Narrative technique · used in 4 films
Building up tension and then releasing it in explicit violence that carries the film's moral or political point. The violence makes you feel what historical distance has turned abstract.
Examples
Quentin Tarantino · 2003
Tarantino builds the O-Ren Ishii sequence as pure release. The amount of blood is theatrical and nowhere near realistic. That tells you the film has left the world of crime and entered one of myth and justice.
Where to see it: The Crazy 88 sequence in the House of Blue Leaves. The violence becomes choreography and the blood becomes theatrical punctuation.
Quentin Tarantino · 2009
The cinema fire and the Basterds' machine-gun attack from Hitler's opera box are designed as catharsis, a big emotional release. The audience's pleasure in it is the film's subject. 2 hours of Nazi arrogance, Shosanna's buried grief and Jewish victimhood all get reversed in 1 sequence of ecstatic destruction.
Where to see it: Shosanna's face on the cinema screen, laughing as the Nazis burn. The triumphant image of the Jewish cinema owner is projected over her own revenge.
Nicolas Winding Refn · 2011
Violence in Drive breaks in after a long stretch of quiet. When it comes, it is extreme enough to make you rethink everything before it. The elevator stomping, the fork in the eye and the shootout are each judged to destroy the romantic film the first half was building. The release you get is dark, and it brings no relief.
Where to see it: The elevator stomping sequence. The violence arrives inside a tender moment. You have to hold both moods at once, and the scene never settles them.
Quentin Tarantino · 2012
The film's violence runs from the Mandingo fight to the dogs to the final shootout. Tarantino stages all of it at an extreme intensity. He wants to take away the comfortable distance that lets people discuss slavery without feeling it. The violence is meant to be too much, because the history was too much.
Where to see it: The Mandingo fight sequence. It is staged so intensely that you get no visual comfort at all.
Questions
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