Violence in film is not a single entity. It is shaped by the styler of the film, by the sensibilities of the filmmaker, by the nature of the thematic discourse conducted in the film, and by a number of other factors that make an example of film violence unique. The filmmaker may be trying to use violence to challenge the nature of violence in society, and even then the way the issue is treated will vary from film to film. Violence has an near iconographic place in film so that the evocation of an instance of violence in one film builds upon and recalls other instances in other films extending back through the history of the medium, and a good director can make use of audience expectations about violence to challenge those expectations, to satisfy them, or to twist them into something very different than what is expected. Lindsay Anderson in his film If. . . and Jean-Luc Godard in Les Carabiniers each draw on earlier film images of violence in creating a particular vision of what violence means in society. While both films can be considered social statements and derive much of their power from the way they reflect the political and social turmoil of the 1960s. the films have very different visions and styles.
Les Carabiniers has the veneer of a mythic story taking place outside of real time and real place. The subject is war--the title in English would be The Soldiers--and war is the height of violence, with one society fighting another. Director Godard sets this film in a non-existent kingdom where the king sends soldiers out to conscript two men living in a shack. Actually, these two men are promised that the king will make them rich if they go off to war and fight for him. Two soldiers come to the shack to deliver this message, and they promise al sorts of things to these two men if they will fight, from money to not having to pay in restaurants. Godard uses a satiric approach which begins with the selection of these ...