Extreme Cinema

Aaron Kerner is a Professor and the Director of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. His publications include a study of the stupid, Theorizing Stupid Media (2019)—exploring cinematic material that does not conform to existing narrative or genre categories. Kerner also published Extreme Cinema (2016). Kerner’s publications often reflect upon the affective potential of the cinematic. Jonathan L. Knapp is a graduate student in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He spent a decade working at various film festivals, archives, and museums in the San Francisco Bay Area, and completed an MA in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. His research is motivated primarily by questions of space, place, and historical trauma—exploring the landscape in conjunction with violence, memory, and the spectral.

• Acknowledgements; Chapter One: Extreme Cinema: Revisiting Body Genres; Chapter 2: Hearing: With a Touch of Sound: The Affective Charge of Audio Design; Chapter 3: Pain: Exploring Bodies, Technology, and Endurance; Chapter 4: Laughter: Belly-Aching Laughter; Chapter 5: Arousal: Graphic Encounters; Chapter 6: Crying: Dreadful Melodramas—Family Dramas and Home Invasions; Chapter 7: The End of Extreme Cinema?; Bibliography; Filmography

This is an exciting and timely book. Through in-depth film analysis, clever reformulation of transnational visual culture, and simultaneous attention to form and affect, Kerner and Knapp open up our world to the intensive capacities of what they judiciously call the "viewing bodies of extreme cinema.