[Week 4] Horror Genre

Horror film is just one of the ways to express art, it just looks a little bit excessive compare to others tho.

I personally enjoyed the reading of this week and agreed with most of the ideas in Jack Valenti's statement.  In the reading "statement by Jack Valenti, MPAA President, before The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence", Valenti states that the problem of violence is only one part of the human condition, just like the lust and emotion, fear or excitement is another form inside the human body which we cannot control.

"The very nature of drama is conflict. New plays and old plays, ancient chants, litanies, the epic poems, and traditional literature of practically every country and civilization that you can name are rooted in violence because man's whole existence has been a story of conflict" (Valenti, 63). 

As we have been discussing through the half of the term, human are especially interested in things that they don't understand. Conflict in human interaction is the best subject for this.  I really like the quote above by Valenti because I never think about the literature like that before. Conflict always comes with more or less some physical contact, when civilized human language does not work, fist can do the conversation. And at some point, things will become bloody.

The creation of art is inspired by life experience, Valenti talks about all the creation of violent are in some level the reflection of real life. And we should not prevent people to visually experience the events that happens in real life too. When circumstance being transformed from life experience into art, it will contain metaphorical and exaggerated changing. All of these are just another concept for audience to acquire, just like any other things they see and do in their life.

"I think the very fact you do have controversy about motion pictures is an indication of the interest, the hidden interest, that we find in it now" (Valenti, 75)

I can't be more agree with this ending of the reading. We shouldn't deprive anyone's right to create art in any form as long as they still hold their own principle. We should live the interpretation of work to the audiences themselves. In Valenti's statement, he discusses about the well-adjusted young audience from well-adjusted home won't have any problem by watching ultraviolence scene, but my problem is, if everyone is well-adjusted, what about the artists who make violence film? Why do they have to use the violence to express their thoughts?

When I watch The Untold Story (1993), seeing the chopsticks scene makes me rethink about the meaning of life and reason of artist's expression. Like "why am I watching this, why did the director do something like this, what joy I earn from this?" Because unlike other type of horror film which I can gain pleasure from, the scene in Untold Story is just too extreme and I can only feel pain watching it... I understand we should appreciate the amazing on screen violence that all the artists able to do, like all the cool people Stephen Prince mentions in his reading "Graphic Violence in the Cinema: Origins, Aesthetic Design, and Social Effects", good violence scene comes with aesthetic and brand new visual enjoyment. The chopstick scene is still beautiful in some way...I guess... we might just need to appreciate and count it as some extreme nightmare that we don't normally see.