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Chris_morris (Chris_morris)
Username: Chris_morris

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 12.165.240.116
Posted on Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - 07:43 pm:   

That's the title: A Serbian Film. It premiered at SXSW yesterday, and it's the talk of all the film blogs. You can find a trailer if you Google it, but I won't link it here. Here's one writeup: http://www.cinematical.com/2010/03/16/sxsw-review-serbian-film/

I'm actually afraid of this film. I've read a bit about it and know some of what it contains. I think lines have been overstepped here. Although I'm drawn to all transgressive films (by a quirk of personality, no doubt), this is one I won't be able to bring myself to see. If I'm honest, I have to admit this fact sort of disappoints me. I'm not up to it. I can't do this one. Either I'm too old or things have gotten out of hand.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.240.106
Posted on Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - 08:02 pm:   

I think I'm with you on this one, Chris...
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Mark West (Mark_west)
Username: Mark_west

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.39.177.173
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 11:18 am:   

I'm with you too. I was worried about finishing the end of that review, let alone watching the film and although I think I can guess at some of what is seen, I certainly don't want to keep it in my head.
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Simon Bestwick (Simon_b)
Username: Simon_b

Registered: 10-2008
Posted From: 86.24.167.138
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 11:31 am:   

Hm... mixed feelings about this. It's the first time I've ever read a review and really wondered if I want to see the film. But at the same time, there's been a lot of films/books that've been touted as something that your sanity may not recover from, and I've always felt half-scared of going to see them and half-drawn to. This is the first time where it's felt like a choice that could genuinely scar me in ways I didn't think a piece of art could. But aren't we in the business of creating fictions that do such things? Is this a film that's maybe actually achieved what quite a few of us have been striving for..?
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Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.56
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 11:34 am:   

But will it be released uncut in this country?
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Simon Bestwick (Simon_b)
Username: Simon_b

Registered: 10-2008
Posted From: 86.24.167.138
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 11:39 am:   

Well, here's the trailer. So far, my brain is still unscarred.

I think.

http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/serbian-film/red-band-trailer
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.163.176.9
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 11:46 am:   

It has the sort of slick feel of a Bond film, though. Bet it just feels like Hostel or something, but with a family in it. The bloke's bound to encounter his family in one of the horrible situations, isn't he?
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.96.11
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 11:54 am:   

"This is the first time where it's felt like a choice that could genuinely scar me in ways I didn't think a piece of art could. But aren't we in the business of creating fictions that do such things?"

I really don't think we are. Ramsey's recent definition of horror stuck with me - horror is everything we have yet to come to terms with. To me, this implies that horror's function, like that of all art, is to heal.
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Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.56
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 12:22 pm:   

But what is a scar if not the physical evidence of a healed wound?
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.163.176.9
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 12:25 pm:   

Skin being marked can be dealt with, but mental ones? I dunno... Trauma never really goes away, and it's well known that kids exposed to bad things are wonky for life. There's no crutches for the brain.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.96.11
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 01:01 pm:   

"Skin being marked can be dealt with, but mental ones? I dunno... Trauma never really goes away, and it's well known that kids exposed to bad things are wonky for life. There's no crutches for the brain."

Well, it's not quite that simple, is it? A combination of early childhood distress and genetic susceptibility to depression/anxiety are required to cause later problems. It isn't automatic.

Did you know that the frontal lobe of our brains are still physically growing into our early 20s? That the part that controls decision making. I think we're still vulnerable up to those ages too. Alcohol and violent movies may have damaging effects but it takes time for the damage to show itself, which is why people have breakdowns in their 30s and 40s. We psychological palsy with middle age, so the demons can get in. Maybe violent movies are like cigarettes. We think they're cool but decades down the line we find they've corroded us from the inside. Maybe
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 02:12 pm:   

If you read further reviews about this one, it does seem to contain things I certainly don't want to see simulated onscreen (sex with an infant, for one). I think I'm still with Chris on this one.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.22.224
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 02:49 pm:   

"But what is a scar if not the physical evidence of a healed wound?"

