Cinematic Violence: Can Anything Be Justified?

[knives]

I really don't understand the hard to watch descriptions for Park. There's a lot of graphic violence, sure, but it is all handled with a great deal of humour. Maybe distasteful I understand, but not disturbing.

[Michael Kerpan]

I bought the Korean DVD when it was brand new -- and very little had been written in English about Mr. Vengeance beyond a few laudatory articles. As a BAE Doo-na fan, with few other films to buy, it seemed reasonable to check it out.

Despite MY dislike of SfMV, I introduced the film to a number of people by lending out the DVD -- virtually no one in the US had heard of the film yet.

[matrixschmatrix]

> if you want "extreme", it's by Park Chan Wook "Vengeance trilogy".

I made the mistake of buying the first of these films (due to the fact that BAE Doo-na was one of the leads).

I personally find Mr Vengeance to be an excellent movie.
But clearly, it doesn't seem to be for you, and I'm wondering if maybe you should have learn a bit more about it before buying it.
I don't want to seem harsh or lesson-giving, but I always find sad and (let's say) a bit annoying the people complaining about having bought or seen a movie that they could just have avoided if they had just checked a bit on the internet what there is in it.

I loved Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, but I didn't like Mr Vengeance very much- partly because it was the last one I saw, so I'd already seen where Park was going with it, and partly because it seemed almost sadistically cruel to its characters in a way I didn't think applied to the others.

I mean, it's essentially a super, super dark noir- I might have liked it more if that was what I expected going in- but if anything, I was put off by the lack of hammer-in-the-hallway scenes.

[tenia]

I really don't understand the hard to watch descriptions for Park. There's a lot of graphic violence, sure, but it is all handled with a great deal of humour. Maybe distasteful I understand, but not disturbing.

Well, as you said, there's a lot of graphic violence. Personnally, I'm not disturbed by that, but I think that any people having trouble with graphic violence will be disturbed by these movies, even if there is a "great deal of humour" (which is not that obvious at all, like in the 2nd part of Mr Vengeance, for instance).

I loved Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, but I didn't like Mr Vengeance very much- partly because it was the last one I saw, so I'd already seen where Park was going with it, and partly because it seemed almost sadistically cruel to its characters in a way I didn't think applied to the others.

Well, for me, Mr Vengeance is a Greek tragedy, so I didn't really see the sadistic treatment of the characters. Everything is unhappy, yes, every single bad thing that could happen happens, but I didn't struck me at all, and I really liked it (plus it was the first movie of the trilogy I saw).

And, Michael, you should maybe try Lady Vengeance. It is tamer in terms of violence, and better in cinematographic terms. You might like it, and, even if it's not my favourite at all, it's clearly worth a shot.

[Brian C]

It's been a few years since I saw the films but my recollection is that Lady Vengeance was the most disturbing of the three, as the violence was perhaps not quite as graphic but nonetheless the most straightforwardly sadistic of the three films. I seem to remember the third act playing out more or less like a Fox News revenge fantasy, not terribly thoughtful or even all that novel. It just indulged the characters' and the audience's worst instincts, by giving us a sympathetic victim as a protagonist and an unredeemable villian.

I didn't like it.

[knives]

It seems you only remember half of it. While the end starts out just as you described there's a neat little reversal that paints the parents just as bad as the kidnapper. This takes a physical form in the cake made in blood, basically a literal bloodthirst. A lot of it is shown through tone though and I don't expect anybody to notice/ remember that reversal after only one viewing.

[Brian C]

Perhaps you're right. I remember the coda in the bakery but I don't really recall anything other than the characters standing around acting solemn about what they had done. Struck me as insincere on the part of Park but it's certainly possible (probable?) that I missed something.

[Michael Kerpan]

I think I will continue to avoid the rest of Park's Vengeance films. But I did check out his very different "Cyborg". ;~}

[eljacko]

Having seen most of Park's films except Mr. Vengeance, I've always had the impression that he walks a very fine line between condemning the violence he displays and reveling in it. Lady Vengeance (and JSA) seem to come on the side of condemnation, where the violence acts almost as an example of why violence is unwarranted - knives' mention of the end of LV being a great example. That film is actually my favorite of his, and the one I usually cite as a great action film from the past decade, largely because I never felt the violence reached a point of exploitation or disgust, except in the very end, which I felt was justified based on the character's realization at the end. Oldboy, for all its slick action (and I am also a fan of this film) stretches the limits at times (the treatment of the prison owner being a real sticking point in my mind).

[knives]

You should see Mr. Vengeance if you enjoyed Lady. They're cut from the same cloth and I think Mr. is actually the better distillation of the good qualities of Park (if you want the negative side to that watch Thirst). Oldboy for all the applause it gets seems like his most average film to me. I just don't have the urge to think about it or watch it again as much as the other four.

