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    F i l m - P h i l o s o p h y
    ISSN 1466-4615
    http://www.film-philosophy.com
    Volume 3  Number 19
    April 1999

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    Stephen Prince

    Reply to Schneider



Steven Schneider
'The Means and Ends of Screen Violence'
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 3 no. 18, April 1999
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/schneider.html

I appreciate Steven Schneider's attentive and detailed treatment of my
book. Here are a few responses and suggestions.

Schneider notes that I pose the following question: 'If we accept that
contemporary movie violence is excessive and produces harmful social
effects, does this not tend to invalidate any claims we might make on
behalf of Peckinpah's work?' He writes: 'Only if one conceives of Peckinpah
as the father of 'contemporary movie violence' does this question make
sense.'  On the contrary, I believe the question stands irregardless of who
'began' contemporary movie violence. Perhaps a rephrasing can demonstrate
this -- what are the grounds for a legitimate (artistically, morally,
philosophically) use of graphic violence in cinema? I define 'legitimate'
in the sense of being nonexploitative. One can ask about the integrity of
Peckinpah's work without having to maintain that he started it all because,
clearly, he did not. It is important, however, to maintain a historical
perspective when examining and assessing his work. Viewing his films in a
historical context lends credence to his view (i.e., that he might hold
this view) that a breakthrough in the techniques for rendering screen
violence could lead to a breakthrough in viewer consciousness/awareness.
That, of course, was the modernist conceit. Today, seeing where movie
violence has gone and has taken subsequent filmmakers, one may be skeptical
of claims that breakthroughs in technique help produce breakthroughs in
vision. But one should nevertheless grant Peckinpah the privilege of not
being subject to our hindsight on this issue.

Schneider questions my view that movie violence has become a stylistic
dead-end for filmmakers by citing Spielberg's _Saving Private Ryan_.
Indeed, Spielberg did achieve a new level of intensity comparable (for
viewers today) to the way late sixties audiences may have found _Bonnie and
Clyde_ and _The Wild Bunch_. But one should not lose sight of the very
clear historical dynamic at work. The history of movie violence -- and I
make this point in the book -- shows us that these new thresholds are soon
breached. The level of gore in _Saving Private Ryan_ will in time become
more normative than it presently seems.

In his discussion of chapter one, Schneider writes: 'Surely, Peckinpah's
failure to realize his didactic intentions after 1974 has at least as much
to do with the narrative incoherence of his pictures as with their
ahistoricity.' Indeed, and I go into considerable detail in chapter five
about the reasons for this narrative incoherence. Regarding my emphasis of
the social context of late sixties America in which Peckinpah worked,
Schneider writes: 'In his desire to situate Peckinpah within a particular
historical context, to show that Peckinpah's films were products of and
comments on their times, Prince runs the risk of trivializing the
director's repeated claims that his main interest was in examining the very
*nature* of human violence.' The reason I am suspicious about claims to an
essential 'violent nature' in people is that these claims can be used to
justify virtually any position, and I stand with Albert Bandura in
stressing the cognitive and social learning components of human violence.
Discussion about violent instincts doesn't get us very far, and I think
these were among Peckinpah's more stupid remarks.

Schneider mentions my detailed discussion of Japanese director Akira
Kurosawa in chapter two. He may not be aware that I know his work very well
indeed. My book, _The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa_
(Princeton, 1991), will be re-issued in an expanded edition this Fall, with
two new chapters covering his last films, and his legacy to world cinema.

Schneider criticizes my insistence, contra realism, on Peckinpah's
stylization of violence, and he suggests that, indeed, Peckinpah did bring
to modern cinema a more realistic depiction of violence. I would not
minimize the realist vs stylized distinction in regards to Peckinpah's
work. As a modernist, Peckinpah believed that his images were grounded in
the *reality* of violence, in distinction to postmodernists like Tarantino,
for whom screen violence is merely a special effect. But Peckinpah
understood that his efforts to approach the phenomenon of human violence
required the mediations -- the special stylistic transformations -- of art.
Insisting on *realism* can be a trap for the unwary, and stylization need
not impede a filmmaker's efforts to find truth.

Schneider feels I'm a bit too harsh on Tarantino and his ilk, writing:
'Here it looks as if Prince is taking Tarantino's admittedly black humor a
little too seriously. The fact that the violence depicted in such films as
_Reservoir Dogs_ (1992) and _Pulp Fiction_ (1995) have an excessive, unreal
quality is precisely what gives viewers the emotional distance they need to
enjoy it.' Indeed, and I would add that it is precisely the cartoonishness
of the Tarantino-Stallone-Schwarzenegger films that makes them problematic.
They have exactly the features that correlate with viewer aggression in the
empirical studies -- painlessness, deserving victims, and scenarios of
justifiable aggression. If one puts credence in the empirical findings --
and I do -- this constellation of attributes may lead to some unfortunate
social consequences. To his credit, Peckinpah rarely played violence as a
joke.

Again, I appreciate Steven's attention to detail, and his well reasoned
response to my book. The problems and issues of movie violence are complex
and deserving of sustained debate and examination.

Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA
April 1999


Copyright © _Film-Philosophy_ 1999

Stephen Prince, 'Reply to Schneider', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 3 no. 19,
April 1999
<http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/prince.html>.

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