Law and violence in the movies

Project management: Prof. Dr. Angela Keppler and Prof. Dr. Martin Seel

The depiction of violence has been a leitmotif of cinema from the very beginning. It takes on very different functions in different genres. However, the question of the law of violence and the violence of law has always been an important strand in the narratives of cinema. Many feature films that tell of acts, events and conditions of open or latent violence pose the question of the legitimacy of the social orders in which violence arises and fades through the way they are told. They deal with the intimacy of law and violence.

Using exemplary films of various genres – especially westerns, film noir, police films and war films – it was examined how the interlocking of law, justice and violence is dramatized in their artistic treatment. The analysis of these genres was guided by the thesis that cinema imagines the connection between law and violence from multiple perspectives: It equally tells of the genesis of normative orders from experiences of violence and injustice as well as of the different forms of violence associated with the – one-off – establishment and – permanently repeated – enforcement of these orders.

The medium of film was used to examine how cinematic fictions represent, question, break and even create normative perspectives on social and political conflicts in various combinations. This aesthetic reflective achievement of cinema was made theoretically fruitful in order to gain a non-illusionary view of normative orders and their dialectical connection with violence, which they often attempt to tame in vain. Key concepts of the cluster – above all that of the “justification narrative” – were examined from a media-theoretical perspective.

The project was based on philosophical and sociological analyses of the dialectic of law and violence as aesthetically acted out in feature films. A central format of the research was also interdisciplinary lecture series and workshops in which lecturers from various disciplines dealt with the topic using selected examples from their respective perspectives.
A central finding of our research is that the internal views of the life of normative orders as presented in feature films are characterized by an oscillation between justification and questioning, legitimation and de-legitimation, which is rarely clearly resolved.

The most important events in this project:

Lecture series: Crime and Punishment in Cinema (Lecture series “Cinema” of the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”), Goethe University and MMK, Frankfurt am Main, summer semester 2015.

Lecture series: Law and Violence in Cinema (Lecture series “Cinema” of the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”), Goethe University and MMK, Frankfurt am Main, winter semester 2013/14 and summer semester 2014.

Workshop: Justification narratives. Terror and war in the moviesCluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, April 14-15, 2014.

Panel: “Dimensions of Violence and Legitimation in Cinema”, at the international film philosophy conference Beyond Film (organized by Frederike Popp and Jochen Schuff), Amsterdam, 10-12 July 2013.

Panel: “Kritik auf der Leinwand”, as part of the 2013 Junior Researchers’ Conference of the Cluster of Excellence Practices of Critique (organized by Frederike Popp and Jochen Schuff), December 2013.

The most important publications in this project:

Seel, Martin: Ignore “Hollywood”. From the cinema , Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2017.

Schuff, Jochen and Seel, Martin (eds.): Narratives and counter-narratives. Terror and war in 21st century cinema (Normative Orders vol. 16), Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2016.

Keppler, Angela/Popp, Frederike/Seel, Martin (eds.): Gesetz und Gewalt im Kino(Normative Orders vol. 14), Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2015.

people in this project:

Project management / contact person

Keppler, Angela, Prof. Dr.

Seel, Martin, Prof. Dr.

Project staff

Popp, Frederike