Limit Cinema

Transgression and the Nonhuman in Contemporary Global Film

Chelsea Birks

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501352874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

WINNER of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies ( SCMS) Best First Book Award 2023 Limit Cinema explores how contemporary global cinema represents the relationship between humans and nature. During the 21st century this relationship has become increasingly fraught due to proliferating social and environmental crises; recent films from Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) address these problems by reflecting or renegotiating the terms of our engagement with the natural world. In this spirit, this book proposes a new film philosophy for the Anthropocene. It argues that certain contemporary films attempt to transgress the limits of human experience, and that such 'limit cinema' has the potential to help us rethink our relationship with nature. Posing a new and timely alternative to the process philosophies that have become orthodox in the fields of film philosophy and ecocriticism, Limit Cinema revitalizes the philosophy of Georges Bataille and puts forward a new reading of his notion of transgression in the context of our current environmental crisis. To that end, Limit Cinema brings Bataille into conversation with more recent discussions in the humanities that seek less anthropocentric modes of thought, including posthumanism, speculative realism, and other theories associated with the nonhuman turn. The problems at stake are global in scale, and the book therefore engages with cinema from a range of national and cultural contexts. From Ben Wheatley's psychological thrillers to Nettie Wild's eco-documentaries, limit cinema pushes against the boundaries of thought and encourages an ethical engagement with perspectives beyond the human.

Part 1

Objectivity

1

Sacrifice and the sacred in Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Ben Wheatley

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I argued that certain contemporary films confront us with the limits of the human, and I contextualized this claim within recent discussions in the humanities and film studies more specifically about how to break with anthropocentric modes of thought. This chapter, the first half of Part 1 on Objectivity, will consider the possibility of representing nonhuman reality through cinema in relation to Bataillean notions of the sacred. Bataille distinguishes the sacred from the profane world of work and reason, which he argues betrays the nature of existence by imposing truth and meaning. The sacred, on the other hand, is what is excluded by or in excess of the human: ‘There is in nature and there subsists in man a movement which always exceeds the bounds, that can never be anything but partially reduced to order.’¹ Though the sacred is external to human modes of thought, it nevertheless ‘subsists’ in our behaviour and manifests itself through irrational drives such as sexual desire and self-destruction. Because the sacred resists reason, Bataille characterizes it as irrational, contradictory and ambivalent; the sacred is also associated with nature, since despite its exteriority to human thought it is immanent to this world rather than belonging to a transcendent world beyond. This Bataillean understanding of objectivity – of a world outside the particularities of the human perspective – will be explored in relation to the works of two film-makers: Ben Wheatley² and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I will argue that the films of Wheatley and Apichatpong evoke two kinds of relationship with the sacred: Wheatley’s films emphasize death and sacrifice, while Apichatpong’s films envision an erotic communion with nature.

The films of Apichatpong and Wheatley differ greatly in terms of cultural context and aesthetic approach, but this chapter will draw connections in the ways that both film-makers explore tensions between contemporary society, related to suburban and urban spaces, and a pagan or animist history that inheres in the natural landscape. Apichatpong is a prolific artist and a prominent favourite on the international film festival circuit, especially after his Palme d’Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010); he makes films that are slow-paced and narratively obscure and has been linked to other contemporary ‘slow cinema’ auteurs such as Béla Tarr, Abbas Kiarostami and Lisandro Alonso. His art house aesthetics, however, are infused with a love of pop culture, even kitsch: Thai pop songs feature prominently on his soundtracks, and the supernatural elements of his films are often referencing sci-fi and horror as much as Buddhist and animist folklore. Wheatley, a British film-maker who has been extremely prolific since the release of his first feature, Down Terrace, in 2009, is similarly interested in supposedly low-brow genres such as horror and science fiction. His films straddle the line between genre and art house cinema, as they experiment with generic structures through narrative ambiguity and formal excess. Wheatley’s films often stage human relationships in the midst of natural landscapes characterized by irrationality and violence, representations that serve as counterpoints to the comparatively gentler but no less incomprehensible junglescapes in Apichatpong.

While Wheatley insists on violence and death by focusing on male brutality and pagan sacrifice, in Apichatpong’s work the dissolution of the rational is staged as erotic, evidenced in the frequent sexual encounters of humans in nature or even of humans with nature (inter-species sex is a common trope in his cinema). Reading Apichatpong and Wheatley through Bataille will allow me to see them as two sides of the same coin, because eroticism and death for Bataille are the two ways by which we can confront the limits of the human. As I outlined in the previous chapter, both sex and death culminate in a transgression of/at the limits of thought: both acts risk the dissolution of the self into an ecstatic communion with alterity. Complementary representations of eroticism and death in the films of Apichatpong and Wheatley will help to elucidate – as much as possible, given its resistance to thought and language – the Bataillean sacred. I will start by exploring the negative post-theology of Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) and A Field in England (2013), which I argue are structured by a sacrifice-for-nothing that emphasizes the radical aporia of death. Building from this, I will move towards the erotic encounters with nature in Apichatpong’s Tropical Malady (2003), Syndromes and a Century (2006) and Uncle Boonmee. Wheatley’s evocations of the sacred are violent and nihilistic, while Apichatpong’s are more optimistic and life-affirming; however, rather than insisting on one of these versions of the sacred over the other, I argue that holding positive and negative notions of the sacred in suspension is essential for the ethical project made necessary by the Anthropocene.

