Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002
Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-260) and indexes
Introduction: film violence as figurality -- - Screen violence: five fallacies. Empiricism ; Aristotelianism ; Aestheticism ; Mythologicism ; Mimeticism -- - Filming death. The transfigured image -- - Narrating violence, or, allegories of dying -- - Male subjectivities at the margins. Mean streets: death and disfiguration in Hawks's Scarface -- - Kubrick's The killing and the emplotment of death -- - Blood of a poet: Peckinpah's The wild bunch -- - As I lay dying: violence and subjectivity in Tarantino's Reservoir dogs -- - One-dimensional men: Fincher's Fight club and the end of masculinity
In many senses, viewers have cut their teeth on the violence in American cinema: from Anthony Perkins slashing Janet Leigh in the most infamous of shower scenes; to the 1970s masterpieces of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah and Francis Ford Coppola; to our present-day undertakings in imagining global annihilations through terrorism, war, and alien grudges. Transfigurations brings our cultural obsession with film violence into a renewed dialogue with contemporary theory. Grønstad argues that the use of violence in Hollywood films should be understood semiotically rather than viewed realistically; Tranfigurations thus alters both our methodology of reading violence in films and the meanings we assign to them, depicting violence not as a self-contained incident, but as a convoluted network of our own cultural ideologies and beliefs
