Deliberate violation of taboos or visual/narrative conventions—creates discomfort and forces engagement. Bunuel, Haneke, von Trier deploy it systematically.
Anyone who systematically fights against the audience's expectations is working with transgression. This is not provocation for provocation's sake – it's about consciously violating visual, narrative, or moral conventions to jolt viewers out of their passivity. You sit in the cinema, relax, and suddenly something happens that you *didn't* want to see. The discomfort is intentional.
In editing, this means specifically: holding a shot when every instinct says to cut. A close-up of a body that doesn't appear idealized. Bodily excretions, violence without aestheticization, sexual acts without editing euphemisms. Buñuel understood this early on – his surreal images weren't enigmatic because they *were meant* to be enigmatic, but because they violated the prevailing visual grammar of his time. The eye of the horse being cut – not for a horror effect, but to shift the threshold of perception.
Haneke works in a similarly structured way: he withholds the images you *want* to see and shows you their consequences instead. Or he lets the camera run when things become uncomfortable, forcing you to look – not because it's beautiful, but because *not looking* would make you complicit. This isn't the depiction of violence; it's violence as an artistic method of perceptual control. You can't look away or switch channels; the film controls your attention by deliberately violating taboos.
Practically on set, this means: casting against type. Lighting that reveals flaws instead of hiding them. Sound design that disturbs instead of soothes. Lars von Trier often uses transgression through nudity and sexuality, but not erotically – degradingly, dehumanizingly. This is the difference between transgression and mere explicitness: the effect lies in the contextualization, not in the raw material. A naked body in an art film can be conservative; the same shot with different editing, music, and sequence of cuts becomes transgressive. The transgression occurs in the editing, not in the shot.
Important: Transgression is not a moral statement. It is a formal strategy. It only works if the audience actually still has boundaries to transgress. In a culture that shows everything, transgression must work more subtly – psychologically rather than sensorially. The strategy remains; the tactics adapt.