While few people have taken Quandt's pronouncements about new extreme films seriously[citation needed], his article has become the first reference for talking about these films: "Bava as much as Bataille, Salò no less than Sade seem the determinants of a cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement.
Some of the most commonly discussed literary and artistic reference points for scholars and critics looking at extreme cinema include Marquis de Sade and his many sexual, violent, and sexually violent novels, Gustave Courbet and his painting L'origine du monde,[14] Antonin Artaud’s writing about the Theatre of Cruelty,[4] and Georges Bataille's work on erotism and transgression.
[5] More recently, a trend towards graphic depictions of sex and violence in literature, sometimes under the moniker contemporary extreme has been associated with writers such as Henry Miller, Bret Easton Ellis, Michel Houellebecq, Marie Darrieussecq, Richard Morgiève, Alina Reyes, and others.
[15][16] In a cinematic context, it is an established practice to mix supposedly 'low-brow' forms of popular expression with 'high-brow' filmmaking, notably by including sexual and violent imagery in arthouse films.
[4][17] Art cinema has long been seen as drawing its aesthetics and narrative tropes from forms of eroticism and depictions of the body that transgress mainstream rules such as those of Hollywood.
[3] Specifically in terms of sexual and violent imagery, 20th-century films that are often considered as precursors to contemporary extreme cinema include Un Chien Andalou (Buñuel & Dalí 1929), Salò, Or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pasolini 1975), The Virgin Spring (Bergman 1960), Belle de Jour (Buñuel 1967), Weekend (Godard, 1967), Straw Dogs (Peckinpah, 1971), The Mother and the Whore (Eustache, 1973), Cannibal Holocaust (Deodato, 1980), Possession (Żuławski, 1981), and A Nos Amours (Pialat, 1983).
Tim Palmer also suggests other precursors such as Window Water Baby Moving (Brakhage 1959), Christmas on Earth (Rubin 1963), Flaming Creatures (Smith 1963), and Fuses (Schneeman 1967).
[21] Haneke's films have become very well known for their self-reflective approach to violence – especially The Seventh Continent, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, Benny's Video, Funny Games, Hidden, and The Piano Teacher.
Lengthy scenes of rape are also a key feature of A Serbian Film, Baise-moi, Fat Girl, Free Will, Holiday, Romance, The Tribe, and Twentynine Palms.
[9][27][29][30][31] Most notably, how rape is used as an aesthetic element – in order to create shock and exhilaration in the spectator – and subordinated to political or philosophical purposes, rather than being considered as a physical, literal violation.
[57] Taxidermia can be read as an allegory of Hungarian history, with its three sections corresponding loosely to fascist, socialist, and capitalist periods in the country's past, and how different members of a family come to terms with this political context.
[58] Similarly Steven Shaviro connects the film's depiction of bodies with broader ideas of history: "these body-images are immediately visceral, and indeed disgusting; and yet they are also abstract and allegorical".
In other words, they suggest that new extreme films are ethically/politically engaged because they aggressively destabilize dominant interpretations of sex and violence, and because they challenge spectators to look at the world differently.
The depiction of sex in Twentynine Palms has been read as revealing 'alternative, non-pornographic ways of being sexual' and thereby creates a 'productive estrangement' from mainstream and pornographic modes of spectatorship.
[64] Baise-moi has been read as presenting "a desire that operates subversively alongside rather than outside of the (masculine) imaginary",[65] while the films of Catherine Breillat are seen as disrupting "the relations of distance and control, on which viewing has been seen to depend, by her emphasis on the tactile".
Joan Hawkins summarises audience responses to new extreme films, suggesting that, like many critics, "Quandt cannot decide whether they have more in common with the "épater les bourgeois" spirit of the French Surrealists or with the work of the right-wing anarchist hussards of the 1950s.
[69] Indeed while many scholars have sought to praise new extreme films for their innovative aesthetics, their affective depictions of bodies, and their direct challenge to spectators, their political views have often been questioned as reactionary, if not outright troubling.
As Mattias Frey notes about extreme cinema in general, it is less important to look at exactly what reviewers say, "much more decisive is the sheer amount of coverage: the more exposure, whether positive or negative, the more value a film accrues".
Baise-moi was cut in many countries to remove images of penetration during a rape scene, and a gun being inserted into a man's anus, and was banned elsewhere for its overall pornographic nature.
[77][78] Graphic sexual imagery, especially those from Breillat in Romance, Anatomy of Hell, and Fat Girl, as well as the mixing of sex and violence in Twentynine Palms and Trouble Every Day was also heavily criticised by critics at the time.
There is often an individual or a group who constitutes the violent monster against which the protagonists must struggle, with death and injury following the main characters until the end of the film when they either escape or are defeated by the evil enemy.
The significant interest in Julia Ducournau in France on the release of Raw and her propulsion to the pinnacle of arthouse filmmaking a few years later with her Palme d'Or-winning Titane demonstrate the value that is attached to the innovative storytelling and filmic style associated with new extreme films.