Mirella Bontempo is a Montreal based writer and frequent film critic for Serai.

Subversion has become an idea so facile, that the non-conventional is convention. With so many mores broken, one grasps for a meaning. Even meek and mild me can commit the biggest subversion without effort; frank truisms are often affronts to society. One could say the Luddites, and their modern-day incarnations transgress in their own way. In cinema, it is measured by narrative content versus experimentation in form and aesthetics. Amos Vogel's book Film as Subversive Art (1974) lists the elements of filmable subversion such as the destruction of time and plot, taboos (sexual, deviant, religious and metaphysical in nature) and the obvious, the political. But has everything been done and is everything else, an exercise in pretense?

In art and in performance art in particular, I think of body art. Orlan desecrates and disfigures her body undergoing plastic surgery; she recites lines such as "skin is deceiving" from the operating theatre, as a video installation is broadcasted live. "My work is blasphemous… I fight God and DNA." It's her body she can do to it whatever she wants to it including cheek implants and incurring consequential scars. Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri courts the elderly into signing a contract in literally giving their bodies for art - his. Damien Hirst, famous for dead animals in formaldehyde, had a self-portrait with a severed head. When Joel-Peter Watkins couldn't use cadavers in his photography since they were illegal, he purchased some in Mexico. He subverts religious still life from the Dutch baroque masters by replacing fruit with decaying fetus, dismembered body parts and fish parts in The Feast of Fools (1990). The Kiss' (1982) hauntingly beauty hides the fact that the two severed heads comes from the same male kissing himself / itself, vertically severed as well, inspired from their position in the parcel. Another photographer Andres Serrano's Morgue series is example of corps morcelé where fragmented and fetishized body parts are given clinical titles: Death by Drowning, Rat Poison Suicide and Fatal Meningitis.

There are infamous controversies that ruffled feathers in recent memory. The sacred and the profane can still provoke buttons to come unfurled. Serrano's Piss Christ(1989), Virgin Mary mix-media that included elephant dung in Brooklyn and the Cheese whiz explosion in a New York City hotel room, entitled Room 114 (Montrealer Cosimo Cavallaro) got media attention. Ditto for the Meat Dress (Jana Sterbak, 1991 for The National Gallery, Ottawa), the concrete literalisation of women as meat, which inspired a cattle slaughter by a student artiste at one of the studios inside Concordia University's Fine Arts building encouraging a ban on such practice. Ethics usually trumps acts of megalomania, that, and the bloody cost of mopping it all.

Provocation in art does not necessarily rest on mere gross-out shock value alone. If a film successfully has a paying member of the audience leave a screening, that his / her sensibilities were infringed, the film was oppressive for whatever reason, subversion was achieved. Michael Haneke's La Pianiste (2001) had the theatre issue a notice to patrons but the 'disturbing' psychological elements came from the mind of Elfriede Jelinek whose book the film was based upon. Another Austrian politically-tinged satire Dogdays (Ulrich Seidl, 2001) had vignettes interconnected by unconnected sex: swinging in the suburbs, rape in cars while Irréversible (Gaspar Noe, 2002) grabbed media attention for a real-time rape of Monica Bellucci's character. The female directed Mourir à tue-tête (Anne Claire Poirer, 1979) opens with a rape from the point-of-view of the victim's eyes acting as camera. Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day (2001) depiction of carnivorous vampire-like tropical illness and graphic rape murders perpetuated by Vincent Gallo, who is scarier off-camera but not as scary as Beatrice Dalle's prominent jaw line, had theatre members leaving the theatre where my sister claimed, "That was the worst movie I ever saw". I retorted, "I thought Pecker (1998) was the worst movie you ever saw."

