In the 1920s, the French actor, director and poet Antonin Artaud elaborated his vision of the Theatre of Cruelty, a form of spectacle designed to rattle audiences' sensibilities with a force he compared to that of the bubonic plague: "I propose a theatre whose violent physical images pulverize, mesmerize the audience's sensibilities, caught in the drama as if in a vortex of higher forces." Substitute the word "theatre" for "cinema", and you have a fair description of a prominent strain of contemporary French cinema, one which has been dubbed the "New French Extreme".

Increasingly, this new strain of French cinema has been dominated by graphic sexuality, violence and a sense of social apocalypse. Among the defining images of the past decade, we have seen the embittered butcher of Gaspar Noé's Seul Contre Tous (I Stand Alone, 1998). Graphic sexuality is one thing (and all these films deal with that in great detail), but the use of incest is indeed another. Why is incest, a social and ethical taboo, used so provocatively in contemporary French cinema?



The hypothesis of new French extreme is to attempt to go beyond accepted limits. As Catherine Breillat (director of Baise-Moi and Anatomy of Hell) says: "It's about watching what is unwatchable...There are laws against obscenity, but I wanted to know what it was about from the point of view of an artist - not from the point of view of the law which forbids you to be an artist. [It’s about] trying to present people with something they can't bear, so as to make them see how miserable it is to be able to bear so little. “French cinema is terribly bourgeois," complains Breillat. "You're either an artist or a conformist - if you're conformist, you show society conforming to the way it likes to see itself. If you're an artist, you show a society that's much more transgressive."

It is no less influential 20th-century figure is Georges Bataille, philosopher and writer of a deliriously sordid brand of literary pornography who has paved the way for this new imbroglio of incest in French cinema. For Bataille, transgression is all, a quasi-religious yearning towards transcendence, in which abjection and exaltation go hand in hand. Perhaps it takes a lapsed Catholic to get the most out of Bataille, but his posthumously published Ma Mère has been adapted for the screen by Christophe Honoré, and was a surprise hit. This exploration of debauchery and the incest taboo stars no less an eminence than Isabelle Huppert, which testifies to the seriousness with which Bataille is taken in France.

Arguably however, the idea of incest in cinema is being broached now; after all other sexual taboos have been explored. Incest is in fact known as ‘the final taboo’. Bertolucci’s film Last Tango in Paris, was in 1972, a controversial move, and was the first mainstream film to feature an act of sodomy. Indeed, Bertolucci, Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider (who played the lead roles), where indicted for making the film under the term "utilitarian pornography". Interestingly, Catherine Breillat acted in this film, and then went on to become the “Queen of French Extreme”. Bertolucci, then, is the forefather of this type of cinema, he was a contemporary of Godard and Truffant, all of whom influence New French Extreme heavily. Bertolucci then, has now come full circle, with his film Les Innocents (The Dreamers), which features graphic sex, violence and a sense of social apocalypse (all ingredients of the new French extreme).

I Stand Alone - The butcher (known from Noe's short film Carne) has done some time in jail after beating up the guy who tried to seduce his teenage mentally-handicapped daughter. Now he wants to start a new life. He leaves his daughter in an institution and moves to Lille suburbs with his mistress. She promised him a new butcher shop. She lied. The butcher decides to go back to Paris and find his daughter.

Ooh Papa! Cinema Francaise d'Incest presented by Alan Hook and Rachael McConkey.