The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media

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.

Steve Choe is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany (2014), Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium (2016), ReFocus: The Films of William Friedkin (2021), and is a co-editor of Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia (2019).

Autorentext

Steve Choe is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany (2014), Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium (2016),ReFocus: The Films of William Friedkin (2021), and is a co-editor of Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia (2019).

Klappentext

This book updates existing studies dealing with media and violence while vastly expanding the scope of the field. 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. It provides key examples and methods for how we should continue thinking about this urgent issue.

Inhalt

Introduction.- Part I: Critical Models. Chapter 1. Equality in the face of violence? - Diverging paths of moral speculation in violent fiction.- Chapter 2. Violent Corporeality in Cinema.- Chapter 3. The Power of Procedure: Systemic Violence in Popular Narratives about Crime and War.- Chapter 4. Force, Power, and Control: Functions of Video Game Violence.- Chapter 5. White Material: Michael Haneke's Ethics of Violence.- Part II: Histories of Violence in Film and Media. Chapter 6. Man's Greatest Catastrophe: Violence in the Films of Cornel Wilde.- Chapter 7. British Film Censorship in the 21st Century.- Chapter 8. Surgical Strikes on Screen: Narrations of Terrorism and Military Cross-border Violence in Bollywood Cinema.- Chapter 9. Violence in the School Shooting Film.- Chapter 10. When a GIF becomes a weapon: The latent violence of technological standards and media infrastructure.- Part III: The Aesthetics of Aggression. Chapter 11. Scratching the Surface: For a reappraisal of violence in contemporary French cinema.- Chapter 12. The Aesthetics of Asymmetrical Warfare: Cinema's Representation of Conflict in the 21st Century.- Chapter 13. The Birth of Naturalist Violence in the Russian Chernukha Film.- Chapter 14. Violence Framed: Remediating Images of Racialized Violence.- Chapter 15."'Don't Look Now: Ontologies of Off-screen Violence.- Part IV: The Politics and Ethics of Brutal Media. Chapter 16. White and Violent: Political Violence in 21st Century European Cinema.- Chapter 17. Getting over the Feat of Murder: Video Game Violence and the Ethics of Empowerment in The Last of Us.- Chapter 18. Unseeable Abuse: The Impossible Act Of Visualising Childhood Sexual Abuse in Digital Cultures and Technology".- Chapter 19.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.- Chapter 20. Politics and Aesthetics of Violence in the Videos of the Islamic State.- Part V: Affected Audiences. Chapter 21. Disgusting Images?: Documentary Affect and Political Extremism.- Chapter 22. Does the Dog Die?: Nonhuman Violence and Affective Viewership in American Horror.- Chapter 23. Sadistic Laughter: A Case for 'Non-Ethical' Viewing.- Chapter 24. Real violence: Jordan Wolfson, Virtual Reality, and the Privilege of Allegory.- Chapter 25. A Personal Memoir of Death in Animation.