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GENRE
TROUBLE
AND
EXTREME
CINEMA
FILM THEORY AT
THE FRINGES OF
CONTEMPORARY
ART CINEMA
Troy Bordun
Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema
Troy Bordun
Genre Trouble
and Extreme Cinema
Film Theory at the Fringes of Contemporary
Art Cinema
Troy Bordun
Trent University
Peterborough, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-319-65893-3 ISBN 978-3-319-65894-0 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-65894-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950397
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover credit: Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas 2013)
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
This volume is a revised version of my Ph.D. dissertation. From my thesis

committee, I thank Davide Panagia, Veronica Hollinger, Ian McLachlan,
Brian Price, and Elaine Stavro. Their comments, patience, and adminis-
trative support made the dissertation work flow smoothly and steadily.
Erin Stewart Eves at Trent University’s Academic Skills Center was inval-
uable at the beginning of my dissertation. Several sections of this book
were previously published in slightly altered forms, and I would like to
thank the journal editors for permission to reprint them here. Chapter 4
is derived, in part, from “‘Sex is Metaphysical’: Catherine Breillat’s
Pornographic Films,” published in Cine-Excess 2 (2016); part of Chap. 5
was published as “Seeing Horror, Imagining the Horrible” in Off-screen
19.9 (2015); Chap. 6 was derived, in part, from “Onscreen and Off-
screen Flesh and Blood: Performance, Affect, and Ethics in Catherine
Breillat’s Films,” published in Studies in European Cinema 12.2 (2015),
available online at www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1741154
8.2015.1037572; and part of Chap. 8 was published in CineAction! 96
(2015) as “Abuse of Weakness.” My thanks to the film studies editor at
Palgrave Macmillan, Lina Aboujieb, for making this project possible in
such a short timeframe. Lina was very encouraging and eased the process
of publishing my first book. The comments from the anonymous reviewer
were also very helpful. I thank Carlos Reygadas for permission to use stills
from his films.
My peers and colleagues in Trent’s Cultural Studies programs
and Theory, Culture, and Politics program made my four years at the
v
vi Acknowledgements
University enjoyable. For sharing conversation on my work, and on life,

I extend my gratitude to all of you. It is also important to recognize the
support of those closest to me. My supervisor consistently reminded me
that graduate studies (and now, I may add, contract instructorships) takes
its toll on the best of us, so I thank my friends and partners for their
inspiration and for having confidence in me throughout the years. My
parents also deserve my appreciation—they were infinitely supportive.
Contents
1 Introduction: Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema 1

Body Genres and Extreme Cinema 7
Film Theory After Maurice Merleau-Ponty 12
Beyond the Shock of On-Screen Sex and Violence 23
References 26
2 Carlos Reygadas, the Avant-Garde, and the Senses 29

The Difficult Film 33
“[A]ll the Levels of Perception” 37
Narrative Shock 37
Cinematography and Levels 47
A Slow Dream, “As If” It Was Real 57
References 62
3 !Que Viva México!: Reygadas as Documentarian 67

Performative Documentary 68
Human Animals, Non-Human Animals 80
Fictional Death: “Come Play with Us Cos Dad
Has Died Already” 86
References 96
vii
viii Contents
4 I Don’t Know It When I See It: Catherine Breillat’s

Pornography 99
Erotic and/or Pornographic 103
Looking-At Breillat’s Films 111
References 120
5 Horrible Pornography: Fat Girl (À Ma Soeur!, 2001) 123

Sexual Numbers 124
Fat Girl: Synopsis and Sexual Numbers 126
Pornography “Too Late!” 129
Pornography Under-Age 136
Problems with the Pornographic 139
Horror “on Time!” 142
Breillat’s Horrible Fat Girl 152
References 160
6 On-Screen and Off-Screen Flesh and Blood:

Performance, Pornography, Spectatorship 165
Blow Job (2005) 171
Mesquida’s Tears 180
The Extradiegetic and Profilmic Event in Breillat’s
Brief Crossing 188
The Ethics of Breillat’s Method 190
Affective and Possessive Spectatorship 193
References 195
7 Reframing Spectatorship Theory with Extreme Cinema 199

Pornography and Psychoanalytic Film Theory 199
The Confrontation with the Real of the Film 204
The Remembered Film 208
Postscript 213
References 214
Contents ix
8 Conclusion: Know Genre, No Trouble 217

A Courageous Supplement 223
References 228
Filmography 231
Bibliography 233
Index 237
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Post Tenebras Lux (Reygadas 2013) 40

Fig. 6.1 Battle in Heaven (Reygadas 2009) 174
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Genre Trouble and Extreme

Cinema
A critic-defined tendency in recent art cinema, initially coined New

French Extremism by James Quandt ([2004] 2011) and now known
generally as “extreme cinema” by scholars working in the Anglo-Saxon
context, offers a set of films to be investigated in light of their formal
affects as well as their effects on spectators.1 Indeed, much of the schol-
arly and critical attention to this production trend has centered upon
particular films’ or directors’ capacity to shock or affect spectators. Less
attention has been given to the number of genres invoked by so-called
extreme filmmakers. While the trend is not limited to close readings
from the theories and histories of the following genres, with varying
degrees of emphasis I will argue that the avant-garde, documentary,
melodrama, pornography, and horror genres play significant roles in
the oeuvres of two filmmakers associated with the extreme cinema trend,
Carlos Reygadas and Catherine Breillat. My turn to these genres hinges
upon the theory that genre is not inherent to a given film but that cer-
tain elements are extracted from the work and recollected by a viewer.
This reading of genre is inspired by Rick Altman’s critique of genre
1 Most scholars agree with these terms: it is not a genre, a style, or a movement but a
recent production trend for extreme representations of sex and violence as well as trans-
gressions of the formal codes of art cinema. Cf. Quandt (2011); Grønstad (2006: 163);
Beugnet (2007: 25); Vincendeau (2007: 205); Horeck and Kendall (2011: 3, 5); Frey
(2014: 158–160); Frey (2016: 6–8). William Brown (2013: 26–28), incorrectly in my
view, contends that extreme cinema “perhaps constitutes” a genre.
© The Author(s) 2017 1

T. Bordun, Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-65894-0_1
2 T. Bordun
theorists who attempt to “level all spectators” and only study genres that
do not mix, crossbreed, or function as anomalies (Altman 1999: 151,
17). For Altman a film may attempt to turn its audiences into “a sin-
gle homogenous block,” but given the diversity of individual experience
and individual knowledge of genre(s), “the ability to choose one’s genre
pleasures lies at the very heart of generic operations” (1999: 151). My
undertaking in this book, in the personal choices of genres to study and
films to engage with, represents a critical effort to both understand and
practice a theory of genre that puts the spectator into an active engage-
ment with images, sounds, and his or her past associations with those
images and sounds—call it a work that combines philosophical reflec-
tion and cinephilia. For Stanley Cavell, film is less a completed work than
an assemblage of frames that matter for an individual ([1978] 2005: 9).
Extreme cinema, as a trend that attempts to confound simple readings or
interpretations, functions as the best example to demonstrate my thesis.
My aim is therefore not to produce a genealogy or cultural history of the
aforementioned genres nor an attempt to contemporize and contextu-
alize those genres with the recent production trend known as extreme
cinema—such a project is for the film historian. The chapters demon-
strate that the films under investigation re-order the generic categories
of sense-perception and verification and work against the logic of trans-
forming a body of spectators into a single homogenous block.
A theory of spectatorship that argues for a process-oriented model—
that is, spectatorship as recollection and assemblage—does not simultane-
ously suggest that a film lacks a style and mode of address. The modes
of address in the five genres above can be generally proposed as follows:
Stan Brakhage argued for “pure perception” in the cinema, thus explain-
ing experimental filmmakers’ longstanding fascination with both pleasur-
able and unpleasurable visuals, consistently devoid of narrative pleasure;
documentary, contentiously, can provide a shock in the form of truth—
the shock of a scene or story is in the veracity of its representation(s) or
truth claims; melodrama, as theory describes, often brings a familial narra-
tive to a bittersweet resolution filled with spectators’ tears; pornography’s
address is often to arouse viewers sexually, sometimes apart from either
a narrative or intellectual pleasure; and horror films aim to elicit fear in
1 INTRODUCTION: GENRE TROUBLE AND EXTREME CINEMA 3
their audiences, causing jumps in seats, screams, and nausea.2 Extreme

cinema deploys these generic tropes or addresses to an ideal spectator.3
A filmmaker may aim to elicit disgust, unease, tension, anxiety, and shock
while also aiming at perceptual pleasure by certain so-called experimental
tactics; certain films also solicit sexual pleasure via pornographic tropes.
Martine Beugnet therefore claims (2007: 9) that this “hybrid cinema” is
“the most exciting forms of filmmaking […] currently offered,” although
the notion of hybrid refers to hybrid genres.4
The aim of my research is to navigate the so-called “hybrid” terrain
in a manner that does not claim extreme cinema to be at the avant-
garde of narrative filmmaking or a mix of genres.5 Beugnet’s claim about
2 Viewing documentary in this way is only one of many definitions and practices. Indeed,
the ties between experimental film and documentary film have frequently been noted
by theorists from the 1930s up to the present. Cf. Dulac ([1932] 2011: 656); Grierson
([1935] 2011: 662); Minh-ha ([1990] 2011); Marks (2000: 10, 177). I will tease out the
connections between these two genres in Chaps. 3 and 6.
3 Cf. Elsaesser and Hagener (2010: 4–5): “Each type of cinema (as well as every film
theory) imagines an ideal spectator, which means it postulates a certain relation between
the (body of the) spectator and the (properties of the) image on the screen, however much
at first sight the highlighted terms are ‘understanding’ and ‘making sense’, ‘interpretation’
and ‘comprehension’ […] Films furthermore presuppose a cinematic space that is both
physical and discursive, one where film and spectator, cinema and body encounter one
another […] Likewise, bodies, settings, and objects within the film communicate with each
other (and with the spectator) through size, texture, shape, density and surface appeal, as
much as they play on scale, distance, proximity, color or other primary optical markers. But
there are additional ways the body engages with the film event, besides the senses of vision,
tactility and sound: philosophical issues of perception and temporality, of agency and con-
sciousness are also central to the cinema, as they are to the spectator.”
Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener’s claim (2010: 5) that the film is much more than
diegesis and form, such as “extra-diegetic material” and the fact that spectators inhabit two
(or more) worlds simultaneously—the diegesis and their own physical space—is additionally
relevant to the study I undertake in Chaps. 6 and 7.
4 The hybrid mode makes distribution difficult. “[A]ccording to [Raymond] Murray
[CEO of Artsploitation Films], the apparently inclusive advantage of hybrid modes such as
extreme cinema—artistically sophisticated yet with a titillating allure—can develop into a
commercial disadvantage as well” (Frey 2016: 76–77).
5 Mattias Frey’s book-length critique of extreme cinema scholars who champion the
trend as transgressive and ground-breaking without considering the industry or reception

side is an invaluable reorientation of the field (Frey 2016; Bordun 2017). Unfortunately,
nearly all of the research of my present volume was completed before its publication. In my
attempt to read extreme cinema alongside genre and spectatorship, as well as film theory,
I equally contest the scholars who emphasize the transgressive in extreme cinema without
addressing reception, at least in hypothetical terms.
4 T. Bordun
extreme cinema maintains some affinities with postmodern notions—

