Before the climax to Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone (Seul contre tous), a provocative warning appears: “You have 30 seconds to leave the screening of this film”. Noé borrowed the idea from the black-and-white thriller Homicidal, which has a forty-five-second ‘fright break’ “to allow anyone to leave this theatre who is too frightened to see the end of the picture.” Of course, rather than prompting nervous viewers to flee in terror, these gimmicks are designed to create anticipation.
Moral panics stirred up by the media can also give films—such as Cannibal Holocaust and other ‘video nasties’—a certain notoriety. Tabloids periodically demand the banning of controversial films and videos, on behalf of a notional moral majority; the ‘shockumentary’ Faces of Death made a virtue of such negative publicity, with posters proudly proclaiming that it was banned in forty-six countries.
Amid this hyperbole, there are some films that live up to the hype, examples of extreme cinema that truly test the limits of their audiences. The breaking of taboos on screen is all the more transgressive if the act is unsimulated: Un chien andalou (‘an Andalusian dog’), for instance, begins with one of the most horrific images in film history. It retains its shock value after almost a century because of its authenticity, as it shows a razor slicing into a real (bovine) eye.
Moral panics stirred up by the media can also give films—such as Cannibal Holocaust and other ‘video nasties’—a certain notoriety. Tabloids periodically demand the banning of controversial films and videos, on behalf of a notional moral majority; the ‘shockumentary’ Faces of Death made a virtue of such negative publicity, with posters proudly proclaiming that it was banned in forty-six countries.
Amid this hyperbole, there are some films that live up to the hype, examples of extreme cinema that truly test the limits of their audiences. The breaking of taboos on screen is all the more transgressive if the act is unsimulated: Un chien andalou (‘an Andalusian dog’), for instance, begins with one of the most horrific images in film history. It retains its shock value after almost a century because of its authenticity, as it shows a razor slicing into a real (bovine) eye.
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