This is at odds with Simon's original use of the word scar, which I think he was using to mean wound.
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Mark West (Mark_west)
Username: Mark_west

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 217.39.177.173
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 02:51 pm:   

Whilst I agree with Simon (I was concerned about what we'd see during the ear-scene in "Reservoir Dogs", for instance), like Gary I've looked at other reviews on the Net and the mention of children in proximity to snuff-movie and everything else, just switches off everything for me.

A while back, I was planning on writing a novella that would deal with snuff movies and their aftermath. I did some research on the Net, which included newsreportage during the Chechyn war and I never touched my planned project again - whatever I came up with just couldn't compare with that level of depravity that just made me feel ill.
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Clive (Clive)
Username: Clive

Registered: 10-2009
Posted From: 81.104.165.168
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 02:52 pm:   

For me it all depends on the approach of the filmaker. I tend to think that if an act exists in real life, and reactions to that act, then art should be created to explore it. I feel this is done very well with films like Man Bites Dog and Henry and even Salo, but films like Hostel far less so. I thought Hostel was pretty incompetent in most aspects of film making and commentary really. The problem with 'transgressive' art is that it is often so incredibly dull and wears thin so quickly. The books of Peter Sotos come to mind. Yawn! Or De Sade. Double yawn!!.

I've got no problem with stuff like extreme sexual violence and torture and peodophilia etc being simulated and shown. As to being scarred. I've got no doubt that extreme images can stick in the brain, Emmanuelle In America comes to mind, but i find they do far less than other disturbing stuff from, say, David Lynch or Don't Look Now.

Saying that, if A Serbian Film is showing near me i'll probably pop to see it but it's not something i'm massively excited to see.
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Chris_morris (Chris_morris)
Username: Chris_morris

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 12.165.240.116
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 02:56 pm:   

Some details:

http://bit.ly/cmZ9BI

A couple of sympathetic reviews:

http://www.fearnet.com/news/reviews/b18477_sxsw_2010_review_serbian_film.html

http://tinyurl.com/ydogbkm

Ooo-wee.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.22.224
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 02:57 pm:   

I think it's important that we think about why we like horror, what its purpose is in our lives, so we don't fall into the trap of defending something just because it's transgressive.

For me, good horror doesn't wound, it heals.
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Chris_morris (Chris_morris)
Username: Chris_morris

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 12.165.240.116
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 03:24 pm:   

I agree with you, Proto, at least up to a point. Certainly A SERBIAN FILM has left me reevaluating my own relationship to horror and to transgressive films. For me, the truth is that I tend to prefer quiet, thoughtful horror -- but there's a part of me that prefers the sort of horror that is blunt enough or forceful enough to rip my psyche from its moorings, if only for a couple of hours. I don't always give the latter free reign, but I can't deny it's there.

A SERBIAN FILM, however, appears to cross too many lines for me. I'm not sure I can define what I'm looking for in horror film, but I'm quite certain this isn't it ... and yet my curiosity about what it contains is such that I'm not sure I could resist seeing it if an easy opportunity arose. I'm at war with myself about it. Whether I do or don't see it, however, it will obviously be a force to be reckoned with. For years filmmakers have one-upped themselves to out-gross the viewing public, and A SERBIAN FILM seems to have set the new standard. Somebody, somewhere is going to try to top it. And this is what bothers me the most: At some point (this point?), this one-up-manship will take things beyond the pale. At some point our desire for fresh horrors will take things too far.

