BVA Yr2 Blog 8

violence and sex in film

In this blog, I would like to analysis how movies can reflect historical and social phenomena and problems. There are lots of movies explore and present the disasters and social events happened in human history.In Schindler's List (1993), Steven Spielberg truly expresses the brutality of fascist in the second World War. There is a sequence can let viewers deeply feel the how serious guilt fascist made in history.


In this sequence, Spielberg uses comparison technique to explore wide difference of living environment between Nazi officer and Jewish slaves. Herr Kommandant is a high-ranking officer who controls majority of Jewish slaves. Herr Kommandant walks to the balcony and shoot at the poor slaves with worn-out clothing. What behind him are extravagant furniture and a naked woman. So the scenes of Herr Kommandant's house and Jew's are keeping crisscross.In this sequence, there are few shots are highly compared, like the haughty look of Herr Kommandant with terrified look of slaves, beautiful furniture with worn-out clothing and so on.

Different movies pursuit different objectives. Movies like Schindler's List are always describe war, race, sex, nation,faith, money, pity, encroach, hope in a serious way. However, some modern films start using new ideas and art concepts to explore same social social problems. In the movie Pulp fiction, it still includes elements like violence, money, crime, sex, race and faith. The reason why Pulp fiction is a landmark of film history is not just because its narrative structure against normal principle but also the way of how Quentin Tarantino presents the concept of violence and sex. The idea for creating this film is mixing templates of stories and narrative structures together rather than telling viewer how bad of taking drug or killing innocent people. That means there is no educational content in the film, the director just wants to let viewer easily to watch this movie like a reading fictions or novel books selling out of the streets.

Black humor is the main feature in Quentin Tarantino's work. Pulp Fiction is full of blood and thunder and its visual impact is greatly surpassed other violence movies. The quote from wikipedia tells people the violence in pulp fiction is not horrible anymore. Killing and sex are exposed in black humor."The film is known for its rich, eclectic dialogue, ironic mix of humor and violence."

All in all, violence and sex have became a common subject in Hollywood film industry. It is hard to find a Hollywood movie with no violence and sex. There are more new concepts about violence and sex like "romantic violence", "aesthetics of violence " and so on. However some people say " Hollywood's preoccupation with violence over sex has affected our ability to accurately perceive reality."(http://www.abc.net.au/) But I think to be an artist, we should think more about how to develop old ideas into something new and stop being realism unless when we have to make some political art with other purpose.