[karmajuice]

I watched part of The Human Centipede with my friend last night. The part that matters.

Debate about its moral culpability aside, it's a pretty bad film.

(Personally, I don't take much issue with the whole super-violence trend in horror movies nowadays. Obviously there's not much point to it, and it produces some terrible stuff, but I don't see much harm in it, either. It's one-up-manship, really, a game of who can conceive the most fucked up scenario. People are well aware that it's a game and I don't think anyone takes it seriously, in large part because the more grotesque scenarios (like The Human Centipede) are so out there they end up being pretty silly.)

[matrixschmatrix]

(Personally, I don't take much issue with the whole super-violence trend in horror movies nowadays. Obviously there's not much point to it, and it produces some terrible stuff, but I don't see much harm in it, either. It's one-up-manship, really, a game of who can conceive the most fucked up scenario. People are well aware that it's a game and I don't think anyone takes it seriously, in large part because the more grotesque scenarios (like The Human Centipede) are so out there they end up being pretty silly.)

I actually find things like Human Centipede less unsettling, in the abstract, than more realistic and thus plausible torture porn of the Eli Roth school- though I know Roth has his defenders, and I'm not going to say the movies themselves are morally wrong, I do know a fair number of fans of his who are deeply, deeply spooky people and who seem genuinely to enjoy watching torture (both in fiction and internet clip nonfiction.)

Human Centipede, on the other hand, is cartoonish in conception, and seems more like the kind of 80s Tom Savini splatterfest kind of gore that distances it from reality and thus hopefully attracts people based on something other than the alluring prospects of human beings in pain.

[tenia]

As a whole, Human Centipede isn't even very graphic, like, at all.
In fact, the most disturbing part might be very well when the doctor explain so precisely the details of the operation itself. The rest is nothing else than a few make-up and bandages on three people's face crawling on the floor.

And yes, it isn't a very good movie. It's not as bad as some people said it is though.

[Awesome Welles]

Eureka to release The Human Centipede in the UK.

[denti alligator]

Perfect for MoC #-o

[JamesF]

The page on the BBFC website for the DVD classification says it was submitted by Bounty Films, which unless I'm mistaken (I may well be) is Eureka's subdivision for gay-themed cinema - not quite sure how Human Centipede fits into that! Coprophilia wasn't limited to any one sexual preference last I heard...

[domino harvey]

Someone at Eureeka mistook what an IMDB user meant when he called the film "Soooooooo gay"

[domino harvey]

The director and co-writer of A Serbian Film justify their "art" -- I'm linking to the ONTD discussion of the article because, well, it's just more fun that way

EDIT: And you can read a poster's summary of the ending to the film which adds the delightful component of forced incest and necrophilia to the laundry list of the film's offenses

[tajmahal]

The director and co-writer of A Serbian Film justify their "art" -- I'm linking to the ONTD discussion of the article because, well, it's just more fun that way

EDIT: And you can read a poster's summary of the ending to the film which adds the delightful component of forced incest and necrophilia to the laundry list of the film's offenses

I honestly wish I hadn't read this post, even.

Quote, unquote

[Elephant]

The director and co-writer of A Serbian Film justify their "art" -- I'm linking to the ONTD discussion of the article because, well, it's just more fun that way

EDIT: And you can read a poster's summary of the ending to the film which adds the delightful component of forced incest and necrophilia to the laundry list of the film's offenses

I've seen A Serbian Film--on top of everything else, it's a really, really, really shitty movie. You wouldn't think a film that had one shock sequence after another that out-shocked the previous shock sequence could be so boring, but it really is. The opening scene--with the ex-porn actor Milos' young son watching one of Milos' films--is quite funny and then it's just quickly downhill after that.

The thing about the, ah, baby scene, in addition to all the obvious reasons that it's awful, is that it's cowardly within the world of the film itself. Massive, disgusting spoilers within, but don't waste your time clicking in and reading:

Spoiler

They're trailblazing a new style of pornography: newborn porn, in which a guy fucks an infant to death seconds after it's born. In the world of A Serbian Film, if you're going to make infant porn, it seems like criminals/sociopaths who would have the balls to do that would have the balls to film it, you know, full on. But it's (for obvious, real-world reasons) filmed almost completely obscured. Similarly, nothing is taboo in A Serbian Film except for scenes of lust and sex involving a pre-teen girl. I mean you've already shown a man fucking an infant to death and another one having (unwitting) anal sex with his six-year-old son and that same man loaded with bull Viagra and fucking a headless corpse (and worse) and now you're going to back away from shocking the world with scenes of-pre-teen sex?

It's really a ridiculous, stupid, awful film. And obviously I'm not defending a second of it, or complaining that you don't get to see sex with pre-teens--I'm just calling out the filmmaker's attempts to make his movie so shocking and bold and defending it as art when in fact it's just cowardly and bad and boring.