Sure, John Waters is an acquired taste. The Scatalogue: 30 years of Crap in Contemporary art, the Shit Exhibit for short, at the Saw Gallery ( Ottawa) in 2003 exposed the card accompanying his Polyester (1981) film, a first and last in Odorama. Unfortunately, it was encased in glass where you couldn't take a waft of the aged scratch n' smell card which the original movie audience was cued to scratch a square rendering the cinematic experience a sensorial one; the scent of whatever onscreen such as grass or shit. Waters' earlier film Pink Flamingos (1972) is subversive due to Divine's intervention, where the flamboyant tranny eats dogshit freshly produced by the dog without any editing, inducing gag reflexes everywhere especially when she sticks out her tongue. Proving that she is, as she contends, "the most disgusting person alive." That's when subversion becomes exploitation, making fun of the grotesque, the overweight lady in a baby pen pining for the Eggman.

You'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who calls John Waters films high-art and he knows it. The earliest film that could have exploited its subject, banned by MGM studios, Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932) dealt with a midget lured by a trapeze beauty and her strongman boyfriend. Other carnie elements include Siamese twins in the carnivalesque setting. Unlike other later freaks on film, the lenses are sympathetic towards the physical freaks while tarnishing the beautiful freaks. Mexican cult classic Santa Sangre (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1989) also features circus freaks in a violent atmosphere. Brazil's Coffin Joe films contribute to the Zombie exploitation genre.

'Is it intellectually honest or dishonest?' critics surmise. Anyone can call toilette humour garbage but even garbage has its virtues.

Creating garbage was aimed at by Brazilian filmmakers in the final stage of Cinema Novo, in its Tropicalist stage. These are terms thrown around in manifestos by filmmakers. Garbage aesthetics personified by the critique of consumerism in the 1970s where cannibalism was a metaphor for consumerism. Best exemplified by Macunaima (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1969) and Como Gustoso Era Meu Francês (How Tasty was my Frenchman, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, 1974). With the latter film, our sympathy starts for the white French Huguenot enslaved by a luso-allied tribe then traded by his countryman, the film questions the colonial iconography and its way of seeing who is savage? Unfolding credits begin with picto-montage of European drawn nudies of the aboriginals' body parts, fantastical painted faces gives us the Primitive lure we're used to seeing. To the Huguenot-allied tribe, Tupinambas, he fails to prove to them he is French. To them, Europeans are interchangeable in the same manner aboriginals are treated in films. Colonial rhetoric is expressed by the puritanical Huguenot who refuses the advances of a female aboriginal who is left perplexed, "He says he's French and won't sleep with me" telling of the colonial mores. The intertitle offers up the religious context with a quote from a Calvinist: "My Lord, if I must die a barbarous death, let it be at the hands of someone who knows You."

There are other European characters such as Portuguese priest who narrates and French Captain represents economic exploitation, trading off his countryman ("How to treat a Christian," retorts enslaved Frenchman) to which the aboriginal chief gets wise to the bartering inequities "Do we kill enemies with mirrors?" The Frenchman ultimately marries a local and feigns going along with the plan of being fattened up to be eaten by the tribe: i.e. Chief's cousin gets his arm. His wife instructs him on the rituals towards an honourable death through final lovemaking ritual but when he betrays the tribe to escape, she plucks a bow and arrow. There is a visual target of her forehead foreshadowing aboriginal genocide.

While How Tasty was my Frenchman was about literal cannibalism, though not depicted, Macunaima is a modern allegory to modern-day economic dependency. Macunaima introductory credits tell us "the film is about consumerism as cannibalism. Brazil devouring itself." Black man from the jungle turns white as he enters the city, meets a girl with a gun and an industrialist who feeds guests piranhas. Its most impressionistic scenes when the character jumps into the pool of limb-infested Feijoada, the national stew and vomits in green and yellow - the colours of the national flag.

Filmmaker Peter Greenaway also uses the body, Dutch Baroque and cannibalism in The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover (1989) which harkened Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus where the flesh is cooked and served to the enemy. Theatre of human cruelty usurps anything imagined. In his Pillow Book (1995), where after the protagonist's suicide, his skin is transformed into a hide in a book by his publisher / lover. It is in the inanimate dealing of the body as object, when the publisher licks the neo-book-cum-lover, that the idea becomes subversive. Pasolini also concentrated on mass consumerism in western societies in his Porcile(1969) making the consumerism-bestiality allusion where the son of German capitalist opts to a return to nature in a pigpen while the other storyline has another character sentenced to be eaten by wild beasts. Probably the most subversive Pasolini gratuitous scenes are in Salò: 120 days of Sodom (1975) which is synonymous with human degradation within the context of that short-lived Fascist republic.

