Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Currently Reading 9
Friday, December 2, 2011
Wriggle Like A Centipede.
Background: on Tuesday the film Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) was banned by the Classification Review Board in Australia. Prior to this the film was passed by the Classification Board uncut and rated R and had played across Australia and at the Brisbane International Film Festival. The Review Board overruled this classification and all screenings of the film were suspended. I attended the Review Board at the invite of Monster Pictures - the local distributor - and presented in favour of the film. What follows below are the unedited indicative notes on which I based my talk, there are a couple of spoilers here too.
The film Human Centipede 2 was passed as created by its director by the OFLC, I believe that their decision was right and fair and based on their understanding of the current trends and styles of both filmmaking in general as well as the horror film genre. In the following bullet points it is my hope to address various elements both within the film and that exist in the discourses around the work, and contextualise these within the work.
To offer a brief context, Human Centipede 2 is a much talked about sequel to Human Centipede, a film that gained a small cult following amongst some horror fans and cineastes. Human Centipede 2 is a body horror film but it also plays on the wider tradition of European experimental and avant-garde film and underground cinema. These are works which come from an artistic tradition as much as a cinematic one. Audiences for Human Centipede 2 – which like it predecessor has screened at numerous international film festivals – are cinematically literate and understand the context the film has emerged from, indeed some horror fans dislike the film because of its roots in art cinema. As much as it can be placed in a tradition of horror Human Centipede 2 can also be viewed as part of a contemporary European cinema that includes films by the likes of Lars Von Trier and Michael Haneke. As the following points will illustrate the film should be read as coming from these traditions and its audiences should be seen as cinematically engaged.
1. All films are marketed towards specific audiences, in the case of horror films the classic marketing campaign is about being scared or shocked. Some recent examples: Paranormal Activity “Don’t See It Alone” Paranormal Activity 2 “Last year you demanded it. But that was just the beginning” Paranormal Activity 3 “It Runs In the Family”. What these illustrate is a move from playing on a general sense of daring and scaring an audience to the textually specific, which plays on the audience’s knowledge of the cycle of the films. The same occurs in films such as Harry Potter, where the Deathly Hallows Part 2 had the tagline “It All Ends”. In horror the idea of scaring and daring has a long history, most famously in Alfred Hitchcock’s theatrical trailer for Psycho which saw him touring the set and in his plumy tones explaining the crimes of the film, while his 1963 feature The Birds was marketed with the line “…and remember, the next scream you hear may be your own!” The point in these campaigns is to seduce an audience, and such campaigns go back to the Grand Guignol of 1890s Paris which staged violent plays full of gore and horror to enthusiastic crowds. The taglines and marketing slogans in the media around Human Centipede 2 are a part of this tradition of spruiking a film. Indeed at the film’s screenings in Australia part of the campaign consisted of Neil from Monster Pictures handing people barf-bags, of course nobody actually vomited in them, the idea was a marketing gimmick, and, while funny, not exactly an original one, and over the years horror film makers have done everything from taking out fake insurance policies on people being so scared they die or employing actresses to dress as nurses in case people faint. The idea is purely market driven, and any historian of horror movies will be able to list a dozen examples, it is the horror version of ‘selling the sizzle not the steak.’
2. Human Centipede 2 is a film intended for a niche audience, it belongs to a subgenre of horror films referred to by writers as body horror, which includes works such as the film The Fly and the book Frankenstein. These are works that explore ideas such as disease and so on rather than, for example, supernatural horror, which explores ghosts and hauntings. Body horror may superficially appear contentious because it is dealing with the representation of the physical rather than metaphysical, but in doing so it comments on various aspects of the body in culture, themes such as medicine for example may be dealt with in these works in the same way a ghost film may deal with the question of life after death. In a work such as Human Centipede 2 the work explores the fear of the breakdown of control over the individual body, of the idea of the individual becoming a part of the mass, of loss of control of the body. Some have evoked the term torture porn to describe some contemporary horror, but it should be noted that Human Centipede 2 is not within this subgenre, there is no sense of the audience enjoying the violence or the pleasure being in the suffering of victims, instead the story emphasises the psychological processes behind the protagonist’s breakdown and the violence exists to alienate us - as viewers - from him. A process of alienation that is also emphasised by the use of black and white film, which also distances the viewer from the work. There exists in film theory much writing about modes of identification and the way in which viewers relate to characters, and this film avoids these in order to create a distance between the viewer and the subject in the film.
