Helen Freshwater, University of Edinburgh

This paper explores the reaction of the press, the audience, and the censor to the arrival of the French Grand Guignol theatre phenomenon in Britain in 1920.

The London Grand Guignol’s bloodthirsty scenes of madness, gore and perversion presented an unprecedented challenge to the Lord Chamberlain and his readers. They were unused to dealing with exhibitions of sustained and explicit violence, but their response to the genre’s preoccupation with murder and violation reflects an enduring concern that dramatised violence both desensitises and arouses its audience.

This paper examines the rationale behind the censorship’s attempts to sanitise the stage. It addresses the invention of new categories of ‘excessive’ or ‘gratuitous’ displays of violence, the disapprobation of the genre’s failure to provide moral lessons, retributive justice or a re-establishment of order, and the criticism of its concentration on chance misfortune and unlucky co-incidence. Then, as now, images of horror might be permitted, but not simply for their own sake. Without a moral framework, they were intolerable.

However, the London Grand Guignol enjoyed enormous popularity, attracting both sell-out audiences and voluminous press coverage during its brief existence. Audiences seem to have been terrified and thrilled in equal measure, relishing the infamous somatic responses produced by exposure to Grand Guignol’s disturbingly convincing illusions of mutilation, torture and violation. They appear to have revelled in their immersion in a world of sensation and excess.

The Grand Guignol’s success is perhaps one explanation for its subjection to official censure, contemporary critical dismissal and long years of academic oversight. Perception of Grand Guignol as a popular, ‘low’ form of entertainment - a business venture, rather than an artistic endeavour - has resulted in a lack of critical appreciation. This paper intends to reverse this trend. It is illustrated using images from performance and publicity, and draws on Bataille and Foucault in a discussion of the medium’s constant renegotiation of the limit, its covert, sado-masochistic eroticism, and the pleasure and melancholia produced during the realisation of transgressive performance.

Billed as the ‘most violent film ever directed by a woman in Hollywood’, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995), a film that depicts the so-called ‘first virtual reality rape’, was panned by critics. In the US, when Bigelow’s film was first screened at the New York Film Festival, people booed and walked out in protest; in England, a similar protest was staged over the decision to open the London Film Festival with Strange Days. At the centre of the controversy over the alleged ‘dangerousness’ of Bigelow’s film, lies a rape scene that critics described as ‘sick’, ‘sadistic’, ‘disgusting’. Given the prevalence of violence in contemporary cinema, why was the rape scene in Strange Days singled out by critical audiences as particularly upsetting?

This paper considers Bigelow’s depiction of virtual reality rape, and the outraged reactions it provokes, in terms of a wider question about public response to representations of sexual violence. In particular, I examine how rape brings an anxiety about the relationship between cinematic spectatorship and violence into stark relief. Comparing the rape scene in Strange Days to the far more graphic rape scene in The Accused (a film written and directed by men), and considering Bigelow’s gender, I set out to answer the question of why the rape scene in Strange Days was so vilified. Exploring Bigelow’s use of violence as a means of considering the possibilities, as well as the limitations, of new media technologies, I argue that her attempt to make the cinema audience aware of their complicity in scenes of grotesque violence is what ultimately caused considerable anxiety about the film. Finally, I consider the links between Strange Days and Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), a film Strange Days pays homage to in its self-reflexive examination of the links between sex, violence, and voyeurism. My concluding argument is that images of sexual violence – so-called ‘dangerous representations’ – bring the wider question of cinema audiences’ fear of, and fascination with, screen violence into the open.