What kind of strange, metamorphosing figures breed in the interstices of the cinema of sensation's fluctuating audio-visual fields? What kind of mutants does the aesthetics of chaos generate and, ultimately, what kind of monstrous film bodies? How do these various processes of filmic embodiment speak, directly or indirectly, of the most pressing issues in contemporary France, of the closely interwoven questions of identity and difference we associate with globalisation, immigration and colonial aftereffects, work and exploitation, gender, desire and possession? This chapter looks at how, where cinema becomes a cinema of sensation, the questioning about identity and otherness is evoked not merely in narrative and representational terms, but through the very texture of the films; how it materialises in forms of ‘becoming’ and, ultimately, imprints itself in the make-up and ‘in the flesh’ of the filmic body itself.

From Genre to Archetype

Though the filmmakers whose work is explored in these pages often draw on and subvert generic elements, the end result is neither predefined nor determined by the narrative or discursive operations of genre. Where, for instance, the term ‘excess’ as it is used in the context of genres (Williams 1991) is applied here, it is in a Bataillean sense, to connote the ‘gratuitous’ dimension of artistic choices, choices largely unjustified by, and independent from the expectations, functions and economic rationales attached to genre production.