for example, “pastiche” and “schizophrenia,” hyperrealism, attacks
on modernity (Storey 2006: 129ff; Altman 1999: 156–157)—despite
attempts to suggest otherwise (2007: 126–127). (Moreover, she very
much reads extreme cinema as “against the grain” of mainstream cin-
ema: hence the subtitle of her volume, French Film and the Art of
Transgression.) Indeed, if extreme cinema offers nothing but a postmod-
ern genre mixing, there is no argument to be made about the novelty of
this production trend since Hollywood has always mixed together gen-
res in both advertising and in their semantic and syntactic components
so as to appeal to as many spectators as possible (Neale [1990] 1995;
Altman 1999: 128–143; Staiger 1997). I therefore maintain my distance
from categorically labeling extreme cinema as a genre or as composed
of evident, unchanging, and verifiable ones. Instead, without dismissing
the genre critic who notes common formal traits and themes alongside
spectators’ recognition of those traits and themes to thereby compose
an understanding or theory or history of (a) genre, I treat genre the-
ory as a theoretical tool to undermine its own methodologies, for-
mulations, and conclusions. In other words, the films discussed in the
chapters of this book are not borrowing formal and narrative elements
of identifiable genres; they are reorienting and restructuring the notions
of genre(s) and spectatorship and, as I will introduce below, spectators’
sensuous experiences of films. Transforming sense-experience, follow-
ing the general theory and methodology of many phenomenologists and
affect theorists, thereby transforms social, cultural, ethical, and political
engagements (Leys 2011).
Genre and genre theory have been a contentious object of study, and
there has been no critical consensus on how to study them (Ryall 1998:
327–330; Blandford et al. 2001: 113). Rather than identifying one dom-
inant genre in a given film according to a pre-established generic cate-
gory—for example, as William Brown does in labeling extreme cinema
an offshoot of horror (2013: 26–28)—I will argue that the extreme films
I have chosen to discuss demonstrate an epistemological instability in five
film genres. Thus I do not address the question of what the tendency
for new fictional films of dramatized sex and violence categorically or
generically is as such, in terms of a definitive genre, style, and its his-
tory or antecedents. Through theoretical analyses of two directors and a
number of their films, and through a careful consideration of these direc-

tors’ straying from and proximity to one or more of the aforementioned
genres, as established by the genre scholarship, I locate each filmmaker’s
attempt to elicit sensuous responses in his or her spectators.
Extreme cinema is a challenge on all fronts: the difficult-to-stom-
ach content, the play with formal and aesthetic codes, and the refusal
of many filmmakers to craft films within a pre-established generic cate-
gory or categories. What this challenge reveals, furthermore, is that the
scenes and sequences of films are collected or assembled by spectators
in ways that make/have sense to/for them. Altman names this experi-
ence the “generic crossroads” of a film, a fork directing spectators to
either submit to the generic pleasures or return to cultural norms (e.g.,
in a gangster film a spectator must take pleasure in illegal and possi-
bly murderous fictional events or oppose generic pleasure to return to
a culture in which the rules are mostly followed). Indeed, the common
link amongst genre films is precisely “the warring traditions in society
and the social importance of understand convention” (Braudy [1976]
2009: 538). Moreover, for most Hollywood genre theorists, film gen-
res share structurally similar narrative arcs: a disruption of social order
followed by a return to that order (e.g., Sobchack [1975] 1995; Schatz
[1981] 2011). While Altman’s crossroads address the tension between
narrative pleasure and cultural norms, the films investigated here offer
a crossroads between possible competing generic experiences of percep-
tual, narrative, and formal natures. My collection and recollection of the
films begin from my bodily and theoretical responses to these works and
to my associations and readings of genre. This approach requires that the
scholar or critic trust his or her experiences of the film, which means that
the film itself should teach the author how to read it. This will become
clearer as I assemble together two vastly different directors who aestheti-
cally, geographically, and politically have nothing to say to each other. I
bring them together under the banner of extreme cinema for the sake of
my arguments about their oeuvres to be sure, but also to argue my larger
claims about the porous nature of genre.
My interest in extreme cinema begins with a line of inquiry opened by
Linda Williams and, as I introduce below, in extreme cinema’s confound-
ing of Williams’s theory of genres and sensation. Before my own work
on an individual director begins, I should suggest why her short essay
6 T. Bordun
on genre and spectatorship and her more recent work on sex and sensa-
tion in the cinema cannot be adequately applied to this recent cinematic
trend. I will introduce contemporary extreme cinema in more detail as
well. In the section that follows my preliminary remarks on Williams, I
turn to recent developments in phenomenological film theory, the lens
I adopt for this study. Of the possible theoretical frameworks through
which to approach extreme cinema and genre, the recent turn to phe-
nomenology is the best suited to my project. Alongside my argument
of the fluidity of genre, my contention is that this production trend can
reorder the categories of sense-experience (when spectators are con-
fronted with a supposedly generic film) and, according to the aims of the
director and the spectators’ willingness to approach or adopt the film-
maker’s visual critiques of society, culture, and/or politics, make a minor
change in the real world. Thus diverse theories in phenomenology, with
their respective focuses upon the body, will be useful in the following
chapters. Indeed, much work has been done in this area of sensation and
extreme cinema, and I will briefly explore how my research adds to prior
scholarship on the subject.
Theorists such as Vivian Sobchack, Laura U. Marks, and Jennifer
M. Barker are each informed by the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
His position that embodiment is the seat of experience is adopted by
these three theorists to consider both aesthetics and spectatorship. Yet
this turn to embodiment in film studies exists not solely within the
scholarship. I hope to show that the phenomenological turn in film
theory occurs at a time when filmmaking itself has also turned to vis-
ual and aural techniques that explicitly aim at evoking spectators’ senses
(Beugnet 2007: 14) and directly engage “sensory mode[s] of address”
(de Luca 2014: 1). In keeping with the phenomenological framework
and “sensory mode of address” in contemporary cinemas, I deploy phe-
nomenological descriptions when speaking to and about the films them-
selves. As the formal qualities of films can reach out to touch viewers
viscerally, as much of the scholarship describes, my style of writing aspires
to achieve the same. I accomplish this form of argumentation with a
writing that gives close attention to detail and original interpretations of
narratives, and which works with the films to deliver descriptions in tune
with a film’s slowness, urgency, or spontaneity. Catherine Wheatley sug-
gests (2011: 178) there is not yet a “coherent approach” to research-
ing and writing on extreme cinema; I bring one torch to brighten this
darkness.
Body Genres and Extreme Cinema

In the 1991 essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Williams
identifies the content of and bodily response to three of the so-called low
genres of cinema: melodrama, horror, and pornography. Each in its own
way produces bodily sensations of varying degrees and intensities in the
spectator (Williams [1991] 2009: 613). With melodrama, characters are
always “too late!” and miss an opportunity for love or happiness, thereby
effecting sadness or tears in predominantly (passive) female viewers. The
colloquial terms for these films have included “weepies” and “soft-core
emotional porn for women” (Williams 2009: 603, quoting Douglas).6 In
the experience of horror film, often viewed by teenage boys and young
men, characters appear “too early!” in a narrative or scene—that is, they
are situated in the wrong place at the wrong time to thereby encounter
and face off with a murderer/serial killer. The ensuing shock, surprise,
and violence of the horror film causes shuddering, disgust, fear, anxi-
ety, and other negative visceral effects in spectators (Kerner and Knapp
2016: 46). Finally, in pornography, the time of fantasy is always perfect;
characters operate in a ‘pornotopia’ where every time is bedtime. At this
period in 1991 Williams posits an active male spectator who is aroused
by and capable of producing his own pleasures and orgasms during the
screening of a (heterosexual feature-length) pornographic film.7 To bring
us to the third term in her essay’s title, what is excessive is an addition
to the film itself—a corresponding and sometimes implacable sensation.
According to Williams, sensation and the low genres go hand-in-hand.
For Beugnet, body genre films and the corresponding sensuous
experience they offer usually exist only in mainstream cinemas (and, we
should add here, mainstream pornography websites). Due to the com-
mercialized nature of the genres, “experimentation with cinematic effects
is, on the whole, limited or standardized. Controlled and rendered
functional, the initial element of excess loses its power of disruption”
6 The history of the melodrama and woman’s film is much more complicated than
Williams’s hypothesis suggests. For an overview of this history and critics’ invention of the
woman’s film, see Elsaesser ([1972] 2011) and Altman (1999: 70–77).
7 Kerner and Knapp (2016: 3) unconvincingly add comedy to Williams body genres, for
“humor, and particularly its grotesque forms, can be deeply affecting, causing the spectator
to ‘roll’ with laughter, cry, or bend over in involuntary spasm.” Extreme cinema, on the
whole, does not make room for humor.
8 T. Bordun
(Beugnet 2007: 24–25). The sensations that result from an extreme

film may resemble those identified by Williams in “Film Bodies,” but
claims to epistemology and sensation are much more complicated than
Williams’s and others’ genre and spectatorship studies of popular or
art-house films.8 The distinction between the pornography of Gerard
Damiano and the transgressive art of Bernardo Bertolucci, for example,
is maintained in the reviews of the films cited by Williams in Screening
Sex (2008). Critics appeared equally enthusiastic and equally sure of the
perverse arousal of Deep Throat (1972) and the formal beauty of Last
Tango in Paris (1971) (Williams 2008: 119–124). Critics’ sensual expe-
riences of Deep Throat and Last Tango are equally intense—one gim-
micky yet providing maximum visibility and the other comparing the
little death to the finale of real death (Williams 1999: 48–49)—yet they
occur in different levels of the body. A critic of pornography could rate
the former feature based on a “Peter-Meter,” the extent to which images
and sound produce an erection; a critic of art cinema could make claims
to a dark and poetic eroticism (Williams 2008: 123, 346n28). Or, in
more theoretical terms, Barker’s (2009) phenomenological account
of spectatorship may locate the sensation of Last Tango in the viscera,
the dark eroticism of the film reaching down and gripping a spectator’s
core, and Deep Throat might produce tingles of varying degrees on one’s
skin, therefore resonating with Williams’s suggestion that the two films
“exist on a continuum of representations, any of which can be sexually
stimulating” (2008: 142).9 The arousing features operate in their sepa-
rate spheres and theatrical spaces and evoke sensations of quite different
types, but never do the films, at least for Williams, at their opposite poles
on the continuum, convey any epistemological or affective doubt upon
8 In Screening Sex, Williams begins to think through extreme cinema and sensation—she
refers to it as “hard-core art,” a nod to her field of interest, porn studies. Her chapter is “an
initial typography of hard-core art film chosen from a range of possibility” (2008: 261).
9 Following Leo Bersani, Williams (2008: 132–133) provides a distinction between the
satisfying scratch of Deep Throat—“which emphasizes the telos of end pleasure”—and the
itch in Last Tango, “which intensifies and increases sexual tension up to the limit case of
[…] self-shattering and death.” The binary restates the obvious and general: porn is for
masturbation and art cinema for the philosopher or cinephile. I find such a conclusion
inapplicable to extreme cinema, the latter cinema having a much richer and complex rela-
tionship with representation, sensation, and claims to knowledge/genre categorization.
their verification as a graphically explicit product of a particular type

