University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

Home , Chronicle of an Escape, Le Petit Soldat, Siege of Sarajevo, Todd Haynes

THE CINEMA OF ATROCITIES: TORTURE AND STATE VIOLENCE ON FILM

ALLISON M. RITTMAYER

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2013

To my mother, my saja and Caleb

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to start by thanking my chair, Maureen Turim for her mentorship and friendship during my four years at the University of Florida. Since the seminar I took with her during my first semester through my job search and the completion of this project, she has offered her advice and support in all of my endeavors. I thank my committee members Barbara Mennel, Scott Nygren, and Martin Sorbille for their encouragement and insight throughout this process. I have truly enjoyed the productive discussions we engaged in during our meetings. I am especially grateful to Barbara for her extensive meticulous feedback on my writing.

I thank the faculty and staff of the Department of English for their support during my graduate studies at UF, and for ensuring that all official business proceeded smoothly. I am also indebted to my friends near and far, without whom I would not have survived graduate school. I thank Beth Dixon, Tamar Ditzian and Marina

Hassapopoulou for their encouragement (and commiseration); Georg Koszulinski for being an eternal optimist; Janelle Flanagan and Val Shulman for being my champions; and Harriet Pollack, John Westbrook, and Molly Clay for being my cheering section in

Lewisburg.

Most importantly, and with the deepest gratitude I thank my family for supporting all of my intellectual endeavors. I am grateful to Caleb Sheaffer for following me down here into the swamp. He deserves a medal for working as my perpetual editor and proofreader, challenging my ideas, and loving me through it all. I thank my mother,

Cathy Burton, for having faith in me and always being excited about my academic pursuits. I thank my saja, my sister, Kate Rittmayer for being able to make me laugh no

matter what. I thank them both for always being just a call or text away. I could not have achieved my goals without you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 8

ABSTRACT ...... 13

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 15

Ethics and Its Uses ...... 21 On Lévinas and Derrida ...... 25 Ethics and Politics ...... 30 The Filmmaker’s Role ...... 34 Overview ...... 36

2 THE CLOSE-UP AND THE “GAZE OF THE OTHER UPON ME” ...... 40

Facing the Viewer ...... 46 Overwhelming Faciality ...... 50 Looking Away ...... 53

3 BROKEN BODIES ...... 66

Watching Torture ...... 69 Mediated Encounters with State Violence...... 80 News Media Images ...... 81 Guided Encounters ...... 85 The Self/Body Split ...... 97

4 THE UNSEEN AND THE UNSEEABLE: NOT SHOWING VIOLENCE...... 121

The Unseen ...... 123 Interlude ...... 134 The Unseeable ...... 144

5 THROUGH A FAMILIAR MAZE: THE DISTORTION OF BANAL SPACES IN SCENES OF TORTURE ...... 159

Spatial and Lexical Distortions of Imprisonment ...... 160 Invading the Home ...... 165 The Carnivalesque and the Absurd on the Frontlines ...... 168

6 CONCLUSION: HAUNTINGS, THE CONTINUED IMPERATIVE ...... 195

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 203

FILMOGRAPHY ...... 203 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 206

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 211

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

2-1 The first image of Bobby Sands’ face. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD...... 60

2-2 Sands looks into the camera. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD...... 60

2-3 Sands dying. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD. ... 61

2-4 Maintaining the framing. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD...... 61

2-5 Faces of women in Grbavica. Grbavica the and of My Dreams. Dir. asmila bani . Strand Releasing Home ideo . D D...... 62

2-6 Esma looks into the camera at the end of the opening scene. Grbavica the and of My Dreams. Dir. asmila bani . Strand Releasing Home ideo 2007. DVD...... 62

2-7 Esma cries as she testifies to her experiences. Grbavica the and of My Dreams. Dir. asmila bani . Strand Releasing Home ideo . D D...... 63

2-8 Bruno looks away in Le Petit Soldat. Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier]. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Fox Lorber, 2001. DVD...... 63

2-9 Bruno looks down. Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier]. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Fox Lorber, 2001. DVD...... 64