Then again, yesterday was my 42nd birthday, and maybe I'm just getting too old. Would the 21-year-old me have been okay with seeing this movie? I don't know. Maybe.
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.207.170
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 03:32 pm:   

A lot of it sounds unpleasant, but I don't think this is anything new. Once you've accepted (as we all seemed to about a decade ago) that a film that features a child masturbating with a crucifix whilst shouting obscenities is a classic horror film, I'm not sure that you've left yourself much moral high ground on which to plant a flag...
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Hubert (Hubert)
Username: Hubert

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 78.22.229.205
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 03:34 pm:   

I can't wait to see it.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.163.176.9
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 03:59 pm:   

It's a subtle difference between the Exorcist and this, though; presumably in this a real little kid has been filmed (mimmicing, albeit) sex with an adult. I dunno - this is too tricky for me to figure out.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.4.234.92
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:01 pm:   

How do I have yet to deal with dread Cthulhu rising from his ocean depths?
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Chris_morris (Chris_morris)
Username: Chris_morris

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 12.165.240.116
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:06 pm:   

Nathaniel, if you take that tack, it's slippery moral ground to defend a love of horror at all.

Still, a crucifix only has meaning if you believe in God. If you don't, it's just an object, a knick knack, a dust collector. Big deal. Linda Blair was 14 when The Exorcist came out. A 14-year-old shouting obscenties and masturbating sounds a lot like what I heard from my neighbor's house in my youth, not a transgressive horror film.

Also: a decade ago?
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.163.176.9
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:15 pm:   

Hmm. A bloke having sex with a new born baby. Maybe it'll be ok if it's tastefully framed, kept a little out of shot.
Does it matter that there will be people who get off on this, that kids might sneakily see it? How far do we 'protect' ourselves, if we need to? Are some images and ideas toxic? Those 'boys from hell' a few months ago who tortured two kids to the point they wanted to die liked watching Saw movies (and were allowed to, to be honest). I wonder/guess if they had any effect at all. Is there a cut off point for what should be out there?
But yadda yadda - we've been here many times before, and to no avail.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.22.224
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:18 pm:   

I'd be impressed if a horror film-maker dealt seriously with the consequences of a simple mugging. Once they've explored that issue with enough maturity they can move onto something more serious. But we haven't even reached that level of maturity.

Even murder has been made safe through a century of whodunnits and cliche which have blinded us to how terrible (and complex for all involved) the act of murder is. On occasion, a film is adult enough to deal with the consequences (FIVE MINUTES OF HEAVEN is a recent good example). But most of the time transgression is immature, sadistic doodling with human puppets. If it doesn't deal with consequences then, in my opinion, it's dishonest.
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Chris_morris (Chris_morris)
Username: Chris_morris

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 12.165.240.116
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:22 pm:   

>> If it doesn't deal with consequences then, in my opinion, it's dishonest.

Virtually all fiction is dishonest in this way. Endings are tidy. Loose ends are cleaned up. These are holdovers from nineteenth century thinking, the idea that rationality will win out. But 21st century reality is inherently fragmented, ambiguous, messy. Few films or books try seriously to grapple with that. (This is the subject, at least in part, of David Shields's new "manifesto," REALITY HUNGER.)
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.207.170
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:25 pm:   

It was passed by the censors a decade ago (that was the point at which i was suggesting it became acceptable, before that society obviously deemed it unacceptable). It may have been 1999, I'm don't remember without checking.

And she may have been 14 when it came out, but she wasn't 14 when it was filmed, and the character wasn't 14 either.

My point was that you're basing your judgement on a description of something that sounds, by its nature, horrific, and I was suggesting that any description of a scene involving an underage girl masturbating with a crucifix until she bleeds should sound just as disturbing.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.22.224
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:26 pm:   

>> If it doesn't deal with consequences then, in my opinion, it's dishonest.

>Virtually all fiction is dishonest in this way.

I'd say it's a sliding scale: the more transgressive the subject matter, the more maturity you'd better bring to the table to avoid being exploitative. An Oscar Wilde essay (the name of which escapes me) argued something similar. The right to address your subject matter has to be paid for with insight.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.4.234.92
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:26 pm:   

[SPOILER, from the review cited above - I've not seen the film:]

"But around the time that Milos (Srdjan Todorovic), a retired porn star who's lured in for one last (inevitably ill-advised) gig, is shown a tape in which a man attends a nude pregnant woman through labor, and then unzips and rapes the still-bloody infant, I thought that maybe they weren't kidding...."

