American cinema has always been violent, and never more so than now: exploding heads, buses that blow up if they stop, racial attacks, and general mayhem. From slapstick's comic violence to film "noir," from silent cinema to Tarantino, violence has been an integral part of America on screen. This new volume in a successful series analyzes violence, examining its nature, its effects, and its cinematic and social meaning.

J. David Slocum is Assistant Dean in the Graduate School for the Arts and Science at New York University, where he teaches cinema studies.

Acknowledgments; Introduction: Violence and American Cinema: Notes for an Investigation, J. David Slocum; I. Historicizing Hollywood Violence; 1. Violence and Film, William Rothman; 2. The Violence of a Perfect Moment, Leo Charney; 3. Violence American Style: The Narrative Orchestration of Violent Attractions, Marsha Kinder; II. Revisiting Violent Genres; 4. Clean Dependable Slapstick: Comic Violence and the Emergence of Classical Hollywood Cinema, Peter Kramer; 5. The Spectacle of Criminality, Richard Maltby; 6. Murder's Tongue: Identity, Death, and the City in Film Noir, Paul Arthur; 7. Violence in the Film Western, Lee Clark Mitchell; 8. Passion and Acceleration: Generic Change in the Action Film, Rikke Schubart; III. Hollywood Violence and Cultural Politics; 9. Black Violence as Cinema: From Cheap Thrills to Historical Agonies, Ed Guerrero; 10. Documenting Domestic Violence in American Films, Phyllis Frus; 11. Splitting Difference: Global Identity Politics and the Representation of Torture in the Counterhistorical Dramatic Film, Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg; 12. Holocaust Film Criticism and the Politics of Judeo-Christian Phenomenology, Terri Ginsberg; Contributors; Index