When I think of subversive cinema, I think of the classic canons that have left an imprint on our visual memory. Un Chien Andalou  (1929) by Luis Buñuel which was done earlier in cinematic history and still holds up in its surreal images, razor cutting eyeball scene (once again, the poor cow as prop) and religious mores, armpit hair on chin, priests towing a piano turn into donkeys. I think of modernist literature and whole modernist tradition influencing cinema narrative-wise. Alain Resnais' L'année dernière à Marianbad (1961), thanks to Robbe-Grillet, tinkering with linear narration, before Pulp Fiction (1994), as well as Chris Marker's La Jetée(1962) which tinkers with emotional memory and characters through the succession of stills except for that one moving 'still'.

A film is subversive in content when it defies narration to take an inconsequential role such as David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) and Mulholland Drive(2001) which had a room with film critics scratching their heads in unison debating what was the last 20 minutes about?

Jean Rouch's Moi, Un Noir (1958) has racist undertones with a narrator with exaggerated pseudo-African Creole accent attacking the form of ethnographies. This time, he, the subject, has a voice; yet, it is still white man's affectation of it that is the subversive part. Peter Kubella's Unsere Afrikareise(1966) has the same politically subversive rendering. He was hired to make a safari film of German industrialists on an exotic hunt; he subverts the travelogue by making the hunters' barrel of the gun over their African 'help' the focus, not the African sky or animals as you'd expect from a travelogue.

Santiago Alvarez agitprop shorts are the best political subversive shorts from Cuba (not internally bothersome to Cuba's regime but formalistically as art). Now (1965) takes Lena Horne's song to images of segregation in the USA while Hanoi Martes 13(1967) visually assaults the President, also the subject of a family portrait satire in LBJ (1968), and his Vietnam War through montage and collages especially through the maniacal laughter on the soundtrack "They're coming to take me away". Criticism of a regime are usually most palatable when it is working from inside the revolutionary vanguard in guise of comedy such as Tomás Alea Gutiérrez's Death of a Bureaucrat (1966) where the widow cannot get her recently departed husband's pension since he was buried with his worker's card. Less punchy jokes about the bobocracia came from Juan Carlos Tabío's co-directed Guantanamera (1995) which deals with a trans-Cuban funeral road trip and The Waiting List (Tabío, 2000) about Cuba's housing crisis.

Rendering subversive the political is the easiest of expected subversions in liberal democracies but in Eastern Europe, the socialism on cinema was depicted with a raunchy face such as the celebration of the absurd in Daisies (Vera Chytilova, 1966) from Czechoslovakia. Dusan Makavjev's W.R. Mysteries of the Organism (1971) from Yugoslavia is a political sexual comedy romp (how they never made one before) and pokes fun at agitprop documentaries within a dramatic context. So subversive it warranted censorship. Panahi's Circle (2000) was filmed clandestinely and smuggled out, a critique of the then-Reformist Iranian regime with focus a day in the life of Iranian women. His, though Abbas Kiarostami-scripted, Crimson Gold (2003) was also "forbidden".

Sometimes time is considered subversive in experimental films whereas chronological timeline gets reworked in non-linear narratives in feature filmmaking. The eight-hour film from Syberberg, Hitler: a Film from Germany (1978) has a more performance art feel to it since there is a proscenium arch/stage where actors are performing to the camera. It differed in approach from his New German Cinema contemporaries in the goal of consciously putting the Third Reich in your face to German audiences whose past was still a taboo. Most unnerving is Himmler's massage session extolling the virtues of Buddhism and vegetarianism. Far shorter yet more unsettling, Alain Resnais dealt with Auschwitz in Night and Fog (1955). Madame X (1977) about a fake feminist and lesbian pirate subplot might as well be the most subversive film from Germany along with those from Rosa von Praunheim (a transgendered person from Latvia).

