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 William Castle’s 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 were designed to create audience anticipation.
On the other hand, the breaking of taboos on screen is genuinely transgressive and disturbing if the act is unsimulated, as Amos Vogel wrote in Film as a Subversive Art: “When confronted by visual taboos... such as real sex or death — we immediately feel an element of risk and primordial danger”. A surprising number of films contain images of real death and unsimulated sex.
Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou is the foundation stone of transgressive cinema. Despite being almost a hundred years old, it begins with one of the most shocking sequences in film history, and one shot in particular (featuring a dead cow’s eye) is still almost impossible to see without flinching.
Pink Flamingos, directed by John Waters, broke every cultural taboo. A monologue by the lead character, Babs Johnson, encapsulates the film’s transgressive philosophy: “Kill everyone now! Condone first-degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit!”
The first non-pornographic film to show an erection was Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour, which the US Supreme Court declared obscene in 1967. In the 1960s, several artists produced short, experimental hardcore films, the first being Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth in 1962. In the UK, films featuring erections were not initially classified by the BBFC, though screenings were permitted at private cinema clubs in London. One such screening, of Flesh at the Open Space Theatre in 1970, was raided by the police.
In the Realm of the Senses (愛のコリーダ) introduced unsimulated sex into arthouse cinema and was, as Linda Williams writes in Screening Sex, “the first example of feature-length narrative cinema anywhere in the world to succeed as both art and pornography”. Hardcore video footage has also been used as a backdrop for several theatrical performances, including Joyce by performance artist Ron Athey, Kimura-san by video artist Tadasu Takamine, XXX by theatre group La Fura dels Baus — all in 2002 — and Kim Noble Will Die by comedian Kim Noble in 2009.
Video documentaries such as Faces of Death — a more extreme version of the sensationalist Mondo Cane — focus on news footage of human fatalities. The controversial documentary Executions was the first such video to be classified by the BBFC in the UK.
The autopsy art films The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes and Le poème (‘the poem’) were influenced by Franju’s poetic documentary Blood of the Beasts (Le sang des bêtes), filmed in a Paris slaughterhouse. Hollis Frampton’s experimental films Apparatus Sum and Magellan also contain images of bodies in morgues.
Autopsy footage has even occasionally been included in narrative cinema: Superbeast, Black Mamba, and Providence all feature footage of real autopsies. T.F. Mou claimed that the autopsy of a boy in his film Men Behind the Sun (黑太阳731) includes genuine medical footage. Thriller by Bo Arne Vibenius apparently utilised a real corpse for its eye-gouging sequence. Juan Logar concocted the plot of Autopsia (‘autopsy’) as an excuse to insert footage of a real post-mortem.
Three underground music videos — Hijokaidan’s Live and Confused, and SPK’s notoriously offensive Despair and Two Autopsy Films — also feature autopsy footage. Suicide’s music video Frankie Teardop was partly shot in a mortuary, as was the horror film Unrest.
Arguably the most famous death on film, the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, was captured by Abraham Zapruder on his home movie camera. Life magazine immediately purchased all rights to his 8mm film, and published selected frames from it a week after Kennedy was killed, showing “for the first time and in tragic detail, the fate which befell our President.” Life did not print the headshot, seen in frame 313, and the film itself was not shown to the public until an unauthorised copy was aired on ABC’s Good Night, America on 6th March 1975. Its first commercial video release came with the 1998 documentary Image of an Assassination, on VHS and DVD.
On the other hand, the breaking of taboos on screen is genuinely transgressive and disturbing if the act is unsimulated, as Amos Vogel wrote in Film as a Subversive Art: “When confronted by visual taboos... such as real sex or death — we immediately feel an element of risk and primordial danger”. A surprising number of films contain images of real death and unsimulated sex.
Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou is the foundation stone of transgressive cinema. Despite being almost a hundred years old, it begins with one of the most shocking sequences in film history, and one shot in particular (featuring a dead cow’s eye) is still almost impossible to see without flinching.
Pink Flamingos, directed by John Waters, broke every cultural taboo. A monologue by the lead character, Babs Johnson, encapsulates the film’s transgressive philosophy: “Kill everyone now! Condone first-degree murder! Advocate cannibalism! Eat shit!”
The first non-pornographic film to show an erection was Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour, which the US Supreme Court declared obscene in 1967. In the 1960s, several artists produced short, experimental hardcore films, the first being Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth in 1962. In the UK, films featuring erections were not initially classified by the BBFC, though screenings were permitted at private cinema clubs in London. One such screening, of Flesh at the Open Space Theatre in 1970, was raided by the police.
In the Realm of the Senses (愛のコリーダ) introduced unsimulated sex into arthouse cinema and was, as Linda Williams writes in Screening Sex, “the first example of feature-length narrative cinema anywhere in the world to succeed as both art and pornography”. Hardcore video footage has also been used as a backdrop for several theatrical performances, including Joyce by performance artist Ron Athey, Kimura-san by video artist Tadasu Takamine, XXX by theatre group La Fura dels Baus — all in 2002 — and Kim Noble Will Die by comedian Kim Noble in 2009.
Video documentaries such as Faces of Death — a more extreme version of the sensationalist Mondo Cane — focus on news footage of human fatalities. The controversial documentary Executions was the first such video to be classified by the BBFC in the UK.
The autopsy art films The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes and Le poème (‘the poem’) were influenced by Franju’s poetic documentary Blood of the Beasts (Le sang des bêtes), filmed in a Paris slaughterhouse. Hollis Frampton’s experimental films Apparatus Sum and Magellan also contain images of bodies in morgues.
Autopsy footage has even occasionally been included in narrative cinema: Superbeast, Black Mamba, and Providence all feature footage of real autopsies. T.F. Mou claimed that the autopsy of a boy in his film Men Behind the Sun (黑太阳731) includes genuine medical footage. Thriller by Bo Arne Vibenius apparently utilised a real corpse for its eye-gouging sequence. Juan Logar concocted the plot of Autopsia (‘autopsy’) as an excuse to insert footage of a real post-mortem.
Three underground music videos — Hijokaidan’s Live and Confused, and SPK’s notoriously offensive Despair and Two Autopsy Films — also feature autopsy footage. Suicide’s music video Frankie Teardop was partly shot in a mortuary, as was the horror film Unrest.
Arguably the most famous death on film, the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, was captured by Abraham Zapruder on his home movie camera. Life magazine immediately purchased all rights to his 8mm film, and published selected frames from it a week after Kennedy was killed, showing “for the first time and in tragic detail, the fate which befell our President.” Life did not print the headshot, seen in frame 313, and the film itself was not shown to the public until an unauthorised copy was aired on ABC’s Good Night, America on 6th March 1975. Its first commercial video release came with the 1998 documentary Image of an Assassination, on VHS and DVD.
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