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Extreme Cinema
Affective Strategies in Transnational Media
by Aaron Kerner and Jonathan Knapp
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Book Presentation:
Examines how extreme cinema mobilises explicit content and highly embellished aesthetics to affect spectators
Extreme Cinema examines the highly stylized treatment of sex and violence in post-millennial transnational cinema, where the governing convention is not the narrative but the spectacle. Using profound experiments in form and composition, including jarring editing, extreme close-ups, visual disorientation and sounds that straddle the boundary between non-diegetic and diegetic registers, this mode of cinema dwells instead on the exhibition of intense violence and an acute intimacy with the sexual body. Interrogating works such as Wetlands and A Serbian Film, as well as the sub-culture of YouTube ‘reaction videos’, Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp demonstrate the way content and form combine in extreme cinema to affectively manipulate the viewing body.
Key features
• Considers a wide scope of international approaches to extreme cinema
• Draws together a diverse body of theoretical ideas to work towards a conceptualisation of the affective potential in the cinema
• Engages critically with films that have received little scholarly attention
• Cases studies include Wetlands, A Serbian Film and Helter Skelter
About the authors:
Aaron Kerner is a Professor and the Director of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. His publications include a study of the stupid, Theorizing Stupid Media (2019)--exploring cinematic material that does not conform to existing narrative or genre categories. Kerner also published Extreme Cinema (2016). Kerner's publications often reflect upon the affective potential of the cinematic.
Jonathan L. Knapp is a graduate student in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He spent a decade working at various film festivals, archives, and museums in the San Francisco Bay Area, and completed an MA in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. His research is motivated primarily by questions of space, place, and historical trauma--exploring the landscape in conjunction with violence, memory, and the spectral.
Press Reviews:
This is an exciting and timely book. Through in-depth film analysis, clever reformulation of transnational visual culture, and simultaneous attention to form and affect, Kerner and Knapp open up our world to the intensive capacities of what they judiciously call the "viewing bodies of extreme cinema.– Tarek Elhaik, University of California, Davis
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
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