After the Tall Timber by RENATA ADLER
Author:RENATA ADLER [Adler, Renata]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 781590178805
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2015-03-16T04:00:00+00:00
ON VIOLENCE
FILM ALWAYS ARGUES YES
THE MOTION picture is like journalism in that, more than any of the other arts, it confers celebrity. Not just on peopleâon acts, and objects, and places, and ways of life. The camera brings a kind of stardom to them all. I therefore doubt that film can ever argue effectively against its own material: that a genuine antiwar film, say, can be made on the basis of even the ugliest battle scenes; or that the brutal hangings in The Dirty Dozen and In Cold Blood will convert one soul from belief in capital punishment. No matter what filmmakers intend, film always argues yes. People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind. If you want to make a pacifist film, you must make an exemplary film about peaceful men. Even cinema villains, criminals and ghouls become popular heroes overnight (a fact which In Cold Blood, more cynically than The Dirty Dozen, draws upon). Movies glamorize, or they fail to glamorize. They cannot effectively condemnâwhich means that they must have special terms for dealing with violence.
I do not think violence on the screen is a particularly interesting question, or that it can profitably be discussed as a single question at all. Every action is to some degree violent. But there are gradations, quite clear to any child who has ever awakened in terror in the night, which become blurred whenever violence is discussed as though it were one growing quantity, of which more or less might be simply better or worse. Violence to persons or animals on film (destruction of objects is really another matter) ranges along what I think is a cruelty scale from clean collision to protracted dismemberment. Clean collision, no matter how much there is of it, is completely innocent. It consists, normally, of a wind-up, a rush, and an impact or series of impacts; and it includes everything from pratfalls, through cartoon smashups, fistfights in westerns, simple shootings in war films, multiple shootings in gang films, machine gunnings, grenade throwings, bombings, and all manner of well-timed explosions. Most often, thorough and annihilating though it may be, a film collision has virtually no cruelty component at all. It is more closely related to contact sport than to murder, and perhaps most nearly akin, in its treatment of tension, to humor. I am sure that such violence has nothing to do with the real, that everyone instinctively knows it, and that the violence of impact is among the most harmless, important, and satisfying sequences of motion on film.
Further along the cruelty scale, however, are the individual, quiet, tidy forms of violence: poisonings and stranglings. Their actual violence component is low, they are bloodless but, as any haunted child knows, their cruelty component can be enormous. The tip-off is the sound track; abrupt, ingratiating, then suddenly loud, perhaps including maniacal laughterâthe whole range of effects that the radio-and-cinema-conditioned ear recognizes as sinisterâto approximate the nervous jolt of encounters with violence in reality.
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