Anyone ever seen the underground comics of frequent-New Yorker cover/cartoonist Ivan Brunetti?... do a google image search, but prepare to be revolted.... (I'm sure The New Yorker isn't aware of these; surely the New Yorker's general readership isn't, at least....)
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.163.176.9
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:29 pm:   

Last night I watched the daftest Jean Rollin film I've yet seen, but in it I saw the most realistic reaction to horror I have ever seen; a young woman, on seeing a hideous corpse chained up in a dungeon, shoots it again and again, screaming. She literally loses sense. Also, last week, I watched The Abyss again. In it some people react to the news that there are aliens in the sea with the same level of cheeriness you might expect to see from someone finding a tub of nice cheese on their doorstep. One night at our old house our neighbour threw a brick through our windows, upstairs and down, just missing me. I've never ben so scared in my life and went temporarily insane. As a film that event and those of the next few days would be the most unreal you'd have ever seen. I actually don't think it would work cinematically, the expression of my reactions.
Um, I did have a point ... now i seem to have got lost down memory lane... :-(
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Chris_morris (Chris_morris)
Username: Chris_morris

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 12.165.240.116
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:31 pm:   

>> The right to address your subject matter has to be paid for with insight.

I'd agree with that. From what I've read, though, A SERBIAN FILM may actually "pay" for what it contains -- reviews are mixed on this issue -- with the "insight" of adroit political allegory. But I can't help but feel it's objectives could have been reached in other ways. It may pay for what it includes, but I'm still not sure it's justified.
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Chris_morris (Chris_morris)
Username: Chris_morris

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 12.165.240.116
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:33 pm:   

>> And she may have been 14 when it came out, but she wasn't 14 when it was filmed, and the character wasn't 14 either.

Okay, 13. This still sounds like my neighbors.

>> My point was that you're basing your judgement on a description of something that sounds, by its nature, horrific, and I was suggesting that any description of a scene involving an underage girl masturbating with a crucifix until she bleeds should sound just as disturbing.

Should it? It never bothered me. Again, the impact of demons/crucifixes/etc is somewhat mitigated when you think Christianity is crap.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.163.176.9
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:36 pm:   

My 11 year old's current favourite joke; 'Smell my finger - it's your mum.'
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.163.176.9
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:36 pm:   

- the irony being it took me about a day to get it. :-(
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.4.234.92
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:40 pm:   

That joke shades into horror, Tony, if your mum's dead....

(What? - he started it!)
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.163.176.9
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 04:43 pm:   

Ha! She is!
The little bastard.
you know, maybe this meaty-sounding film is just the way things have always been. It's inexcusable, it's gross, but it's out thing, the thing we do. Compared with the beslan school thing it's not even worth worrying about.
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Nathaniel Tapley (Natt)
Username: Natt

Registered: 11-2009
Posted From: 78.144.207.170
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 05:11 pm:   

"Again, the impact of demons/crucifixes/etc is somewhat mitigated when you think Christianity is crap."

Yes, but a lot of people don't think that. The scene was intended to shock, and that's why it used the imagery and the language it did.

Lots of people were shocked. We (eventually) decided that they would have to get over it.

Now someone has come up with something that shocks you.

(And, yes, I'm absolutely saying that it's a slippery slope defending any horror film. Or the contents of Genesis 19. The point is that describing what happens in a film is a very poor guide to deciding if it's worth seeing.)
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.22.224
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 05:27 pm:   

"Now someone has come up with something that shocks you."

This comes down to whether you view morality as just a cyclical, subjective phenomenon or a progressive one. Liverals hold the former view, conservatives the latter.

