The chapters contained in this handbook address key issues concerning the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of violence in film and media. In addition to providing analyses of representations of violence, they also critically discuss the phenomenology of the spectator, images of atrocity in international cinema, affect and documentary, violent video games, digital infrastructures, cruelty in art cinema, and media and state violence, among many other relevant topics. The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media updates existing studies dealing with media and violence while vastly expanding the scope of the field.
Representations of violence in film and media are ubiquitous but remain relatively understudied. Too often they are relegated to questions of morality, taste, or aesthetics while judgments about violence can themselves be subjected to moral judgment. Some may question whether objectionable images are worthy of serious scholarly attention at all. While investigating key examples, the chapters in this handbook consider both popular and academic discourses to understand how representations of violence are interpreted and discussed. They propose new approaches and raise novel questions for how we might critically think about this urgent issue within contemporary culture.
Author(s): Steve Choe
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 527
City: Cham
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Introduction: The Ambivalences of Violence
References
Critical Models
Equality in the Face of Violence?—Diverging Paths of Moral Speculation in Violent Fiction
Enjoying and Questioning Fictional Violence
Understanding and Relating to Characters
Two Kinds of Drama
Understanding The Equalizer16
Understanding Those Born Equal
Simplistic vs. Complex Moral Fantasies
Para- and Eso-Dramatic Features in The Equalizer and Born Equal
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Violent Corporeality in Cinema
Painful Violence
Incapacitating Violence
Momentous Violence
Screen Violence
Othered Corporeality
Notes
Works Cited
The Power of Procedure: Systemic Violence in Popular Narratives About Crime and War
Introduction: Nothing to See Here
The Thin Blue Line: Systemic Violence in the Police Procedural
The Green Machine: Systemic Violence in War Stories
Habeas Corpus: Agency and the Problem of the Bloody Corpse
Notes
Works Cited
Force, Power, and Control: Functions of Video Game Violence
Shadow of the Colossus: The Textual Force of Video Game Violence
Donkey Kong: Violence as a Figuration of Computing Power
Control: Graphic(s) Violence as the “Outside”
Note
References
White Material: Michael Haneke’s Ethics of Violence
Notes
References
Histories of Violence in Film and Media
“Man’s Greatest Catastrophe”: Violence in the Films of Cornel Wilde
From Hollywood Leading Man to Independent Auteur
Violent Themes
Wilde’s Visual Transgressions
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
British Film Censorship in the Twenty-First Century
Notes
Bibliography
Surgical Strikes on Screen: Narrations of Terrorism and Military Cross-Border Violence In Bollywood Cinema
Bollywood Cinema and the Nationalist Narrative of Violence
Imagined Extremities and Border Politics
Terrorism and Narratives of Violence
Emotions that Cross Borders: Rationalization of National Violence in Uri
Aestheticization of Popular Violence and Jingoism
Violence as a Medium for Political Propaganda
Conclusion
References
Violence in the School Shooting Film
Violent Media in the School Shooter Film
Bullying in School Shooter Films
Conclusion
Notes
References
When a GIF Becomes a Weapon: The Latent Violence of Technological Standards and Media Infrastructure
Photosensitive Epilepsy
The Televisual Condition
Television Standards and Electrical Infrastructure
The Frail Universality of Universal Standards
Neurology and Experimental Film
Bodies on Display
Conclusion
Notes
References
The Aesthetics of Aggression
Scratching the Surface: For a Reappraisal of Violence in Contemporary French Cinema
Introduction: Understanding the Violent Image
Reframing Violence, Rethinking Spectatorship
Violence and the Female Body
The Violence of Subjection, the Lure of Smoothness
The Commodification of the Female Body: “Revenge” and the Violence of Patriarchy
The Negation of Self: “Dans Ma Peau” and the Violence of a Globalized World
“Raw”: Laying Bare the Violence of Social Structures
Reinvesting One’s Skin: Rethinking Violence as a Mode of Resistance
Smoothness, Cleanliness, and Femininity in a French Context
Disrupting the Fetishist Gaze Through Violence
Breaking the Status Quo: Violence and Self-Empowerment
More Than Meets the Eye: Understanding the Unfolding of Violence
Violence and the Disruption of the Commodifying Gaze
Conclusion: Reappraising the Violent Image
Notes
References
The Aesthetics of Asymmetrical Warfare: Cinema’s Representation of Conflict in the Twenty-First Century
Forging the Gulf War Aesthetic
Beyond the Gulf War, the Aesthetics of 21st Century Conflict
Mediating Violence in a War of Ideas
Beyond the Gulf War Aesthetic, the New Visibility of Violence
Bibliography
The Birth of Naturalist Violence in the Russian Chernukha Film
Representation of Violence Before Perestroika
Perestroika in the Soviet Film Industry
Chernukha as Genre
Chernukha’s Naturalist Violence
Conclusion
Notes
Violence Framed: Remediating Images of Racialized Violence in Film
Introduction: “With Whose Blood Were My Eyes Crafted?”
