From the Banal to the Extreme… and Back Again: Troubled Everyday: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Everyday in European Art Cinema by Alison Taylor

Extract: The sustained critical success of auteur directors like Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier, the emergence in the 1990s and 2000s of the “new extremism” particularly in French cinema, and the rise in recent years of the “feel-bad” film have all contributed to a rise in the critical attention paid to the relationship between violence and European art cinema. Alison Taylor’s new book Troubled Everyday: The Aesthetics of Violence and the Everyday in European Art Cinema builds on this scholarship and takes it in a new direction.