Screen Violence Research Articles

Filtered Violence: Propaganda Model and Political Economy of the Indian Film Industry

Production, distribution, and consumption of cinematic violence raises several questions of academic import. Despite a plethora of research studies exploring the nature of screen violence and its effects on viewers, a serious debate on the influence of state machinery on the production of sanitized violence in movies is still wanting. Likewise, Bollywood’s role in advancing the Indian government’s agenda in war and peace times has been paid petite attention in academic discourses dealing with media-state interconnection. This article explores the relevance of Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model as a framework for analysis and analyzes Bollywood’s movies based on stories of violence in war and peace times. The article discusses the connections with the Indian state apparatus that influences production processes in the Indian film industry by providing financial assistance and applying multifarious political, social, economic, and ideological pressures (filters). The findings suggest that the Bollywood movies support diplomatic initiatives of the Indian government through cinematic narratives of

The cinema of Clint Eastwood: chronicles of America

He became a movie star playing The Man With No Name, and today his name is known around the world. Measured by longevity, productivity, and profits, Clint Eastwood is the most successful actor-director-producer in American film history. This book examines the major elements of his career, focusing primarily on his work as a director but also exploring the evolution of his acting style, his long association with screen violence, his interest in jazz, and the political views -- sometimes hotly controversial -- reflected in his films and public statements. Especially fascinating is the pivotal question that divides critics and moviegoers to this day: is Eastwood a capable director with a photogenic face, a modest acting talent, and a flair for marketing his image? Or is he a true cinematic auteur with a distinctive vision of America's history, traditions, and values? From A Fistful of Dollars and Dirty Harry to Million Dollar Baby and beyond, The Cinema of Clint Eastwood takes a close-up look at one of the screen's most influential and charismatic stars.

From the Editor

This issue of Projections focuses on movie violence, a topic of continuing controversy. Concerns about screen violence are not new. Because of their visceral power, popular appeal, and the seeming ease with which they bypassed established channels and norms of socialization, movies swiftly drew the attention and scorn of social critics and reformers. The city of Chicago passed the nation’s first movie censorship ordinance in 1907. Numerous state and municipal censor boards were established in its wake, and movie violence drove the first court-adjudicated censorship case in American film history. The James Boys in Missouri (1908) and Night Riders (1908) were Westerns that Chicago authorities deemed to be immoral because they concentrated on showing the exploits of violent outlaws. The Chicago reformers felt that the films lacked an appropriate moral balance in failing to devote sufficient attention to law-abiding characters.

Peckinpah Today: New Essays on the Films of Sam Peckinpah. MichaelBliss, editor. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.

Peckinpah Today: New Essays on the Films of Sam Peckinpah. Michael Bliss, editor. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.Sam Peckinpah clawed his way into movie history as a multileveled visual poet, an instinctive trailblazer, and the last great filmmaker to bring direct knowledge of the Old West to the Western genre. With that sentence that opens his essay on page 69 about the adaptation of The Siege at Trencher's Farm into Straw Dogs, critic Michael Sragow pretty well nails Sam Peckinpah. Editor Michael Bliss (who teaches English at Virginia Tech) has assembled some gifted specialists for this collection, including several who have written books on the director, such as his Virginia Tech colleague Stephen Prince (Savage Cinema, 1998), author and film editor Paul Seydor (Peckinpah: The Western Films, 1980), biographer Garner Simmons, and Bliss himself.Consequently, nine essays here celebrate a director who was cantankerous and maybe not so well suited for Hollywood filmmaking; yet this maverick still managed to make fourteen films, many of them arguably great, but most of them, excepting The Wild Bunch, perhaps, now generally forgotten. Even so, no one made better or more honest and realistic Westerns. Editor Bliss fails to provide a clear biographical introduction or even a needed filmography, apparently assuming that anyone who comes to this book will know and have seen the body of work, but that was a mistake that his editors should have noticed and rectified. Peckinpah has now been dead for a quarter century, after all, and Bliss really needs to remind youngsters who Peckinpah was and why his work should matter. His stunted Introduction runs only to five pages. Had he taken it to twenty-five pages, he could have easily provided a biographical sketch instead of a banal extrapolation of contents to come.The Wild Bunch tested the limits of screen violence but seemed almost tame in comparison with Straw Dogs, adapted from a trite novel made brilliant, according to critic Michael Sragow. Bliss himself covers Wild Bunch, but even more space is given to Peckinpah's last Western, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in essays by Stephen Prince and Paul Seydor, an academic turned film editor, who attempted to re-edit and restore the film. But what Seydor calls the contentious afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Prince considers an ethical dilemma in film restoration, reflecting on the cutting and re-cutting of the film while Peckinpah himself was locked out of the cutting room. …

