Check out Marsha Kinder's "Blood Cinema" (Berk:  UC, 1993).  It has a
fantastic section on violence in Spanish cinema, but its theory is very
useful for other contexts.
 
I've written an essay about violence in American and Japanese war cinema.
See "Cherry Trees and Corpses:  Representations of Violence in WWII
Documentary" in "Japan/America Film Wars:  WWII Propaganda and its Cultural
Contexts" (New York:  Gordon and Breach, 1994).
 
Markus