Professor Mattias Frey, Professor of Film and Media Studies and Head of Film and Media Studies in the School of Arts, has been interviewed on Czech National Radio this month on Reflexe: Film!, a film review programme which also hosts discussions of key themes of contemporary cinematography.
Mattias was interviewed about his book, entitled Extreme Cinema: The Transgressive Rhetoric of Today’s Art Film Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2016), which received an Honorable Mention for the 2017 British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) Best Monograph Award. From Shortbus (2006) to Shame (2011) and from Oldboy (2003) to Irreversible (2002), film festival premieres regularly make international headlines for their shockingly graphic depictions of sex and violence. Film critics and scholars alike often regard these movies as the work of visionary auteurs, hailing directors like Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier as heirs to a tradition of transgressive art. In his book, Mattias Frey offers a very different perspective on these films, exposing how they are also calculated products, designed to achieve global notoriety in a competitive marketplace.
The segment is available to listen to at the link below (in Czech) – Mattias’ segment starts at 20 minutes and 49 seconds into the programme and ends at 45 minutes: https://vltava.rozhlas.cz/u-zlate-rukavice-panoptikum-plne-ztracenych-existenci-8088971