Readings · Plot DNA
Before Sunrise, at one end: no violence. Come and See, at the other: violence as primary language. Violence With Purpose: that is the distance between them.
Violence With Purpose
Violence With Purpose is the reading that asks whether violence is how a film speaks, or is absent, or is only something that happens.
From one end to the other
- Before SunriseTwo strangers meet on a train, get off in Vienna, and spend one night walking and talking, knowing dawn will end it — the whole film is the space between two people learning they're real to each other.
- 25th HourA man's last day of freedom before prison — spent saying goodbye to his friends, his city, his dog, and the life he threw away — in a New York still raw from its own catastrophe.
- BreathlessA small-time thief who styles himself after Bogart drifts through Paris with an American girl he can't read — a cool, careless love story that tore up the rulebook of how films are cut.
- Amores PerrosOne car crash, three lives, and a savage argument that in this city love and cruelty are the same animal.
- Come and SeeA boy walks into a war and the war walks out wearing his face — the most honest film ever made about what atrocity does to a person.
Trailer
There is violence that entertains and violence that indicts. Violence With Purpose does not count how much violence a film shows. It asks whether the violence is the film's language: every blow saying something words cannot, and costing something on screen and in you. At the other end are films where it is absent or incidental. Come and See sits at the end where violence is how the film speaks.
Feature
One end of this reading is marked "No violence": the film has no violence in its vocabulary, or it is only a plot event. The other is marked "Violence as primary language": the violence is how the film thinks, and every act of it means something. Before Sunrise sits at the first end. Come and See sits at the second. It is not the same as gore. The most meaningful violence can be barely shown: a sound, an aftermath, a face. And it is not the same as tension in the body, which has its own reading. What matters is whether it costs something. It is hard to watch on purpose, because looking away would be the lie. Ask for it in the words you would use with a friend. Try a sentence like the one below.
Brutal but not empty, where every hit costs something.
Making of
Violence With Purpose covers how violence functions in a film, from absent, through incidental, to central and expressive. It does not cover how much violence there is, how graphic it is, or whether a film is suitable for anyone. It is not a warning label and it is not age guidance. Every one of the 275 films is read on it, and every reading has a sentence that says why. With an account you can open that sentence and see what the reading rests on. Every other film is read against the 5 calibration films and checked. The limit: the reading asks what violence does in a film, and that is an interpretation. Two viewers can agree on what was shown and differ on what it meant. The sentence gives the reason so you can weigh it. It cannot tell you whether you will be able to watch. It reads the whole film, not its single loudest scene.