3. There are scenes of specific violence in the film that are intended to shock, most clearly a rape scene near the film’s end. However this scene is constructed as horrific, as alienating and as evidence of a psychologically wounded protagonist. The scene is purposefully horrific, its intent antithetical to any sense of sexuality or sexual satisfaction, instead it is about the character trying to both fuse with his creation and annihilate his own identity while simultaneously serving to, as I have already stated, further push the audience away from any kind of identification. It is a scene of horror that rightly disturbs the viewer. Much has been written about the depiction of rape in horror, and other, films, and the book Men Women & Chain Saws published in the UK by the British Film Institute and written by a feminist film critic Carol Clover makes it clear that these acts of violence are horrific scenes which may challenge and upset viewers but do not necessarily position the viewer with the perpetrator but often with the victim, this is clearly the case within Human Centipede 2. The book Men Women And Chain Saws has become a key text for film students across the world. There is also a pregnant woman in the film, clearly wearing a prosthetic device she functions as a narrative counterpoint to the central protagonist’s unloving mother. Other scenes of shock include brief flashes of surgery, but these almost act as a commentary on the media’s fixation with television programmes about using cosmetic surgery to change our appearance, parodying our cultural fixation with surgically enhanced beauty like a contemporary Rabelais.
4. In addition to being a horror film, the work can also be viewed as part of a longer history of art and art cinema, with allusions to the surrealism of Bunuel and Dali’s cinematic masterpiece Un Chien Andalou, as well as visual art by the surrealists and by contemporary artists who also explore the transforming body. In terms of art the work also echoes more classical paintings such as Goya. The use of black and white film not only creates a distance as previously mentioned but also echoes art cinema, and the visual style of the film plays into a tradition of experimental cinema and visual art perhaps even more than horror
5. Finally, Human Centipede 2 has screened across the Australian state capitals in the last few weeks, these screenings have seen large and appreciative audiences watching the film, and to the best of our knowledge nobody has complained or was upset at these screenings and we wondered if there had been spontaneous complaints from anybody who had seen the film.
The film Human Centipede 2 was passed as created by its director by the OFLC, I believe that their decision was right and fair and based on their understanding of the current trends and styles of both filmmaking in general as well as the horror film genre. In the following bullet points it is my hope to address various elements both within the film and that exist in the discourses around the work, and contextualise these within the work.
To offer a brief context, Human Centipede 2 is a much talked about sequel to Human Centipede, a film that gained a small cult following amongst some horror fans and cineastes. Human Centipede 2 is a body horror film but it also plays on the wider tradition of European experimental and avant-garde film and underground cinema. These are works which come from an artistic tradition as much as a cinematic one. Audiences for Human Centipede 2 – which like it predecessor has screened at numerous international film festivals – are cinematically literate and understand the context the film has emerged from, indeed some horror fans dislike the film because of its roots in art cinema. As much as it can be placed in a tradition of horror Human Centipede 2 can also be viewed as part of a contemporary European cinema that includes films by the likes of Lars Von Trier and Michael Haneke. As the following points will illustrate the film should be read as coming from these traditions and its audiences should be seen as cinematically engaged.
