Emergence of Violence in American Cinema

Cinematic violence has been in films since the start of movie making. From Orson Wells tearing up his estranged wives room in Citizen Kane to Anthony Perkins slicing up Vivian Leigh in Psycho, violence has always been present in film in one form or another. It was not until the late sixties and seventies that such visionaries as Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Sam Peckinpah, and William Friedken, to mention a few, came …

…to keep up with the times. Violence is now a type of art form. Tarantino, Stone, Hughes Bros., and Rodriguez are the names that are synonymous with violence today. Tim Roth, an actor whose film credits include Reservoir Dogs and Bodies, Rest & Motion, states in the February 1993 issue of Premier: "I love violence in films, but you have to do it well. I don't like films where the consequences of shooting someone are abandoned"(28).