely: laughter. It is hard to say with certainty that Valentine was aiming for this type of fluctuating reaction, culminating in amused disbelief (although the very fact that the vomiter in question is a pasty, chubby white man with a prominent belt buckle spelling out “HENRY” suggests that there is indeed a sense of humor at work, however twisted). But this matters little: the point is that, as we will see throughout our exploration of extreme cinema, the physical responses of spectators are not uniform, and do not always adhere to logic or morality.

It is worth noting that laughter for this viewer (Knapp) once again gave way to disgust, back to laughter, and ultimately to an uneasiness that bordered on boredom. Slaughtered Vomit Dolls—like many of the examples of extreme cinema discussed in this book—on some level pushes cinema to its limit, exposing realities of the body in extreme detail and striving to affect the bodies of spectators through graphic content and abrasive form, taking the basic elements of image and sound and rendering them at their most primal. Extreme cinema is pornographic. But not in the ways in which this intentionally provocative statement might suggest. Although it is presumed that the pornographic engages with sexually explicit material anticipating sexual excitation in the spectator, Hester insists that the pornographic need not elicit sexual “arousal, sexual pleasure, and orgasmic climax.” She views the pornographic in expanded terms, associating it with material (e.g. memoir, novels, television) that is intensely affecting. For instance, the highly affecting 2 Girls 1 Cup, an infamous internet sensation that will be discussed in Chapter 4, “represents something of a displacement of the sexual. Just as the gag reflex comes to stand for another bodily paroxysm in the 2 Girls 1 Cup reaction videos, so an interest in the authentic bodily experience of sex is displaced onto a fascination with the authentic bodily experience of illness in [the British television series] Embarrassing Bodies.” The program features a compendium of abject human ailments. Thus, when the notion of the pornographic is expanded, it becomes

EXTREME CINEMA: REVISITING BODY GENRES II clear that we no longer need “the act of external ejaculation” in order to elicit the label “money shot”—“pus, mucous, or inflammation might just as easily come to stand in for semen.”*! Where we diverge from Hester’s argument is her insistence upon “authentic” performances “with real bodies really experiencing corporeal phenomena on screen.”*” For instance, Eli Roth successfully appropriates the syntax of pornography in his staging of torture numbers in the Hostel films.” Where our arguments might reconverge is in the “authentic” experience of the spectator—a spectator that is affected, be that in the form of tumescence, sweat, goosebumps, laughter, tears, nausea.

Because extreme cinema generally does not subscribe to conventional narrative regimes (e.g. character development/motivation, plot, narrative arc), instead privileging cinematic embellishments, this demands appropriate modes of cinematic assessment. And this calls to mind the very critical prejudice that Tom Gunning exposes in his seminal essay, “The Cinema of Attractions.” Gunning is largely concerned with the historical context that gave rise to “the narrativization of the cinema,” which he places between 1907 and 1913.% Prior to this, Gunning argues, the cinematic elicited a different sort of pleasure from the spectator—one closer to the amusement park ride, or attraction. The cinema of attractions offered visual spectacles (relatively) unencumbered by the obligations of narrative, as Gunning states, “emphasizing the direct stimulation of shock or surprise at the expense of unfolding a story or creating a diegetic universe. The cinema of attractions expends little energy creating characters with psychological motivations or individual personality.” Rather than directing attention toward the interior world of the diegetic text (whether fictional, or not), the cinema of attractions “moves outward towards an acknowledged spectator.”*> Extreme cinema, to one degree or another—in an effort to viscerally address its audience—mobilizes the cinematic attraction.