New Brutality Film

Paul Gormley

Description

The 1990s saw the emergence of a new kind of American cinema, which this book calls the “newbrutality film.” Violence and race have been at the heart of Hollywood cinema since its birth, but the newbrutality film was the first kind of popular American cinema to begin making this relationship explicit. The rise of this cinema coincided with the rebirth of a longneglected strand of film theory, which seeks to unravel the complex relations of affect between the screen and the viewer. This book analyses and connects both of these developments, arguing that films like Falling Down, Reservoir Dogs, Se7en and Strange Days sought to reanimate the affective impact of white Hollywood cinema by miming the power of AfricanAmerican and particularly hiphop culture. The book uses several films as casestudies to chart these developments:

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Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841509266
• Langue: English

Extrait

The New-Brutality Film
Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
Paul Gormley
First Published in the UK in 2005 by
Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First Published in the USA in 2005 by
Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA
Copyright 2005 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 1-84150-119-0
Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons
Copy Editor: Julie Strudwick
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Torturous Cinema: Questions of Affect, Mimesis and Race in The New-Brutality Film
Chapter One Na ve Imitations: Falling Down , the Crisis of the Action-Image and Cynical Realism
Chapter Two Gangsters and Gangstas: Boyz N the Hood , and the Dangerous Black Body
Chapter Three Gangsters and Gangstas Part Two: Menace II Society and the Cinema of Rage
Chapter Four Miming Blackness: Reservoir Dogs and American Africanism
Chapter Five Trashing Whiteness: Pulp Fiction , Se7en , Strange Days and Articulating Affect
Conclusion
Bibliography
Filmography
Index
Acknowledgements
Although there are always too many people to thank in a project of this size, the following people deserve particular mention for their intellectual stimulus, and other support over the various stages of completion: John Beasley-Murray, The School of Cultural and Media Studies and Social Sciences and my Urban Film students at the University of East London, Haim Bresheeth, Jessica Edwards, Natalia Garcia, Jane Gaines and the Literature Programme at Duke University, Jeremy Gilbert, Andrew and Jessica Grierson, Laura Mulvey, Mica Nava, Luciana Parisi, Elaine Pennicott, Greg Santori, Ashwani Sharma, Mark Shiel, Sophy Smith and her family, Andrew Sneddon, Tiziana Terranova, Carol Watts, Paul Whelan, Nick Wilson - and my family.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Eileen Gormley (1947-1982).
Introduction
Torturous Cinema: Questions of Affect, Mimesis and Race in The New- Brutality Film
One of the most striking scenes in 1990s US cinema is filmed in ten minutes of real time and centres on a gangster s apparently meaningless mutilation of a cop in a disused warehouse. The infamous torture scene in Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino 1991) begins with a fixed shot of the gangster, Mr Blonde, sat on an abandoned hearse, and the cop tied to a chair in the centre of the room. From the cop s point of view, we see Blonde jump from his perch, with the sinister enunciation, alone at last . As Blonde advances towards the cop, the shots start switching vigorously between both points of view, and we know that some sort of sadistic violence is about to ensue. After some verbal taunting, and the restless circular movement of the camera, the violence begins with a sudden slap to the cop s already swollen face. This blow is made more unsettling for the viewer, by a sudden switch in the camera s point of view which gives the effect of Blonde s outstretched hand coming towards the audience. The film then cuts to another shot of the gangster, standing behind the cop s head and gagging him with some sticky masking tape. As he silences the cop, Blonde makes the horrifying comment, I don t give a good fuck what you know or don t know, but I m going to torture you anyway . The gangster then pulls out his gun on a horrified cop, vainly struggling to escape the line of fire, and we know that knowledge or reason has no power to save the cop from the impending violence. This is echoed in the viewer s relationship to the scene. The bout of violence has no real narrative logic beyond the fact that we have been told by another member of the gang that Blonde is a fucking madman , and this lack of narrative cause and effect leaves the viewer without a clue as to what happens next.
The camera cuts to a close-up of Blonde s boot as he lifts it on to a table to pull out a razor, asking the bizarre question, Ever listen to K. Billy s Super Sounds of the Seventies? The film then zooms in on the cop s beaten and anguished face, before it cuts back to Blonde dancing around him. Suddenly, Blonde lunges at the cop and the viewer with the razor. The changes in point of view become more frenetic, as the gangster sits on the cop s knee, and begins to slice his ear off with the razor. The camera then pans away, leaving the actual disembodiment unseen - although the acousmatic sounds of the cop s muffled cries of pain leave us with the impression of being visually present throughout the mutilation. Blonde then moves back into the frame, and while considering the organ, he alludes to the self- reflexive, sadistic and masochistic overtones of the scene with the question, Was that as good for you as it was for me? 1
