Anna Batori’s monograph, The Extreme Cinema of Eastern Europe: Rape, Art, (S)Exploitation, analyses the phenomenon of extreme films in Eastern Europe which exploit east/west binaries, inherit socialist traumas, and utilise tropes of strong graphic representation and intense gender and animal violence. The book reexamines the subversive value of such films, and asks ethical questions addressed or dismissed by critical literature and international film festivals. The author’s interrogating questions examine the boundary between extreme screen violence and arthouse cinemas. What is the end goal in portraying transgressive taboo imagery in extreme cinemas? Extreme films garner significant spectatorial success, are acknowledged in film scholarship for their convention-breaking imagery and political subversiveness, and often receive critical acclaim at international festivals. If arthouse films investigate psychological complexities of characters and the postmodern (frequently failed) search for ever-escaping multiple selves, why then, Batori asks, do many contemporary extreme films, often labelled as extreme cinema art, oppose this logic, and instead cultivate narrative confusion and subdue their socio-political statements?
The author argues that the genre often promoted as extreme arthouse films actually belongs to exploitation cinema or “wannabe art” (11). Films that accentuate explicit sexual violence, grindhouse trends, and disturbing scenes of cruelty generate sensationalism for profit purposes. “Extreme cinema is extreme because the discourse around it is extreme” (11), and, as Batori further suggests, this discourse often “identifies rape as an artistic gesture” (59), which perpetuates the “colonized position of the region” (60) and is a sold as commodity and Europe’s “excremental Other” (123). In inviting the readers to grapple with these questions, the author examines the inception of obscene imagery that features rape, prostitution, and violence on screen starting from Yugoslav New Wave cinema of the 1960s and 1970s to the post-2004 neoliberal era in the region. Through a postcolonial theoretical lens, Batori investigates the origins and proliferation of the violation of female corporeality on Eastern European screens as a vehicle and metaphor of nationhood, symbolic emasculation, (deprecating) self-perception and self-punishment in the context of the (post)socialist period and post-2004 neoliberalism.
The first chapter examines Yugoslav Black Wave films that feature individual and mass rape as an allegory of ideological abuse. Most Black Wave films utilised silence (rendered as the actual lack of speech or conflation of violent scenes with the serenity of nature) as a device that represented muteness, incapability of resistance, and national trauma. The chapter focuses on Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974), which depict women as sexually unconstrained, liberating men from sexual and political oppression, particularly in WR, or rendered as commodities, oppressed by sex in capitalist societies, in Sweet Movie. In both films, female bodies die following sexual acts and are offered as sacrifice on the altars of ideology.
Chapter two examines what happens on screen when the political transition from the Socialist Bloc gives way to the emergence of market-based post-socialist societies. During this period, women were used as instruments of the state’s pursuits, either for renewed domesticity with an emphasis on motherhood and sacrifice or as commodities used for the proliferation of pornography. In these films, women became objects of desire in Western Europe, whose value went in two directions: “traditional model-looking women who cook, clean, and smile” and can “reproduce white children” offering “a fresh reservoir of love” (43), or sexual labourers and victims of sex trafficking. In contrast to socialist cinema that kept sexual violence offscreen, the post-1989 films of castration foregrounded brutal imagery as shown in Mircea Daneliuc’s The Conjugal Bed (1993), Andrzej Żulawski’s She-Shaman (1996), and Kornel Mundruczó’s Pleasant Days (2002). In these films, the author argues, bodily violence originates from the loss of masculinity and becomes the reflection of the neoliberal corporeal regime (50).
