Page 254 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

interrogation of their own language - in short, reformism masquerading as revolutionism, obscured
by radical chic. They had ultimately subsumed their own alienated forms back into a framework that
remained mostly agteeable for the audience.
Hence even the wildest excesses of the most furious films made for a kind of cohesive narrative
sense, failing to induce the audience flinch. They were so busy accusing themselves that they forgot
to accuse the audience, as you had done; the audience could be said to be entirely 'responsible', for
example, for the anti-coherence of the waking spermatorrheoa-scape of Belle de Jour (1967). Here,
the nature of the narrative shifts implicates the nature of the audience of such a film: those whose
'grip on reality' (to paraphrase Brecht) is easily prised open. Would you believe that so much of the
confessional culture of the 1990s was to become a closed system of self-loathing and self-hatred, and
therein was deemed 'underground'? H o w can such bourgeois self-criticism ever really constitute a
worthwhile oppositional raison d'etre in relation to a new European cinema? And I write to you, Luis,
when the need for an oppositional front has never been more apparent.
Such thoughts occupied my mind after seeing a recent film by, it could be said, one of your
disciples, Michael Haneke - La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher, 2001). It sketched out the customs and
rituals of contemporary European bourgeois society, and held fast to these constructs as the film began
to systematically defile any sense of decency within this civilised context (the Conservatory, family
gatherings, quiet retirement, informal concerts, an 'old world' EU gloss to the whole thing). The net
result was, in a way, classically Bufiuelian: to render such rituals meaningful only in their enactments
and repetitions, as a kind of neurosis - the veneer of respectability to offset the letting loose of the
ego behind closed doors (pornography emporiums, hurried couplings, voyeurism, furtive self-harm,
re-enacted rape scenarios). I wish Deneuve had essayed the protagonist - if only so that the film could
play in a double-bill with Tristana (1970).
As I left the cinema, I wanted to feel that the 'sound and the fury' had signified something
beyond the instinctive decimation of its own codes. But what? Even if this is a 'final word' on this
subject (that is, an encounter with the extremities of the ability of bourgeois society to accommodate
depravity), and it did seem to be the 'final word' for a few days afterwards - I was unable to furnish
the film with the second viewing that it deserved - it still was a 'final word' and nothing more. It is
akin to that Sartrean critique of blasphemy; that no matter how great the outrages uttered against
God, in themselves a measure of an absolute rejection of God, blasphemy still presupposes that there
is a God to be outraged - and so is essentially a conservative impulse. It also represents a mindset that
Lukács would have recognised as 'ultra-radicals' who imagine that their anti-boutgeois moods, their
- often purely aesthetic - rejection of the stifling nature of petty-bourgeois existence [etc] ... have
transformed them into inexorable foes of bourgeois society.7
Luis - we need to have moved beyond the final word, to have rejected the vocabulary altogether.
Haneke's stalling of just such a dialectic is evident in his use of sharp edges that cut (a razor blade,
shattered glass, a carving knife) in the film. H o w do these edges function? In narrative terms: in the
first instance, the edges are utilised as weapons; in the second instance, to advance the dynamic of the
story (the mutilation of the protagonists vagina, for example - an act that radically rearranges our
attempts to locate her within one of the two aspects of the film, 'civilised' and 'behind closed doors').
But do they function beyond this? Not really. One is tempted to say that such makeshift weaponry

240