After this torturous sequence, the viewer might reasonably expect some period of respite, with a cut away to another scene, but the film stays with Blonde, following him to his car. This escape outside of the claustrophobic confines of the warehouse is only temporary as the camera tracks the gangster, petrol container in hand, back into the building. In a slow tracking shot, he dances his way around the cop, to the sounds of Stealers Wheel s Stuck in the Middle with You. The cuts between shots suddenly increase their pace, as Blonde begins to drench the cop with gasoline. The liquid also splatters the camera, threatening to splash through the boundary between screen and viewer. Finally the gangster pulls out a Zippo lighter, to torch the cop alive, when suddenly his chest explodes in a mass of red, with the sound of gunshots puncturing the soundtrack. The shot then cuts to the source of this gunfire, another, previously unconscious member of the gang, firing at Blonde, until the camera circles slowly around to Blonde as he slowly falls to the floor.
This particular scene contains a number of the features which mark the emergence of a new strand of Hollywood cinema in the 1990s, which I call in this book, the new-brutality film. These films all signified a change in aesthetic - a new aesthetic direction in Hollywood film. Reservoir Dogs , Falling Down (Schumacher 1992), Pulp Fiction (Tarantino 1994), Strange Days (Bigelow 1995), Se7en (Fincher 1995) are all new-brutality films, and the one feature that they all share in common is their attempt to renegotiate and reanimate the immediacy and affective qualities of the cinematic experience within commercial Hollywood. There are other films we might include in this list but it is through these particular examples that I shall be exploring what we might mean by the notion of cinematic immediacy and affect in the context of the 1990s. All these films attempt to assault the body of the viewer and make the body act involuntarily in the sense that they all, as Linda Williams puts it, attempt to make the body do things . 2 Most importantly, these films all make the viewer s body act in such a way that it imitates and mimics the actions of the cinematic body, or the bodies that the viewer experiences on the screen. They all contain images which cause a reaction based on immediacy and bodily affect which subordinates critical consciousness and awareness of the world or knowledge outside the image to its initial impact. Moreover the use of images of blackness and African American popular culture as a means by which to create a new cinematic affect and immediacy is a common strategy of all the new-brutality films of this book. It is also important to realise that African-American culture has historically been situated as a site of the new in many of the important shifts in the economics and aesthetics of US cinema. Michael Rogin notes that each transformative moment in the history of American film has founded itself on the surplus symbolic value of blacks, the power to make African Americans stand for something besides themselves . 3 This book will argue that the new-brutality film is another of these transformative moments and it is new because of the particular ways in which contemporary black culture is used to produce affect. At the same time, the use of African-American culture to signal a new aesthetic direction in 1990s Hollywood cinema also links this genre to wider questions of the construction of white American cultural identity.
These are sweeping claims and questions of affect are not readily associated with Hollywood-style cinema, caught up as it was in years of a narrative-centred tradition. They are also statements that depend on the notion of a viewer unsupported by empirical research and a balanced reading. Nevertheless, these assertions are intended to raise some complex issues within the study of film theory and history, particularly concerning the ways in which meaning is made in the consumption of images.
Affect and Cultural Knowledge
One of the most important questions for contemporary film theory is the resonance between the bodily impact of the image and responses elicited by the cultural meaning or signification of images. Gilles Deleuze opens up this question in Cinema 2 when he argues that the most pressing problem in cinema is that of the relations between cinema and language . 4 Deleuze s recapitulation of images and signs explores the degree to which semiotic or what we might call a linguistic- based film theory has sought to reduce film to a series of signifiers and signifieds without taking into account that film does not fit exclusively into a language system. Steven Shaviro takes a broadly Deleuzian approach in his polemic, The Cinematic Body , arguing that the dominant paradigms of semiotic and psychoanalytic film theory is reductive and disavows the power of the connection between t