A rough ride: strenuous spectatorship and the early cinema of assaults

This essay revisits the question of masculinity and early cinema to explore the construction of strenuous spectatorship – a gendered mode of mediated engagement emerging in the late nineteenth century at the intersection of cinema and war. Combining voyeuristic distance with a somatic sense of risk, strenuous spectatorship offers the paradoxical provision of ‘authentic’ embodied experience through the mediated thrills of screen violence. Looking to the figures of the war correspondent and the thrill-seeking soldier alongside the charge films and battle reenactments of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars, the essay analyzes how such representations functioned to transform the very act of observation into a specifically manly activity. In contrast to accounts emphasizing the disembodied identification of the male spectator with the apparatus, here the visceral appeals of cinematic assault are seen to circulate within the context of the strenuous life, in which intense, immediate sensation was understood as primitive balm to the enervations of modern life. Rather than a masculine subject undone by technological modernity, in the charge films and battle reenactments the technology of the cinema is imbued with strenuous promise, suggesting that spectatorship – like war itself – might harbour possibilities of masculine reinvigoration. Looking beyond the early cinema, the essay suggests the ongoing relevance of strenuous spectatorship to war representation today, from the visceral attractions of film and television, to the embodied appeals of first-person shooter games and military simulation technologies, in which the watching and the waging of war are aligned in newly elaborate and more emphatic ways.

Okiem kamery — semiologia obrazów przemocy

The article contains an attempt to analyse the phenomenon of visual violence (iconic) distributed by mass media, like photography, the cinema, television documentaries and news and the Internet. The authors attempt to demonstrate the characteristics of ths type of violence, referring to specific examples, which are interpreted according to the concepts of George Gerbner, Erich Fromm, Susan Sontag, Jean Baudrillard and others. The contemporary iconosphere encourages the practice of the mechanical approach to looking at violence, separating it from ethical reflections, which is why the question of screen violence, on the consequences of rapid but superficial information, seems still worth posing.

The Screen of the Crime: Judging the Affect of Cinematic Violence

Discussions of screen violence polarize around the question of whether images can cause people to behave differently. Proponents of this position point to the influence of images in other contexts; its critics reject the implication that individuals can be so simplistically motivated. Such debate is intensified by events such as the Columbine or Virginia Tech shootings, where cultural products are named as the causes of lethal violence. This article engages with the assumption that the violence in violent imagery is a relatively homogeneous category. It explores paradigms of cinematic violence through the analysis of exemplary scenes from four representative films ( The Matrix, Reservoir Dogs , Natural Born Killers and Elephant), each of which has been linked to violence flowing in and from the image. Each shows multiple killings in highly graphic ways, yet each deploys different representational techniques to produce a range of affective responses in the spectator. As such, the article seeks to answer the question of how to judge the affect of cinematic violence and to investigate the implication of the spectator in the affects and aesthetics of screen violence.

The meaning and definition of violence

Drawing on two studies, one involving a sample of adults, and the other a sample of children, the paper seeks to understand the definition of screen violence given by adults and children. This is accomplished by empirical examination of responses to a range of material that included acts of violence. Using a variant of focus groups video editing groups the paper shows that definitions of violence are drawn from understandings of violence in real life, and the realism of the violence shown on the screen. Definitions of screen violence drawn from definitions of what makes something violent in real life are referred to as the Primary Definers of Violence, and the manner in which the violence is shown on the screen are referred to as the Secondary Definers of Violence. A third set of definers were seen to be in place in so far as the children in our sample were concerned. Referred to as the Tertiary Definers of Violence, they include material that is scary.

Freedom and entertainment: rating the movies in an age of new media

1. New leaders and a new system 2. Sex, profanity, and violence 3. The X rating and the home entertainment revolution 4. The technology of special effects and the wffects of screen violence 5. Pornography 6. The anti-pornography crusade 7. Hollywood, drugs, and religion 8. NC-17 9. Television 10. The digital future.

Pulp Fiction: a clinical case study of screen violence

This paper demonstrates the multiple determinants of violent acting out in the film Pulp Fiction. A comparison between the contents of this work and the life of its director–scriptwriter reveals certain thematic parallels and offers a basis for understanding the attempt to master intrapsychic conflict through the cinematic creative process. Copyright © 2005 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

Classical film violence: designing and regulating brutality in Hollywood cinema, 1930-1968

This work examines the interplay between the aesthetics and the censorship of violence in classic Hollywood films from 1930 to 1968, the era of the Production Code, when filmmakers were required to have their scripts approved before they could start production. Stephen Prince explains how Hollywood's filmmakers designed violence in response to the regulations of the Production Code Administration (PCA) and regional censors. Taking this one step further, he shows that graphic violence in contemporary films actually has its roots in these early films. He explains how Hollywood's filmakers were drawn to violent scenes and how they pushed the envelope of what they could depict by manipulating the PCA. Examining violent scene construction in key films of the period, Prince shows that many choices about camera positions, editing and blocking of the action and sound were functional responses by filmmakers to regulatory constraints, necessary for clearing release approval from the PCA and then in surviving scrutiny by the nation's state and municipal censor boards. Prince's study is a stylistic history of American screen violence that is grounded in industry documentation. Using PCA files, he traces the negotiations over violence carried out by filmmakers and PCA officials and then shows how these negotiations left their traces on picture and sound in the finished films. Almost everything revealed by this research is contrary to what most have believed about Hollywood and film violence. Chapters include Throwing the Extra Punch and Cruelty, Sadism and the Horror Film.

