The other night, I watched the horror movie High Tension for the second time. I first saw it after it came out on DVD in the US in 2005 or 06, when I was in college. I like horror films, but nothing like the way that people who love horror films love them—those people kind of scare me, quite a bit more than any of the movies do.
Anyway, the first time I saw it, I thought it was good, but kind of meaningless: everything seemed to be done really well, it was tight and realistic, and—in short—the movie lived up to its title. But there didn't seem to be any message in the film, nor any formal aspect of it that really interested me. At the time, I didn't recognize any name from the credits except for Giannetto di Rossi, the acknowledged master of special effects make-up.
I watched it with my two roommates at the time, both of whom also watched a lot of movies. I think my then-girlfriend was there, too. Either way, I never really thought about the movie after that, except as another one that I'd successfully checked off on my list of every movie ever made.
I had a very different experience the second time around. For one thing, I rented the movie with a purpose, an idea in mind. Recently, I'd become more and more interested in a group of films and filmmakers collectively referred to as the “New French Extremity”, “New French Extreme”, or “New French Extremism”—whichever. I'll be referring to it as “NFE” from here on.
I became interested in them, dweebish as this sounds, because I saw a potential connection between them and the ideas of George Bataille, who in works such as Story of the Eye, Ma mere, and Literature and Evil sketched out and demonstrated his conception of storytelling as transgressive by its very nature. This can be seen most clearly in Pascal Laugier's film Martyrs, in which aspects of Bataille's biography as well as his thinking seem to be referenced.
High Tension belongs to the NFE (“genre” or “sub-genre” doesn't really seem appropriate) and in a way has flown its flag overseas, at least in the US. By this point a lot of the names on the back of the DVD case meant something to me. Alexandre Aja, the co-writer and director, had rebooted The Hills Have Eyes, and to honest I liked his version better than Wes Craven's original. Grégory Levasseur, Aja's writing partner and the “artistic director” of High Tension, was also heavily involved in that project, and the two of them have worked together on every film the other has made. Philippe Nahon, the brutal, monolithic serial killer of the film, has had a role in every one of Gaspar Noé's film, starring in his short Carné and his first feature-length I Stand Alone (Tout contre seul). Cécile de France I immediately recognized from her role as the curiously-attractive butch lesbian in L'Auberge Espagnole and its sequel Russian Dolls.
Above all of this, I recognized something else much more important: this movie really takes it's time; it's an exercise in exactly what you'd expect it to be—creating tension in the audience. From a few minutes into the more or less hour and a half running time, the suspense begins and doesn't let up until the end credits roll.
As the co-writers claim on their commentary track: “It's not really about the story so much, it's about the direction, about creating the tension.” From that angle, I have give this film a lot of credit. It knows what it is an isn't ashamed or afraid of it. Aja and Levasseaur are young filmmakers, but already they're great technicians—technicians not only of the concrete aspects of filmmaking (cinematography, sound design, etc.) but also extremely adroit at a certain type of narrative.
So, like I said, I enjoyed this movie a lot more the second time I saw it. But this fact reveals something about the experience of a work of art: on the one hand, you can look at, read, or listen to something without knowing anything about it—not for example where it belongs in the huge superstructure of genre that surrounds the world of individual films—or, on the other hand, you can know all sorts of things about it: who created it, why, how, where, when—you can even read entire books about a movie, a symphony or another book before you experience that work yourself. While I think that instinctively a lot of people (myself included) would feel compelled to say that the first of these two ways is better, now that I'm really considering it I'm not so sure that case is that clear.
After all, the second time I watched High Tension I experienced it in the second of the above ways and enjoyed it much more than I did the first time I watched it. I'm not saying this would be true of everyone; after all, the movie achieved its relatively high level of success in this country without most viewers knowing anything about it except that it was supposed to be a really intense horror film. Those people by and large got what they were looking for; maybe they were surprised to get in a package postmarked “Paris, France” but that's about it—the movie is, after all, far more indebted to American models than to French or European models generally. (You could make an argument based on the NFE the French New Wave et al. that this is always true of French film.)
But to me, High Tension isn't just a movie I liked that happened to be French. It's a movie that aside from the very suspenseful experience of watching it fits in my mind into a network of other things: the aforementioned Bataille, the other films and filmmakers of the NFE, as well as the American movies and directors who inspired Aja and Levasseur (e.g. Maniac, Wes Craven). In this way, I saw a lot of things I might not otherwise have noticed or thought important in High Tension, and it's one of those movies that I enjoyed almost as much with the DVD commentary track as without it.
Which way is better, I have no idea. But there does seem to be a gulf separating these two ways of watching movies. Maybe it's more a matter of attitude, or approach, because to be honest no one except an aborigine (and maybe even them anymore) can watch a movie in anything the pure state of innocence that the opposition I presented above implies. This purity doesn't exist because in today's world we are exposed to a bombardment of sights and sounds and learn from a very early age to make dialectical sense of what becomes, as we grow older, a more and more synthetic world. We are all familiar (even if we are unconscious of being so) of the “logic” (“language” might be a better word) of standard film editing: the 180° rule, shot-reverse-shot, etc., etc., etc.
And that's just the beginning; for almost no one will High Tension be their first horror film (if that happened it would probably be some kind of mistake) and so the enormous question of the prejudices of genre conventions comes into this conversation, which I'll have to stop here because I'm really too tired to go onto to deal with it.
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