Fraser, John

(1928– )

   Born in London in 1928, John Fraser used STANLEY KUBRICK’s film A CLOCKWORK ORANGE as a springboard for his study Violence in the Arts, published by Cambridge University Press in 1974. He was an exhibitioner of Balliol College, Oxford, and subsequently earned a Ph. D. at the University of Minnesota, where he was a cofounder and editor of the Graduate Student in English. He married the artist Carol Fraser and went on to teach at Dalhousie University in Canada. Fraser uses A Clockwork Orange as a “convenient starting point” for his study, because, in his view, that film “has done the most to set off complaints in the early 1970s about excessive violence in movies. ” The book’s jacket shows Alex and his droogs about to attack the helpless drunk in the film’s opening sequence. Fraser considers A Clockwork Orange a “striking example of a genre” that he goes on to identify as the “violation movie. ” He described Bonnie and Clyde as the “American source for the kind of aestheticizing and distancing of violence in A Clockwork Orange” and the “earlier movies of Jean-Luc Godard” as the European source.

   J. M. W.