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This chapter begins with an epigraph, “What can you do with the camera that makes you feel like you're a participant?”, which was taken from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges' book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. It points out that the epigraph was used in the opening of The Hurt Locker and considered one of the film's central thematic motifs and metaphor. It also looks at The Hurt Locker's very particular cinematic style that is described as both jagged and frenetic. The chapter discusses how The Hurt Locker was filmed in Jordan, a country which borders Iraq to the west and has a very similar architecture to Baghdad where the film is primarily set. It analyzes the cinematic language and narrative choices that lead towards understanding the character of William James as a masculine hero and a decisive man of action.

This chapter argues that von Trier’s response to the problem of evil and his cinematic style have evolved along with his views on representation. Once committed to the rejection of all cinematic illusion, his later films make use of it—not because he has changed his mind about the dangers of illusion, but because he has come to view an unnatural perspective as something necessary in order to reveal an evil to which we are ordinarily blind. This later style is herein referred to as “pessimistic realism.” In this light, the chapter focuses on two films in particular: Europa (1991) and Melancholia (2011). Both of these films grapple with the question of evil and the difficulty of seeing or representing it.

This chapter discusses the use of parody in Hot Fuzz (2007). It particularly examines the film's manipulation of Hollywood action movie tropes. Uncritical discussions of parody in British film contexts, and with specific reference to Hot Fuzz, underestimate the ambiguous relationship of parody film to its ‘targets’. Looking in detail at the film's style through chosen scenes, the chapter identifies what constitutes parody in this instance, given that much of the cinematic style of Hot Fuzz owes a debt to, rather than subverts, the Hollywood action movie. Exploring what the film really does with other films and television shows proves more revealing than simply ticking off a list of reference points: a game which, fun as it may be, does not tell a great deal about the film's relationship to these same references.

This chapter discusses the research and studio processes from where the Quay Brothers’ films were conceived. Quay Brothers used a kind of research that lets them reinvent visual compositions derived from cinematic origins in order to create an authentic cinematic style. Some cinematic origins include the physical and tangible objects, such as objets trouves or old objects, faded fabrics, and Marcel Duchamp’s artworks which reflect history. The reflected history of these objects is used to structure each and every part of the films of the Quay Brothers; for instance, in their creation of the film Street of Crocodiles. Critics described the film as a realm composed of objects, puppets, and miniatures that move within an uncertain collaged space. The Quay Brothers used Bruno Schulz’s writings to present time as another factor, affecting the manipulation of their films’ collaged spaces.

This chapter explores the cinematic style of City of God (2002). What one might consider here is the way that the film represents a marked change in its audience's way of reading a text. The style of the so-called ‘classic realist film’ evolved through devices such as smooth continuity editing with its use of match cuts used to construct an illusion that what one is seeing is unmediated. This so-called ‘transparent’ style flows in front of one's eyes and apparently requires little effort on the part of the spectator. As noted, some of the responses to City of God enthused about the film's ‘realism’. Realism, formerly associated with the long take and deep focus that allow the spectator to ‘naturally’ absorb the material, here gives way to what some now perceive as the new virtual reality, associated with the ever increasing fragmentation of the world around us. The chapter then considers the cinematography, camera movements, music, and editing in City of God.

The end of the book posits that recent trends towards the extreme do not constitute a cinematic style as such, but rather an international explosion of stylized cinema. There is, however, a genuine risk that such an endeavour might encourage spectators to lose sight of the unique cultural context from which it comes, in favour of a trendy cinematic lingua franca. In the Asian context in particular the London-based DVD label Tartan distributed a line of Asian films under the banner of “Asia Extreme.” While Extreme Cinema acknowledges that this is a perilous tightrope, what the book finally wants to call attention to is the expansive nature of extreme cinema that can be found in nearly every corner of our global media culture.