French Extreme Cinema's Encounter with Feminism in Hollywood The Substance and Its Politics of Representation

Abstract

The following paper builds a case study around the film The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) that explores the political dilemmas and paradoxes that characterise contemporary film culture when products  controversial from a political or ethical point of view enter the mainstream. The paper analyses the formal and representational politics of the film from the perspective of classical feminist film theory, and questions the progressivism and pro-feminist stance of the film, which is usually taken for granted by most reviews, press conferences and television discussions. The paper explores the way issues of feminism play out in global film culture, the attempts at normalizing the brutality of extreme cinema for mainstream audiences, and the ways the goals of classical feminist film theory and criticism can be maintained in the context of early 21^st century media culture.