Transgressive film

Carroll again: He explains that much recent film criticism takes its cues from the effort to maximize aesthetic satisfaction.  This is evident in the respect given to “transgressive” films that overturn “what are called the codes of Hollywood filmmaking”: “Within the context of recent film criticism, it is appropriate to regard disturbances of continuity editing, disorienting narrative ellipses, or disruptions of  eyeline matches as subversions of a dominant and ideologically suspect form of filmmaking.”

Once incoherence is valorized, it becomes easy to project it to earlier films.  Hence the popularity of the B-movies of Ed Wood: ” Plan 9 from Outer Space is a cheap, slapdash attempt to make a feature film for very little, and in cutting corners to save money it violates – in outlandish ways – many of the decorums of Hollywood filmmaking that later avant-gardists also seek to affront.  So insofar as the work of contemporary avant-gardists is aesthetically valued for its transgressiveness, why not appreciate Plan 9 from Outer Space under an analogous interpretation?  Call it ‘unintentional modernism,’ but it is modernism nonetheless and appreciable as such.”  It is certainly more aesthetically pleasing to view Wood’s films as transgressive; therefore, they are transgressive.

Without an appeal to intention, this movement is inevitable, because intention seems to be the only thing that distinguishes a mistake from a transgression.