In 1914, Mexican bandit turned revolutionary, Pancho Villa, starred in an action movie called
The Life of General Villa. The Mutual Film Corporation offered Villa $25,000 and 50 per cent of the film’s profits. Villa accepted, eager for the additional finance it brought to his campaign against the armies of Porfirio Diaz. The deal required that Pancho Villa fight his battles by daylight and in front of Mutual’s rolling cameras, and that he re-enact them if more footage was needed. In the words of the Mutual Film Corporation president, Villa agreed ‘to run his part of the insurrection for moving pictures, taking a prominent part himself’.
1 The film’s co-star was silent movie actor and future Hollywood director Raoul Walsh, who consequently had numerous cameos in several historic battles of the Mexican Revolution. (And although
The Life of General Villa was the first and last movie that the film’s supervising producer, D. W. Griffith, would make with the Mexican revolutionary, the very next year Griffith would cast Walsh as Lincoln’s assassin in
Birth of a Nation.)
The Life of General Villa opened in New York City within two months of the last battle Villa staged for the cameras.
Cinema has long shaped not only how political violence, from torture to warfare to genocide, is perceived, but also how it is performed. Today, when media coverage is central to terror campaigns, and newscasters serve as embedded journalists in the ‘war on terror’’s televisual front, understanding how the moving image is implicated in the imagination and actions of perpetrators and survivors of mass violence is all the more urgent.
The cinematic image and mass violence on huge scales are two defining features of modernity. The possibilities and limits of that image in nonfiction film – as ‘witness’ to and ‘evidence’ of collective violence – have been central concerns of such filmmakers as Marcel Ophüls, Claude Lanzmann and Rithy Panh, as well as the theoretical reflections on ‘post-traumatic cinema’ that their work has catalysed (for example, Joshua Hirsch, Malin Wahlberg, Thomas Elsaesser, Janet Walker, E. Ann Kaplan, Tony Haggith and Joanna Newman). Lanzmann’s film work, in particular, is marked by the conviction that the horror of such violence lies beyond cinematic imagination. However, one consequence of imagining the trauma of genocide as inevitably exceeding the cinematic image is to neglect the implication of that image in genocide itself. Often a cinematic imagination is directly implicated in the machinery of annihilation. The Nazi interdiction on any photographic trace of the extermination programme is as revealing of a cinematic consciousness attendant to genocide as their production of a false cinematic record to disguise the ‘final solution’ (consider, for instance, the propaganda film ‘documenting’ the contented life of Theresienstadt concentration camp prisoners,
The Führer Gives a Village to the Jews (1944)).
In the first Liberian civil war, warlord Joshua Milton Blahyi (better known as ‘General Butt Naked’) would screen action movies to the young children he abducted to be soldiers. He showed actors getting killed in one film, and appearing again in another film. He told the children that when they kill people, they come alive again in another movie; that made it easier for the kids to kill.
2 In Sierra Leone,
Rambo (1982) was a canonical text for Revolutionary United Front rebels, who borrowed their
noms-de-guerre directly from Hollywood action films. As recently as 2002, Guantánamo torturers developing their ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ looked no further than prime-time television for inspiration: Jack Bauer offered a treasure trove of techniques in his weekly torture of terrorists.
3 And in North Sumatra, Indonesia, the army recruited its death squads during the 1965–66 ‘extermination of the communists’ from the ranks of self-described ‘movie theatre gangsters’ – thugs who controlled a black market in movie tickets, and who used the cinemas as a base for more serious criminal activity. The army chose these men because they had a proven capacity for violence, and because they already hated the leftists for boycotting American films (the most popular, and profitable, in the cinemas). These killers explicitly fashioned themselves – and their methods of murder – after the Hollywood stars who were projected on the screens that provided their livelihood. Coming out of the midnight show, they describe feeling ‘just like gangsters who stepped off the screen’. In this heady mood, they strolled across the boulevard to their office and killed their nightly quota of prisoners, using techniques borrowed directly from movies. (This particular intersection of cinema and mass-murder is the territory explored by Joshua Oppenheimer’s film,
The Act of Killing (2012), discussed in two contributions to this volume.)