(porn or art cinema).
The directors associated with extreme cinema, by contrast, inten-
tionally and unintentionally challenge the relative stability of (critics’
assessment of) film genres (Beugnet 2007: 15–16). This output of fes-
tival-circuit fictional films, roughly from 1997 to the present, had been
dubbed New Extremism due to its sexual and violent content. The “New”
is the more graphic depictions compared to its transgressive cinema pre-
decessors such as Bertolucci, Nagisa Oshima, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer
Werner Fassbinder, and many others. It is also likely that New Extremism
emerged from the ashes of 1980s Hollywood’s phase of extreme violence
against women. At present, similar to the life cycles of various New Waves
of cinema, extremism is now a staple at festivals and theaters alike, so the
“New” has been shed. The films under consideration here do not con-
sciously label themselves as extreme, or as part of a specific genre; how-
ever, filmmakers identified as extreme deny neither generic influences
nor the accompanying sensations produced by those genres. This leads,
of course, to numerous troubles when playing the game of film critic or
theorist. Although I do not consider Judith Butler’s gender theory in this
research, perhaps her notion of gender performativity is analogous to the
practices of extreme filmmakers. Butler contends ([1989] 1999: 43–44)
that gender is the “repeated stylizations of the body, a set of repeated
acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to pro-
duce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.” Similarly, if
gender is seen as “natural” when it is rather “naturalized” and “created
through sustained social performances” (Butler 1999: 143, 180), some
genre critics have also deployed arguments as to genre’s ahistoricity with-
out having considered its creation through repeated forms and narratives
unique to the medium (Altman 1999: 49ff, 77–78). In Butler’s study of
gender, drag performance demonstrates the constructed quality of gender.
Drag performers imitate gender and “implicitly reveal […] the imitative
structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency”, and thereby debunk
myths of originary genders (Butler 1999: 175–176). According to my
reading, extreme filmmakers demonstrate the same for genre.
Similar to Beugnet’s approach to French cinemas of sensation
(2007: 16), I will attempt to look beyond the ‘sensationalist’ aspects
of the studied films, although, by virtue of the films’ respective narra-
tives and content, there will be sustained investigations of both horrific
10 T. Bordun
and pornographic elements. With this book I have chosen two direc-
tors whose style and output offer a cross-section of extreme cinema.
The directors are from different nations and come from different film-
making backgrounds. Carlos Reygadas, from Mexico, operates accord-
ing to an aesthetics of realism, the avant-garde, and documentary.
Catherine Breillat, from France, crafts melodramatic features that con-
tain scenes bordering on pornography and horror; her cinema is largely
indebted to the erotic literary tradition in her country. While each
director can be situated within the mode or institution of art cinema
(Bordwell [1975/2007] 2011), screening their films at the same festi-
vals and receiving some of the same awards, the filmmakers vary in their
generic means to elicit spectatorial interest and sensorial engagement.
Reygadas and Breillat are not part of the “antigenre film” identified by
Thomas Sobchack (Sobchack [1975] 1995: 111–112)—the directors
do not merely adopt conventional genre plots, characters, and iconog-
raphy to then pull a fast one over us at the end (e.g., the “crook” gets
away with it). The “queer connection” between the critic-defined label
“extreme cinema” and my two filmmakers (for it is not enough to point
at an object and repeat its name to give it a “real name” [Wittgenstein
(1953) 1958: 19–20]) is in their repeated invocations of the commonly
held definitions of experimental film, pornography, horror, melodrama,
and documentary, and the appropriation of these genres in an attempt
to aim for the bodies of their spectators. As I progress through the chap-
ters, I will show how this differs from a postmodern conception of pas-
tiche or genre mixing. Given my claim that the directors have an aim, so
as to not fall victim to an intentional fallacy, I must state that whether
Reygadas and Breillat intentionally want to move spectators bodily is of
less concern than what I believe their work accomplishes, although, my
occasional use of interviews with the filmmakers furthers the arguments I
make about their films.
My study will assess each director’s use, abuse, subversion, and appro-
priation of established codes of film genres to frustrate expectation, as
Richard Falcon suggests (1999: 11): “Although disparate in their aes-
thetics and influences, [extreme films] share an aggressive desire to con-
front their audiences, to render the spectator’s experience problematic.”
Falcon is echoed by Mattias Frey when he writes (2014: 148),
Specifically, extreme cinema depends on two hermeneutic transformations:

(1) the creator’s intention and/or pretension to be producing something
more sophisticated than simple horror [and other sensational genres]; and
(2) the consumer’s belief and/or desire to have the capability of rarefied
taste to appreciate larger, deeper meanings beyond the obvious horror
[and other sensational genres].
In a broader sense, I would suggest that the films discussed in the follow-
ing chapters find a home in the pornographic. The term ‘pornographic’
is employed here in a way similar to Siegfried Kracauer’s definition
([1960] 2009: 270): that is, as an indicator not just of on-screen nudity
and sexuality but as referring to any cinematic subject which “over-
whelms consciousness,” be it “Elemental catastrophes, the atrocities
of war, acts of violence and terror, sexual debauchery, and death.”10
Reygadas’s and Breillat’s films overwhelm consciousness and engage the
body of the spectator through treatments of, and experiments with, film
genres. Narrative and form function to overwhelm the viewer. Further,
we will see that, regardless of the genre invoked by the directors, these
filmmakers forgo typical distinctions between fiction and reality.
I have suggested that the extreme film spectator does not quite know
what he or she sees. The epistemological confusion of genres and of fic-
tion and reality counters the habitual sensuous responses of Williams’s
low genres—in most instances the effect desired by the filmmaker (if he
or she has one), in terms of cause within the diegesis or particular images
and sounds and the effect produced in the spectator’s body, is not so
simply definable and locatable. To address the aesthetics of extreme cin-
ema and to be precise and clear about directors’ desired affects is a dif-
ficult project to undertake and, according to some readings, would be
either an intentional or an “affective” fallacy (Brinkema 2014: 26–46),
although I am perhaps less concerned about this fallacy than I am with
fully accounting for the film experience.11 To claim that the directors
10 Helen Hester (2014) has published a book-length study about the contemporary shift
from pornography as a genre to the use of the term pornographic in discourse. Among
other topics, she studies “warporn,” “misery porn,” and the use of pornographic as a syno-
nym for disgusting. Unlike Hester, I find critical value in thinking of pornography as a
genre.
11 Daniel Yacavone (2015: 14–15) contends that knowledge of the filmmaker, both as
the person responsible for a given film as well as the artistic intention behind the film, is
part of the experience of attending to it. Further considerations suggest, for Yacavone, that
author intention is but one of many experiential and interpretative engagements a spec-
tator has with a work. He writes: “In the appropriate application of […] relevant (prior)
knowledge, as opposed to its mental bracketing or willed ignorance [such as a suspension
12 T. Bordun
do nothing would result in a formal exercise within the larger body of

work known as film criticism. According to critical and scholarly writings,
Reygadas and Breillat craft cinemas of displeasure in an effort to offer
some kind of critique of social or cultural relations: of class, race, and
gender in Mexico, and the lingering resonance of patriarchy in France,
but perhaps the West in general. However, these social and political
aims are often misfires as spectators perhaps do not make the connection
between the film’s reconsiderations of genre and their own desire to have
that expectation fulfilled—that is, what Altman calls the generic cross-
roads. Indeed, a criticism that could be leveled against the production
trend is the extent to which these misfires promote violence or refuse to
return to cultural norms whereby immoral or illegal behavior is punished
(Altman 1999: 145ff).
Extreme cinema is therefore dangerous across a number of different
registers. I contend that this cinema is the most deeply problematic one
of the twenty-first century. The range of interpretations and sensations is
expansive; thus, when I place the spectator as the subject of my theory or
argument, as in any film theory, I am always speaking of the relationship
between the spectator and the film(s). As I quickly introduced above, I
heed Cavell’s “theoretical” and “practical advice” (1981: 10): “I should
like to stress that the way to overcome theory correctly, philosophically,
is to let the object of the work of your interest teach you how to con-
sider it.”
Film Theory After Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Now that we have understood how sensation and genre has been stud-
ied by Williams, we can turn to the theory that undergirds the analyses
of the following chapters. It will helpful to have a basic understanding
of Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology before turning to the
contemporary incarnation of phenomenological film theory proper. The
of disbelief], viewers may literally experience more of the singular, irreducible, presented
[film] world […] and not (necessarily) less. Such relatively more knowledge informed per-
ception often leads to quite literally seeing and hearing something more, or different, on
the screen than one otherwise might, not to mention to often feel more deeply in relation
to it.” I adopt a similar approach to Yacavone’s broad account of spectatorship, particularly
in Chaps. 6 and 8.
central tenet of Merleau-Ponty’s writings was to describe the fundamen-

tal way humans encounter the world—that is, through bodily percep-
tion (but not limited to sight). His Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
argues that perceptual experience is pre-personal and anonymous, taking
place in me (bodily), rather than in a personal I (ego or consciousness as
the receptor of sense-data) that perceives the world. The following brief
account of embodiment will then lead us to its applicability to theorizing
cinema and its effects on perception.
The lived body is the way in which we inhabit the world—it is the
structure of sensuous existence. Gary Brent Madison observes that the
body is present in the world and we are aware of it, a consciousness of
one’s self, as a body, taking up the demands of the world (1981: 23).
This awareness of having sensations makes it possible to discuss the
body’s pre-cognitive capacities. For Merleau-Ponty, we experience the
world through our bodily sensations, and those sensations constitute the
world as a thing which exists ([1945] 2004: 93). We know this world
through habitual nature, a continuity of experience through a storing
or stocktaking of prior encounters with things and persons. According
to Merleau-Ponty, I do not wake up each morning and need to readjust
my motility to my surroundings, for my body is ready to respond to the
imperatives of physical comportment that the world demands. On the
other hand, to usher in the new, heretofore unique motor and perceptual
imperatives are assimilated into the habit body.
A famous example would be the experiment by clinical psycholo-
gist G.M. Stratton. Stratton rigged eyeglasses to reverse the up-down
axes of natural perception; everything that was down was up, and vice
versa. This upside-down perception was a hindrance at first, but after a
week of experimentation Stratton was able to interact normally with the
world (Lingis 1996: 31–32). This example suggests that the habitual-
ized body “guarantees” or assures the body can act spontaneously; the
habit body allows for a consistency and continuity of the world through
time, whether perception is normalized or disrupted then normalized, as
in Stratton’s experiment (Merleau-Ponty 2004: 93–94). There are thus
two layers of the lived body: a habit body and a body in the moment.
In the following chapters, I will demonstrate how both Reygadas and
Breillat re-order habituated patterns of genre spectatorship. Steve Neale
and Thomas Sobchack argue that spectators’ memories and awareness of
prior genre films are instrumental in their generic expectations and evalu-
ations of a given film (experienced in the film’s generic qualities as well
14 T. Bordun
as seen and heard in advertisements, trailers, and so on) (Neale 1995:

