Return to the Everyday

In contrast to the films examined in earlier chapters, which tend to culminate in events of violence, and end abruptly thereafter, chapter five turns to films which draw attention to the endurance of the everyday, and the persistence of violence within it. Gaspar Noé’s I Stand Alone (1998) and Markus Schleinzer’s Michael (2011) offer insight into what a return to the everyday following violent disruption might look like. What is potentially most troubling about these films is their implication that violence and the everyday are perhaps not mutually exclusive. In varying ways, both films depict violence as something that might be absorbed into the very fabric of the ordinary. Drawing on theoretical conceptions of everyday time as both measured and perpetual, eventful and repetitious, this chapter argues that these films frustrate our desire for coherence by making explicit the fallacy of the narratives we construct to make the everyday meaningful. Chapter five posits that by undermining our attempts to understand on-screen violence with legible meaning, these films extend their potency by calling attention to the meaning we project on life outside the cinema; I Stand Alone and Michael challenge us to question just what is at stake in acknowledging the everyday as indeterminate.