ABSTRACT
This chapter situates itself within criminological aesthetics, and to the enterprise of investigating crime's fascination it contributes an analysis of relationship to the cinematic image. It discovers how law, violence and justice appear and reappear in the image on screen, in order to open up and give access to the affective dimension of crime and its structures of identification. The chapter constitutes a discrete part of a larger project: an analysis of the cinematic image of crime and the relationship of the spectator to the representation of crime, violence and justice on screen. It deals with the practice of looking – spectatorship – and its construction of a relation between spectator and image. The chapter explores the relationship between spectatorship and the representation of law, crime and victimage. It concentrates on the cinematic scene of violence and the ways in which the spectator's encounter with that scene has implications for the theorization of law, judgment and justice.
