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I went to see A History of Violence with strong expectations of an important film. I'm not sure whether I was expecting to 'enjoy' the film. I've generally avoided Cronenberg, simply because I thought I was too squeamish to cope with his concept of 'body horror'. The two films I have seen are Crash -- a film I admired but found very cold and eXistenZ, a film I enjoyed immensely. I make these points because I suspect that A History of Violence will evoke different responses from Cronenberg fans, cinephiles (i.e. arthouse fans) and the more general audience attracted by a film with a high critical reputation. I certainly wasn't disappointed by the film and I thought about it a great deal after the screening. Since my main concern is whether it would make a useful study text, my first reaction was towards its aesthetic, which reminded me of the more distanced feel I got from Crash. I was surprised to discover that this is officially an American movie and that it cost $32 million. It was made mostly in Canada, in a Toronto studio and on location in Ontario. The lead cast members are American, but the look of the film is very different from other contemporary American films. The small Ontario town of Millbrook looks like a midwestern American town of the 1940s or 1950s. In some ways it looks like the small town at the start of Out of the Past (Build My Gallows High) (1947) in which Robert Mitchum is hiding out from a past life threatening to catch up with him. Many commentators have remarked that 1950s westerns are the most important reference point and I think this is certainly the case -- Peckinpah's early work in television perhaps or those 'psychological' westerns of the early 1950s. Sam Fuller seems like another touchstone, because his films were simple and direct and punched home their ideas on simple sets. It isn't just the studio set and idealised locations (diner, streetcorner, farmhouse) but the cinematography. I'd need to see it a few times because I'm struggling to get a handle on it, but the overall look seems to say 'moral tale' rather than 'gritty realism'. No doubt some will say that the aesthetic fits the graphic novel origins of the story, although Cronenberg claims not to have known about these origins until some way into pre-production. At this point, I decided that I didn't know enough about Cronenberg and that I was in danger of exposing my ignorance, so I looked around on the websites and lo, here is the answer to my questions about camerawork. Cronenberg and DP Peter Suschitzky have used a 27mm lens since eXistenZ. A standard lens is 50mm focal length, so 27mm is very much a wide angle lens. To create 'normal' framings, the camera has to be placed closer and care is needed to avoid distortion. The effect is unnerving since although a scene looks conventional, it feels wrong. It is this 'distanced' aesthetic which makes me wonder whether the film would work with students. It's an '18' in the UK, so that limits formal teaching to at least post-16s, but would a 16-19 audience be engaged? Obviously, most audiences are going to be affected by the action rather than the look, but perhaps they go together. I watched the film with a small audience on a Sunday afternoon. Two young women left before the end and during the rest of the film there were what I took to be occasional nervous laughs. Cronenberg himself has teased critics by suggesting that it is funny -- or at least that laughter is the only response to some of the scenes. Perhaps he means the moments of violence, which are brief, but spectacularly gruesome. Peckinpah would have appreciated the possibility of showing how much blood and guts are spewed out when high velocity bullets are fired into bodies at short range (although as Cronenberg says, the violence here is 'direct' without any of the emphasis given by slow motion and multi-camera shooting as in The Wild Bunch).Each of the three bouts of violence is shocking in its impact and must make audiences think -- especially with the link to a violent sexual coupling and the suggestion that a capacity for violent action is an inherited trait. In this sense, the title of the film could refer to the history of a single character with a violent past, the propensity for violence to be perpetuated over time or simply a description of American (and most other developed) societie(s). There is a good analysis of Cronenberg's comments on the politics of the film in Village Voice and he answers questions directly on the film's website. There is much inevitable fencing around the politics of violence, as well as the sexual politics in the film. Here is a Cronenberg quote from the Village Voice essay: Cronenberg says he was striving for "emotional honesty. Or let me be more pretentious and say existential honesty. Morality is a human invention—it doesn't come from outer space, it doesn't come from God. It's constantly being redefined, and it's constantly up for grabs. It makes a lot of people very nervous to accept that and they want absolutes, but of course then you just get absolute opposites killing each other. There's a lack of certainty on the part of those making this film, a willingness to discuss complexities. The final scene encapsulates all of that." My other concern in using the film with students is the range of references that various commentatorshave made to other filmmakers. As well as those I have mentioned above, others have cited Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, both of which I can see. It would be patronising to say that younger audiences might misunderstand the film without knowledge of these historically significant figures, but I do think that this is a film most suited for mature audiences – or younger audiences prepared to make a leap from most mainstream fare. Seen at Vue, Kirkstall, Leeds 23/10/05 Roy Stafford | ||||||||||||||||||
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