170; Sobchack 1995: 103). Likewise, the body in the seat in the cinema
(or, more likely, on a couch at home), becomes habituated to the generic
sensations offered by the abovementioned body genres. Reygadas and
Breillat, I contend, aim to reorganize this sense experience through both
their filmic forms and their narratives.
What makes my claim about these two directors’ films possible is the
relationship our bodies have with the world. For Merleau-Ponty, acts do
not start with the cogito as intentionality, as Edmund Husserl suggests,
but are rooted in bodily experience. In shifting focus from cogito to lived
body, consciousness turns from “I think” to “I can,”—that is, the body
is a subject-object, “a being of possibility, a being open to the emergence
of determinateness from an horizon of indeterminacy” (Russon 2003:
31). I can deliberately encounter and engage with things and persons or
I can react to their coming to greet me. Consciousness retains its sta-
tus as a mediator between self and world but does not function as the
initiator. Rather, the body is a directedness toward something: limbs are
put into motion for intentional acts, toward some purpose or goal, or,
as Alphonso Lingis deems it, to address the bodily imperatives placed on
us by the world (1996). John Russon similarly observes (2003: 16): “I
experience interpretively changed environments, things, and places that
carry within them a directive force [… W]hat I experience are environ-
ments that already have meanings embedded in them, and the kinds of
meanings they have are essentially directional, that is, they direct my
actions toward some end.” We therefore do not just inhabit space and
time, but operate in expressive space, in an open realm for possibilities of
action as well as responses to the demands of the world. Put in the terms
of film spectatorship, the images and sounds on a screen can direct our
bodies to certain forms of sensuous expression—anything from goose
bumps to motion sickness.
An individual history comes along with the habitualized body. The
moment of sensation is a reconstitution of a personal history, part of
what has been left behind by prior constitutions. This reconstitution or
recreation happens at every moment. Perception, in its constantly renew-
ing and reconstituting character, offers itself as pre-personal to us in the
dual sense of pre-cognitive and coming before an existing personality
(ego or consciousness) (Merleau-Ponty 2004: 128). The anonymity of
perception and its pre-personal quality become clear in Merleau-Ponty’s
example of the perception of a lamp (2004: 81). Part of habitual life is
in grasping the identities of objects in terms of their respective aspects.

“[T]o look at an object is to inhabit it,” and inhabiting an object, in
perceiving it, one is also opened up to the various angles in which to
see that object through the perspective of other objects. The wall, the
chimney, the tables and chairs “see” the faces of the lamp that a person
cannot. “Thus every object is the mirror of all others,” the phenome-
nologist writes. An individual’s gaze, however, is always directed toward
one face of the object, and at that same time this gaze opens perception
for all other possible vantage points. In my gaze I presume a synthesis
of the object when, in fact, it is incomplete (in the sense that I see only
one side). I perceive anonymously in this respect, for my perception is
“incapable of bringing any precise testimony,” and the parallel with films
is quite clear in that the objects, persons, and entire film world are per-
ceptually incomplete. For Merleau-Ponty, an object in its incompleteness
“slips away,” then is rekindled, in part, by the “infinite number of dif-
ferent perspectives compressed into a strict co-existence” (2004: 82).12
Such a process is beyond our immanent experience—Merleau-Ponty
names this an ek-stase of experience (2004: 83). Ek-stase is described as
“Active transcendence of the subject in relation to the world” (Merleau-
Ponty 2004: 84n1). The body is the medium for these experiences of
objects in the world; sensation and perception synthesize the horizon of
objects.
The lived body primordially senses against a background or setting.
This background is not made of perceived unrelated parts; rather, move-
ment and perception are in relatedness to the whole setting, a Gestalt
(Merleau-Ponty 2004: 122). Even the outlying and strange bodily expe-
riences, such as “dreams, hallucinations, erotic and psychedelic phan-
tasms,” operate in the same “practicable field of perception” (Lingis
1996: 112). In Chap. 2 of this book, these strange bodily experiences
factor into the phenomenological account of Reygadas’s Post Tenebras
Lux (2013). In answering the call of things and persons in the world,
we are therefore not collecting sense-data, sets of empirical facts, for
some of our perceptions may be entirely hallucinatory (Merleau-Ponty
[1945] 1964: 48–49; Lingis 1996: 114; and elsewhere). Perception tran-
spires against a background of bodily and perceptual givens, even the
12 Lingis (1996: 60): “To see a real thing is to sense how to position our forces before it;
to see something is to know how to approach it and explore it.”

16 T. Bordun
strange ones, thus indicating not a personal identity but an opening for
general and anonymous sensation (Madison 1981: 26). As we will see
in the chapters of this book, the first experience we have with the films
of Reygadas and Breillat offers us a plethora of perceptual experiences
unlike our preconceived generic expectations.
Perception is a response to a situation, sensitivity to the moment.
Jennifer M. Barker, who owes a debt to Merleau-Ponty for her phenom-
enological film theory, defines the pre-personal nature of perception as
follows (2009: 18): it “takes place in the world of phenomena; we are
immersed in it as we are immersed in materiality. It does not require a
will and desire on our part as subjects to put it into play”. We can con-
trast this primordial or immediate experience with what we might call
a personal act. An individual does not plunge into the vast blue sky in
the same way one understands a book or devotes oneself to mathematics.
These “personal acts” create a situation from a decision, but perception,
fundamentally, is the pre-personal expression of the body in a given situ-
ation (Merleau-Ponty 2004: 129–130). Pre-personal bodily expression is
a perceptual a priori.
In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and in the films I discuss, the
reorganization of perceptual experience has the potential to foster mean-
ingful encounters, first, between the film and the viewer, and second,
between the viewer and the world outside the film. For the phenome-
nologist, the body is “a hollow, a fold, which has been made and which
can be unmade” (Merleau-Ponty 2004: 129–130), thus opening a “‘dia-
logue’ between consciousness and thing, subject and object” (Madison
1981: 28). Perception, then, creates a situation within which sense-
experience is anonymous and general—a perceptual field is opened for
our gaze, a field in which we are always already enmeshed, where mean-
ing and significance can be fostered through the mediation of conscious
thought. My close readings of the films followed by my arguments as to
the significance of these films adheres to the phenomenological process:
I explicate the forms and narratives of the films interspersed with remarks
from critics, theorists, and even the directors themselves in an attempt
to replicate this first-time experience. Once sensed, perceived by all of
the senses, I bring these “discoveries,” as Laura Marks calls them (2000:
178), to consciousness. I then develop arguments about the genre inter-
ventions of the two studied filmmakers by turning attention to oft-cited
film genre scholarship. The writings of genre theorists assist me in articu-
lating Reygadas’s and Breillat’s efforts at not necessarily overturning the
qualities of specific genre but expanding the notion of genre and recon-
sidering the concept as a whole. Finally, this complex method is neces-
sary for the larger claims I make about the directors’ works—namely,
about their visual critiques of contemporary Mexico and contemporary
France, respectively. Their films function as attempts to visually critique
social, political, and cultural facets in their home nations.
The above brief account of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology plays
more of a pivotal role in this volume than his attempts at film philoso-
phy. For a philosopher with such an investment in perception and the
arts, especially painting, Merleau-Ponty wrote comparatively little about
film. In his only extended account of film, “The Film and the New
Psychology” (1945), film is contrasted with a “normal vision,” a vision
in which the figures stand out from the ground so that we may direct
ourselves toward them (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 49). A figure or “sector”
discloses itself in a landscape, momentarily concealing all others from our
gaze (Merleau-Ponty 2004: 80). Perception operates along this horizon.
Film, on the other hand, “has no horizons:” “When […] the camera is
trained on an object and moves nearer to it to give a close-up view, we
can remember that we are being shown the ash tray or an actor’s hand,
we do not actually identify it” (Merleau-Ponty 2004: 80). Thus we see
that a film, given Merleau-Ponty’s argument for embodiment above, is
not a collection of sense-data and its sum total, “but a temporal gestalt”
(1964: 54). Without the clear figure–ground separation, memory is
called upon to revive the prior shots in order to perceptually comprehend
the new. His account of film spectatorship, then, parallels what he wrote
about the lived body in the moment and the habit body. In Chap. 7
of this book we will see how Breillat demands that her spectators use
their memories to discover the meaning and message of Sex is Comedy
(2002).
It was in this 1945 essay that Merleau-Ponty also seemed to champion
a realist aesthetics which touch upon humanist issues. Despite this affin-
ity for the realism of his time, the play of movement on-screen for per-
ceptual pleasure seemed to resonate deeply with Merleau-Ponty (1964:
57–58). Prior to his attempt to posit some kind of cinematic specific-
ity with realist aesthetics, the aspect of film that was of most interest
was its potential for perceptual experimentation. Cinema as a percep-
tual experience allows filmmakers, theorists, and spectators to play with
the varying expressions—visual, aural, and tactile—of moving images.
Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of a moving train (which has an affinity with
18 T. Bordun
the early Lumière pictures—whether trains arriving or landscapes shot

from trains) and the perceiver’s relation to that movement should serve
as an example of what I have called cinema’s potential for perceptual
play. Additionally, Merleau-Ponty’s following statement was clearly influ-
ential on the ideas of contemporary film theorists. The frame of a win-
dow and the two modes of viewing the contents of the frame—in motion
or stationary—suggest the cinematic experience.
Even the perception of movement, which at first seems to depend directly

on the point of reference chosen by the intellect is in turn only one ele-
ment in the global organization of the field. For, although it is true that,
when either my train or the one next to it starts, first one, then the other
may appear to be moving, one should note that the illusion is not arbitrary
and that I cannot willfully induce it by the completely intellectual choice of
a point of reference. If I am playing cards in my compartment, the other
train will start moving; if, on the other hand, I am looking for someone
in the adjacent train, then mine will begin to roll. In each instance the
one which seems stationary is the one we have chosen as our abode and
which, for the time being, is our environment. Movement and rest distrib-
ute themselves in our surroundings not according to the hypotheses which
our intelligence is pleased to construct but according to the way we settle
ourselves in the world and the position our bodies assume in it. (Merleau-
Ponty 1964: 51–52)13
This is the power cinema can harness. The camera itself can track,
zoom, pan, and the like, and in doing so will shortly thereafter project
the movement of whatever was captured. It is not our cognitive abilities
that grant these perceptual pleasures but our body, anchored as it is to
the seat in a cinema. Merleau-Ponty would say we instantly recognize the
13 Lingis (1996: 34) interprets Merleau-Ponty’s scenario as follows: “The particular
movements we make toward things that move or stabilize are made possible by the move-
ment our sensory-motor powers make to maintain themselves on the levels that extend and
maintain a field. If, seated in the compartment of a train and waiting for the departure, we
get absorbed in what someone is doing over in the adjacent train, then when one of the
trains starts to pull out, it will be ours we experience as pulling us away from the scene or
person we are holding on to with multiple interests. But if, when we entered our compart-
ment, we settled into our seat, are now arranging our papers or starting a conversation with
our fellow-passengers, then it is the adjacent train we see backing out across the side win-
dow. Later, engrossed in our reading or in conversation, it is the trees that lean over and file
across the window of the train and not the car that pitches as the train mounts the hills.”
projection as part of our field and in turn express our perceptual capaci-
ties in the reception of the projection. On the one hand, the movements
and colors may dazzle our eyes; on the other, more recent narrative
films may nauseate audiences with a shaky camera, sometimes known as
queasy-cam. While Merleau-Ponty sets the foundation for thinking about
the embodied spectator at the cinema, his phenomenology is insufficient
by itself to discuss the film experience fully. A dogmatically Merleau-
Pontian film theory could not venture much further than I have here.
How do contemporary film theorists work with the philosophy of
Merleau-Ponty, and more importantly, fill in the gaps and extend his
work? Perhaps the most significant concepts developed thus far are by
Vivian Sobchack. In “The Active Eye: A Phenomenology of Cinematic
Vision” (1990), Sobchack initially conceptualizes the spectator’s
encounter with cinema as a “viewing view.” While at the cinema, what
a spectator views is the camera in the act of its viewing, and we see the
importance of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for him/her to describe and
assess the film experience. The kind of reversible exchange between the
spectator’s perception and his or her expression is likewise appropriate in
accounting for the camera’s viewing. Sobchack summarizes this relation
(1990: 25):
[Merleau-Ponty argues that w]e can see the visible and objective body
of another who is looking at the world or ourselves, and understand that
objective body is also a body-subject – whose sight is as intentional and
meaningful as my own. What is so unique about the cinema’s ‘viewing
view,’ however, is that it presents and represents the activity of vision not
merely as it is objectively seen by us, but also as it is introceptively lived by
another. Thus, the cinema’s ‘viewing view’ is a model of vision as it is lived
as ‘my own’ by a body-subject, and its uniqueness is that this ‘viewing
view’ is objectively visible for us in the same form as it is subjectively visual
for itself.
The way to understand cinema, then, is similar to the manner in which