Cinema is often directly implicated in the imagination and machinery of mass-violence. Thus, if the cinematic image and mass violence are two defining features of modernity, the former is significantly implicated in the latter. The nature of this implication is this volume’s central focus. If the book’s chapters share a common starting point, it is that cinema offers unique opportunities to explore both the routines of violence as well as the rhetoric and imagination that begets violence. The contributions here engage with film and video projects that explore the perspectives of both perpetrators and survivors. They investigate cinema both as a tool for articulating histories of political violence, while at the same time analysing how cinema itself can operate as an actor in these histories. This latter exploration may itself be divided into two broad areas.
First, there are chapters that explore how the moving image, as for Pancho Villa and Indonesia’s movie-theatre gangsters, may play a direct role in the execution of political violence. These consider, of course, the deployment of moving images in the execution of the violence itself. This is not limited to the direct use of moving images as components of high-tech weaponry, as propaganda or as instrument of political mobilisation; it also includes how the cinematic inflection of perpetrators’ imaginations can become a crucial resource in the execution of violence (as it was for Indonesia’s movie-theatre gangsters). As urgently, these essays explore the impact of narrative – cinematic, historical, as well as those generated by the broadcast media – on the imaginations of key bystanders who might intervene to reduce violence, including the ‘international community’ and the general public.
Second, in a logical development of Jean-Luc Godard’s insight that ‘forgetting extermination is part of extermination’,
4 there are contributions that examine the contemporary consequences of historical remembrance, specifically the cinematic recovery of violent pasts. These chapters examine cinema as a set of diverse practices that can intervene in how historical accounts of violent pasts function in the present. They explore how perpetrators’ accounts (including official histories by victorious and unchallenged perpetrators) may function as crucial elements of a regime of terror and repression. Specifically, they interrogate how violence may originally be staged as spectacle, one whose ‘theatre of operations’ was to be symbolically rehearsed again and again in official histories and their fictive projections in works of cinema. Here, the smooth functioning of such regimes may be disrupted by filmmaking projects that either exploit inconsistencies within perpetrators’ accounts, or that frame such accounts with the responses of those subjects they exclude – survivors. These contributions ask how such methods might enable communities of survivors to respond to, recover and redeem a history that sought to physically and symbolically annihilate them?
Several contributors interrogate the tension between cinema’s potential to document violence and the cinematic impulse to stylise historical rendition – most fruitfully by deconstructing the deceptively transparent genres of authentic testimony and historical realism.
This book’s focus is decidedly not the ethical, aesthetic or political consequences of the representation of violence in cinema in nonfiction film. Neither it is a study of the history of screen violence or the genres of film violence (a developed area of Film Studies). Rather, this volume focuses on cinema’s engagement with the performance of violence. Although most chapters are studies of nonfiction film projects, Adam Lowenstein and Daniel Morgan use fiction films (Japanese horror and late Godard, respectively) to analyse how cinematic space may be structured (and ruptured) by repressed or traumatic histories.
This anthology offers scholarly contributions from academics, as well as insightful discussions by filmmakers about their own practice (Harun Farocki, Avi Mograbi, Errol Morris, Joshua Oppenheimer, David Polonsky and Rithy Panh). The contributions from filmmakers are offered in the hope that their direct experience working in theatres of violence, from Iraq to the US military’s training machine, from Lebanon to Israel to Palestine, and Indonesia to Cambodia, will offer important insights into the cutting-edge possibilities of cinematic intervention in contexts of mass violence.
