Violence in film
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"This is how the mediocre Tragedy of Rigeletto by Flavio Calzavera, inspired by Victor Hugo and Verdi, saw itself rechristened The King's Slave, though the wretched baffoon really did not deserve that title. All cinematic bondage is …"--Sadism in the Movies (1964) by George de Coulteray |
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A couple of pointers to film and violence.
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Overview
Film critics analyzing violent film images that seek to aesthetically please the viewer mainly fall into two categories. Critics who see depictions of violence in film as superficial and exploitative argue that such films lead audience members to become desensitized to brutality, thus increasing their aggression. On the other hand, critics who view violence as a type of content, or as a theme, claim it is cathartic and provides "acceptable outlets for anti-social impulses". Adrian Martin describes the stance of such critics as emphasizing the separation between violence in film and real violence. To these critics, "movie violence is fun, spectacle, make-believe; it's dramatic metaphor, or a necessary catharsis akin to that provided by Jacobean theatre; it's generic, pure sensation, pure fantasy. It has its own changing history, its codes, its precise aesthetic uses."
Margaret Bruder, a film studies professor at Indiana University and the author of Aestheticizing Violence, or How to Do Things with Style, proposes that there is a distinction between aestheticized violence and the use of gore and blood in mass market action or war films. She argues that "aestheticized violence is not merely the excessive use of violence in a film". Movies such as the popular action film Die Hard 2 are very violent, but they are do not qualify as examples of aestheticized violence because they are not "stylistically excessive in a significant and sustained way". Bruder argues that films such as such as Hard Target, True Romance and Tombstone employ aestheticized violence as a stylistic tool. In such films, "the stylized violence they contain ultimately serves as (...) another interruption in the narrative drive".
A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 film written, directed, and produced by Stanley Kubrick and based on the novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess. Set in a futuristic England (circa 1995, as imagined in 1965), it follows the life of a teenage gang leader named Alex. In Alexander Cohen's analysis of Kubrick's film, he argues that the ultra-violence of the young protagonist, Alex, "...represents the breakdown of culture itself". In the film, gang members are "...[s]eeking idle de-contextualized violence as entertainment" as an escape from the emptiness of their dystopian society. When the protagonist murders a woman in her home, Cohen states that Kubrick presents a "[s]cene of aestheticized death" by setting the murder in a room filled with "...modern art which depict scenes of sexual intensity and bondage"; as such, the scene depicts a "...struggle between high-culture which has aestheticized violence and sex into a form of autonomous art, and the very image of post-modern mastery".
Writing in The New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews the controversy and moral panic surrounding the 1991 novel and 2000 film American Psycho. Garner concludes that the film was a "coal-black satire" in which "dire comedy mixes with Grand Guignol. There's demented opera in some of its scenes." The book, meanwhile, has acquired "grudging respect" and has been compared to Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. Garner claims that the novel's author, Bret Easton Ellis, has contributed to the aestheticization of violence in popular media: "The culture has shifted to make room for [Patrick] Bateman. We've developed a taste for barbaric libertines with twinkling eyes and some zing in their tortured souls. Tony Soprano, Walter White from "Breaking Bad", Hannibal Lecter (who predates "American Psycho")—here are the most significant pop culture characters of the past 30 years... Thanks to these characters, and to first-person shooter video games, we've learned to identify with the bearer of violence and not just cower before him or her."
In Xavier Morales' review of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Volume 1, he calls the film "a groundbreaking aestheticization of violence". Morales argues that, similarly to A Clockwork Orange, the film's use of aestheticized violence appeals to audiences as an aesthetic element, and thus subverts preconceptions of what is acceptable or entertaining.
Titles
Psycho (1960) - Blood Feast (1963) - Bonnie and Clyde (1967) - Straw Dogs (1971) - A Clockwork Orange (1971) - Dirty Harry (1971) - The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) - Jaws (1975) - Mad Max (1979) - Man Bites Dog (1992) - Irréversible (2002) -
Related
exploitation film - gore - grindhouse - horror - kung fu film - mondo film - rape revenge trope - roughie - snuff film - slasher film - video nasty
Sadian trilogy
In 1959 and 1960, Anglo-Amalgamated produced three which, because of their emphasis on sadism, cruelty and violence, with sexual overtones, are dubbed the "Sadian Trilogy".
See also