human perception operates. When an object calls to us, demands our
attention, we alter our heretofore indeterminate horizon and re-evaluate
our figure–ground relationship to bring the object into contact with our
perception. The zoom-in of the camera functions similarly, intensifying
the object, “making it more vivid than it was before, centering it—first,
immediately, in the film’s consciousness, and second, mediately, in ours
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LE NOZZE AL CASTELLO
SCENE FEUDALI
PARTE PRIMA.
Sei giorni se n’andò mattina e sera

Per balze e per pendici orride e strane.
Dove non via, dove sentier non era,
Dove nè segno di vestigia umane.
Ariosto.
La campana del solitario villaggio di Arola dava i primi segni

dell’Avemaria, ed il rimbombo di quei tocchi radi e prolungati
spandevasi come una patetica voce per la ristretta valle a cui quel
villaggio dà nome. Il cielo che da un lato erasi fatto d’azzurro bruno
mostravasi verso occidente del colore dell’oro; su tutte le cime
d’intorno e pei rialzi dei valloncelli vedevasi il fogliame imporporato,
e l’ultima luce trapassando pel varco de’ monti scendeva ben anco al
fondo della valle ove faceva apparire d’argento quei tratti di corrente
del limpido Plino che le rupi e le piante non celavano sotto la
nereggiante loro ombra.
Scendevano dal ripido sentiero che dall’erta metteva ai casolari le
contadinelle, mandando innanzi chi le capre, chi un branco di
pecore. Calavano drappelli di donne portando altre le gerla ed altre
elevati fardelli sul capo; veniva di quando in quando un vecchio
montanaro spingendo il somiero che mutava a fatica i passi sotto il
pesante carico delle legna o del fieno. Alcuni di questi entravano
negli abituri di Arola, varj passavan oltre, e procedendo verso
inferiori disperse capanne valicavano il torrente sopra un ponticello
là dove parte dell’acqua, artatamente divertita in altro canale,
correva poco lungi a far girare le ruote d’un mulino.
Era già deserta interamente quella via e null’altro rumore udivasi,
fuorchè quello che ad intervalli faceva la brezza vespertina tra le
frondi, quando alla sommità del sentiero apparve un Pellegrino. Lo
indicavano per tale il cappello a larghe falde circolari, la veste oscura
che tutto l’avvolgeva colla sovrapposta dalmatica sparsa di
conchiglie e il lungo bordone che portava. Camminava spedito, ma
al vedere il gruppo di casolari e l’acuto campanile colla chiesuola
formanti il paesetto d’Arola, di subito s’arrestò e poscia
abbandonando il viottolo calò lungo la balza e si condusse al
ponticello, lo passò, indi fermossi di nuovo ad esaminare il luogo
onde prendere più certa direzione.
Cominciava già più vasta a regnare l’oscurità, chè avanzavasi la
sera e meno rade scintillavano le stelle. Volgendo il Pellegrino gli
sguardi per entro la selva di cui toccava il limitare, scorse fra mezzo
ai tronchi degli alberi splendere un lume che sembrava trapellare da
finestra o porta di non lontana abitazione. Si mise pel bosco, il quale
constando di grossi castani poco stipati, offriva non disagevole
passaggio e s’avviò verso la casa d’onde partiva quel chiarore. Era
dessa il mulino. Dal lato della selva questo rustico edificio andava
cinto da un muricciuolo di pietre che sorgeva a trenta passi di
distanza dal caseggiato e inchiudeva un picciol orto, al quale faceva
parete verso il canale una siepe di bianco-spino. Al centro del
muricciuolo eravi praticato l’ingresso chiuso allora da rozzo cancello
di legno. Là pervenuto il Pellegrino accostossi al cancello e prima di
bussare, udendo dentro la casa parlare con voce molto alta, si
trattenne un momento in ascolto.
Abbenchè la ruota fosse arrestata, lo scroscio che faceva l’acqua,
cadendo per gli ordigni del mulino, non lasciava luogo ad udire
distintamente le parole. S’accorse però che chi parlava era un uomo
il quale doveva trovarsi seduto avanti ad un gran fuoco, poichè
scorgevasi l’ombra della metà superiore della sua figura disegnata
sull’impannata della finestra di prospetto e vedevansi le sue braccia
alzarsi e distendersi con energici e rapidi moti. Al lembo della stessa
impannata stava l’ombra d’un’altra mezza figura, ma questa
rappresentava un bel profilo femminile che si sarebbe giudicato
essere quello d’una statua, tanto era regolare ed immobile.
Dopo alcuni istanti il Pellegrino s’avvedendo essergli impossibile
comprendere sillaba di quanto veniva profferito, percosse col suo
bordone ripetutamente il cancello; nè sembrandogli d’essere stato
inteso pronunciò sonoramente — Date ricovero ad un povero
pellegrino! —
A quella voce cangiarono d’un tratto gli atteggiamenti delle due
figure projette in ombra sull’impannata; quella di profilo si fece ovale
e l’altra si mostrò di profilo inchinando il capo e alzando un dito. II
Pellegrino ripetè la sua inchiesta e allora spalancatasi la porta uscì
un uomo d’avanzata età, che dal casaccone infarinato indicavasi pel
mulinaro, tenendo la lanterna in una mano e un pezzo di
mazzafrusto nell’altra. S’appressò al cancello, sporse in avanti il
lume onde farlo riflettere sul viso dello sconosciuto e guardatolo ben
bene tutta raggrinzando la pelle intorno agli occhi ed alla bocca, con
che dava alla propria fisonomia una singolare espressione di
sospetto e di stizza. — Chi siete voi? — gli chiese in modo iroso.
«Vedete: sono un povero viandante che contava giungere prima di
sera giù alle sponde del lago per recarmi all’Isola di San Giulio e fui
sorpreso dalla notte in questa valle.
«Perchè non vi siete fermato là su ad Arola da mastro Seghezzo
l’ostiere?
«Perdonatemi, non ho pratica di questi luoghi ed avrò oltrepassata la
terra che m’indicate senza essermene accorto, poichè è già qualche
tempo che cammino alla cieca a causa dell’oscurità che mi ha fatto
perdere la traccia. Datemi di grazia ricovero per questa sola notte!
Un giorno sarete ricompensato largamente della vostra ospitalità.
Il mugnajo che gli aveva sempre tenuta la lanterna appuntata al
volto, l’abbassò; e mormorando fra sè alcune parole trasse
dall’imposta la spranghetta di ferro onde il cancello si aprì; entrato
l’estraneo, rifisse la bandella e lo precedette verso l’uscio ch’era
rimasto spalancato.
Nel mezzo d’una camera modicamente spaziosa, fornita di
contadinesche masserizie miste a tramoggie, stacci e sacchi, eravi
un rotondo focolare sul quale ardeva molta legna la cui fiamma
lambiva i margini d’ampio pajuolo; la catena che sostenevalo
scendeva dalle travi coperte di nera gromma e tappezzate qua e là
da qualche tela di ragno imbiancata dallo spolvero della macina. A
poca distanza del focolare stava seduto un villico alto, destro,
nerboruto, di ventott’anni all’apparenza e presso a lui una giovane
montanina di forme assai belle e appariscenti.
«Gli ho dovuto aprire, o Gaudenzo, perchè è un povero Pellegrino
che va a San Giulio ed ha smarrita la strada (così spegnendo la
lanterna disse il mugnajo al villico che balzando in piedi alla venuta
di quell’incognito gli fissò addosso gli occhi con sorpresa e
diffidenza). Nel bujo poteva capitare in un mal passo o precipitare da
qualche burrone. Mi ha chiesto per carità gli dessi alloggio questa
notte, e Bernardo non rifiutò mai di ricettare nel suo mulino un
viandante anche a rischio di vedere sotto il cappello da pellegrino la
testa d’un eretico o d’un bandito.
Lo Straniero a tali detti fece un moto sdegnoso, ma il Mugnaio nel
quale l’amaro di quelle espressioni non era suggerito dall’indole sua
naturalmente umana e fidata ma da un giro momentaneo di acri
idee, di cui il lettore conoscerà fra poco l’origine, quasi pentito
d’avere offeso quell’ospite nell’atto stesso che lo accoglieva,
soggiunse con viso accaparante in tuono gajo: — «Venite qui, qui
presso al fuoco, buon galantuomo, sedete. L’aria della sera è
frescolina ed umida, il calore vi ristorerà.
Il Pellegrino senza profferir parola appoggiò alla parete il suo
bordone e avanzata una panchetta di legno si sedette in prossimità
del focolare. Gaudenzo stando in piedi continuava ad esaminarlo
attentamente. Ma l’incognito non alzando mai lo sguardo egli alfine
gli domandò:
«Da qual parte venite o Pellegrino?
«Da Val d’Antrona.
«Sempre per le montagne?
«Sempre.
«La strada che avete scelta è la più lunga e disastrosa: venendo pel
piano dell’Ossola ad Omegna sul lago l’accorciavate della metà.
«Il piano e mal sicuro poichè vi sono a campo le masnade dei
Ponteschi [8], e d’altronde dovetti risalir l’Anza per toccare Calasca.
«Vi recate a San Giulio per isciogliere un voto o per ottenere favori
dalla Corte del Vescovo?
«Per un voto» — rispose esitando, ma con qualche asprezza lo
Straniero.
«Non foste a Varallo?
«No.
«E dalle parti della Sesia?
«No» — ripetè il Pellegrino con manifesto dispetto, indicando quanto
già fosse infastidito da quell’insistente interrogare.
Gaudenzo tornò a misurarlo coll’occhio da capo a piedi, poi mirando
in volto Bernardo e la sua figlia fece un atto come di chi dicesse:
costui non dev’essere quel che pare. Si riassise quindi sullo sgabello
che occupava da prima e voltosi di nuovo alla figlia del Mugnajo, il
quale s’era posto intanto a versar la farina nell’acqua del pajuolo che
bolliva. — «Torna a sederti qui o Maria (disse battendo col palmo
della mano la seggiola ove essa si pose mesta e taciturna), e dimmi
tu se quelle che ti ho raccontate non le sono cose da far uscire dai
gangheri qualsiasi cristiano? Quel... quasi sarei per dirlo... quel
nostro conte Jago da Biandrate vuol ora introdurre nel paese anche
di queste belle usanze! Non s’accontenta il signor feudatario di farci
pagare doppia gabella pel sale, d’avere imposto il balzello d’un soldo
d’argento per ogni ruota di carro e d’obbligare noi poveri vassalli a
lavorare per lui un giorno ogni settimana, quando la buona memoria
del conte Bonifacio suo padre non c’imponeva altro carico che quello
della decima del mosto e delle legna, egli vorrebbe adesso che tutti
quelli che contraggono matrimonio si sottoponessero a questa nuova
qualità di tributo.
Maria mandò un profondo sospiro e abbassò gli occhi al suolo;
Bernardo, che inginocchiatosi sulla pietra del focolare, andava col
matterello tramestando la polenta: — «Ah il conte Bonifazio,
esclamò, non avrebbe mai fatte azioni di questa sorta! Gran
brav’uomo ch’egli era! veniva soventi a cacciare in questa valle e
qualche volta ho prestato ajuto io stesso al suo scudiero a condurre
a mano i cavalli nei passi più scabrosi.
«Sapete poi (proseguì Gaudenzo) chi mi ha significato il comando
del Conte?... fu Tibaldo il suo falconiero, quella faccia da giudeo col
naso più adunco che il becco degli uccellacci con cui preda le
allodole e le pernici. M’incontrai seco lui a Quarona nell’atto ch’esso
usciva dalla bottega di Zancone il fabbro, ove va soventi a far