It is divided into four main sections. The first, (De)activating Empathy, investigates the gulf between the declared intention and actual effects of the moving images that emanate from the world’s conflict zones. Under what conditions does media attention to political violence generate (or fail to generate) the political will for constructive intervention? Under what conditions do images desensitise us to violence? Under what conditions do they create sympathy, and what are the effects of that sympathy? The book opens with a detailed study of the use (and misuse) of broadcast news images of the siege of Sarajevo. What difference did these images have in stopping ethnic cleansing? The answers are surprising, and demand a radical rethinking of Enlightenment assumptions of a public sphere, in which knowledge begets empathy begets constructive action. Here, it appears that the political stories we tell with violent images are, ultimately, far more important than the poignancy of the images themselves in determining their consequences. The imperative for specifically ‘humanitarian’ action that accompanies decontextualised, depoliticised images of suffering may, in numerous ways, prove counterproductive.
This is followed by an exploration of two video interventions in zones of violent conflict: the feature-length documentary,
Burma VJ (2008), which presents the work of Burma’s video journalists, and the video projects of the Israeli human rights NGO, B’Tselem. Both projects involve activists using video cameras to document conflict. The chapter offers a detailed analysis of each project’s goals and strategies, and concludes by questioning their methods, impact and unspoken ideological commitments. Specifically, the chapter questions whether suffering, turned into a marketable narrative, hinders critical understanding or political action.
Harun Farocki’s recent project, Immersion (2009), documents the use of VR by the US Army as a therapeutic tool to help soldiers recover from post-traumatic stress upon their return from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers’ memories of what they experienced in the theatre of war (the violence they lived through) is re-staged with the help of a VR console game. In this form of exposure therapy, the soldiers are visually immersed in their experiences of violence and combat. Yet in a sinister twist, the identical mise-en-scène is used to desensitise pre-combat soldiers to the potentially traumatic impact of violence prior to their deployment. That the same moving images used to help individuals forget the trauma of war is also used to make soldiers more effective fighting machines is, again, an ironic corollary to Godard’s proposition that forgetting violence may be, in this case quite literally, part of the apparatus of violence.
‘Violent elements typical of Brazilian films are means of provoking the public out of its alienation’, proclaimed the filmmaker Glauber Rocha in 1965. Closing the first section of the book, we revisit his essay on the aesthetics of hunger in its attempt to make manifest the structural causes of violence. Rocha proposed an equation between hunger and violence, as violence is a direct response of Latin America’s poor to the conditions of their deprivation. Set against the background of 1960s Latin American cinema, a detailed analysis of Rocha’s manifesto is presented here – and the conclusions are contrary to those of the previous three contributions. Here, the aesthetics of violence is marshalled for the revolutionary purpose of provoking viewers out of alienation and into action with the intention of subverting and, ultimately, destroying the material causes of poverty.
The second section,
Memory of Violence: Visualising Trauma, discusses major strategies used by nonfiction filmmakers over the past fifty years to deal with traumatic effects of violence. It opens with a reflective analysis of efforts to visualise the trauma of the Holocaust from the 1950s to today. Because there exists only 1’59” of moving images of the mass execution of Jews in Eastern Europe (along with fragmentary moving images photographed in the days following the liberation of the death camps), there are considerable challenges for generations of documentary filmmakers seeking to address the trauma of the Holocaust. Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour film,
Shoah (1985), effectively sums up the strategies available for the realist Holocaust documentary (in the absence of archive footage) – and exposes its shortcomings. Is the Holocaust beyond the reach of documentary? Perhaps not, suggests this contribution, as it surveys other modes open to nonfiction filmmaking (the films of Péter Forgács, Joram ten Brink and, especially, Orly Yadin and Sylvie Bringas’s animated film,
Silence). The chapter argues that these filmic modes create the degree of
ostranenie (de-familiarisation) needed to overcome the over-familiarity of the narrative of the Holocaust (and its iconography) after more than fifty years of realist visual treatment.