Wheatley, post-theology and the sacrifice of sacrifice

Like Bataille, Ben Wheatley’s films are obsessed with death and sacrifice. Down Terrace ends with the protagonist murdering his parents with the help of his girlfriend; Kill List culminates in the ritual sacrifice of the protagonist’s family, unknowingly committed by the protagonist himself; A Field in England contains the repeated death and resurrection of a central character; the romantic holiday in Sightseers (2012) ends with a woman allowing her boyfriend to fall to his death in a thwarted double suicide. Rather than answering questions or resolving narrative tensions, these deaths raise more questions than they answer as they coincide with the gradual disintegration of generic structure towards an increasingly obscure and excessive aesthetic. This gradual collapse into irrationality and excess correlates with the central tension between Christian rationalism and a repressed pagan violence that Wheatley views as central to the British cultural imaginary. This concern with pagan history is nothing new to British cinema, and Wheatley borrows extensively from horror films such as The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) and Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968) that focus on themes of witchcraft and human sacrifice. What differentiates Wheatley from other British folk horror is that the sacrifices in his films no longer serve an authority but rather inhere in the structure of his films as a sacrifice of form itself. Sacrifice in Wheatley serves nothing: there is something in it that cannot be recuperated to serve the structuring forces of law, god or truth. The sacred evoked by sacrifice in Wheatley inheres in the landscape itself, a landscape that is bereft of higher meaning but that structures human existence as its very limit.

Bataille provides an effective framework for considering Wheatley’s treatment of sacrifice, as he also envisions a sacrifice-for-nothing that has radical potential to disrupt authoritarian forces. This notion of sacrifice attests to the pervasiveness of sacrificial logic despite the impossibility of sacrifice serving a higher truth after the death of God. Christopher Watkin argues that ‘to think in the West today is to think after God, with concepts and a tradition bequeathed by theology and theologically informed thinking, and even if the aim of such thinking is to be atheological it cannot avoid the task of disengaging itself from the theological legacy’.³ Watkin continues that post-theology recognizes that the death of God does not rid us of God’s impact on metaphysics; thinking beyond God requires that we recognize the influence of theology on the construction of thought and language.⁴ Sacrifice in Wheatley serves a similar function by undermining generic conventions and frustrating attempts at interpretation or meaning.

Sacrifice holds a central place in the foundations of Western thought, culminating in Christianity’s notion that humankind could only achieve salvation by sacrificing God. Post-theology argues that, despite the absence of God, this way of thinking persists in secular culture, and that sacrifice remains implicated in the ways that we understand and work towards truth. As Dennis King Keenan explains, the notion of truth has explicit ties to sacrifice in the Western philosophical tradition because ‘sacrifice has come to be understood as a necessary passage through suffering and/or death (of either oneself or someone else) on the way to a supreme moment of transcendent truth. Sacrifice effects the revelation of truth’.⁵ This process is thwarted by the lack of possibility for transcendence, since there is no higher truth to attain; while sacrificial logics persist, their grounding has become obsolete, resulting in what King calls the need for sacrifice to sacrifice itself.

Keenan locates this movement towards the sacrifice of sacrifice in thinkers like Julia Kristeva, Nancy and Bataille (among others); Bataille, he argues, effects this by emphasizing ‘the irreducible undecideability of the double meaning of death articulated by that moment when death as possibility turns into death as impossibility’.⁶ Death is aporetic in that, at the very moment that it can be apprehended, the possibility for apprehension ceases to exist; it remains a ‘not yet’ until the moment when speaking the not-yet becomes impossible.⁷ Sacrifice for Bataille is a means of relating to this impossibility at a distance because, through the communal witnessing of the death of another, we can share an experience of death without dying. The impossible subjective experience of death is turned into an objective event, which in turn can only be experienced in fragments of individual subjective experiences. Sacrifice is therefore the name Bataille gives to the compulsion to go beyond the self, to break the boundaries of ego and to experience alterity: it is a way of explaining the ‘necessity of throwing oneself or something of oneself out of oneself’,⁸ a necessity that exceeds the rational and requires the ecstatic communion of a group. He continues that this compulsion to exceed oneself ‘in certain cases can have no other end than death’;⁹ the urge to break the boundaries of the self is an inherently self-destructive one, though that destruction can be mitigated through the deferred, mediated experience of witnessing.

Sacrifice in Bataille is also a means of breaking with anthropocentric rationality. Human sacrifices and other offerings to gods are useless expenditures that exceed the profane logic of work and reason because, as waste, sacrificed objects are no longer subordinated to use and cannot be contained by the restricted systems of human labour and productivity.¹⁰ By exceeding profane human logic, Bataille argues that sacrifice can form a paradoxical relation to the sacred outside of thought. This duality between the sacred and the profane is another way of naming the divide between the human and that which exceeds it: since the profane for Bataille is structured by labour and encompasses everything related to human activity and production – from philosophy to language to trade – the sacred is everything in excess of this sphere. It is the ‘beyond’ of experience, implied by the structure of the profane and conditioned by its limits. This ‘beyond’ encompasses alterity in all forms, including the mind of the other and the impossible experience of death; but most importantly for my purposes the sacred is also associated with nature, the unknowable outside of human consciousness. While we cannot move beyond our limits, Bataille argues that through sacrifice we can exceed the narrow logic of the profane and form a paradoxical relation to what is outside of human thought. Sacrifice is one of the ways that we can break from the logic that allows us to...