I think it's both - morals are subjective, historical and cyclical to some extent but there are objectively boundaries that stop society and individuals being harmed. The danger of the completely liberal view is that it refuses to recognise the one can go too far.
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Chris_morris (Chris_morris)
Username: Chris_morris

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 12.165.240.116
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 06:50 pm:   

>> The point is that describing what happens in a film is a very poor guide to deciding if it's worth seeing.

Oh, that's the point. Okay. Well, that seems at odds with your original post. Nonetheless I can't disagree with you there. As I said before, I fully feel that A SERBIAN FILM may possibly "pay for" its content with political meaning. And I still feel it goes too far. And I still may talk myself into seeing it. (Is your head spinning? Mine is.)
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Chris_morris (Chris_morris)
Username: Chris_morris

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 12.165.240.116
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 06:58 pm:   

I get the feeling, Nathaniel, that you think I'm pro-censorship or something. I'm not, not at all. I don't mind that A SERBIAN FILM exists. I only mind that I'm so terribly divided about seeing it, and I mind that if this is the direction extreme films have to go, then I'm sort of embarrassed to have ever been interested in them in the first place.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.240.106
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 09:21 pm:   

"The point is that describing what happens in a film is a very poor guide to deciding if it's worth seeing."

Isn't that how reviewers and critics make a living?

Chris - you echo my sentiments regarding this so closely that I don't even have to express them. I know exactly what you mean.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.240.106
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 09:33 pm:   

"I think it's both - morals are subjective, historical and cyclical to some extent but there are objectively boundaries that stop society and individuals being harmed. The danger of the completely liberal view is that it refuses to recognise the one can go too far."

Proto - I couldn't agree more.

The base line here for me is that what scares me most is my interest in seeing this film. As Chris says above, the thoght of this film actually scares me because I think lines have been crossed...yet part of me wants to see the result.

But, of course, I'm a complete psychopath.
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Clive (Clive)
Username: Clive

Registered: 10-2009
Posted From: 81.104.165.168
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 09:53 pm:   

It's hard to really comment without seeing the film of course but for me no lines have been crossed at all with this film. They only way lines would have been crossed is if people are actually harmed, abused or killed in the making of the film. As it is it is all fake blood, grease paint and smoke and mirrors and as such someone somewhere is always going to be offended somewhere down the scale from Coronation Street to A Serbian Film.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.240.106
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 10:09 pm:   

The lines I'm talking about are personal ones - to do with what I'm prepared to see, and my own response to my oddly divided feelings towards seeing this film (like Chris, I've always been a staunch advocate of extreme and transgressive cinema).

But when you show a baby coming out of a womb and being raped, I'd say lines have been crossed. Even if it is simulated. By Jack Duckworth.

The last film I saw that made me feel remotely the same way was Irreversable. I'm still tainted by that film. I thought it was a brilliant piece of work, but it's as if someone took a blood-and-semen-laced shit in my brain and I'm in no rush to repeat the experience.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.94.139
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 10:27 pm:   

Clive, I don't understand the position that asserts that simulated images and sounds are harmless. Surely we watch them precisely because they do affect us emotionally.

We can try to rationalise these things away once we've seen them, but we're not 100% rational beings. Ten seconds of channel surfing tells me that we're barely 1% rational beings.

We have a subconscious and a nervous system. Adrenalin, glucocortisol. These things have no minds to reason with, and we meddle with them at our peril.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.240.106
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 10:34 pm:   

A couple of years ago I was stupid enough to watch the notorious "chechclear" video online. I wish I could unwatch it; my entire view of the world darkened a shade and has never regained its brightness.

I know that was real, and not simulated, but taken in context simulated images certainly cause a watered down version of the same effect.

I'm still drawn for some reason to this kind of extreme cinema, but I now question that desire to watch such horrific, nihilistic images. Why do I need my negative view of the world reinforced in this way?

It's interesting to think about.
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Clive (Clive)
Username: Clive

Registered: 10-2009
Posted From: 81.104.165.168
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 10:39 pm:   

Well, yes, but 99.9% of us are rational enough to know that what we are watching isn't really happening and whilst it may disturb and horrify us we do tend to know that it is actually make believe.