The next three chapters further develop this exploration of animation as a tool for projecting the ruptured psychic tissue of memory (including its lacunae, blindspots and wormholes) in the aftermath of traumatic violence – in this case the September 1982 massacre of several thousand civilians at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Here, the film work in question is the world’s first animated feature-length documentary film, Waltz with Bashir (2008). The first of these chapters addresses the question of the psychic adequacy of documentary images, and examines the possibilities of creating a ‘screen memory’ – ‘a psychic topography’ of the soldiers’ mind. This is followed by an interview with the film’s art director on the visual strategies deployed in creating the film.
The next chapter explores how fictional cinematic space may be structured by repressed historical violence. Examining the horror films of Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa, this contribution argues that the horror genre’s ‘elasticity’ allows Kurosawa to explore repressed traumatic history. Here, traumatic violence (the atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing of virtually every major Japanese city, military aggression followed by defeat) once repressed, becomes spectral and haunts the surface of Kurosawa’s films, while structuring their cinematic and imaginative spaces. Repressed nonfiction trauma conditions the very space of fictive imagining.
The following chapter closes this section with a similar exploration of how fictive language is structured by (and in response to) historical violence and political trauma. This time, however, the focus is on Jean-Luc Godard’s Allemagne 90 neuf zero (1991). In his films and videos since the late 1980s, Godard’s project has been to develop aesthetic resources for facing and grappling with the legacy of a century marked by violence. Here, stuttering, silence and disruption is often more important than understanding. His work is founded on the conviction that film is implicated in the historical events it seeks to analyse. In Allemagne 90 neuf zero, Godard makes a case for cinema as uniquely capable for addressing history in a way that other media and modes of analysis cannot, resulting in historical understanding and knowledge made possible by innovations in film form.
The third section of the book,
Battle for History: Appropriating the Past in the Present, explores how narratives of the past are used and implicated in contemporary settings. It opens with an interview with the Israeli director Avi Mograbi, on his use of film to subvert the narratives of official histories (which are invariably written by history’s ‘winners’, and therefore, most often, by perpetrators). The focus of the interview is Mograbi’s sardonic essay film,
Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (2005). Mograbi’s cinematic style as provocateur from behind the camera changes the dynamics of the events that he documents at Israeli Army checkpoints in the West Bank. This allows him to highlight moments of violence and humiliation that otherwise would remain invisible. Here is proposed a central mission of nonfiction cinema: to document, on a regular basis, a ‘way of life’ for both victims and perpetrators of violence, and thereby to make present for our understanding the mechanisms of violence, the way that violence that we wish would be unimaginable is not only imagined, but far too easily performed. The chapter explores, too, the ethical implications of Mograbi’s unusually pronounced self-reflexivity (one that many filmmakers avoid) in his documentation of systemic violence.
The next two chapters in this section explore re-enactment as another cinematic strategy to confront the violent past: here, re-enactment as a strategy of performing the past in order to reveal its implication in the present. Under the guise of excavating and manifesting (in the present) authentic details of the past, many re-enactment projects (and the re-enactors themselves), knowingly or not, are interested in the past for its significance in the present. In this sense, re-enactments are always interventions in the present. The first of these chapters discusses Peter Watkins’ films
Culloden (1964) and
La Commune (2000). While re-enactment (and in the case of films like
Punishment Park (1971) and
The War Game (1965), re-enactment of hypothetical histories and ‘pre-enactments’) has been a core filmmaking strategy for Watkins, the chapter explores how the re-enactment process deployed in
Culloden and
La Commune constituted a platform not only for an in-depth historical analysis of the battles being re-enacted, but, and even more so, for an articulation of parallels between the past and the present. In that sense, like Rocha’s violent imagery, these films open new possibilities for analysis and action
in the present. Walter Benjamin’s understanding of the historian as one who summons the past (and in particular the tradition of the oppressed) into the present, so that it ‘flashes up at the instant it can be recognized’, is very close indeed.
