The Cinema Of Transgression

So, I finally got my computer ordered the other day and I'm really looking forward to getting it. Most of all I think I'm excited about all the films I'll be able to actually get that don't seem to be available anywhere else, like those of Catherine Breillat and Gaspar Noé for example. They both do films that belong to the "Cinema Of Trangression" genre; where the purpose, I suppose, is to shock. What's shocking, though, is subjective I suppose although I hear they're both violent and sexually expolicit (along the lines of "Baise-Moi", if anyone's seen that one), some of them made with an 8 mm camera and in black and white. In other words; something I might like. The "Cinema Of Transgression" had a manifesto about what they do and who they are as a group of underground film makers, which really really awakens mycuriosity. It reads, as follows:

We who have violated the laws, commands and duties of the avant-garde; i.e. to bore, tranquilize and obfuscate through a fluke process dictated by practical convenience stand guilty as charged. We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic snobbery which erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded to lock out those filmmakers who possessed the vision to see through this charade. We refuse to take their easy approach to cinematic creativity; an approach which ruined the underground of the sixties when the scourge of the film school took over.

All values must be challenged. Nothing is sacred. Everything must be questioned and reassessed in order to free our minds from the faith of tradition.Intellectual growth demands that risks be taken and changes occur in political, sexual and aesthetic alignments no matter who disapproves. We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men. We pass beyond and go over boundaries of millimeters, screens and projectors to a state of expanded cinema. We violate the command and law that we bore audiences to death in rituals of circumlocution and propose to break all the taboos of our age by sinning as much as possible. There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed.

Since there is no afterlife, the only hell is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many rules as you can. This act of courage is known as transgression. We propose transformation through transgression - to convert, transfigure and transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full of unknowing slaves".

Need I say I have to check this out? :) They continue to say that "...any film which doesn't shock isn't worth looking at" which is, of course, utter rubbish. Shocking for the sake of shocking is too simple. But still...I'm excited.