22 journal of film and video 58.3 / fall 2006 ©2006 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois Style and Sensation in the Contemporary French Cinema of the Body tim palmer I expect an artist to show me the edge. And to show me that edge, they must go over a bit to the other side. —Bruno Dumont poraries (Neupert 299–304), however, this is a group connected more loosely, through com- monalities of content and technique. The recent work of Denis, Dumont, and Noé, a trio best thought of as filmmaking figureheads or cata- lysts, offers incisive social critiques, portraying contemporary society as isolating, unpredict- ably horrific and threatening, a nightmarish series of encounters in which personal relation- ships—families, couples, friendships, partner- ships—disintegrate and fail, often violently. But at the center of this cycle, a focal point most famously emblematized by Trouble Every Day, is an emphasis on human sexuality rendered in stark and graphic terms. The filmmaking agenda here is an increasingly explicit dissection of the body and its sexual behaviors: unmotivated or predatory sex, sexual conflicts, male and female rape, disaffected and emotionless sex, ambigu- ously consensual sexual encounters, arbitrary sex stripped of conventional or even nominal gestures of romance. Forcible and transgressive, this is a cinema of brutal intimacy. But there is more to this cycle than the sheer depiction of sexual and social dysfunction. As we will see, although considerable critical en- ergy has been focused on evaluating this new French cinema, few have recognized its col- lective ambitions for the medium itself, as the means to generate profound, often challenging sensory experiences. In the age of the jaded spectator, the cynical cinéphile, this brutal in- timacy model is a test case for film’s continued potential to inspire shock and bewilderment— raw, unmediated reaction. For these narratives of the flesh, the projects of Denis, Dumont, Noé tim palmer is assistant professor of film studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His essays on French, American, and Japanese film have appeared in Cinema Journal, Studies in French Cinema, and Film International. He is currently writing Brutal Intimacy: Contemporary French Cinema for Wesleyan University Press. as an art form and a professional prac- tice, cinema thrives on its ability to induce forceful, vivid sensation—a tendency that in some cases is taken to extremes. Yet while the majority of world film engages its viewers to convey satisfaction or gratification, there occa- sionally emerges an opposite tendency, aggres- sive and abrasive forms of cinema that seek a more confrontational experience. It is in this context that we can begin to gauge the impact of a group of high profile French-language film- makers, notably Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, and Gaspar Noé. Polarizing recent films such as Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001), Dumont’s Twentynine Palms (2003), and Noé’s Irrevers- ible (2002) have, in fact, already become icons of notoriety in international film culture. To some, this group and the related projects of certain French contemporaries embody film- making at the cutting edge: incisive, unflinch- ing, uncompromising. To others, such cinema is as indefensible as it is grotesque, pushing screen depictions of physicality to unwelcome limits, raising basic issues of what is accept- able on-screen. Either way, forty years on from the New Wave, French cinema is once more in the global critical spotlight. Unlike the movement embodied by Godard, Truffaut, and their Cahiers du cinéma contem-