New French Extremity, named in a 2004 complaint

James Quandt coined the New French Extremity in Artforum in February 2004, in an essay written against the films it labels.

The essay is "Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema", and the phrase sits inside one clause of it. Quandt wrote that a critic hunting for trends might call it the New French Extremity, this tendency to the willfully transgressive by directors like François Ozon, Gaspar Noé, Catherine Breillat, Philippe Grandrieux and now Bruno Dumont. The clause is a joke aimed at the kind of writer who would take the phrase up. What had set Quandt off was Dumont's Twentynine Palms, which competed at Venice in 2003 and spends its last half hour on a rape, a knifing and a suicide. He had read Dumont's earlier films as the work of an heir to Bresson, and he took the turn personally.

The films in the essay

Quandt's roll call is worth keeping straight, because the lists that came after it drift. He put Noé's 1991 short Carne at the head of it, then its feature continuation Seul contre tous (1998). Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day (2001) is there, a cannibal film from the director of Chocolat (1988). So is Marina de Van's Dans ma peau (2002), which de Van wrote, directed and played the lead in, as a woman who cuts and eats herself. Breillat's Romance (1999) and Baise-moi (2000), by Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, carry the sex. Grandrieux's Sombre (1998) and La Vie nouvelle (2002) close the list.

Nothing joins these people except a decade. Breillat had been directing since 1976, Denis came out of colonial-childhood drama, Grandrieux came out of television and video art. There is no manifesto, no shared producer, no signed document of any kind.

The annulled visa on Baise-moi

Quandt's essay called Baise-moi banned in France and in Ontario. The French file is narrower than that word. The film opened on 28 June 2000 with a visa restricting it to viewers over sixteen. The association Promouvoir took the visa to the Conseil d'État, and on 30 June 2000, two days after release, the court annulled it. That left one category available, X, which France applies to pornographic and extreme films and which confines a title to a licensed circuit that had all but closed by then. Distribution stopped.

The row that followed changed the classification regime. France created an 18 certificate in 2001, a category the visa system had done without, and a film that would have gone to X could be released to adults instead. Nobody ordered a print seized and nobody was prosecuted. The word for what happened to Baise-moi is annulment, and the body that did it was an administrative court ruling on a licence.

The Ontario refusal

Ontario is the other half of Quandt's sentence. The Ontario Film Review Board refused Baise-moi a classification, and under the province's Theatres Act a film without one could not be shown to the public there. A refusal is a board declining to certify the submission in front of it. It leaves the film legal to own, and it leaves the submitting distributor free to come back with another print.

The label on the horror shelf

The phrase moved from the art houses to the horror shelf, where it stuck harder. Alexandre Aja's Haute tension (2003) is the hinge. Aja cast Philippe Nahon, the butcher out of Carne and Seul contre tous both, as his killer, which is a citation of Noé and not a coincidence. The French horror run that followed, Frontière(s) and À l'intérieur, both 2007, gets filed under the same heading in most catalogues. Quandt's essay covers none of it, and the two lists that now answer to the term share no title.

The British file on Irréversible

Irréversible is the film the term gets carried by, and in Britain it went through the classification process like any other submission. Noé's film played In Competition at Cannes in May 2002, with Monica Bellucci as Alex and Vincent Cassel as Marcus. The two scenes at issue are the fire extinguisher killing in the club and the rape in the underpass, held on a fixed camera in one take with no cut to release the viewer.

The British Board of Film Classification read the second scene against its policy on sexual violence and commissioned a clinical forensic psychiatrist to advise on the effects of watching it. The Board's own case study on the film records her reading. The scene is a harrowing and vivid portrayal of the brutality of rape, it contains no explicit sexual images, and it is not designed to titillate. On that advice the Board passed the film 18 uncut for cinema in 2002 and 18 uncut on video in 2003. Each certificate covers one submission from one distributor, and the file sits with the Board, where moving either decision starts with a rights holder paying for a fresh one.