Andy Warhol's Empire (1964) was also eight hours long of a stationary camera filming, you guessed it, the Empire State Building as day turns into night. Here, the aesthetic is somewhat subversive or a grand waste of time. Canadian artist Michael Snow does the same with forward and backward sign as title <-> ( Back and Forth, 1969) his camera panning left to right, back to left to right in a classroom for the early duration of the short may seem tedious but one can see changes in light, the hues of wall, dirty window panes, aural interruptions on the soundtrack and the introduction of 'characters' changes direction of the camera into upward and downward tilts and ultimately, into a dizzying frenzy.

Kenneth Anger is probably the best-known subversive experimental filmmaker. His most accessible film Scorpio Rising (1964) takes motorcycle culture, its rituals and renders them homoerotic unbeknownst to the subjects not unlike the buff men of Tom of Finland. The best soundtrack of any experimental film, Anger seduces the viewer with the innocuous pop songs of '50s and '60s such as The Shangri-las' " Leader of the Pack" and Ricky Nelson singing "You're torturing me" sung over as the bikers are being dragged about partaking in boyish hi-jinks. When found footage of Christian pageantry accidentally was delivered to his apartment, he uses Palm Sunday Jesus riding on a donkey and juxtaposes the image with iconography of Nazism making a link between the three rites. Kenneth best exemplifies subversion of rationality since his other films cull from 'Supernatural' inspiration, as Vogels categorizes it, from Egyptian mythology Isis and Aleister Crowley ( Invocation of my Demon Brother, 1969 and Lucifer Rising, 1970). He is quoted saying, " Hollywood must be dismantled" quite natural for someone born in Tinseltown to parents in showbiz.

Can commercial Hollywood produce subversive cinema? Perhaps, just maybe, if the producers don't know it. Douglas Sirk's melodramas are also touted as subverting the genre with the critique of the American bourgeoisie. The Marx-lite subversion in his slick melodramas is very tempered. Probably more Brechtian since the outrageous melodrama was so subtly subversive for some since he worked within the Hollywood system in the 1950s with wholesome stars like Sandra Dee and Rock Hudson such as Universal-produced Written on the Wind (1956) where the poor little oil-rich heiress is victim to her bourgeois caprices. Another made-in-Hollywood film, Otto Preminger's Man with a Golden Arm (1955), had its release pending due to its Hays Code-breaking subject, heroin addiction, based on a Nelson Algren opiate-tinged novel. The Americanization of Emily (Arthur Hiller, 1964) has unusually sexy Julie Andrews as a British war widow puts up a front of resistance to the charms by a stationing naval GI (James Garner), with all that implies, has anti-war messages disguised as Anglo-American quips in this black comedy, quite different from other WW2 jingoistic Hollywood movies. Though The Boy with Green Hair (Joseph Losey, 1948) visits the tolerance terrain; it is strangely allegorical about diversity, war, orphans and refugees.

When potentially subversive premises go awry, they can still produce the same effect although there is no contention for political high art. A Day without a Mexican (Sergio Arau, 2004) was until now a fantastical notion (mass boycott of work by legal and illegal migrants of Mexico / Central America the week of May Day and Cinco de Mayo 2006) contends with what if the Mexicans labourers disappeared, how would the deficits affect white America economically and domestically? Robert Downey Sr.'s Putney Swope (1969) has a black man restructuring Corporate America. Melvin Van Peebles did the what ifs thesis in The Watermelon Man (1970), before blaxpolitation was funky cool for whites, has a bigot turn black and experiences a day in the life ensuing discrimination.

Subversion does not always have to scream. One of my favourite films,Leningrad Cowboys Go America(Aki Kaurismaki, 1989) quietly tells a story about 12 mute pompadoured Finnish folk musicians on a road trip who experience surreal interactions in America and ultimately, finding acceptance of their brand of music only after reaching the Mexican border.