Its attempts at being 'shocking' are undermined by the fact that it can't be--because of the law, and human decency--as shocking as it wants or, I guess, needs to be. (Though I don't need to see anything they couldn't or didn't show.) For the film to be successful as the director is clearly intending it to be is something that will/can never happen--otherwise he'd end up in prison, all copies destroyed, etc. There are dozens of great films that can be completely horrifying and terrifying and shocking through what they don't show, and A Serbian Film just pales next to great, psychologically terrifying films because by trying to show everything it's just crushed under its own aspirations (however feeble and appalling they may be) which in turn reveals and underscores all the artifice and lousiness in nearly every frame of the film.

It's an embarrassing movie, uninteresting and ugly and silly.

[MichaelB]

Its attempts at being 'shocking' are undermined by the fact that it can't be--because of the law, and human decency--as shocking as it wants or, I guess, needs to be. (Though I don't need to see anything they couldn't or didn't show.) For the film to be successful as the director is clearly intending it to be is something that will/can never happen--otherwise he'd end up in prison, all copies destroyed, etc.

This is where A Serbian Film differs from something like Pink Flamingos, because John Waters realised that fakery wouldn't work - in order for his film to have the kind of impact he envisaged, something would have to happen for real that would never be filmed for a mainstream production. But because he didn't fancy ending up in jail, he chose something whose only deleterious effects would potentially be on the health of the willing volunteer who performed the stunt in the first place. In fact, Waters swiftly denied a subsequent rumour that he was offering someone cash to commit suicide on film - if I remember rightly, Kim Newman said something like "Even John Waters draws the line somewhere. Though in his case it's on the other side of someone eating dog shit."

Many years ago when I still had ambitions to produce films for a living, I was sent a horror script by someone who thought that graphic onscreen child abuse was a taboo that needed shattering. The problem was, as I explained in my rejection letter, that filming the script as written would make it undistributable (at least in any conventionally regulated film market where box-office income might stand a chance of reaching the production company), whereas toning it down would eliminate the shock factor - and once you removed that, the script had little else going for it.

[knives]

This can't be real. No one would seriously go here. would they?

[Grand Illusion]

This can't be real. No one would seriously go here. would they?

Also, the first cutaway to a victim in the gas chamber is a shot of an obese woman screaming. I don't mean this as an insult to the actress, but it's already offensive. The implication that there was meat on anyone's bones is already horrifying in the context of the starved bodies and sunken eyes that you see in actual Holocaust photos.

[MichaelB]

My review of The Human Centipede is in the current Sight & Sound, but I don't think it's available online. In a nutshell, it's a very silly film indeed, and remarkably tame given the outrageous premise. The latter is pretty much the only thing it has going for it, as it doesn't develop its ideas to any noticeable extent - with the result that the actual film is more or less completely redundant once you know what it's about.

And as an intriguing footnote to A Serbian Film, it's worth noting that while the British Board of Film Classification requested 49 cuts totalling nearly 4 minutes to make it distributable on video, they also said that in their opinion the content of even the uncut version doesn't breach the 1978 Protection of Children Act (which would make it legally compulsory to remove infringing material). Instead, the cuts are entirely to do with the BBFC's own internal guidelines about juxtaposing children with graphic sexual material. (BBFC statement).

[JamesF]

A Serbian Film was pulled from the Frightfest line-up as a result of the BBFC cuts, though it looks like the uncut version's going to be shown at Raindance instead. Mark Pilkington of Sight and Sound asks:

Nobody can be surprised by the BBFC’s decision to mutilate Spasojevic’s debut – which was due to head straight to DVD after Frightfest – but by censoring the film, and diminishing its visceral impact, the Board could be accused of the same cultural hypocrisy to which Spasojevic is trying to draw attention. During the Bosnian conflict thousands of ordinary people experienced horrors like those on display in the film, while European news agencies largely averted their eyes. Is it right for us to do so again?

There’s no denying that A Serbian Film is extremely unpleasant – it’s meant to be – but it’s also a slickly-produced, relatively sophisticated film whose violence is unambiguously degrading to all parties concerned and hammers home a clear message. As porn torture, rather than torture porn, it’s a film that extremophiles need to assess for themselves, and one that may cause some of them to reconsider their own enthusiasms. Meanwhile, on a pragmatic level, censorship will boost the film’s notoriety but wreak havoc on its chances of making money in regions where it is cut: no transgressive film fiend wants to see a neutered film, and every one knows where they can find intact copies.

On the subject of Frightfest, none other than Tom Six made an appearance to announce that he is currently shooting the second Human Centipede film on a closed set (due to all the nudity) somewhere in London.