Saturday 2 January 2016

FILM EFFECTS Tarantino: Japan violent cinema peaceful society

Interesting point by Quentin Tarantino when pressed on accusations that his films inspire real life violence. Tarantino's trademark style includes explicit violence, often cut to soundtrack music, but he argued that the notion that cinema and civic violence are linked is rendered ridiculous by Japan, with its ultra-violent cinema but low violent crime culture.

The director also addressed his infamous interview with the Channel 4 News presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy three years ago, when he lost his cool about a question suggesting a link between violence in his films and violence in real life. Tarantino’s films, including Django Unchained, Reservoir Dogs and now The Hateful Eight, include high levels of violence and brutality. 
“I wasn’t going to give it to him,” he said of Guru-Murthy. “But one of the things that backs up my point is that in the last 25 years, when it comes to industrial societies, hands down the most violent cinema that exists in any one country is Japan. Sometimes grotesquely so. And as we all know, they have the least violent society of all. It’s just right there.”

Politicians and the press, who mutually love a good moral panic, both casually infer this link frequently, as do conservative, pro-censorship campaign groups, but the field of audience effects research, one of the largest in academia, not just Media, has singularly failed to provide any conclusive backing for the notional harms that the likes of the BBFC is set up to protect the public from. The BBFC has addressed this in an interesting interview elsewhere.

Here's his notorious UK (C4 News) interview:

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