2-10 Bruno avoids the camera. Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier]. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Fox Lorber, 2001. DVD...... 64

2-11 Bruno finally looks into the camera. Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier]. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Fox Lorber, 2001. DVD...... 65

3-1 Electrocution of the eye in State of Siege. State of Siege. Dir. Costa-Gavras. Columbia Pictures Home Entertainment, 1980. VHS...... 109

3-2 Former prisoner demonstrates the “crab position” in Hidden Agenda. Hidden Agenda. Dir. Ken Loach. MGM Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD...... 109

3-3 Anne looks at pictures from Bosnia in Before the Rain. Before the Rain. Dir. Milcho Manchevski. Criterion Collection, 2008. DVD...... 110

3-4 Anne spills her coffee in a picture of a woman in an under-breast corset. Before the Rain. Dir. Milcho Manchevski. Criterion Collection, 2008. DVD...... 110

3-5 News footage from a concentration camp in Welcome to Sarajevo. Welcome to Sarajevo. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2004...... 111

3-6 News footage of men at a concentration camp. Welcome to Sarajevo. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2004...... 111

3-7 Prison guards throw Davey into the gauntlet in Hunger. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD...... 112

3-8 Riot police beat Davey in the gauntlet. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD...... 112

3-9 A young riot police member stands aside while the prisoners are probed in Hunger. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD...... 113

3-10 The young riot police officer cries alone in the middle of the violence. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD...... 113

3-11 The young riot police officer is framed in a split screen, opposite an image of the gauntlet. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD. .. 114

3-12 Bobby Sands is shown on the same half of the screen as the riot police officer after he has been beaten. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD...... 114

3-13 Booby-trapped bodies in Warriors. Warriors Bosni . Dir.Peter Kosminsky. Memphis Belle, 2000. DVD...... 115

3-14 t. Feely brushes the hair out of the face of Almira’s corpse. Warriors Bosni 1992. Dir.Peter Kosminsky. Memphis Belle, 2000. DVD...... 115

3-15 Blood and pus seep out of the truck that Pte. James will climb into. Warriors Bosni . Dir.Peter osminsky. Memphis Belle . D D...... 116

3-16 Damien watches as Black and Tans attack Sinead and her family in The Wind that Shakes the Barley. The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Dir. Ken Loach. Genius Entertainment, 2007. DVD...... 116

3-17 Damien sees the Black and Tans shearing Sinead’s head. The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Dir. Ken Loach. Genius Entertainment, 2007. DVD...... 117

3-18 Damien and Sinead reunited. The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Dir. Ken Loach. Genius Entertainment, 2007. DVD...... 117

3-19 Damien tries to take Teddy’s place. The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Dir. Ken Loach. Genius Entertainment, 2007. DVD...... 118

3-20 We see from Teddy’s point of view as his thumb nail is pulled out. The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Dir. Ken Loach. Genius Entertainment, 2007. DVD. ... 118

3-21 Damien covers his head in the mock execution. The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Dir. Ken Loach. Genius Entertainment, 2007. DVD...... 119

3-22 The camera retreats as Claudio thinks during his torture in Chronicle of an Escape. Chronicle of an Escape . Dir. Israel Adrián Caetano. Genius Products, 2008. DVD...... 119

3-23 Samira sees a fly in As If I Am Not There. As if I Am Not There. Dir. Juanita Wilson. Wide Eye Films: Element Pictures, 2011. DVD...... 120

3-24 Samira’s unharmed double watches as the men urinate on her. As if I Am Not There. Dir. Juanita Wilson. Wide Eye Films: Element Pictures, 2011. DVD...... 120

4-1 Bosnians about to be executed, seen in flashback, in Behind Enemy Lines. Behind Enemy Lines. Dir. John Moore. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD...... 152

4-2 Lt. Burnett emerges from the pile of bodies. Behind Enemy Lines. Dir. John Moore. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD...... 152

4-3 A man chases down one of the nuns in Salvador. Salvador. Dir. Oliver Stone. MGM Home Entertainment, 2001. DVD...... 153

