Cinema is a mirror or a reflection of a society, that is what they say when they talk about cinema. For decades, cinema is portraying the society and it also influences the society.
Seeing fictional violence as a representation of real violence is anathema to an adequate comprehension of both phenomena writes AsbjørnGrønstad. In real life, violence is an extreme experience, one that threatens the integrity of the individual but when we watch violence unfold on a movie screen, we are never further away from it. The scene from Baazigar when SRK throws the heroine off the high-rise building, A moment of shock and pleasure.
Reality of cinema
For Grønstad film does not imitate any reality other than that of cinema’s own history. Since cinematic violence is fundamentally shaped by its trans and intertextual lineage, the increasing explicitness of violence in cinema (a cause for moral panic all over the world) has to be seen as not just as “a new permissiveness” but as a “transformation of formal conventions”. Godard’s famous representational adage “not blood, red” reminds us of the artifice that is cinematic violence.Despite its ubiquity, violence has remained a “remarkably undertheorized concept” according to Abel. He points to Deleuze’s encouragement to ‘defer judgement’. In order to move towards a theory (or theories) of cinematic or literary violence, it is imperative to move away from responses of judgement.
Perception
In The Cinematic Body (1993), an influential book that preceded Abel, Steven Shaviro argues that the antinomy of cinematic perception is the following: film viewing offers an immediacy and violence of sensation that powerfully engages the eye and the body of the spectator; at the same time it is predicated on a radical dematerialization of appearances. According to Shaviro, we respond “viscerally to visual forms without having the leisure to read or interpret them as symbol.
Film as a medium
In 2008, fifteen years after The Cinematic Body was first published, Shaviro reflected back on what now seemed to him to be an “aggressively polemical” and implicitly anti-feminist work. In an important updating of his earlier work, Shaviro points to new developments in neurobiology that show that the procedures by which the brain processes images is so convoluted and complex that there was no way that either ‘seeing’ or ‘hearing’ could be described as “direct and unmediated”.Paul Gormley in his book The New Brutality Film (2005) rejects the(false) binary of thinking about cinema as a mass of signs and meanings, and film as a primarily a sensory and affective medium that signifies a secondary process.
