Stylized Violent Aesthetics: Tarantino’s Surgical Lens on Three-stages
Abstract
Acclaimed director Quentin Tarantino is renowned for his masterful depictions of violence. Through his influential filmography, he has meticulously crafted a unique, stylized aesthetic for on-screen brutality, transforming bloodshed into a distinctive and highly recognizable cinematic signature. "Violent aesthetics" in movies often emphasize how to present violent scenes in a suitable and non-repulsive way. Tarantino makes use of this principle and moreover, gives violence a new perspective and presentation through his distinctive cinematic language. This research aims to demonstrate and analyze how Tarantino conducts violence via the usage of diverse cinematic language. More precisely, this essay will employ Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Django Unchained (2012) as case studies for an in-depth analysis of the connection between cinematic language and violent aesthetics. Furthermore, the paper is built upon a concept of three-stages, referring to the “pre-violence”, “violence scene”, and “post-violence” within a single scene. Besides, these three films shares the plot of revenge, accompanied a similar three-stages rhythm when violence is going to occur, which is comparable to digging into cinematic language. Therefore, it will be concrete and legible for us to understand reconstruction and beautification of violence.
References
- Kendrick, J. (2009). Hollywood bloodshed: violence in 1980s American cinema. SIU Press.
- Junaedi, H., Hariadi, M., & Purnama, I. K. E. (2018). Profiling Director’s Style Based on Camera Positioning Using Fuzzy Logic. Computers, 7(4), 61. https: //doi.org/10.3390/computers7040061
- Ma, T., Liu, H., & Yang, H. (2020). Interactive Narrative Generation of Aesthetics of Violence in Films. 2020 IEEE 20th International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security Companion (QRS-C), Macau, China, 2020, pp. 657-662, doi: 10.1109/QRS-C51114.2020.00111.
- Gai, Q., & Lin, G. 2022. The Aesthetics of Cinematic Violence and the Mechanism of Affect Theory. Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 42, (4): pp.32-42. https: //tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol42/iss4/4
- de Melo Rocha, R., & Portugal, D. B. (2012). AESTHETIZATION OF VIOLENCE AND CONTEMPORARY CINEMA: Death meets sensuality.
- Yuan, F. (2021). violent aesthetics IN FILMS - A CASE STUDY OF QUENTIN TARANTINO'S FILMS. Bangkok University. Retrieved from: http: //dspace.bu.ac.th/jspui/handle/123456789/5389
- Pandolfo, A. C., Brunstein, C., Frank, C., Almeida, J., Meyer, L., & Sousa, N. (2018). Reality and fiction – Tarantino’s filmography on the couch. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 99(3), 756–764. https: //doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2017.1411160
- Maglajilja, A. (2014). Tracing Tarantino : dark humor, excess and the aestheticization of violence. Am Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. Retrieved from: https: //unipub.uni-graz.at/obvugrhs/content/titleinfo/240371
- Kupfer, J. (2018). Aesthetic Violence and Women in Film: Kill Bill with Flying Daggers (1st ed.). Routledge. https: //doi.org/10.4324/9781315228143
- Jenkins, G. (2015). Whose revenge is it anyway? Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, intertextuality, and America’s War on Terror. Holocaust Studies, 21(4), 236–249. https: //doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2015.1066065
- Gooch, J. (2019). Violent Feelings: Quentin Tarantino’s Cruel Optimisms. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 30(1), 5–24. https: //doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2019.1560877
- Balázs, B., & Mast, C. (1945). The close-up. Rutgers University Press.
- Bálint, K. E., & Rooney, B. (2019). Narrative sequence position of close-ups influences cognitive and affective processing and facilitates theory of mind. Art & Perception, 7(1), 27-51.
- Finnegan, J. (2024). The stylisation of violence in film. Institute of Art, Design + Technology. https: //hdl.handle.net/10779/iadt.25408081.v1
- Wöllner, C., Hammerschmidt, D., & Albrecht, H. (2018). Slow motion in films and video clips: Music influences perceived duration and emotion, autonomic physiological activation and pupillary responses. PLoS One, 13(6). https: //doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0199161
- Sarria, L. C. (2015). The influence of camera angle in film narratives (Doctoral dissertation, Institut for Æstetik og Kommunikation, Cognitive Semiotics Aarhus Universitet). Previous experimental studies in camera angle (pp. 39-53).