A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

What is the correlation, if any, between onscreen male on female violence and modern society?

Have we as a society, become desensitised to onscreen female suffering, endangerment and death? 

Although men are killed on screen, in much greater numbers,

the percentage of female characters who experience violent death and brutality is significantly higher -  in relation to the percentage of male characters who experience the same.

The prevalence of violence against women in film, within a framework of underrepresentation, makes for a harrowing perspective.

It is inescapable that so much of the emotional energy of contemporary cinema centres on women's pain - with men seen as both the perpetrators and vanquishers.

It’s an unavoidable truth that so much of this cinematic femicide is by the guns, hands and knives - of male characters.

Women as “hapless victim” is a cinematic trope as old as celluloid itself, although a contemporary genre of women as “kick-ass protagonist” has flourished in the last decade.

This much-needed injection of ‘self-determined” female protagonists, doesn’t yet stem the ubiquitous tide, of onscreen female brutalisation and murder.