acconciare le lasse de’ suoi grifagni. Ne portava uno infatti sul
braccio a cui andava lisciando le penne. Oh perchè non gli è saltato
agli occhi e non glieli ha cavati entrambi nell’istante che s’avvide di
me!
«Ebbene che ti disse il Falconiero?» — chiese con impazienza
Bernardo.
«Gaudenzo di Civiasco, mi gridò egli subito che mi scôrse, appunto
con te ho bisogno di parlare — E avvicinatosi a me con un sorriso
infernale sul ceffo disse: — Corre voce pel paese che tu ti sposi e
prendi in donna la mulinara di Val d’Arola, la figlia di Bernardo, è ciò
vero? — Verissimo, risposi io; mia madre invecchia e voglio darle la
consolazione prima che chiuda gli occhi di tenere un mio bambolo
sulle ginocchia — Ottimamente, soggiunse il ribaldo. Il Conte nostro
padrone m’ha imposto d’avvertirti che vuole che le nozze siano
celebrate a Monrigone nel suo castello. — Perchè nel suo castello?
(dissi io stupito) non ho forse una chiesa nella mia terra? — Non vi
sono repliche: esclamò Tibaldo. Così vuole il conte Jago e tu devi
ubbidire. Se tu ignori i suoi diritti li sa ben esso. Altri feudatarj già da
molti anni gli esercitano e se egli ne ha trascurato l’uso sin’ora
intende adesso di farli pienamente valere, nè spetta a te, vassallo
mascalzone, lo scrutinare i diritti del tuo signore. — Che diritti può
mai vantare il Conte sopra di me (l’interruppi io con rabbia) oltre
quelli di togliermi come fa, quasi tutta la roba e costringermi a
lavorare per lui quasi fosse un suo bue od un cavallo? — Che
diritti?... Che diritti? — ripetè furibondo, l’iniquo Falconiero, e
pronunciò certe parole da stregone che spiegò poi nel modo che vi
ho già narrato. All’udire una tale scelleraggine mi si drizzarono i
capelli sulla testa, mi si oscurò la vista e sono stato filo filo di
passarlo col mio spuntone da una parte all’altra egli e il suo farsetto
di cammuccà crimisino.
«Era senza il giaco e ti parlava così? Oh anch’essi, grazie al cielo,
non possono star sempre vestiti di ferro! (pronunciò fra i denti il
Mugnajo).
«Ah Signore Iddio (disse Maria con timidità ed angoscia), chi sa che
disgrazia sarebbe accaduta se gli mettevate le mani addosso; forse
io non v’avrei veduto mai più!
«Gran fortuna (continuò il giovine), che il mio santo Protettore mi
trattenne in quel momento la mano e m’inspirò il salutare pensiero di
vendere la mia casuccia ed i miei terreni e venire ad abitare con mia
madre in qualche luogo di questa Riviera d’Orta sotto il dominio del
vostro Vescovo, dove Maria non avrà a temere le zanne di quella
bestia feroce del Conte.
«Che anime perverse! (esclamò Bernardo alzandosi in piedi). Ecco
cosa hanno fruttato le massime di Fra Dolcino e de’ suoi iniqui
gazzari, vera peste di questi paesi! Coi grani dell’eresia non si può
macinare altra farina.
«Il conte Jago (profferì Gaudenzo con fuoco) è un gazzaro [9] se ve
n’è mai stato un altro al mondo. Dirlo a me? non ho io stesso veduto
Fra Dolcino e la sua Monaca Margherita entrare più volte nella
Rocca del Conte a Monrigone? [10] e quando l’Eretico stava colle sue
turbe nel piano di Parete-Calva sulla cima di Valnera chi è che
mandava colassù le biade e il vino affinchè quei maladetti lupi non
morissero arrabbiati di fame? È chiaro adunque come il sole che il
Conte era tinto della loro pece sino ai capelli. Ma pure, che volete? I
Valsesiani che strinsero anni sono la lega contro i Biandrati ed ora la
fecero contro gli eretici, obbligandoli a snidare dalle loro montagne,
rispettano il conte Jago. Anche a Zebello egli mandò i suoi arcieri a
soccorrere Fra Dolcino, e se il Vescovo di Vercelli non fosse venuto
a capo quest’inverno di serrarlo con quasi tutti i suoi nella rete,
metterei una mano nel fuoco che esso stesso il Conte andava quivi
in persona a combattere per lui.
«Così San Giulio l’avesse concesso che tu, o Gaudenzo, non saresti
costretto per unirti alla mia Maria d’abbandonare la tua casa ed i tuoi
campi, giacchè egli avrebbe fatta la fine che farà tra poco l’Eretico,
cominciando a provare nelle fiamme di questo mondo come
abbrucino quelle dell’inferno in cui vorrei soffiare io stesso per farlo
ardere eternamente in pena de’ suoi enormi peccati.
A tale fiera imprecazione pronunciata con tutto accanimento da
Bernardo in odio al Conte fecero eco col cuore e le parole i due
promessi. E questa smisurata e violente brama di vendetta, di che
s’accesero simultaneamente, non era indizio in essi d’animo
selvaggio e crudele, ma bensì intimo sfogo d’un oppresso
sentimento di giustizia sancito in certo modo dalle circostanze e
dalle idee religiose dei tempi. Si consideri infatti lo stato delle
persone del popolo e specialmente di quelle che abitavano aperte
campagne, in quei secoli nei quali ad ogni pazzo e criminoso
capriccio di chi comandava, si dava il nome di diritto cui era
necessità sottostare. Non gli averi, non la libertà, non l’onore erano
sacri. Dalla turrita rocca il Feudatario faceva bandire a suon di
tromba i suoi voleri e guai a chi avesse osato resistere! erano strazii
e morte. La forza prepotente, brutale imperava nel mondo pressochè
da assoluta signora. Innanzi ad uomini coperti di ferro e vigorosi
adopratori di spade, mazze e lancie la plebe inerme star non poteva
che pavida e inoffensiva lasciandosi miseramente conculcare. In
tanta abbiezione ritraevano gli infelici valido conforto dalla speranza
che i loro patimenti venivano tenuti a calcolo in una vita migliore e
che terribili castighi attendevano gli oppressori inumani, pei quali
l’Eterno Giudice impugnava più severo e tremendo il vindice flagello.
Il Pellegrino appoggiato il capo ad una mano e tutto raccolto in se
stesso, sembrava non prestare punto d’attenzione ai parlari di quella
gente; ma quando il Mulinaro profferì gli ultimi veementi suoi detti si
scosse, s’agitò e il pallore che coprivagli le guancie si fece più
intenso. Nello stesso mentre Bernardo che esalata la bile,
riprendeva placidamente le sue faccende, volse gli occhi a lui e
disse: — «Pur troppo, eh Pellegrino! vi sono degli uomini cattivi i
quali pare proprio che ci godano nel tormentare gli altri. Di questi tali
non ne mancherà certo anche dalle vostre parti non è vero?
Fortunati noi che per misericordia del cielo qui comanda un Vescovo
sotto di cui certe birbonate non si fanno, e chi prende moglie può
condursela a casa... senza che prima... ma lasciamola lì. Pensiamo
ora a mangiare in pace questa poca grazia di Dio... Galantuomo
(proseguì dopo aver guardato più attentamente lo Straniero) v’è
forse saltata addosso la febbre o avete fatto penitenza tutto il
giorno? siete smorto come uno a cui abbiano data la corda. Bisogna
che non prolunghiate il digiuno, altrimenti perderete le forze di
proseguire il viaggio. Venite qui, sedete a questo tavolo e rinvigorite
lo stomaco dividendo con noi il poco frutto delle nostre fatiche.
Così parlando aveva Bernardo staccato a due mani il pajuolo dalla
catena e lo aveva capovolto sul tagliere stato coperto da Maria di un
ruvido ma pulito tovagliuolo.
Rialzato il recipiente vi rimase una soda e fumante polenta che ne
conservava intera la forma. Il Pellegrino che provava più cocenti
stimoli che quelli della fame, si mostrò sulle prime restìo, ma vinto
poi dalle cordiali ripetute tute offerte, appressò e s’assise a quel
desco frugale.
«Domani se vi risvegliate gagliardo e riposato (disse il Mugnajo
ponendogli innanzi ampia porzione) in un’ora di cammino arrivate
vate giù a Pella dove troverete delle barche quante volete per farvi
mettere all’Isola. Non dimenticatevi di pregare San Giulio per il
povero Bernardo, per sua figlia e per il bravo Gaudenzo ed
invocatelo che tenga da noi lontane nuove tribolazioni.
«Sì buona gente (rispose il Pellegrino con voce che forzavasi a
render dolce), pregherò per voi non solo a San Giulio, ma anche in
Santuarii più lontani e miracolosi, e pregherò di tutto cuore ancorchè
i presenti vostri mali siano lieve ombra a fronte di quelli... (e si
corresse) che opprimono un gran numero de’ vostri pari.
Mentre andavano consumando la villeresca cena, Bernardo e
Gaudenzo continuarono a parlare delle faccende che stavano ad
entrambi tanto a petto, proponendo alternativamente varii progetti
sul modo in cui meglio conveniva impiegare il ricavo che il giovine
contadino avrebbe fatto de’ suoi pochi tenimenti di Civiasco, affine di
prendere stabile dimora nelle terre soggette alla giurisdizione
vescovile, sottraendosi al dominio del prepotente Biandrate.
Dirigevano nel calore del discorso alcuna volta la parola anche allo
Straniero, ma questi, sempre assorto ne’ proprii pensieri, non
rispondeva che motti tronchi ed insignificanti. Dopo molti
ragionamenti protratti in lungo sinchè Maria ebbe sparecchiato,
Gaudenzo sorse in piedi dicendo: — «La notte s’innoltra e mia
madre che sta aspettandomi potrebbe essere agitata da sinistri
presentimenti se non mi mettessi subito in cammino. A passare la
Colma ci vuole il suo tempo; e va e va non si è mai giunti là in cima.
Una volta però che vi sia arrivato balzo giù dalla punta della Croce ai
pascoli e in quattro salti sono a casa.
«Giacchè hai risoluto di partire mio figliuolo (disse Bernardo
alzandosi anch’esso) sì, è meglio che non ritardi di più. L’ascesa è
lunga, e mi ricordo che io pure quando aveva le gambe buone come
le tue a pervenire colassù non faceva mai tanto presto quanto
desiderava... Ora tu, o Maria, che hai versato l’olio nella lanterna,
accendila e dagliela che egli se ne possa andare con San Giuliano
che l’accompagni.
«No, no: non voglio lume (soggiunse Gaudenzo trattenendo il
braccio della fanciulla in atto d’accenderlo). Un Romito con una gran
barba bianca ch’è venuto da poco ad abitare vicino al nostro paese,
ha detto che di notte le anime dannate se veggono un chiaro andare
in volta gli corrono dietro ed i diavoli saltano giù dagli alberi a
graffiare chi lo porta.
«E volete passare in mezzo ai boschi e vicino al campo dei morti
solo ed all’oscuro? (esclamò Maria con amorosa temenza).
«Ho gran pratica di questi luoghi e tu lo sai, Maria; nè poi è tanto
bruno di fuori (in così dire spalancò la porta). Guarda come
risplendono le stelle: se spuntasse la luna non potrebbe il cielo
essere più lucente, si distingue il sentiero a meraviglia — Addio,
addio, state sani, doman l’altro si rivedremo ed ogni fastidio, spero,
sarà finito.
Si pose quindi a spalle la scure, diede la buona notte al Pellegrino
che gli augurò felice il viaggio, e prese la via. Bernardo e la figlia lo
seguirono sino al cancello che fu aperto fra nuovi saluti, e un
momento dopo non si udirono che le sue pedate per il bosco, il
rumore delle quali fu ben presto coperto da quello dell’incessante
caduta del vicino torrente.
PARTE SECONDA
Dopo il bacio di Giuda il primo è questo

