There is harm even in harmony: On why documentaries so often are about human vulnerability, harm, and suffering. (original) (raw)
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Diffractions, 2023
This essay is a direct result coming after an immersive and collaborative experience at the Documentary Summer School that took place in 2022 in Switzerland, a joint effort between the Università della Svizzera italiana and the 75th edition of the Locarno Film Festival. As such, it aims at collecting a few impressions about the state of the art of documentary production, particularly when concerned with modes of narrating violence. Besides the thematic sections that may group the films together, a few general points regarding different documental procedures will be teased out, to engage with scholarly research on themes such as trauma and catastrophe and thus give room to further academic exploration. The films analyzed are: The Hamlet Syndrome, The River is not a Border, It Is Night in America and Matter Out of Place.
The eighth conference of the Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory invites researchers to reflect upon the dynamics between cultural theory and cultural practice. Live theory, as we understand it, is cultural theory that is carried out today, that is currently relevant to the effort to make sense of culture as it is lived – practiced and experienced by people – at a particular time and in particular socio-environmental conditions. Lived culture encourages us, as researchers, to understand how and why people do, and make sense of, things in a particular way. Like culture itself, live theory is not conclusively defined or finalised, although it may rely on existing ideas in cultural research. Live theory refers to our constant struggle to find a balance between attempts to interpret culture through analytical conceptualisations and open-ended imaginations, visions that aim to describe emergent cultural phenomena. Furthermore, we see cultural theory itself as part of cultural practice – by describing and explaining culture we also create it in different terms and imageries. Different types of contribution of and collaborations between scholars from various disciplines are welcome. The topics of the panels are formulated around broad concepts that provide opportunities for different theoretical imaginations of the current research into how culture is being lived today as well as in the past.
Documentary Horror: The Transmodal Power of Indexical Violence
journal of visual culture, 2015
This article reevaluates critical distinctions between so-called 'art-horror' and 'natural' or real-world horror to challenge larger modal distinctions between fiction and documentary film and their ostensibly divergent spectatorial practices. It focuses on images of animal slaughter, which traverse boundaries between fiction and documentary, art-horror and natural horror. The indexical force of animal slaughter may displace or undo the metaphorical in fictional horror film, producing a spectatorial wavering between the registers of the figurative and the literal. Shaun Monson's documentary film Earthlings (2005) demands of viewers a mode of spectatorial discipline derived from the horror film experience. Earthlings and its viewer reaction videos reinvent the collective performance of terror among theatrical horror film audiences for a documentary context and for online media platforms like YouTube. Earthlings functions as a form of spreadable media in which viewers' horrified reactions are harnessed in the production of knowledge and political commitment.
Perpetrator Trauma as a Possible Solution for Cultural Trauma: The Case of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), 2022
The present article analyzes Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentaries The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) from the perspective of trauma. The aim of this study is to give new approaches that could allow a deeper understanding of such a complex sociopolitical situation as the one that is taking place in nowadays Indonesia. First, I will introduce the term cultural trauma to explain the situation of the victims of the 1965-66 mass killings that took place in Indonesia. Then, I will make use of the concept of the political taboo to better understand how the official narrative imposed by the government has worked, and still works, as some sort of unquestionable myth. Afterward, I will point out that these two concepts give birth to a vicious cycle from which escaping becomes highly unlikely. A possible solution I propose here comes from studying another type of trauma, that of the perpetrator, since, in an indirect way, it can lead to an improvement of cultural trauma. By approaching trauma in a non-moralistic sense, allowing the perpetrator the status of a victim, I intend to highlight the importance of empathy and understanding in the process of healing of not only perpetrator trauma, but also, and more importantly, cultural trauma.
European Journal of Cultural Studies
Oppenheimer describes The Act of Killing as a ‘documentary about the imagination. We are documenting the ways we imagine ourselves, the ways we know ourselves’. This research analyses the documentary films The Act of Killing (Director Oppenheimer, co-directors Christine Cynn and anonymous 2012) and The Look of Silence (director Oppenheimer 2014), and the documentary imaginary. The research combines normally separate sites of analysis in production and audience studies in order to understand the power of documentary and the spectrum of social stories we inhabit. The article asks: how do the films document and imagine fear and impunity in memories of the genocide, and how do audiences engage with this documentary imaginary? Particular focus is paid towards the endings of the two documentary films and how audiences in this study reflect on the absence of justice for the victims of the genocide. Through the empirical research, we take a journey with the director and his film making proc...
