“If you can’t bear pain, you don’t live up to your reputation.”
That line, spoken in Chang Cheh and Pao Hsueh-li’s The Boxer from Shantung (1972), speaks to a common sentiment found in the many kung fu films produced in Hong Kong under the Shaw Brothers. For the humble martial artist, the body isn’t only the means by which they perform their craft, or enact violent comeuppance on local goons, it’s a physical manifestation of their reputation in the wider community. Each practitioner is judged on the basis of the shapes they carve with their corporeal form, every chop and kick a signifier of their internal control, every shrugged off injury a mark of their enviable synchronicity between mind and body. In such a social structure, resilience to pain, the most intrusive and instantaneous clarion call from flesh to nerve to brain, becomes a signifier of both inner peace and technical proficiency.
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Cinema, by nature of its visual immediacy, has always been engaged with the tangible anatomy of the human body. In the case of Shaw Brothers films, the strapping physique of an actor is part of the price of entry, each combatant’s clothes inevitably being torn off or discarded during battle, unveiling rippling muscles and chests slick with sweat. Appearances can always be deceiving, of course—an unassuming older man with a hunched back and a walking stick, for example, or a woman whose prowess is doubted by bawdy men at a local bar—though, in these instances still, it’s the stable bridge between mind and body that enables them to overpower their weaker-minded and covetous rivals. But what about when a schism occurs internally, separating the two? What about when the bubbling, stewing viscera within can no longer be contained?
If unity in body and mind is the realm of the kung fu film, then disunity is most often found in horror movies, notably in the transgressive films of the New French Extremity. As defined by critic James Quandt, these turn-of-the-millennium films represented:
“…a cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement.”
For Quandt, this protracted description of sputum and spunk was intended to be pejorative, dismissing such an abundance of gore and bodily fluids as merely reactionary, but in doing so he ignored the genre’s many tactile considerations of how the internal informs the external—the contractual sexual exorcisms of Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell (2004) or the deadening disease at the heart of Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001). In his book, Brutal Intimacy (2011), Tim Palmer suggests a more suitable nomenclature: cinéma du corps (literally, cinema of the body). Drawing from the Grand Guignol, a popular theatre in the Pigalle district of Paris during the early 20th century, renowned for its gory special effects and subversive social commentary, cinéma du corps brings the body to the fore, highlighting the discomforting aspects that emerge from the mental being coupled to the physical.
In the disruptive disconnect of Marina de Van’s In My Skin (2002), cinéma du corps finds its defining text. Following Parisian marketing professional Esther (de Van herself), In My Skin questions what happens when the subconscious revolts against the quotidian. What starts when Esther severely injures her leg without noticing (her doctor quips, “Are you sure it’s your leg?”) gradually turns into a fascination with self-harm, Esther peeling at the surface layers of her skin in an attempt to find any semblance of the self behind the pores and veins. In contrast with the high-flying acrobatics of the Venom mob or Cheng Pei-pei, Esther has no athletic acumen—indeed her initial injury stems from a clumsy fall over some discarded industrial supplies. Here the body is merely a barrier disguising the true Esther, something to be torn apart and shredded until all that’s left behind is pure. No matter, only mind.
For each of the articles in our new issue, VISCERA, our contributors performed their own autopsies of the body as it exists in the cinematic form. And yet, far from being post-mortems, every dissection reveals the essential liveliness of the human form rendered frame-to-frame, and what such unblinking visions of the body ultimately disclose about each person’s internal machinations.
Cinema Year Zero is volunteer run. Our goal is to pay writers a fair fee for their work. So if you like what you find at Cinema Year Zero, please consider subscribing to our Patreon!
CINEMA YEAR ZERO 