Flesh and Excess: On Underground Film

Focusing on key works by two award-winning underground filmmakers, Usama Alshaibi and Aryan Kaganoff, Sargeant examines the desire and the need for shocking bodily representations and interventions in film. Challenging readers to examine the nature of pleasure, of viewing and of experiencing cinema, he punctuates his writing with philosophical analysis while exploring industrial culture, surrealism, butoh dance, fine art and medical fetishism. Flesh and Excess is Jack Sargeant's first book since 1999.

About the Author :
Jack Sargeant's most recent book is Against Control, previous titles include Deathtripping: The Extreme Underground and Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. His writings on film and culture have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, and DVD releases, including the Throbbing Gristle DVD box set. He appeared as an interviewee in the documentaries Blank City, The Advocate For Fagdom and Llik Your Idols, amongst others. He has lectured on underground film, beat culture, William Burroughs and many other topics across the world. Jack is currently program director for the Revelation Film Festival.

Review :
""When a major reimagining of film, and a rewriting of the "other history" of cinema is undertaken, Flesh and Excess will surely be seen as an urtext of this grand alternative history. -- " Senses of Cinema" "The subject of transgression lies at the very heart of Sargeant's latest book, Flesh and Excess: On Underground Film. Sargeant examines, in some great depth, bodily representations throughout underground cinema. Tracking right back to the ocular abuse of Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929), right through to contemporary cinema--via counter-cultural movements such as punk, and postpunk, industrial, fanzine culture; cinema of transgression, film festivals and community, medical fetish, and butoh--Sargeant presents us with bodies exposed to extreme violence, extreme sex, naked bodies, shitting bodies, bleeding bodies, deformed bodies, disgusting bodies, bodies that represent the entire spectrum of human depravity, perversity, and profanity, as they push the realms of extreme experience as art. Potent stuff. The book provides a deep exhilarating thrill, dense in context and commentary; the author analyses his core themes using philosophy, including the theories of Georges Bataille, Freud, de Sade and Nietzsche, to present one of the most comprehensive studies on the subject of underground film ever committed to book form. Sargeant writes with passion and integrity, which provides a deeply absorbing and enriching experience. For anyone with an interest in visceral representations of the body as art, this is a must read." -- Kat Ellinger, Diabolique. "At last! This is now the definitive work on underground film." -- Jon Reiss, filmmaker and author "Flesh and Excess is a work of passionate scholarship. More than a history of transgressive cinema, Sargeant examines the persistence of underground art across generations, and the particular appeal of cinema that enfolds physical pleasures and horrors. It's a clear-eyed and fascinating book." -- Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and Where Art Belongs "Flesh and Excess is an engaging and heady read, a good introduction to neophytes, a grounded analysis for the skeptical, and a strong argument for continued exploration in the realms of underground film art." - Film International "Finely detailed and informative." -- Sight&Sound