Violence in Early Western Cinema
The cinema, which was born almost simultaneously in the United States and Europe, has always been violent.1 The prevalence of violence in the earliest [986] movies is not surprising given that the medium emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when violence of varying sorts was already a constituent part of many entertainments.
In the United States and Europe, violence was integral to both high culture (Shakespeare, operas)[987] and low culture (dime novels, Punch and Judy shows, murder ballads). The French had the notorious Theatre du Grand Guignol, England had penny dreadfuls, Germany had gruesome fairy tales, and Spain had bullfights (see Chapter 10 in this volume). The penny press, which flourished across Europe and the USA in the mid 1800s, focused intently on violent crime, drawing people together in mutual fascination with the ghastliest of details.[988] In the late 1800s and early 1900s, many state-sanctioned executions were still performed in public and drew enormous crowds.While the earliest films were documentaries that captured innocuous, everyday moments, it was not long before filmmakers started turning their cameras towards more violent subjects, both real and recreated. The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1894), a Kinetoscope film produced by the Edison Company, depicts the beheading of the Scottish monarch in 1567. While it appears to consist of a single take observing Mary as she kneels down in front of the executioner's block and has her head hacked off with a single axe stroke, it is actually a trick film in which an edit disguises the replacement of the actor with a dummy body that is then beheaded (a technique that came to be known as ‘stop-motion substitution'). As one commentator notes, ‘It's difficult to know how viewers in 1895 would have responded to this.
It's hard to imagine that they could have been technically savvy enough to understand the way in which the effect was achieved, even if they believed (or wanted to believe) that a real human head wasn't actually being severed.'[989] The film's illusion that the beheading was caught in a single take enhances its sense of realism, providing strong evidence that the desire for graphic film violence is as old as the medium itself.Other late nineteenth-century Edison films such as Indian Scalping Scene and Lynching Scene (both 1895) ‘indicate a curious penchant for the gore of murders and executions'.[990] The British distribution company Maguire & Baucus's 1897 film catalogue reveals numerous films centred on violent subject matter: Cock Fight, Duel With Pistols, a series ofbullfight films, numerous French and English military ‘views', Mexican Knife Duel, Joan of Arc (which depicts the French martyr being burned at the stake), as well as the aforementioned Lynching Scene, two different films depicting Indiana scalpings, and The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.[991] The French film company Pathe Freres also produced its share of violent films, including History of a Crime (Histoire d’un crime, 1901), in which a thief stabs a man to death, is arrested, imprisoned, and then executed via guillotine (again depicted using stop-motion substitution). Writing in The Photo-Era in 1908, journalist Carl H. Claudy described one film in which he saw ‘a knife plunged deep into the breast of a woman by a jealous lover... and, by the art of the picture-maker, the knife really seems to enter the flesh and the blood to spurt forth, after which the victim writhes, rolls her eyes and finally dies in agony! Ugh!'[992] Importantly, not all the violence in this era was recreated; some early films recorded actual executions, including The Hanging of William Carr (1897)[993] and An Execution by Hanging (1898), which is described in the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company's 1902 catalog as ‘A very ghastly, but very interesting subject'.[994]
From a social standpoint, concerns about depictions of sexuality were typically more pressing than concerns about violence, which is why, when the major Hollywood studios agreed to the Production Code, an industrywide document that was adopted in 1930 to govern content in their films, the initial version offered far less regulation of violence than of sex.
The original text stipulated that ‘Brutal killings are not to be presented in detail', that rape ‘should never be more than suggested', and that ‘repellant subjects', which included ‘actual hangings or electrocutions', ‘third degree methods', ‘brutality and possible gruesomeness', ‘branding of people or animals', ‘apparent cruelty to children or animals' and ‘surgical operations', were to be ‘treated within the careful limits of good taste'.[995] Hollywood’s Movie Commandments, a guide for screenwriters to help them avoid running afoul of the Production Code, noted that, without the Code, ‘movie audiences would be exposed to such visual details in the films as disfigured, dismembered, bloodstained and mutilated bodies, close-up views of dying men, and hair-raising details of inhuman treatment’.11 While the Production Code Administration (PCA) actively enforced the Code from 1934 to the mid 1960s (also dictating the content of foreign films distributed in the USA), such extreme imagery was largely absent from mainstream Western cinema. There were always exceptions - the gangster film cycle, Universal’s gothic horror films, combat films during World War II, and various low-budget exploitation films that were produced outside the studio system - but, for the most part, Hollywood film violence was relatively sanitised and unrealistic.However, starting in the 1960s, depictions of violence throughout Western cinema began to change. What had been left off-screen or depicted with minimal detail was now on-screen and graphically depicted with new special effects and make-up. As Philip French noted, there was no increase in violent content - ‘It [was] the form and intensity of violence that... changed, rather than its quantity.’[996] [997] While there have been instances of what we would now call extreme violence throughout film history, its presence became decidedly more pronounced in the latter half of the twentieth century, to the point that it is now a common and constituent part of the cinema.
More on the topic Violence in Early Western Cinema:
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