4-4 Cathy Moore’s rapist. Salvador. Dir. Oliver Stone. MGM Home Entertainment, 2001. DVD...... 153

4-5 Cathy Moore’s body is exhumed. Salvador. Dir. Oliver Stone. MGM Home Entertainment, 2001. DVD...... 154

4-6 One of only two images of Charles Horman during his captivity in Missing. Missing. Dir. Costa-Gavras. Criterion Collection, 2008. DVD...... 154

4-7 The second image of Charles Horman. Missing. Dir. Costa-Gavras. Criterion Collection, 2008. DVD...... 155

4-8 Henri Charlegue is about to be electrocuted for the first time in La Question. La Question. Dir. Laurent Heynemann. Doriane Films, 2003. DVD...... 155

4-9 The shot cuts to this exterior shot before we see Henri’s torture. La Question. Dir. Laurent Heynemann. Doriane Films, 2003. DVD...... 156

4-10 An F N member chains Bruno’s right hand to the faucet. Still from the series of swish pans in Le Petit Soldat. Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier]. Dir. Jean- Luc Godard. Fox Lorber, 2001. DVD...... 156

4-11 A slow pan across the apartment’s exterior during a monologue by Bruno. Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier]. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Fox Lorber, 2001. DVD...... 157

4-12 Ana tells Alicia about her rape and imprisonment in La Historia Oficial. La Historia Oficial. Dir. Luis Puenzo. Koch Lorber Films, 2004. DVD...... 157

4-13 The camera faces Paulina as she tells her husband how Dr. Miranda raped her while playing Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden.” Death and the Maiden. Dir. Roman Polanski. New Line Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD...... 158

5-1 Image of the Institutio Espacio para la Memoria. Espacio Memoria. Instituto Espacio para la Memoria. Web. 8 Sept. 2008...... 184

5-2 Strong lines as Maria is brought into the prison in Garage Olimpo. Garage Olimpo. Dir. Marco Bechis. Videoteca Foco, 2001. VHS...... 184

5-3 Maria is led down one of the garage’s halls. Garage Olimpo. Dir. Marco Bechis. Videoteca Foco, 2001. VHS...... 185

5-4 Pablo is led to room 4 to undergo torture in La Noche de los Lápices. Night of the Pencils [La Noche de los Lápices]. Video Archives, 1999. DVD...... 185

5-5 Pablo pressed against a mattress in room 4. Night of the Pencils [La Noche de los Lápices]. Dir. H ctor Oli era. Latin American Video Archives, 1999. DVD...... 186

5-6 Pablo experiences the “Truth Machine.” Night of the Pencils [La Noche de los Lápices]. Dir. H ctor Oli era. atin American ideo Archi es . D D...... 186

5-7 Alicia’s husband slams her head against the doorframe while their daughter’s toys can be seen in the background in La Historia Oficial. La Historia Oficial. Dir. Luis Puenzo. Koch Lorber Films, 2004. DVD...... 187

5-8 Roberto closes his daughter’s sticker-co ered door on Alicia’s hand. La Historia Oficial. Dir. Luis Puenzo. Koch Lorber Films, 2004. DVD...... 187

5-9 Mrs. Tamburrini on the floor at the beginning of Chronicle of an Escape. Dir. Israel Adrián Caetano. Genius Products, 2008. DVD...... 188

5-10 Mrs. Tamburrini’s captor at mid-level, smoking on the couch. Chron Dir. Israel Adrián Caetano. Genius Products, 2008. DVD...... 188

5-11 Mrs. Tamburrini behind her cage. Fuga]. Dir. Israel Adrián Caetano. Genius Products, 2008. DVD...... 189

5-12 In the first torture sequence in ’ I , the torture stops when Lt. Terrien enters. ’ I Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD...... 189

5-13 In the second sequence, Lt. Terrien begs the old man to talk before taking over the electrocution. ’ I Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD...... 190

5-14 t. Terrien’s reaction when he realizes that he has killed the old man. ’ I Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD...... 190