Chapters three and four concentrate on animality, dead or tortured animals on screen that function as “animetaphor,” estranged presences that speak without language (62), mimicking capitalist mass production and serviceable flesh in which “capital becomes animal and animals become capital” (63). Animal violence on screen, according to Batori, becomes a substitute for human death in the service of exploitative shock-entertainment, supporting the self-colonising image of Eastern Europe as “primitive, animalistic, and less human” (69). In Vladimir Michálek’s Angel Exit (2000), Lukas Nola’s Alone (2001), and Sulev Keedus’s Somnambulance (2003), the tortured animal is linked to femininity, translating the zoomorphic violence into violence against women and ultimately against nation. The author argues that the death of animals on screen reduces animals to simple metaphoric signs that are one-sidedly linked “to the death of the nation as a neo-colonised, subjugated entity” (70). Analysing the marketing language of these films, the author highlights their sensationalism of “going where no movie has gone before” (85) that utilises shock and taboo as spectacle, which is then discursively translated as social anxieties and political issues. Batori examines Želimir Žilnik’s Marble Ass (1995) and Alexo Petrov’s Baklava (2007) as films representative of this trend that cultivate taboo imagery (animal death and child pornography) to mock Balkan patriarchy and “shake the viewer into political consciousness” (93) by oversimplifying the diversity of LGBTQ+ communities and reducing the representation of the region to self-Balkanization (the internalization of the externally imposed stereotype). The chapters argue that prioritising corporeal and animal torture for shock value overwrites the symbolic messages that are left subdued due to the insistence on sexual objectification and taboo transgression.
Chapter five analyzes Mladen Đorđević’s The Life and Death of a Porno Gang (2009) and Srđan Spasojević’s A Serbian Film (2010) as examples of national-extreme filmmaking and post-war realities that rest on self-Balkanization to examine war traumas, obsession with ethnocentrism, commercialization and commodification of the region. These films utilise themes of necrophilia, pedophilia, pornography, and self-exoticization in order to criticise Western stereotypes of the Balkans, the tropes of belligerent Serbs (that became a part of internalised national imaginary), and Milošević’s nationalist politics, as well as to discuss the post-2000 identity crisis and transition era realities. In their deconstruction of domestic and Western media representations, of the spectacle of nationalisms, and of Balkanization, these films question the truth of the very cinematic medium (113). They utilise taboo imagery as an ethical strategy to play with forms of spectatorial positions (the viewer is implicated as torturer, tortured, and witness (119)).
The final chapter investigates post-2010 films and argues that corporeal gender violence persists in a form of a double burden: as an internal colonisation with a resurrection of an impotent socialist father figure who acts as a domestic oppressor; and self-colonisation under a foreign Western oppressor. Alongside the double oppressive structure and new orientalist mindset, movies of this period–including Ruxana Zenide’s Ryna (2005), Damjan Kozole’s Slovenian Girl (2009), Szabolcs Hajdu’s Bibliothèque Pascal (2010), and Matěj Chlupáček and Michal Samir’s Touchless (2013) feature nostomania (a desire to reconstruct the old socialist way of life). Batori also notices a change and growth in the post-2010 films that reflect in smoother unfolding and tighter storylines, allowing for identification with the oppressed female characters. The post-2010 films embrace more self-reflexivity that criticises hypermasculine hegemony and resists normalizing rape and violence as part of traditional masculinity.
Batori’s monograph is a valuable study of Eastern European extreme cinema; however, there are segments in the book that the author might reconsider in a subsequent edition. The chapters show uneven engagement with critical sources. At times, films are introduced descriptively, steering the discussion toward plot summaries rather than employing close readings that could better support the study’s central arguments, which occasionally come across as rushed and repetitive. The author rightly advocates for clearer contextualization and discourses that distinguish between films employing (s)exploitation and commercial tactics, and those rooted in arthouse cinema with subversive potential and medium-specific self-reflexivity. However, it is sometimes difficult for the reader to distinguish these two tendencies in the argumentation, particularly in the fifth chapter. As a whole, Batori’s monograph is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the topic and will be a useful source for film scholars and students of the region.
Marina Filipovic
Bates College
mfilipov@bates.edu
Marina Filipovic is a Visiting Lecturer in Russian at Bates College, specialising in 20th-century Russian literature, Soviet and post-Soviet film, and Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema.
Filipovic, Marina. 2025. Review: “Anna Batori: The Extreme Cinema of Eastern Europe: Rape, Art, (S)Exploitation”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 20. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2025.00020.384.
URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/
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