Remediating White “Golden Age” Hollywood
Remediating Lynching Pictures
Conclusion
Notes
References
Don’t Look Now: Ontologies of Off-Screen Violence
The Horrific Imagination: Frenzy and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Ears and Teeth: The Function of Sound in Reservoir Dogs and American History X
Off-Screen Deaths in Frenzy, Seven, and No Country for Old Men
Conclusion
References
The Politics and Ethics of Brutal Media
White and Violent: Political Violence in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema
The Social Context
The Cinematic Context
Paradoxes of Political Violence: The Wave
Young, Rebellious and Innocent: This is England
Conclusions
Works Cited
Getting Over the Fear of Murder: Video Game Violence and the Ethics of Empowerment in The Last of Us
Introduction
Gameplay and Plot of The Last of Us
“We’re Kind of Creating a Female Action Hero… and This is Her Origin Story”: Gender in The Last of Us
Player Activity, Character Agency, and the Acquisition of Violence
Moral Relativism in The Last of Us
Empowerment in The Last of Us
The Last of Us and the Racial Other
Heteronormative Subjectification and the Oedipal Drama of The Last of Us
Conclusion
Notes
References
Unseeable Abuse: The Impossible Act of Visualising Childhood Sexual Abuse in Digital Cultures and Technology
Introduction: Denying and Defining CSA
The Digital Campfire: Considering the Myth-Making of Peter Scully and the Dark Web
‘Like Watching Child Abuse Through a Snow Storm’: Understanding the Position of CSA as Non-cinema
Conclusion
References
Re-staging Atrocities in a Post-historical World: Cold War Violence, Mass Amnesia, and the Dialectics of Cinematic Witnessing in Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence
Introduction
The Act of Killing: Atrocity, Complicity, and Impunity
The “Banality of Evil” Re-visioned
The Look of Silence: Moral Blindness and the Impasses of Testimonies
Coda: Can the Witnesses Speak?
Notes
Works Cited
Politics and Aesthetics of Violence in the Videos of the Islamic State
Introduction
Beheadings
Other Forms of Executions and the Emergence of the Image-Database
Victims of the Coalition
War Operations
Conclusions
Notes
References
Affected Audiences
Disgust and the Image: Documentary Film and the Representation of Violent Extremists in Salafistes (2016)
Salafistes: Critics and Controversy
Disgusting Images?
Disgust and Political Community
Truth and Images of Violence
Extremism on Screen: Concluding Thoughts
Note
Bibliography
“Does the Dog Die?”: Nonhuman Violence and Affective Viewership in American Horror
Cinematic Affect as Humanist Enterprise
Audience Affect and the Sacrificial Dog
Does the Dog Die? is a Human Question—and a Trigger
The Sacrificial Dog as Horror Trope
The Dog Does Not Die
Notes
References
Sadistic Laughter: A Case for “Non-ethical” Viewing
Introduction: Emotion and Affect
Vomit as a Confession of the Body
Well, I Could Laugh, or Be Sick …
Conclusion: A Framework of Dissonance
Notes
Bibliography
Real violence: Jordan Wolfson, Virtual Reality, and the Privilege of Allegory
Center of the Artworld: 2017 Whitney Biennial
“The Most Disturbing, Horrifying Artwork I Have Ever Seen”3
Vision & Reality
Art and/as Violence
Real Real Violence
Affect, Reality, and Violence
Conclusion
Notes
References
A Personal Memoir of Death in Animation
Deathlessness in Classical Hollywood Animation
What’s Opera, Doc?
Koncert Za Mašinsku Pušku
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