5The second chapter on re-enactment discusses the contemporary politics involved in Jeremy Deller’s massive re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave between the police and striking English miners in 1984. The re-enactment was performed in 2001 as a major live performance, and documented for a feature-length documentary,
The Battle of Orgreave (2001), by film director Mike Figgis. The chapter explores Deller’s fascination with ‘living history’ and using re-enactment as a critical tool to look at the past’s implication in the presence. By seeking to elicit conflicting narratives of the violence at Orgreave, Deller seeks to undermine the authoritative official history of the events, and to re-ignite the radical imagination of the striking miners in 2001 Britain.
The next chapter, ‘Remediating Genocidal Images into Artworks: The Case of the Tuol Sleng Mug Shots’ investigates the appropriation by visual artists of mug shots of political prisoners at the Khmer Rouge’s Tuol Sleng political prison (also known as S21) in Phnom Penh. The inmates in Tuol Sleng were photographed as soon as they arrived at the prison. Their picture was attached to the ‘confessions’ extracted (or fabricated) by their jailers; after the prisoner ‘confessed’, he or she was invariably murdered at the killing fields outside Phnom Penh. When Tuol Sleng was turned into the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in 1980, these photographs were enlarged and put on display. The mug shots have become icons of the Cambodian Genocide. While the chapter recalls the first section’s investigation of the use of iconic images of violence as tools for the activation of empathy, as well as Deller’s notion of ‘living history’, it focuses on the visual and material strategies by which artists struggle to articulate and respond to mass violence. In particular, the chapter explores how artists attempt to subvert the Khmer Rouge’s ‘monocular’ way of seeing (in which the camera became a component in a murder machine), and thereby create less tainted forms in which iconic images of suffering may yet bear witness to a past that must not be forgotten.
Closing this section is a chapter on a struggle elsewhere in South East Asia to deal with a legacy of genocide, in this case the 1965–66 massacre of between 500,00 and two million alleged communists by the Indonesian military and its paramilitary death squads. ‘Screening the 1965 Violence’ discusses cinema’s role in creating and maintaining an official history that erases the genocide from public discussion. (When the official history, compelled by logic, is forced to acknowledge at least some anti-communist violence, it is invariably described as the heroic ‘extermination’ (penumpasan) of communist traitors.) For the final fifteen years of Indonesia’s military dictatorship, a four-hour propaganda film, The Treason of the September 30th Movement of the Indonesian Communist Party (1984), was mandatory yearly viewing for all Indonesian students from primary school to university. The chapter analyses this film as the overarching framework for any discussion, fantasy or allusion to the genocide ever since. It proceeds to discuss the difficulties faced by contemporary Indonesian documentary filmmakers who seek to challenge ideological matrix of this history. Here, film is implicated in the machinery of annihilation, and in any potential historical recovery.
The fourth and final section,
Performing Violence, builds upon the second section’s exploration of the potential of post-traumatic cinema to recover repressed memories of the violent past and translate these to the screen, and the third section’s concern with re-enactment as intervention in the present. Here, through explorations of the
ontology of the performances that constitute re-enactments, as well as the
epistemological limits on our analysis of these performances, we encounter the difficulties, perhaps even the impossibility, of distinguishing between performance and remembrance. ‘Authenticity’ and ‘authentic remembrance’ become thorny concepts indeed. Here, the (mis)use of the camera as a tool in the performance of violence itself, as well as its use in documenting re-enactments of violence for the purpose of historical recovery, becomes ethically and politically fraught as never before.
The Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh, in his film S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), uses re-enactment as a means to recover the embodied memory of guards at the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, specifically gestures and motions that were part of the machinery of killing. In the first chapter of this section, Panh discusses in detail his use of re-enactment as a tool for the precise excavation of perpetrators’ bodily memory. He discusses, too, his surprising methods of securing the cooperation of the perpetrators, motivated by his conviction that testifying is the only way by which perpetrators of crimes against humanity can regain their own humanity.
