Hollis Robbins: belief

Transcript context

…But the emotional valence — what in it is objectionable or proper? That’s a crazy question. [laughter] I don’t think I can answer that. Again, it was a response to some movies that you’re probably not going to ask me about from the 1970s — a couple of Italian movies whose names I’m forgetting right now — that tried to depict slavery after Roots in ways that were realistic and suggested that the slave owners . . . that there are people as cruel today as were in the 1850s. He’s responding to a kind of film depiction of slavery. In his film depiction of slavery, he wants to give more autonomy and more agency to Django. So in that case, I would say there’s a lot of accuracy, then. But if there’s a kind of pornography of violence, which, yes, is used to show slavery as horrible but is nonetheless a kind of pornography of violence which cannot help but stimulate some parts of us which may in some ways enjoy violent movies. Is that itself objectionable?…

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