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- Title
DUMONT, BATAILLE, AND THE MATERIALIST SACRED.
- Authors
WEBBER, INSOOK
- Abstract
While Bruno Dumont's status as auteur cannot be denied, his work has generated intense polemic, even denunciation. One reason for this is the general perception that his actors do not correspond to the image of a film star. Recruited on location in French Flanders, they have included factory- or farm-workers, the chronically unemployed, and disabled people. Their bodies mirror their lives: worn, scarred, or deformed. Dumont's choice of actors radically violates the sacrosanct codes of representation for film actors, which dictate an ideal beauty, an ideal often associated moreover with ideas such as purity, intelligence, or spiritual elevation. This association implicitly rejects the material, or un-ideal, body as impure, ugly, or evil. This article examines Dumont's commercially risky, iconoclastic choice of actors and his insistence on the earthly body, rather than the immaterial spirit, as 'the cause of everything' in light of Georges Bataille's concept of 'bas materialisme' and its essential relation to the sacred. Flouting conventional codes of beauty, Dumont's cinema locates the sacred, I argue, in the basse matière literally embodied by its actors and their natural habitats.
- Subjects
LA Vie de Jesus (Film); L'HUMANITE (Film); FLANDRES (Film); DUMONT, Bruno, 1958-; BATAILLE, Georges, 1897-1962; MATERIALISM in motion pictures; HOLY, The
- Publication
French Studies, 2018, Vol 72, Issue 1, p73
- ISSN
0016-1128
- Publication type
Film/Television Criticism
- DOI
10.1093/fs/knx232