This contribution is followed by a second interview with Avi Mograbi. Here, Mograbi discusses the innovative use of a digital mask in his film Z32 (2008). In this film, the mask is constructed to conceal the identity of a perpetrator – an Israeli soldier who has murdered an elderly Palestinian civilian. Here, the soldier, code-named Z32, confronts his actions and his memories, including a visit to the site of the killing. Through the film, the soldier seeks absolution for his actions, yet does not have the courage to apologise publicly (as many of his fellow soldiers have done). Mograbi reflects upon his own responsibility as a filmmaker in eliciting performances from a perpetrator of violence in exchange for anonymity. Specifically, Mograbi highlights the ethical dilemma faced by viewers of a cinematic performance that is used as a tool to recover and expose a murder, but simultaneously to help the murderer find redemption.
Benedict Anderson then investigates the historical and political context around Joshua Oppenheimer’s films,
The Act of Killing and
Snake River (2012). In both films, Oppenheimer films elaborate re-enactments staged by the victorious perpetrators of Indonesia’s 1965–66 genocide. Here, seemingly unrepentant and boastful perpetrators draw on their cinematic fantasies to dramatise their roles in the killings, suggesting genres, writing scripts and directing scenes. Through this disturbing dramatic space,
The Act of Killing investigates the routines of violence, and analyses the rhetoric and imagination of the killing machine. The chapter analyses the function of the perpetrators’ on-screen boasting, the impunity that it performatively asserts and the history of the political system of which it is symptomatic. Anderson argues that impunity is fundamentally a performative state, achieved through reiteration of explicitly or implicitly boastful performances by the perpetrators of past violence before different audiences. The circuit is completed when survivors accept their powerlessness, and a ‘general public’ accepts that perpetrators are to be respected and even revered as heroes. Oppenheimer’s camera, and his collaboration with survivors on all aspects of the production (behind the camera in both films, in front of the camera in
Snake River) shorts this circuit. In a dialogue with Oppenheimer, Anderson goes on to interrogate the perpetrators’ complex relationship with the film director, who invites them to reenact their actions as a method of understanding how triumphant and boastful perpetrators of genocide would project themselves into history.
The next chapter is Oppenheimer’s own close reading of performances by two perpetrators whom he filmed at the earliest stage in his film project on the Indonesian genocide. By giving perpetrators free reign to declaim their past for the camera, and by allowing them the space to stage their accounts using whatever cinematic forms they wish (from ‘testimonial’ interviews to large-scale re-enactments and even to musical numbers depicting their ‘redemption’), Oppenheimer seeks to reveal the generic imperatives conditioning perpetrators’ historical accounts, as well as the contemporary effects of those accounts. These cinematic strategies aim to draw the process of national- and self-imagining out from under the shadow and sway of catastrophe.
The book’s final chapter is a discussion with Errol Morris about his film
Standard Operating Procedure (2008). Here, we continue the discussion of perpetrators using cameras to stage their actions, but the focus is now on the photographs of torture and abuse taken by the guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. The film’s investigative premise is that the photographs are not what they appear to be: they are neither evidence of the ‘few bad apples’ the military claimed, nor of guards so sadistic that they are happy for their friends to see them delight in humiliating others (a story the public might simultaneously deplore and relish, with a fascination not unrelated to the emotions inferred from the guards’ smiles). The posing soldiers are usually not even the perpetrators: their smiles and ‘thumbs up’ would suggest the violence was staged for the photographs, yet the key violence (a homicide) happened off camera, and the perpetrator appears in none of the photographs. Furthermore, the photographs’ quality of being staged
may itself have been staged as an elaborate cover for the photographer’s project of documenting and, ultimately, exposing the abuse. Yet the very fact that posing for a snapshot while smiling next to a murder victim could be an efficient cover speaks volumes about the climate at the prison, and above all its ‘standard operating procedures’. Morris’s discussion (and film) not only questions the violence that went on inside the prison’s walls and the soldiers’ use of photography, but how we see ourselves through the stories we tell about images of violence.
And that, surely, is the central concern of this volume.
NOTES