Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today’s Art Film Culture

Virtual terrors

“…The drive to see in art a vehicle for empathy is not new to cinema, to be sure, but the power of film to steer viewers's phenomenology seems particularly well poised to put a subject through an experience of the kind an ‘empathy machine’ would presumably be most useful for: one radically unfamiliar to the empathizer, one she wouldn't otherwise be in a position to undergo. This is the logic behind a long‐standing aim of cinema, in particular of ‘unwatchable’ (Grønstad 2012), ‘feel‐bad’ (Lübecker 2015) or ‘extreme’ (Frey 2016) cinema. These are films that aim to acquaint viewers with extreme suffering.…”