De’ tradimenli umani, ma la fama
Sdegnò pietosa numerar le arcane
Orrende fila onde fu ordito un tanto
Delitto e il tacque alla futura istoria.
Romanzi-Poetici.
Non iscorse che un giorno e fu commesso un fatto esecrando. La

misera Maria sorpresa all’improvviso presso il suo casolare venne
portata a Monrigone e rinchiusa nelle mura del castello del Conte.
Quivi vano è ogni suo grido, vano ogni pianto, poichè quelli che la
circondano non hanno orecchio pei lamenti femminili.
Ma chi è mai colui che nella gotica antica galleria tutta guernita
intorno di ampj oscuri quadri frammisti a corazze rugginose, ad elmi,
ad azze, a daghe passeggia a lenti passi colle braccia incrocicchiate
e gli occhi rivolti al suolo?... Oh tradimento!... Egli è il Pellegrino
accolto sì ospitalmente nel mulino di Arola... lo stesso conte Jago
Biandrate! [11].
Mostra all’aspetto più di trent’anni: è alto, magro, con muscolatura
risentita e nervosa. Ha spaziosa fronte, pallide le guancie che
alquanto sceme rendono oblungo il suo viso. Nerissimi sono i suoi
occhi e nera del paro la capellatura, una ciocca della quale gli sta
ritta sulla fronte essendo nei rimanente fitta ma breve. Una striscia di
barba ricciuta e bruna ma non lucida come i capelli gli contorna il
volto passando sotto il mento bipartito. Nudo, slanciato, tendinoso gli
si scorge il collo chiuso al confine dall’orlo trapunto del giustacuore
color verde-bruno, spoglio in tutto d’ornamenti e che s’informa
strettamente alla persona come i calzoni rossi che riveste, i quali gli
scendono ristretti sino alla nocca del piede. L’unico oggetto che
s’abbia sulla persona, il quale non consuona colla simplicità del
vestimento è un cordone d’oro che lo cinge ai lombi nel quale porta
infisso un pugnale col manico cesellato di argento in vagina d’avorio.
Benchè i suoi lineamenti rimangono quasi immoti, un certo fremito
che gli erra sulle labbra, un leggiero corrugarsi della fronte ad
intervalli, un tener fiso lo sguardo ora in un punto ed ora in un altro,
mostra ad evidenza che la sua mente sta appuntata in immagini vive
che lo scuotono dalle intime fibre.
Ad un tratto fermasi presso una finestra che guarda nel cortile
rinserrato fra le alte merlate mura, al di sopra delle quali s’alza la
torre del Castello. Guarda verso di questa, porge l’orecchio, ed
udendo come il suono d’un gemito soffocato, che parte da quella
torre, si ritrae dal davanzale con moto di dispetto.
Passava in quel mentre in fondo alla galleria il falconiero Tibaldo,
confidente e Consigliero suo prediletto; ei gli fece segno colla mano
d’entrare in sala, rimanendo immobile in prossimità della finestra.
Quando gli fu vicino accennò col guardo la torre e disse:
«Che fa là dentro?
«Piange» — rispose con tutta indifferenza il Falconiero.
«Quel suo miagolare continuo mi annoja.
«Fateci mettere un bavaglio alla bocca e non la sentirete più.
«No. — Benchè sia una villana non voglio usarle violenza... se
venisse a deformarsi colle contorsioni, il suo promesso potrebbe non
volerla più, ed io non ho intenzione di rompere il loro matrimonio.
«Ah!... ah!... v’è da scommettere una moneta d’oro contro un soldo
che al matrimonio non v’è più un’anima che vi pensi (disse Tibaldo
con riso beffardo).
«Oh! perchè credi che non si celebreranno le nozze? lo sposo è mio
vassallo, ed alla fine del conto troverà convenirgli assai meglio
venire a fare gli sponsali nel mio castello, vedersi qui festeggiato e
godere poscia egli ed i suoi figli della mia protezione, che condursi
ad abitare sotto altro dominio vendendo i suoi averi ad ogni vil
prezzo.
«Sì, mettete la pecora nella tana del lupo e poi sperate che si consoli
il pastore coll’offrirgliene i resti.
«Come? non fosti tu stesso che mi dicesti che per introdurre l’uso di
quel diritto già da tanti altri feudatarj praticato, era necessario
adoperare per le prime volte la forza, e che poi i vassalli vi si
sarebbero a poco a poco abituati, piegandovisi senza difficoltà? Tu
m’hai narrato del mio contadino Gaudenzo che sposare doveva la
mulinara di Arola; tu me l’hai dipinta quale bellissima fanciulla, gli
imponesti tu di venire a far le nozze al castello ed allorchè giungesti
a scoprire ch’egli meditava di sfuggire al mio potere, fosti tu quello
che consigliasti il modo d’impedirlo. Ora che la fanciulla è qui in mia
mano, e che il nostro scopo non può essere raggiunto se non viene
lo sposo a ricercarla ed ottenerla da me, tu sembri dubitare della
riuscita di quest’impresa!... M’avresti tu posto a repentaglio di
sostenere una guerra col Vescovo Signore d’Orta e dell’Isola per
avere rapita una donna del suo dominio, senza poter venire a capo
di stabilire quanto ci eravamo proposto?...
«Che mai v’importa ancorchè il primo colpo andasse fallito?... ma
che dico: andare fallito?... non è anzi riuscito ottimamente?
Senz’ombra di pericolo, senza che a voi nè ad alcuno dei vostri
alabardieri sia stata pure scalfita la pelle colla scure o colle mazze
dei villani, vi siete impadronito della più bella fanciulla di tutto il
dominio della Riviera e vorreste far lamento se il miserabile a cui era
destinata non viene a riprendersela?... Vi ricordate quanto costò
l’ultimo fatto consimile, quando faceste qui trasportare la nipote del
Priore di Serravalle? dodici arcieri rimasero sul terreno, tre furono
presi ed appiccati, io ebbi da un graffio scorticata una mano ed a voi
uccisero il cavallo.
«Per ciò appunto aveva determinato di non mettermi mai più in
cimento a causa di donne: esse alla fin fine non recano che
svantaggio, non sono che di peso. Almeno si potesse ottenere
alcuna buona somma pel loro riscatto; tutti fanno grande
apparecchio e rumore per non lasciarsele portar via, ma una volta
che siano state qua dentro non darebbero una lira per riaverle. Lo
sai ch’io non voleva pensarci più: se non venivi in campo colle tue
maladette parole, io non usciva certamente a questa caccia... e nel
momento in cui siamo!
Rimase pensieroso alcun istante, poi riprese a bassa voce: — «Due
delle mie bande più valorose sono perdute; erano cento uomini, i
migliori che portassero elmo e giaco in tutte le terre che bagna la
Sesia... Ma poteva io far di meno per sostenere Fra Dolcino,
quell’uomo santo e incantatore che mi aveva legato a lui con tante
promesse!... Se non erano le genti d’armi di Novara alla battaglia di
Zebello il Vescovo Vercellese non cantava vittoria di certo! nel
momento che si menano le spade ci vuol altro che gli scongiuri e le
invocazioni del piviale e della mitra, abbisognano buone loriche e
braccia di ferro... Or bene, i castellani Novaresi che diedero ajuto a
quel di Vercelli non potrebbero impegnarsi a sostenere il Vescovo
loro, se questi mi chiedesse ragione della violazione del suo
dominio? Ora che mancano gli uomini e che i miei vassalli hanno
ardito di manifestare qualche segno di malcontento.....
«Da quali pensieri mai vi lasciate dominare? Vivete pure nella
massima tranquillità, poichè il Vescovo di Novara signore della
Riviera ha troppo gravi impegni in questi momenti per volersi
impacciare in simili faccende. Che mai gli deve importare d’una
villana ignorata da tutto il mondo, per torsi la briga poi di sfidare un
signore potente e temuto come siete voi e di cui sono sì celebri le
imprese. Oh! via scacciate ogni temenza, nè abbiate alcun sospetto
sopra i vassalli, che se lo desiderate vi faccio vedere a ridurli in
pochi giorni umili e timorosi più che un branco di pecore. Un pajo
solo di que’ mascalzoni che si prendono, e si.....
«Sono stanco ti dico di vedere i miei soldati a fare da carnefici; nè
voglio più che i cameroni del mio castello siano luoghi da tormenti
come le sale nel convento degli Inquisitori. Fra Dolcino insegnavami
che egli è opera meritoria il dare soccorso agli infermi, e non
accrescerne il numero; che il demonio si fa compagno di chi sparge
inutilmente il sangue umano.
«Gran pazzo briccone ch’era Fra Dolcino! Ed egli crede alle
massime di quell’eretico impostore che a forza di ciarle lo spogliò di
danaro e di soldati (così pronunciava tra sè Tibaldo mentre il conte
Jago s’era posto a passeggiare di nuovo per la galleria come assorto
in un grave pensiero).
«Orsù voglio che questa faccenda finisca lietamente per tutti, e nel
termine di pochi giorni (esclamò il Conte arrestandosi d’un tratto
presso il Falconiero). Farai che Maria sia levata tosto dalla torre e
condotta nelle stanze che erano di mia madre; mi recherò io poi colà
a consolarla; le regalerò dei giojelli per il giorno delle sue nozze, e mi
proverò a parlarle da galante cavaliero: essa non possiede il
candore del latte, nè sa agire e proverbiare secondo i precetti della
corte d’amore come le dame dei nostri castelli, ma ha un non so che
di deciso nella sua fisonomia che mi va sommamente a genio.
Quando poi sarà sposa la colmerò di nuovi doni e allora tutte le altre
la invidieranno e ambiranno di godere nello stesso grado il mio
favore e la mia protezione.
«Oh quanto mai vi siete cangiato! (disse Tibaldo facendo un gesto di
stupore). Usare di queste dolcezze verso i vassalli egli è un volerli
far diventare orgogliosi, caparbi ed intrattabili.
«Ho determinato di far così e tanto basta (pronunciò il Conte
imperiosamente). Tu andrai in cerca di Gaudenzo, gli dirai che la sua
Maria non gli fu tolta che per punirlo dell’aver tentato di sottrarsi a’
miei comandi ed al mio dominio, e lo persuaderai a venire fra due
giorni al castello dove gli sarà resa la sposa e si celebreranno
pomposamente le sue nozze.
«Io andare in cerca di Gaudenzo, di quel villano impertinente, di
quel...