A Media Violence-Inspired Juvenile Sexual Homicide Offender 13 Years Later

No follow-up studies exist on how minors who commit sexual homicides adjust once released back into the community. This is an important question given the extreme nature of their crimes, lack of recidivism data, and the expectation that one-half of them will be freed from prison by mid-life. Likewise, no studies exist on the role our culture's pervasive media violence plays in these offenses. This report describes a 13-year-old boy who committed a witnessed media violence-inspired sexual homicide. Follow-up information is provided on his community adjustment as an adult four years after release from prison. He had multiple indicators of brain dysfunction, and watched a "slasher" film just before committing the blitz style crime upon a female neighbor. Media violence literature is reviewed--against a backdrop of developmental abnormalities, neuropsychiatric vulnerabilities, family dysfunction, and mental illness. This case illustrates how the confluence of such variables, combined with the tinder of erotic screen violence, may lead to sexual murder.

Do Schizophrenic Patients With a History of Violence Express a Preference for Screen Violence?

This study aimed to determine viewing preferences of men with schizophrenia and a history of violent crime and to compare them with two control groups. A retrospective study was carried out using a semi-structured interview to collect information. Results demonstrated that men with schizophrenia and a history of violence did not report watching more violence on screen compared to controls. However, they reported greater preference for watching violent screen images, more pleasure when watching screen violence, and greater identification with violent characters on screen. Avenues for further research and implications for treatment of violent forensic patients are discussed.

Investigating the Role of Screen Violence in Specific Homicide Cases

Despite a substantial body of research indicating a significant and causal empirical relationship between viewing what the authors label "screen violence" and behaving violently, little attention has been paid to the forensic psychological and psychiatric investigation of these phenomena in specific homicide cases. Through the analysis of seven cases of homicide, mostly committed by adolescents, the authors introduce five concepts--aggression immersion, theme consistency, scene specificity, repetitive viewing, and self-editing--for advancing such investigations.

Screening violence

Screening violence

The Means and Ends of Screen Violence

Stephen Prince _Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies_ Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998 ISBN 0-292-75565-1 xx + 282 pp.

Reply to Schneider

Steven Schneider The Means and Ends of Screen Violence _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 3 no. 18, April 1999

Film violence and young offenders

Recent assertions have been made that viewing violent material on film and video may influence children and adolescents who commit violent acts. It has also been proposed that heavy exposure to television violence in childhood is associated with violent crime as an adult, although others have emphasized that experiencing “real” violence as a child has a much greater effect on aggressive predispositions. Ways in which screen violence can effect behavior includes: imitation of violent roles and acts of aggression, triggering aggressive impulses in predisposed individuals, desensitizing feelings of sympathy towards victims, creating an indifference to the use of violence, and creating a frame of mind that sees violent acts as a socially acceptable response to stress and frustration. It is argued that young offenders may like violent videos because of their aggressive background and behavioral tendencies. Whether such tastes reinforce violent behavior and increase the frequency of aggressive acts and antisocial behavior is open to question. This question needs an urgent answer given the availability of violent video film either to be viewed in the home environment appropriately (i.e., the whole film in real time) or inappropriately (i.e., from one violent scene to the next viewed in slow motion and freeze-frame).

Spectacles of Death: Clint Eastwood and Violence in "Unforgiven"

Although screen violence is common in many genres of American cinema, Western film provides a useful entry point to its study. One finds in Western both a codified treatment of violence and countless revisions and reworkings of that treatment. The traditional Western embodies an American ideology of redemptive and purgative violence. As Richard Slotkin writes, Western myth portrays the redemption of American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation [from 'civilization'], temporary regression to a more primitive or 'natural' state, and regeneration through violence.' In Western myth, ritualized violence is purgative because it cleanses society of Other in eliminating outlaw or savage. Clint Eastwood's William Munny remains unredeemed at close of Unforgiven (1992), but film's revisionism and vaguely left politics certainly redeemed actor/director in eyes of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and a Best Director Oscar for Eastwood. Prior to Unforgiven, Eastwood had figured prominently in maintenance of Western myth. In many of his Westerns and in Dirty Harry series, Eastwood upheld idea of purgative violence as a central path to cultural and personal restoration. Unforgiven, on other hand, withholds an easy justification of violence. The extent to which film critiques violence, however, is debatable. When Unforgiven was first released, many critics lionized Eastwood for his directorial effort, seeing film as penance and restitution for his earlier films.4 Dennis Bingham, for example, finds progressivism in Unforgiven and calls it a deeply

Nature of screen violence and its relation to program popularity

Nature of screen violence and its relation to program popularity