The study sets to catagrafy the “violence” phenomenon in actual human society. The diversity of violence types, the education segments, the age segments who aggress and who are aggressed, get more and more extended. The social context is crucial for both the performance and understanding of violence. The term „senseless violence‟ is often heard in cases where a serious violent incident was apparently unprovoked or has emerged from “insignificant” insults or altercation. The notion of “senseless” violence is, by implication, contrasted to some other „reasonable‟ kind, or perhaps suggests that what we find repugnant needs to be placed beyond the bound of sense. Most people probably have a wordless conception of what is a reasonable response to offence or provocation, for example, a fatal shooting following an altercation over a parking place appears inexplicable and senseless. Still many acts of extreme violence occur in response to apparently minor incidents and violence nearly always has “sense”, that is, social meaning, to both perpetrators and victims. The targets of violence are rarely chosen randomly and the victims and perpetrators are frequently already known to each other. In some cases the attribution “senseless” refers to an assumed mental illness or other pathology that might account for otherwise incomprehensible behavior. Human society registered besides direct violence: war, murder, rape, assault, verbal attacks, that is the kind that we physically perceive, another two invisible forms and can‟t be eliminated without eliminating them, cultural violence and structural violence. Direct violence has its roots in cultural and structural violence; then it feeds back and strengthens them. All three forms interact as a triad. Direct violence reinforces structural and cultural violence. We are trapped in a vicious cycle that is now threatening to destroy life on earth.
The Eye of the Beholder: Violence as a Social Process (2011)
2012
A triangular reconstruction of the social dynamics of violence offers a means to bridge the gap between research on the micro- and meso-level dynamics of vi- olent interaction on the one hand, and theories of power and domination on the other. The origins of this approach are found in the phenomenological pro- gramme of social science violence research formulated by German sociologists in the 1990s (Sofsky, von Trotha, Nedelmann, and others). Reconsidering their arguments in the framework of social constructivism, this article reconstructs violence as a triangular process evolving between “performer”, “target” and “ob- server”. Disentangling the dimensions of the somatic and the social shows, however, that these are not the fixed roles of agents, but changeable modes of ex- periencing violence. Violent interaction uses the suffering body to stage a positional asymmetry, i.e. a distinction between strength and weakness, between above and below, which can be exploited for the production and reproduction of social order.
The many faces of violence (FWF P 20300)
The Many Faces of Violence: Toward an Integrative Phenomenological Conception Events of extreme violence, such as suicide-attacks, 9/11, or the “return of a new archaic violence,” have recently renewed attention about physical violence. Interestingly, there has also been a reappearance of concern about social, cultural, and structural violence. However, while all these forms have been subject to special studies, interdisciplinary research is still hampered by the lack of a unifying approach. What is missing is a paradigm that allows us to think these forms of violence as aspects of a unified phenomenon. To resolve this deficit and elaborate an integrative conception of violence, this project will use the phenomenological method. Generally viewed, phenomenology studies how we make sense of the world. Our working hypothesis holds that violence is destructive of sense and, on a more foundational level, our bodily capacities of sense-making. We see embodiment as a multi-level phenomenon, beginning with the physical “I can” and proceeding through various levels of cultural, social, and political practices. Given this correlation, we will analyze how violence destroys the ways we make sense of the world and ourselves according to our traditions and institutions. Because such sense structures delineate our world by forming a series of dependencies, we can be exposed to indirect violence, i.e. symbolic, cultural, and structural. To unfold the implications of our research, we will examine specific examples of cultural and political collapse, so-called “cultures of violence,” “coercive environments,” as well as structures of multiple social exclusion. In this context, we will also address the poietic function of violence and analyze how it is used for the formation and expression of identity, involving both individuals and collectivities. As to the traditional equation of sovereignty and freedom, expressions of identity imply determinations of the other in terms of irrationality and threat that can be used to justify one’s own violence. In uncovering this circle of violence and counter-violence, we, finally, seek to rethink our political categories beyond the logic of confrontation that rests upon essentialist misconceptions of our communal being. To construct an integrative approach to violence, our research will present a non-subjectivist phenomenology that enables us to see how violence is destructive of sense. In testing this hypothesis on historic, sociological and anthropological materials, we will ground our research empirically. Thus, we will, in the last analysis, elaborate a methodology for interdisciplinary research that will foster a deeper understanding of the many interrelated faces of violence. Project underwritten by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF P 20300) (1.11.2007 - 30.06.2011)