«Oseresti tu rifiutare d’obbedirmi? (disse il Conte prendendolo con
forza per un braccio). Se fra due giorni non conduci Gaudenzo
placato al castello ti faccio seppellire vivo in fondo al sotterraneo.
«Non ho mai ardito, nè ardirei esitare un istante ad eseguire la
volontà vostra (rispose timidamente il vile Falconiero). Non era che
per serbare più completamente il grado e il decoro... che io
osservava... ma se altrimenti vi piace faccio subito porre l’arcione al
mio ronzino falbo e non gli leverò il freno di bocca se non ho ritrovato
e ridotto Gaudenzo al vostro volere.
Così dicendo levò il berretto salutandolo rispettosamente,
s’incamminò verso la porta della galleria ove il Conte lo seguì e
nell’atrio gli ripetè il comando di far condurre la fanciulla di Arola
dalle rozze ed anguste stanze della torre ove gemeva, nelle camere
più addobbate del castello ch’erano quelle in cui aveva dimorato la
defunta contessa Isabella sua madre.
La notte che susseguì al rapimento di Maria, Bernardo il mugnajo
solo e desolato passò la Colma e discese a Civiasco, narrando il
crudele evento a Gaudenzo. Un furore indescrivibile invase alla
prima l’animo di questi; ma poi si raffrenò; stette alcun tempo
silenzioso, indi rivolto a Bernardo disse con voce di disperata
risoluzione: — «Le lagrime, i lamenti, le imprecazioni sono inutili: fa
d’uopo vendicarsi o morire. Datemi la mano, o padre di Maria, e
promettete di accompagnarmi nell’impresa che sono per tentare.
«Oh noi miseri! (esclamò Bernardo). Che mai possiamo
intraprendere contro un signore chiuso in un forte castello, e
circondato da tanti uomini d’armi? Ohimè noi poniamo a sicuro
pericolo la nostra vita, e forse rendiamo più crudele la sorte della mia
misera figliuola!
«Non temete: vi sono molti e molti che odiano mortalmente il
Biandrate. Gli uomini d’Ara, quei di Vintebio, a cui esso tolse più
volte i buoi e le messi, non attendono che il momento opportuno di
concorrere a sterminare il feroce loro aggressore: anche i montanari
della Val grande covano contro di lui un astio mortale per le sue
crudeltà, e per avere con ogni possa favorita l’eresia di Fra Dolcino.
«Ma a che mai può questo giovarci? Abbiamo noi mezzo di parlare
con quelle genti, di adunarle secretamente onde il Conte non ci
sorprenda e ci assalga coi suoi prima di essere in grado di opporgli
resistenza? Potremo noi persuaderli a versare il loro sangue per
nostra cagione? O figliuol mio, non lasciarti trascinare dalla smania
di una impossibile vendetta.
«No, ripeto, non è impossibile. Io sono disposto a tutto, e gli ostacoli
che voi calcolaste non sono insuperabili. Noi avremo il soccorso d’un
potente ausiliario.
«Di chi?
«Di Padre Anastasio l’Eremita.
«Oh che mai dici? L’Eremita di Civiasco coopererebbe alla
depressione del Conte? darebbe egli mano ad unire le genti dei
dintorni per liberarle dal loro oppressore?... Ma come lo sai tu?
«Gli ho parlato più volte, e quando gli riferii la prepotente esigenza
del Biandrate che io facessi le nozze con Maria al suo castello, come
mi significò lo scellerato Tibaldo, quel sant’uomo, il quale benchè
vecchio conserva tutta l’ardenza e il vigore della giovinezza, si
scagliò contro di esso colle parole più violenti e disse che un giorno
o l’altro la mano del cielo lo avrebbe colpito in un modo esemplare e
tremendo.
«Se l’Eremita è con noi egli ci assolve da ogni colpa: andiamo;
andiamo da lui ed io eseguirò ciecamente quanto egli saprà
consigliarmi.
Arrivarono di notte al romitaggio, ch’era una casupola presso una
cappelletta posta verso la metà del monte; entrarono colà mentre il
vecchio solitario appoggiato a rozza tavola stava meditando sopra
un ampio volume al chiarore d’una lucerna che rischiarava un
teschio umano. Si gettarono i due villici a’ suoi piedi, poichè
quell’uomo era per l’austera sua vita venerato qual santo, e rialzati
poi da lui cortesemente, fecero il racconto delle loro sventure, e
Gaudenzo annunziò energicamente i suoi arditi progetti.
Nessuno sapeva di qual patria fosse quel vecchio Eremita di nome
Anastasio e tutti parimente ignoravano da qual paese egli
provenisse. Comparve in quella terra e si stabilì sul monte presso
Civiasco allorchè Fra Dolcino l’eresiarca aveva posta la sua sede in
quelle vicinanze, favorito e sostenuto apertamente dal Biandrate.
Vedevasi di quando in quando alcun monaco straniero recarsi a
visitarlo nel suo eremo, lo che accresceva la di lui riputazione, ma
nulla però traspirava intorno alla vita antecedente di lui, a’ suoi
rapporti ed al suo stato. Egli s’adoperava con tutta possa a far
sparire dagli spiriti le tracce lasciate dalle dottrine ereticali seminate
da Dolcino e da’ suoi seguaci e a ritornare in forza i sentimenti di
sommissione e d’obbedienza verso il Pontefice, i Vescovi ed i
Sacerdoti che gli eretici avevano tentato di distruggere. La severità
de’ suoi costumi, la vita di penitenza ch’egli menava, corroborando i
suoi detti, davangli sommo vantaggio sopra i suoi avversarii, la
rilasciatezza ed immoralità dei quali favoriva le perverse inclinazioni
dei potenti, ma era oggetto di scandalo alla maggior parte del
popolo. Non tralasciava pure nei caldi sermoni che teneva alle
bande villerecce ora nei prati, ora ne’ boschi ove soleva adunarle, di
parlare con veemenza contro i ricchi, di minacciare ad essi la
maledizione del Signore in pena dei loro gravi peccati, e soventi
volte dipingendo un reprobo incallito nella colpa, si serviva di tali
immagini che tutti facilmente vi riconoscevano ritratto il conte Jago.
L’Eremita udì la narrazione di Gaudenzo e di Bernardo senza punto
lasciare apparire sentimento di piacere o di dolore: appena appena
la sua calva e rugosa fronte si raggrinzò per un lieve moto di sdegno
quando ascoltò il modo in cui era stato condotto il nero tradimento.
Allorchè essi ebbero cessato di parlare, egli rimase alcun tempo
meditabondo, appoggiata una mano alla gran barba, sostenendo il
capo: poscia disse ai due contadini che riedessero agli abituri senza
palesare i loro progetti a persona, e ritornassero da lui il giorno

Textbook Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema Film Theory at The Fringes of Contemporary Art Cinema 1St Edition Troy Bordun Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF

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Textbook Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema Film Theory at The Fringes of Contemporary Art Cinema 1St Edition Troy Bordun Auth Ebook All Chapter PDF

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Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema:

Film Theory at the Fringes of

Contemporary Film Music: Investigating Cinema

Absence in Cinema The Art of Showing Nothing Film and

The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933

Maverick Movies New Line Cinema and the Transformation

Impure cinema intermedial and intercultural approaches

The Spectacle of Politics and Religion in the

The British Horseracing Film Representations of the

ISBN 978-3-319-65893-3 ISBN 978-3-319-65894-0 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950397

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover credit: Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas 2013)

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This volume is a revised version of my Ph.D. dissertation. From my thesis

University enjoyable. For sharing conversation on my work, and on life,

1 Introduction: Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema 1

2 Carlos Reygadas, the Avant-Garde, and the Senses 29

3 !Que Viva México!: Reygadas as Documentarian 67

4 I Don’t Know It When I See It: Catherine Breillat’s

5 Horrible Pornography: Fat Girl (À Ma Soeur!, 2001) 123

6 On-Screen and Off-Screen Flesh and Blood:

7 Reframing Spectatorship Theory with Extreme Cinema 199

8 Conclusion: Know Genre, No Trouble 217

Fig. 2.1 Post Tenebras Lux (Reygadas 2013) 40

Introduction: Genre Trouble and Extreme

A critic-defined tendency in recent art cinema, initially coined New

© The Author(s) 2017 1

their audiences, causing jumps in seats, screams, and nausea.2 Extreme

trend as transgressive and ground-breaking without considering the industry or reception

extreme cinema maintains some affinities with postmodern notions—

number of their films, and through a careful consideration of these direc-

Body Genres and Extreme Cinema

(Beugnet 2007: 24–25). The sensations that result from an extreme

their verification as a graphically explicit product of a particular type

Specifically, extreme cinema depends on two hermeneutic transformations:

do nothing would result in a formal exercise within the larger body of

Film Theory After Maurice Merleau-Ponty

central tenet of Merleau-Ponty’s writings was to describe the fundamen-

as seen and heard in advertisements, trailers, and so on) (Neale 1995:

in grasping the identities of objects in terms of their respective aspects.

to see something is to know how to approach it and explore it.”

the early Lumière pictures—whether trains arriving or landscapes shot

Even the perception of movement, which at first seems to depend directly

13 Lingis (1996: 34) interprets Merleau-Ponty’s scenario as follows: “The particular

The way to understand cinema, then, is similar to the manner in which

Sei giorni se n’andò mattina e sera

La campana del solitario villaggio di Arola dava i primi segni

Dopo il bacio di Giuda il primo è questo

Non iscorse che un giorno e fu commesso un fatto esecrando. La

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Body Genres and Extreme Cinema