Drastik und Erhabenheit

Abstract

The essay defines two different modes of filmic violence: sublime and drastic pictures of violence. Based on the definitions of the sublime by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, I argue that the sublime has the tendency to detach the viewer from possible affective end empathetic response to pictures of bodies in pain on the screen. By contrast, the drastic mode has potential to evoke empathetic reactions. Both modes are grounded in specific ways of showing violence: the sublime mode diminishes the bodies on the screen, the drastic mode shows us the faces in close-up and tries to immerse the viewer in the violence.

Both definitions are informed by phenomenological film theory (especially the works of Vivian Sobchack), which positions the body of the viewer at the centre of film reception. Nevertheless, the somatic experience is not the only scope of film reception. Films not only show us a filmic world but also suggest a more or less specific way of seeing the world outside the cinema.

To this effect, both ways of staging violence have ideological implications. The sublime violence allows the viewer to experience himself as strong and invulnerable, while drastic pictures of violence tend to victimize the viewer.

These assumptions are tested on two exemplary instances: the helicopter scene in Francis Ford Coppolas war movie Apocalypse Now and the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.