I also think that art has a duty to reflect what is happening in the world and not bury it's head in the sand but to try and approach and tackle extreme subjects and make us think. Haven't seen this of course, and only read that one review, so it may just be pretty bad and hard to call art anyway but films such as Man Bites Dog do make a partly sucessful attempt.
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Clive (Clive)
Username: Clive

Registered: 10-2009
Posted From: 81.104.165.168
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 10:40 pm:   

(above in reply to Proto)
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.94.139
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 - 11:47 pm:   

"Well, yes, but 99.9% of us are rational enough to know that what we are watching isn't really happening and whilst it may disturb and horrify us we do tend to know that it is actually make believe. "

I don't mean that the population is < 1% rational, I mean that all homo sapiens are < 1% rational. Me. You.

You're not addressing my point, which is that (to some as yet unmeasured extent) it doesn't matter if our conscious mind knows it's fake or not.

Why on Earth would it? We haven't evolved to cope with simulated violence, only the real thing. Our neurochemistry is wired to respond to everything that looks violent as if it IS violent. You jump when there's a loud noise. Doesn't matter if it's a real threat or not.

It's naive to think that the scenes mentioned in the above film can't affect you negatively, and possibly permanently.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.5.15.2
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 12:08 am:   

What's worse? This film, or the viral "Two girls, one cup"?

(Which, I want to add, I've not seen... and refuse to see....)

One's a faked horror-beyond-horror. The others real, but real REALLY disgusting stuff....

(I hope it's really disgusting - don't want to offend anyone's tastes here, if they're into that)
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Clive (Clive)
Username: Clive

Registered: 10-2009
Posted From: 81.104.165.168
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 12:17 am:   

>>It's naive to think that the scenes mentioned in the above film can't affect you negatively, and possibly permanently.<<

Who is thinking that? I don't think i ever expressed that view. My point was that, for me, for a line to be crossed it would have to depict actual real horrific acts not simulations. Even then i feel that in some circumstances it may be valid to show actual events.

But then i think i may be approaching this from a certain position. I'm a photographer by trade and have, in the past, worked on a newspaper (Indy On Sunday) and as such have a huge respect for photo-journalism and the sometimes extreme horrific images that have been massively important in educating the world. I also believe art and literature to have a similarly important role and can do so with simulations of equally horrific acts. Like i said, i'll reserve judgement on this film until i've seen it.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.58.71
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 12:18 am:   

Thank God I've no idea what you're talking about!

Short of some Clockwork Orange-type scenario, with my eyes prised open, I'll never see either one.

A door bangs. You jump. There was no real danger, and yet it has a measurable negative physical reaction on your biochemistry. Your consciousness doesn't get a vote.
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Protodroid (Protodroid)
Username: Protodroid

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 109.79.58.71
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 12:23 am:   

"Who is thinking that? I don't think i ever expressed that view. My point was that, for me, for a line to be crossed it would have to depict actual real horrific acts not simulations. Even then i feel that in some circumstances it may be valid to show actual events."

Okay. I'd draw the line in a different place. Certain substances are not classified by age - they're simply banned outright - because they're dangerous. I think that's good. We're kids really, and we love our boundaries. I think it's good that soft drugs are illegal, even if they were harmless, as it gives people a safe way of breaking a boundary.

It's human nautre to want to break barriers, so what happnes when you society places a barrier to the very edge of where it's safe? Bad things.
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Clive (Clive)
Username: Clive

Registered: 10-2009
Posted From: 81.104.165.168
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 12:23 am:   

Craig, i hadn't heard of the 'Two Girls One Cup' viral so i just searched and watched it. It's just scat stuff really and there is a lot of that about of course. It made me a little queesy as that not my cup of tea but each to their own. To be honest, what made me feel more queesy was the Rick Astley soundtrack.
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Clive (Clive)
Username: Clive

