| ashu |
Posted
on 16-Apr-01 02:24 AM
What follows is taken from The New York Times. This was
originally circulated in the email list of The Kathmandu Film Archive (KFA) in October.
Given the content of another debate here on this Site, this article -- though NOT on war per se -- may help us understand how realities reflect/shape movies and vice versa.
Enjoy,
oohi
ashu
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Date: Thu Oct 26, 2000 4:46pm
Subject: Horror films and academic history
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Do Horror Films Filter the Horrors of History?
By SHAILA K. DEWAN
The idea that horror films reflect, or even caricature, society's
collective anxieties is nothing new. "Invasion of the Body
Snatchers" is frequently read as a critique of McCarthy-era pod
people. King Kong? A metaphor for the Great Depression or the
threat of the black man to white social norms. Godzilla? A Japanese reaction to the devastation of the bomb. And the vampires haunting us of late? A coded response to the trauma of AIDS.
In the late 60's and 70's horror films entered a cycle of
unparalleled carnage that has often been explained in the
psychological terms of, say, family dynamics or the subconscious.
As filmmakers and scholars look more closely at those seemingly
exploitative films, however, they have shifted their focus from the psyche to the era's history, arguing that schlocky B-movies, in particular, deserve study as important social artifacts or as a way people process the terrors of real life.
In wildly successful films like "Night of the Living Dead" (1968),"Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (1974) and "Halloween" (1978), the lonely monsters of earlier decades gave way to human-on-human violence.
Zombies shuffle across the land, chewing on human flesh, girls kill their mothers with trowels and crazed men take up chainsaws and butcher knives. The changes had more to do with what was going on
outside the studio than inside it. Indeed, what distinguishes that
period was the public's almost daily exposure to graphic, violent
pictures, whether of napalm victims, street riots or police
brutality. Movies were nourished by imagery from the nightly news,
the ur-horror film of the day.
George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (completed just days
before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated) had
policemen scouring the countryside with dogs at their side,
mirroring photographs of Southern sheriffs spoiling for civil
rights activists. The movie's black protagonist, Ben, is mistaken
for a zombie and shot through the head, with the comment, "That's
another one for the fire."
In a new documentary on independent horror movies between 1968 and
1978, "The American Nightmare," which had its premiere last night
on the Independent Film Channel and will be rebroadcast through
Halloween, major splatter-film directors like Mr. Romero, Wes
Craven, John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper talk, some for the first
time, about the social context of their films.
"What happened in part," said Adam Simon, the documentary's
director, in an interview, "was simply that there were images being
delivered to American living rooms that would not have been allowed
on the screens of their movie theaters without an X rating. And the
self-evident contradiction of that, in part, was what broke through
the barriers.
"It's the Vietnam images, but it's equally the images of
protesters being beaten, it's the images of kids at Kent State with
blood all over the concrete," he said.
Tom Savini, who is primarily known for his groundbreaking,
literally visceral makeup and special effects in "Dawn of the Dead"
(1978) and "Friday the 13th" (1980), served in Vietnam in 1969,
photographing corpses for the United States Army. As a young man
obsessed with Frankenstein and fake scars, he lived in a constant
state of fear. To calm his nerves, he analyzed the carnage from a
filmmaker's point of view. "You have to turn off your emotions to
see this stuff," he says in the documentary. "I almost stepped on
an arm, but to me, through a camera, it was a special effect."
The new explicitness wasn't confined to violence. Mr. Simon
intersperses scenes from Masters and Johnson's sex experiments in
the early 70's with scenes from "Shivers," a 1975 David Cronenberg
film in which a parasite turns people into demented sex addicts,
and an interview with Mr. Cronenberg discussing the sexual
revolution.
Adam Lowenstein, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who
is writing a book about post-Holocaust horror films and appears in
the documentary, said in an telephone interview: "It's the horror
film that's actually able to engage traumatic history and to
confront viewers with it. And it's largely because the horror film
is already equipped with the tools to shock us, to unsettle us, to
disturb us. It's not the place most people would think of as where
history is happening. It's precisely that preconception that allows
things to go on in relation to history."
Mr. Lowenstein is cautious about conjecturing what today's horror
films say about the culture, but when pressed he ventured, "The
"Scream"-type film and its imitators," with their insular worlds of
teenagers obsessed with horror films and ruthless journalists
obsessed with teenagers, "will be seen to have a lot to do with
events like Columbine," the high school in Littleton, Colo., where
12 students were murdered by classmates last year.
"And by the same token," he said, " `The Blair Witch Project,' "
with its handmade pseudo-documentary feel, "is going to look a lot
clearer to us as a product of a moment in an information culture
where the desire for the real is just as intense as its
impossibility."
Mr. Lowenstein's analysis of the way films function historically
echoes that of the German critic Sigfried Kracauer, who made an
early connection between horror and history in his classic 1947
book "From Caligari to Hitler." Not only did the silent German
Expressionist films reflect the uncertainty of the Weimar Republic,
he argued, but they also captured a German fondness for
authoritarianism, thus predicting the rise of Hitler.
Cinema, Kracauer later wrote, "aims at transforming the agitated
witness into a conscious observer."
Yet some critics are skeptical of the claims being made for horror
films. Geoffrey Hartman, the director of the Fortunoff Video
Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, has recently
written that the graphic images churned out by today's culture make
critical thinking more difficult, not less.
"Is this a working-through, or is it a sign that we somehow are in
a new phase of culture in which everything gets escalated and
violence becomes a necessary ingredient to move us, to stir our
emotions?" he asked in an interview. In other words, is the
violence in horror films truly cathartic or just gratuitous
pandering?
Eric Foner, a Columbia University historian, is blunter. "I'm
always skeptical of filmmakers' exaggerating their own social
impact," he said, suggesting that horror films were more about
making money than making sense out of war.
Clearly box office returns are a driving force. But some film
scholars and filmmakers say that horror films serve another
purpose: they penetrate the defenses of even the most jaded viewer
in a way that straight historical dramas can't.
"In a funny way, it isn't just that these traumas trigger these
films, but that we understand these traumas through these films,"
said Tom Gunning, a film historian at the University of Chicago.
The direct presentation of a historical event is almost always
reassuring, he said, comforting viewers instead of leading them to
the abyss. "I can't stand `Schindler's List' because it's a
feel-good movie about the Holocaust," he went on. "And the sequence
that always infuriates me is where they're in the shower and water
comes out. Because that never happened. It kind of reverses the
trauma for us."
That gory films became commonplace in the Vietnam era, Mr. Simon
contends, is evidence not of decadence but rather of a
"revolutionary" willingness to confront the mayhem of the day. In
contrast, he argues, the moral panic that periodically arises in
response to violent films, like the recent outrage over Hollywood
studios' testing R- rated films on children, is really the
displaced panic of a numbed culture overwhelmed by the magnitude of
real-life horrors.
Referring to the Rampart neighborhood of Los Angeles, where the
police framed more than 100 people and are suspected of shooting
and beating others, Mr. Simon, 38, said: "The question is not why
our parents in L.A. freaked out about the horror movies their kids
might see. It's why aren't they horrified about what they hear
happened in Rampart, which is more horrifying than any of the
police scandals of my youth?"
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