Life, death and a ticket to the movies

We all have one, a particular moment of movie violence that forces us to recoil and turn away from the screen in revulsion. For many film fans the sickening scene in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs when tough-guy actor Michael Madsen - Mr Blonde in the movie - slices off a young policeman's ear and then threatens to set him alight is a prime example. Others cite Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers as an illustration of movie-makers' ability to produce scene after scene of gut-wrenching, gaze-averting action. Such episodes of wanton cruelty have sparked animated political debate in the United States over whether explicit film scenes are linked to spiralling real-life violence and all the social and economic costs that entails. They have also led to a series of multi-million dollar lawsuits over so-called copycat crimes which victims claim were spawned by the movies. As the argument rages between right-wing moralists and the libertarian left, no one has come up with a concrete causal link between what we watch over our box of popcorn and what happens on the street. But now, renowned Californian film academic, Dr Nicholas Browne of the University of California, Los Angeles' (UCLA) Department of Film and Television - school to such movie luminaries as Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola and Alex Cox, director of the cult Repo Man - is hoping to shed new light on the subject. And his Stateside study of America's top 100 box office hits from 1994 - backed by US$250,000 (HK$1.93 million) from the coffers of the US medical establishment - has found a new avenue of exploration in Hong Kong. Invited as a distinguished visiting scholar by Hong Kong University's Department of English, Dr Browne has put together a team of five local third-year students to test the belief that the territory's film makers produce some of the most violent movies. At the same time, they hope to construct a valuable data base of information which may go some way towards settling the argument about possible links between celluloid and real-life violence. Dr Browne and his team, which also includes two post-graduate UCLA students, face the painstaking task of dissecting and recording every violent act from the top 33 locally made movies screened here in 1996. The study, funded with Hong Kong University money, aims to compare violent trends in Cantonese movies with crime as it happens in the SAR. 'Hong Kong seems like a very orderly place to me, yet we have this widely held belief that it produces sensationally violent films. We want to paint a picture of the occurrence of film violence by type of genre, weapon, gender, time of day and circumstance to see what kind of violence is exploitable for dramatic effect and eventually, if we can, compare it with official crime statistics,' said Dr Browne. Their tool is a custom-designed computer system, which took two years to devise, allowing them to freeze-frame every single act of violence in each of the 33 films and record everything about them, from what the characters' motivation is, to how the film deals with the consequences of his or her actions. Dr Browne has cast a cursory eye over 25 of the films included in the Hong Kong sample and says initial differences between local and Hollywood productions quickly become apparent. 'One of the principal differences is the amount of hand-to-hand violence, in other words, the amount which is not firearm related. I also think that honour is going to turn out to be significant. 'Violence in the context of preservation and assertion of dignity, I believe, is going to emerge as a stronger dimension than it does in the US where violence is probably a bit more utilitarian.' Funding for the American research - which recorded 2,184 acts of violence in the 100 films studied - comes from the scientific research unit of the US Department of Health and Human Services. Dr Browne says it was only given the go-ahead after top-level government discussions about its value in finding some way of understanding and stemming widespread violence in US cities in a bid to cut judicial, law enforcement and health care costs. 'There were a lot of discussions at the top of the American government about the so-called epidemic of media violence. Everyone has an opinion about it, everybody's complaining about it, but no one knows much about it from a clear and comprehensive point of view. 'One of the things that the medical community is interested in is the extent to which movies create a very strong and misleading picture of the real social consequences of violent action. 'What we see, not just in the action genre but across almost all genres, is the suppression of what really occurs after a violent act, from medical to judicial and psychological. 'It was a controversial proposal, they had never seen anything quite like it, but in the end, they went for it,' he said. Surprisingly, results tabulated from the US study so far reveal the Oscar-winning animation Lion King as one of the most violent films of 1994, along with Pulp Fiction. And despite its grisly reputation, Natural Born Killers came in 25th. Dr Browne said: 'Instinctively we want to make a difference between animated acts and those of actors. Clearly there are violent actions in the Lion King and we applied the system uniformly. 'People tend to think that animation is not graphic but I believe the actions themselves are comparable, it is their presentation which seems to make a difference in the way people understand them. 'If one character shoots another character in animation and likewise in Pulp Fiction, they are both shootings. The effects of violence are very much more suppressed in the animation genre, it's a magical world where people are immediately rehabilitated. There is a greater distance between the act of violence and the consequence,' he said. One of the Hong Kong research students is 21-year-old Shirley Cheung Yee from Shamshuipo, who says that while the work is painstaking, it is also rewarding. 'We need a lot of time to code a very violent film, for example it took us 16 hours to code 15 minutes of violence in The Bodyguard From Beijing. There are so many questions to be answered for each act of violence, sometimes I feel like collapsing afterwards,' she said. Like the other students taking part, Ms Cheung has a strong interest in film and completed a course of study in American movies. Often discussions among students over the motivation behind a particular act of violence generates lively debate. 'Some of the questions we have to ask in order to code the acts are very similar and there are many options to choose, we have to concentrate very carefully so as not to make mistakes.' Among the local films being studied are Steven Lo Kit-shing's The Tragic Fantasy - - Tiger In Wan Chai, based on the short and violent life of Sun Yee On triad enforcer Andely Chan Yiu-hing, who was murdered in a gangland-style execution in Macau in 1994. Dr Browne rates the Lo production as 'quite comparable' to a violent US movie but re-asserts his belief that one of the principal differences is the amount of hand-to-hand violence and the obvious importance of honour as a motivation for acts of brutality. 'At the outset of the project I looked at 25, 11 of them I would consider very violent, six had some violence and eight had no violence at all. The Bodyguard From Beijing probably stands out as one of the most violent. 'I feel one of the purposes of a comparative study like this is that in the US everybody likes to think that in Hong Kong film the cinematic product is lost in the violence - we can present a more comprehensive picture and be in a position to really compare American and Hong Kong films,' he said. With a little less than a year to complete their work, the Hong Kong University team has its work cut out. But given the complexity and depth of the coding system developed at UCLA, Dr Browne believes they can contribute constructively to the debate. 'Many of the people who make the most noise debating the issue of film-societal violence haven't seen the movies, so they don't really know what they are talking about. 'Actually tracing the effects back to real social behaviour is quite difficult. A person may come out of a movie theatre and months later be involved in a crime or a killing. But there are a million intervening circumstances. 'I don't think this is an issue like cigarette smoking where you can really find evidence of cause and effect. This is different,' he said.