At 23:21 27-06-03 -0400, you wrote:
About UK censuring violence on films:
>Films that are thought to appeal to certain types are
held up, but the
>extremely violent Dutch (?) satire Man Bites Dog
about a documentary
>crew tagging along with a serial killer had no
trouble since it was in
>black and white and had subtitles and was therefore
thought to appeal to
>an artier crowd. I wonder how the later variation on
the same idea,
>Natural Born Killers, fared.
"Man Bites Dog" (1992) is a *Belgian* film with most of the
actors being Belgians. Heavy black humor and strong social
derision make it closer to surrealism and modern anarchism
views than elitism or even artysm. Of course, to fully
"get" that movie it asks for a little bit more attention than
what the average viewer has to give to the last fashionable
Hollywood's billion dollars empty lemon or even to the
over-valued corpus of Tarantino and his pitiful pastiches.
IMO "Man bites Dogs" -a very good film- belongs to the noir
film, in the black humor section.
This said, I do not know the exact policy in the UK about
violence in films, but on BBC TV it seems that the accepted
limits are rather high for films -from what I've seen these
last two years (in films that are not pure gore or having
only trash violence as primary goal; these films were always
brodcasted very late at night). I think that as long violence
is not purely gratuitous (= without real purpose but only to
call for the low instincts of the viewers and hope for
lucrative returns from it), it is better to let the director
to decide, as then violence will serves the story and the
general development of his point of view both forming the
real goals of the work. Anyway, in HB/Noir films,
unnecessary, unjustified or overblown violence kills the
film
(see HK films, American cops/thugs films with a multitude of
cars bursting into flames...).
For Straw dogs, I cannot comment because I saw it on the
Continent, at the time, in its complete version.
E.Borgers Hard-Boiled Mysteries http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6384
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 28 Jun 2003 EDT