Registered: 10-2009
Posted From: 81.104.165.168
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 12:32 am:   

I think, perhaps, we're just at different ends on the liberal-conservative slider Proto. I don't actually think ANY drugs should be illegal. I tend to frown upon the arbitrary way that society and government chooses which dangerous activity is allowed to adults and i don't tend to think another person has the right to tell another what to do with their own body.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.132.173.188
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 12:46 am:   

'Irreversable'
- my son's gf goes visibly cold at the mention of that film.
HORRIBLENESS WARNING
I think I told you guys that for a while I surfed the net for real gore images - people hit by trains, a sweet looking girl who had had the top of her head crushed by a car wheel, some girls in south america who had had their faces cut off - and it drove me to the brink of mental illness I think. I might have been a bit unwell before I went looking, I'm not entirely sure, but what it resulted in my feeling was that imagery can affect us, the knowledge that such situations actually happen. I realised that when we see something bad we are reminded it can happen, that that idea was in a human mind somewhere, and that someone will either have carried it out or would like to. I think it's that that really frightens me when I see stuff like that (or even not - Funny Games I had to switch off after ten minutes even though you didn't see *anything*. But this is a whole other issue - or maybe it isn't, maybe it IS ideas that scare us.).
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.132.173.188
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 01:02 am:   

I know it's lame, but even that talk of that Four Lions film made me feel sort of creeped out, like it felt taboo to me deep down somewhere.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.132.173.188
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 01:03 am:   

And today I read about that school in Russia that got so horribly attacked all those years back. God, that must have been the worst news story of our lives.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.96.240.106
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 01:12 am:   

As usual, I've completely lost track of what's being debated here.

I'm still with Chris.
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Chris_morris (Chris_morris)
Username: Chris_morris

Registered: 04-2008
Posted From: 98.220.97.79
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 01:46 am:   

Bless you, Zed. I take comfort in knowing I'm not alone in my ridiculous struggle with this. :-)
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.5.14.178
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 04:01 am:   

I don't know what's being debated anymore either... and I feel I might have contributed to that....

I do agree with Proto, that so many human emotions - maybe "responses" might be a better term - are closer to our animal natures, and it's only the translation through our highly-refined, essentially-lately-developed consciousness that results in lingering mental ache - it's the bruise to our "biochemistry" that we sort of obsess over.

Despair, I believe, is no more than an ancient animal negative version of sexual excitation - the closest analogy - that should result in the orgasm of death/release, when the prey animal is trapped completely and about to be killed and devoured. Our problem, is that we are never really devoured, anymore, in our highly refined lives... and so this ancient emotion is forced to linger, like sexual arousal sans release... and you get all forms of depression... and ennui... and angst... and I'm already losing myself again....
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.5.14.178
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 04:06 am:   

Tony, I just can't imagine you ever going looking for those kinds of things willingly! Not that I know you that well, but it seems so out of character for you... almost like an act of self-destruction, on some level, to be doing that....

I do understand the temptation, to see that which is forbidden. I've never watched one of the beheading videos that were going around recently, though I do admit, I was fascinated by the prospect of seeing it... but I felt the damage to my psyche would be too awful, the soothing of that fascination hardly worth the cost....

Clive - so you were "Rick-rolled" watching "Two Girls, One Cup"?! Ha! That's somehow, I dunno... funny....
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.140.190.131
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 07:17 am:   

'As usual, I've completely lost track of what's being debated here'
- Ha! Me too! Hance my chipping in with anything.

Craig - I dunno what it was about either. But yes, it sticks with you in a way you wish it wouldn't.
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Simon Bestwick (Simon_b)
Username: Simon_b

Registered: 10-2008
Posted From: 86.24.167.138
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 11:17 am:   

The more I think about it, I chose the wrong word (yesterday and 60-odd posts ago.) 'Scar' isn't the correct word (although Zed and I have used that term in conversation off-line- you know, in what some people laughingly call 'the real world')

It should go without saying I'm not out to harm people with written fiction. But I suppose what I meant to say was this: I want what I write to leave its *mark* on the reader. I want to produce work that *has an effect*, makes a change of some kind. A shock to the system, a shift in perception. It would be great to think I've written something, after reading which people aren't quite the same as they were before. Preferably in a good way, obviously, not running around biting the heads off live chickens.

