Paper short abstract:

The Bakhtinian paradigm of bodily transgression will be applied primarily to the cinematic productions of the recently deceased director Imamura, comparing his approach with the different tonalities of the grotesque mode of excess employed by Miike and Lauzon.

Paper long abstract:

The carnevalesque has since Bakhtin been theorized as a topos of the communal or societal body expressing itself collectively in imaginary and performative acts of subversion of the normal order or of the transgression of the boundaries and taboos of rule-governed life. The paradigm of Bakhtin considered in particular the orifices and lower parts of the body as central for the expression and representation of societal inversions and subversions, invoked in temporal interstices by the suppressed or subaltern groups of society. For Bakhtin the orifices, and the correlations between the "higher" and the "lower" parts of the body, were considered universally the most appropriate (or "natural") features, as the body is in these places not only opening the inside to the environment (and letting the latter invade the surface of the body), but also because these places are the ideal merging points for the meeting of opposites, for the mixing of fertility and decay (or in Bataille's terminology the mixing of the sacred, the erotic and the filthy).

The essay is taking some recent film-productions by world-renown directors such as Imamura, Miike and Lauzon as examples for the ongoing use of body-images of decay as well as excessive violence and the breaking of the taboos of incest, cannibalism and eroticism. While all of the projected images seem to fit the carnevalesque modality of the grotesqueness in the use of juxtapositions of eroticism with filth, violence and degradation, the register or tonality of each director seems to fashion each a particular universe of inversion: while Imamura opts for a mythicization of sexuality as life-enhancing force of vitality, Miike seems to manipulate an imagined social reality through grotesque exaggeration. Lauzon in turn creates the reality of a fecal universe as a rite de passage for the discovery of a world of utopian and ideal love. The essay will discuss to what degree the three directors insinuate through their grotesque visions a criticism of concrete social reality. The presentation will finally address through a discussion of the cinematic examples the problem raised by Adorno whether all art has to be considered as an "uncommitted crime" or whether such "rituals of rebellion" could be interpreted as commentaries on existing societal conditions and therefore also as a critical practice.