Edited by: Stephen Prince
Subject: Film and Media
Paperback ISBN 0-8135-2818-6
Pages: 240 pp., 36 b&w illus.
Description: This collection of essays examines the explosive issue of graphic violence in the cinema.

Graphic cinematic violence is a magnet for controversy. From passionate defenses to outraged protests, theories abound concerning this defining feature of modern film: Is it art or exploitation, dangerous or liberating?

Screening Violence provides an even-handed examination of the history, merits, and effects of cinematic "ultraviolence." Movie reviewers, cinematographers, film scholars, psychologists, and sociologists all contribute essays exploring topics such as:

· the origins and innovations of film violence and attempts to regulate it

(from Hollywood's Production Code to the evolution of the ratings system)

· the explosion of screen violence following the 1967 releases of Bonnie and Clyde and The Dirty Dozen, and the lasting effects of those landmark films

· the aesthetics of increasingly graphic screen violence

· the implications of our growing desensitization to murder and mayhem, from The Wild Bunch to The Terminator

Selected Contents

o Stephen Prince, Graphic Violence in the Cinema: Origins, Aesthetic Design

and Social Effects

o Joseph Morgenstern, The Thin Red Line

o Bosley Crowther, Movies to Kill People By

o Bosley Crowther, Another Smash at Violence

o Ronald Gold, Crowther's "Bonnie"-Brook: Rap at Violence Stirs Brouhaha

o Jack Valenti, MPAA President, The National Commission on the Causes and

Prevention of Violence

o John Bailey, ASC, Bang Bang Bang Bang, Ad Naseum

o David Thomson, Death and Its Details

o Devin McKinney, Violence: The Strong and the Weak

o Vivian C. Sobchack, The Violent Dance: A Personal Memoir of Death in the

Movies

o Carol J. Clover, Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film

o Stephen Prince, The Aesthetic of Slow Motion Violence in the Films of Sam

Peckinpah

o Leonard Berkowitz, Some Effects of Thoughts on Anti- and Prosocial

Influences of Media Events

o Richard B. Felson, Mass Media Effects on Violent Behavior

Stephen Prince is associate professor of communication studies at Virginia Tech. He has written many books on film, including The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, and Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film.

In The Depth of Field Series, edited by Charles Affron, Mirella Jona Affron, and Robert Lyons