Is film violence a thing? Not a question I would have asked myself before reading James Kendrick’s short introduction to the subject.
Kendrick is professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Film and Digital Media at Baylor University. This is a private Baptist Christian research university in Waco, Texas but fortunately there’s no hint of religious dogma in his study.
What you get is a concise and informative history of violence in movies. He explains that much of the controversy surrounding the topic is fairly recent. Prior to this, most of concerns over content in popular films were linked to behavioural standards, particular those relating to sexual morality and juvenile delinquency.
Aside from a brief mention of Hammer Horror movies in Britain, the focus is primarily on American cinema. The final chapter is a case study of influential directors of ‘New American Cinema’ : Spielberg, Scorsese and Coppola. This doesn’t really add much to the preceding three chapters. Some wider ranging concluding thoughts would have been better.
Probably Kendrick reasoned that he’s already said everything that could be said. The following lengthy sentence sums up his position and gives a flavour of the book’s style : “As we saw in chapter 1, film violence is not a thing, but rather a complicated system of signifying practices that is understood by viewers as a subjective experience, and even though certain generic tendencies structure it in an attempt to enforce a particular reading, it can never be contained within a set ideological system.”
In other words, subjectivity is all. One person’s gratuitous violence is another’s social realism. Only splatter and snuff movies get short shrift in this study. Aside from this, it is clear that the main reason why violence is so much more divisive than it once was is that today’s sophisticated special effects make the gory details look far more realistic. Gone are the days of the bloodless ‘clutch and fall’ acting technique when an actor pretends to be mortally wounded. Leaving things to the imagination is still an effective strategy but directors and audiences are increasingly likely to demand more challenging scenes.
This book is just a brief summary of film history and theoretical positions relating to screen violence but it’s well researched and makes for a valuable introduction to a complex subject.