And so the idea of a film that you go and see and which leaves you changed, transfigured even- not quite the same person as before- that's both appealing and frightening as a concept. On the one hand, what if it helps me get rid of the things I don't like about myself- the nagging anxieties and bugbears that cause my overeating, lack of confidence, etc? But on the other hand, what if it takes away whatever gives me my ability to write or completely tears down my whole view of the world, everything I've learnt or chosen to believe over the past 36 years?

I doubt either outcome's possible. Or desirable. God knows, there are certain people whose worldview is so venomously narrow, bigoted and inadequate that I really wish it WAS possible to write something that would dynamite it and replace it with something better. But whatever view of the world you have will look stupid, narrow and limited to someone else. Even so, you do sometimes wonder would it would be like to have all your certainties demolished and start again from scratch, seeing the world with new eyes and figuring a lot of things out all over again. Frightening and painful, but better off in the long run? Mind you, a stroke could do that, and I don't fancy one of those. Although I suppose certain things I've written could give some people a brain haemorrhage.

I doubt that writing, on its own, can have that kind of effect, although as any one of a number of messageboard debates (not this one- you know the kind I mean, the ones where people bang each other over the head with their respective certainties in a pointless and interminable game of my-cock-is-bigger-than-your-cock) show, people won't stop trying. But as regards the point Proto, Tony and others have made- yes, if you immerse yourself in certain images- written or visual- repeatedly and over time, it is going to take its toll. I wrote a novella set in the first world war about three years ago and effects of the material I'd had to read and view as research affected me for days, weeks after the writing was completed. But viewing it was necessary for the writing, and in the long run, maybe beneficial, as it underlined, once again, the repulsiveness of violence and atrociousness of war. We shouldn't need reminding of that. But it seems we do.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 11:31 am:   

Yeah, but my cock's still bigger than yours.
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Simon Bestwick (Simon_b)
Username: Simon_b

Registered: 10-2008
Posted From: 86.24.167.138
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 11:33 am:   

No it isn't.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 11:39 am:   

I have proof:

http://www.garymcmahon.com/2010/01/cock.html
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Simon Bestwick (Simon_b)
Username: Simon_b

Registered: 10-2008
Posted From: 86.24.167.138
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 11:40 am:   

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Simon Bestwick (Simon_b)
Username: Simon_b

Registered: 10-2008
Posted From: 86.24.167.138
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 11:44 am:   

In yer face McMahon!

http://media.photobucket.com/image/giant%20chicken/pauly_cy/giant20chicken20cock .jpg
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Simon Bestwick (Simon_b)
Username: Simon_b

Registered: 10-2008
Posted From: 86.24.167.138
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 11:44 am:   

Er, not my cock in your face, obviously.

Er... I'll get me coat.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 11:46 am:   

I have that photo, but I deliberately didn't post it because I know you would as a riposte to my original link. Which means, of course, that you fell right into my little trap. And I win.

My mind works in mysterious ways...
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 11:47 am:   

Btw, I need to speak to you prior to next Wednesday...just to firm up the plans for our road trip to Brighton.
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Simon Bestwick (Simon_b)
Username: Simon_b

Registered: 10-2008
Posted From: 86.24.167.138
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 11:57 am:   

I'll give you a bell this evening.

As in a phone call, obviously...

Bloody hell. I really do need to get my coat this time.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 11:58 am:   

Righto, matey. I'll actually answer the phone this time...
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.4.252.255
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 03:15 pm:   

... and lo, it came to pass that two giant cocks summed up the thread.
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Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
Posted on Thursday, March 18, 2010 - 03:19 pm:   

It happens every time, man.

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