Graphic representations of violence and their influence over viewers is an evergreen topic in media studies, and it would seem that all that can be said has been said, but in this book David Hansen-Miller attends to a rather neglected aspect of such representations. This is their popular attraction and appeal. As he puts it at the start: the 'appeal of cinema violence can be ascribed to the way in which particular narratives productively reinscribe violence in those areas where it is being concealed and absorbed' (p. 2). In doing this they disseminate a modern pedagogy of violence and power, one quite different to the scaffold's display of a sovereign's authority.
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