Oxford French Graduate Seminar, All Souls College (Hovenden Room)

26th April 5-6.30pm

Questions of Duration and Ethics in New Extreme Cinema

Oliver Kenny (QMUL)

Long takes and long sequences are common elements in films which have been associated with new extreme cinema, a loose grouping of films from the last two decades which challenge and provoke the spectator in radical, disturbing and often problematic ways. The final chapter of my thesis, from which the ideas of this paper are drawn, seeks to interrogate the links between duration and extremity as well as duration and ethics in French films such as Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999), À ma sœur! (Catherine Breillat, 2001), Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001), Irréversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002), Twentynine Palms (Bruno Dumont, 2003) and We Fuck Alone (Gaspar Noé, 2006) as well as some from outside France such as The Brown Bunny (Vincent Gallo, 2003), Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, 2005), Free Will (Matthias Glasner, 2006), Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009), and The Tribe (Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy, 2014). 

This paper will propose that the durative qualities of many scenes from these films are able to create a confrontational realism by bringing us into a relation with the qualitative and processive – rather than quantitative and unitary – aspects of ‘extreme’ events such as murder, rape and bodily mutilation. This exploratory claim will be made by examining some intersections of Henri Bergson’s durée, Gilles Deleuze’s time-image and Stanley Keeling’s concepts of processive and unitary duration. In doing so, I aim to provide a basis for considering why new extreme films turn so frequently to the long take and drawing on examples from the films of Breillat, Dumont and Noé I hope to show that spectatorial engagement with the qualities and processes of violence can be ethically powerful in its disturbing, challenging address to the spectator. 

‘Does Madness Represent a Threat in a Deterministic Universe? Diderot and d’Holbach answer’    

Ruggero Sciuto (Merton College, Oxford) 

In my thesis I argue that both Diderot and d'Holbach should be regarded as endorsing determinism. I reach this conclusion by examining their treatment of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the laws of Nature, and causal necessitation.

Diderot's works, however, are teeming with references to madness and mad characters. This might seem to indicate that Diderot's philosophy ought not be taken as deterministic after all. Indeed, in the eighteenth century madness and determinism were perceived as being at odds: we see this, for example, in the Réflexions philosophiques sur le Système de la Nature of the Abbé Holland, as well as in the parallelism between madness and dreaming, which is ubiquitous in eighteenth-century French texts. Significantly, the latter parallelism between madness and dreaming can be found in the works of Diderot, too.

In my paper I shall demonstrate that neither madness nor dreaming represent a threat for Diderot and d'Holbach's determinism. In accordance with the Leibnizian principle of continuity, in fact, d'Holbach and Diderot obliterate all distinctions between mad- and non-mad people – as well as between sleep and wakefulness, for that matter. They consistently insist that madness derives from physical causes, and prove that mad people's actions are just as necessary as anyone else's.