When critic James Quandt framed a then recent grouping of French films by Gaspar Noe, Claire Denis, and Bruno Dumont, as part of what he pejoratively labeled a “New French Extremity” (18), he was reprimanding such filmmakers for what he saw as exploiting tactics traditionally associated with genres of excess, like pornography and horror. Mainly a response to Bruno Dumont's 2003 film Twentynine Palms, Quandt criticized what he saw as the promising young filmmaker (whose Humanité was awarded the Jury Prize at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival) jumping on board with an ill-advised, decidedly “commercial” arthouse trend. Ironically, defenders of the films that Quandt disparagingly labelled as the “New French Extremity” have embraced the term for its usefulness in conceptually linking certain formal characteristics and aesthetic strategies of early twentieth-century European art films (my use of the label, and its more internationally inclusive counterpart the “New Cinematic Extremism,” is by no means intended to echo its pejorative use by Quandt).

The extensive reformation of the Western censorship policies and practices that took place in the early part of the twenty-first century seemed significantly to coincide with the emergence of this trend in French filmmaking, in which new and abrasive forms of cinema were dealing frankly and graphically with the body. In his book Brutal Intimacy, Tim Palmer offers an alternative to Quandt's label for conceptualizing these films, not by singling out their transgressive elements as the basis of new genre formation, but instead by suggesting the idea of a “cinema du corps,” whose basic agenda, “an onscreen interrogation of physicality in brutally intimate terms,” offers an increasingly explicit discussion of the body through its sexual capacities, sexual conflicts (57). Palmer's categorization of the films has less to do with conventional markings of genre than with a conceptual linking of the films’ unusual narrative, aesthetic, and stylistic strategies. Palmer points out that the international scrutiny provoked by these “films of the body” tends to overshadow the experimental stylistic treatment that makes them so affecting in both conception and execution (59). In other words, it has been easier for audiences and critics to dismiss the cinema du corps for its use of graphic physicality than to gauge its status as a conceptually dynamic model of filmmaking.