1. All films are marketed towards specific audiences, in the case of horror films the classic marketing campaign is about being scared or shocked. Some recent examples: Paranormal Activity “Don’t See It Alone” Paranormal Activity 2 “Last year you demanded it. But that was just the beginning” Paranormal Activity 3 “It Runs In the Family”. What these illustrate is a move from playing on a general sense of daring and scaring an audience to the textually specific, which plays on the audience’s knowledge of the cycle of the films. The same occurs in films such as Harry Potter, where the Deathly Hallows Part 2 had the tagline “It All Ends”. In horror the idea of scaring and daring has a long history, most famously in Alfred Hitchcock’s theatrical trailer for Psycho which saw him touring the set and in his plumy tones explaining the crimes of the film, while his 1963 feature The Birds was marketed with the line “…and remember, the next scream you hear may be your own!” The point in these campaigns is to seduce an audience, and such campaigns go back to the Grand Guignol of 1890s Paris which staged violent plays full of gore and horror to enthusiastic crowds. The taglines and marketing slogans in the media around Human Centipede 2 are a part of this tradition of spruiking a film. Indeed at the film’s screenings in Australia part of the campaign consisted of Neil from Monster Pictures handing people barf-bags, of course nobody actually vomited in them, the idea was a marketing gimmick, and, while funny, not exactly an original one, and over the years horror film makers have done everything from taking out fake insurance policies on people being so scared they die or employing actresses to dress as nurses in case people faint. The idea is purely market driven, and any historian of horror movies will be able to list a dozen examples, it is the horror version of ‘selling the sizzle not the steak.’
2. Human Centipede 2 is a film intended for a niche audience, it belongs to a subgenre of horror films referred to by writers as body horror, which includes works such as the film The Fly and the book Frankenstein. These are works that explore ideas such as disease and so on rather than, for example, supernatural horror, which explores ghosts and hauntings. Body horror may superficially appear contentious because it is dealing with the representation of the physical rather than metaphysical, but in doing so it comments on various aspects of the body in culture, themes such as medicine for example may be dealt with in these works in the same way a ghost film may deal with the question of life after death. In a work such as Human Centipede 2 the work explores the fear of the breakdown of control over the individual body, of the idea of the individual becoming a part of the mass, of loss of control of the body. Some have evoked the term torture porn to describe some contemporary horror, but it should be noted that Human Centipede 2 is not within this subgenre, there is no sense of the audience enjoying the violence or the pleasure being in the suffering of victims, instead the story emphasises the psychological processes behind the protagonist’s breakdown and the violence exists to alienate us - as viewers - from him. A process of alienation that is also emphasised by the use of black and white film, which also distances the viewer from the work. There exists in film theory much writing about modes of identification and the way in which viewers relate to characters, and this film avoids these in order to create a distance between the viewer and the subject in the film.
3. There are scenes of specific violence in the film that are intended to shock, most clearly a rape scene near the film’s end. However this scene is constructed as horrific, as alienating and as evidence of a psychologically wounded protagonist. The scene is purposefully horrific, its intent antithetical to any sense of sexuality or sexual satisfaction, instead it is about the character trying to both fuse with his creation and annihilate his own identity while simultaneously serving to, as I have already stated, further push the audience away from any kind of identification. It is a scene of horror that rightly disturbs the viewer. Much has been written about the depiction of rape in horror, and other, films, and the book Men Women & Chain Saws published in the UK by the British Film Institute and written by a feminist film critic Carol Clover makes it clear that these acts of violence are horrific scenes which may challenge and upset viewers but do not necessarily position the viewer with the perpetrator but often with the victim, this is clearly the case within Human Centipede 2. The book Men Women And Chain Saws has become a key text for film students across the world. There is also a pregnant woman in the film, clearly wearing a prosthetic device she functions as a narrative counterpoint to the central protagonist’s unloving mother. Other scenes of shock include brief flashes of surgery, but these almost act as a commentary on the media’s fixation with television programmes about using cosmetic surgery to change our appearance, parodying our cultural fixation with surgically enhanced beauty like a contemporary Rabelais.
4. In addition to being a horror film, the work can also be viewed as part of a longer history of art and art cinema, with allusions to the surrealism of Bunuel and Dali’s cinematic masterpiece Un Chien Andalou, as well as visual art by the surrealists and by contemporary artists who also explore the transforming body. In terms of art the work also echoes more classical paintings such as Goya. The use of black and white film not only creates a distance as previously mentioned but also echoes art cinema, and the visual style of the film plays into a tradition of experimental cinema and visual art perhaps even more than horror
5. Finally, Human Centipede 2 has screened across the Australian state capitals in the last few weeks, these screenings have seen large and appreciative audiences watching the film, and to the best of our knowledge nobody has complained or was upset at these screenings and we wondered if there had been spontaneous complaints from anybody who had seen the film.
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