5-15 Sgt. Dougnac aims his gun at Lt. Terrien at the end of the second torture sequence. ’ I Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD...... 191

5-16 Sgt. Dougnac forces Sayeed to electrocute him as he attempts suicide by proxy. ’ I Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD. 191

5-17 Lt. Terrien enters the room, and Sgt. Dougnac points his gun at Terrien for the second time. ’ I Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD...... 192

5-18 Terrien, Sayeed, and another soldier prevent Sgt. Dougnac from shooting himself in the head. ’ I Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD...... 192

5-19 Lt. Terrien smiles as he dies, once he sees Amar emerge from the group of Algerians. ’ I Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD...... 193

5-20 One Bosnian soldier reads about the genocide in Rwanda in N M ’ d No Man's Land [Nicija Zemlja]. Dir. Danis Tanovic. MGM DVD, 2002. DVD. ... 193

5-21 Ciki and Nino try to attract attention so they will be rescued, but their plan fails since neither the Bosnians nor the Serbs can tell whose side the two are on. No Man's Land [Nicija Zemlja]. Dir. Danis Tanovic. MGM DVD, 2002. DVD...... 194

5-22 An image of the sun setting over the Bosnian countryside dissolves over the final image of Cera, abandoned in the trench. No Man's Land [Nicija Zemlja]. Dir. Danis Tanovic. MGM DVD, 2002. DVD...... 194

6-1 The haunting of Buenos Aires in the final shot of Aparecidos. Aparecidos [The Appeared]. Dir. Paco Cabezas. IFC Films, 2007. DVD...... 202

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

THE CINEMA OF ATROCITIES: TORTURE AND STATE VIOLENCE ON FILM

Allison M. Rittmayer

August 2013

Chair: Maureen Turim Major: English

This dissertation theorizes the ethics and politics of representing torture and state violence in historical fiction films. I focus on images of historical violence enacted by military dictatorships and colonial regimes, taking examples from over 60 films that depict torture as it occurred in the Algerian War for Independence Argentina’s Dirty

War, and the Bosnian War. My work is unique in that I combine perspectives from ethics, trauma studies, and ideological criticism to address the position of historical fiction film between documentary and complete fiction. This approach is vital to studying images of torture because they depict the historically “unseen ” raising ethical questions about political discourse, historical memory, and the filmmaker’s own attempts at filling in the gaps. Through close analysis of different strategies for filming torture, I argue that filmmakers who are opposed to the use of torture depict it in their films in order to testify to the experiences of the victims and to participate in the healing of historical wounds.

The visual structure of torture scenes conveys the physical and mental experience of undergoing torture, the act of remembering, and the impact of state violence on families.

I use Emmanuel Lé inas’ writings on ethics to explore how films use specific techniques to lead the viewer to feel the impossibility of his or her ethical situation: the inability to

change a film’s course. This can induce to ethical reflection, which circumvents passive spectatorship. I argue that techniques such as the close-up, montage, ellipsis, and monologues allow viewers to reflect on what they are seeing, thus moving these images of violence beyond mere spectacle to being an agent of the ethical.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

—Article 1.1, the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, December 10, 1984

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

—Article 2.2, the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, December 10, 1984

Nonetheless, the United States understands that a State Party could not through its domestic sanctions defeat the object and purpose of the Convention to prohibit torture.

—Reservations by the United States of America on the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment upon ratification October 24, 1994, The United Nations Treaty Collection

The use of torture and instances of state violence have raised some of the most poignant ethical questions of the 20th and early 21st century, and with the limited release of Zero Dark Thirty on December 19, 2012 the representation of these acts in specifically historical fiction films have come under increased critical scrutiny. My own investigation of this topic began shortly after the release of the Abu Grahib photos and

ohn Yoo’s torture memos in 2004. I began to question how we are supposed to view restagings of historical violence, and what it means to show those acts in the light of the

real, lived experience of torture and state violence. This dissertation is the culmination of that research, and in it I theorize the ethics and politics of representing torture and state violence in historical fiction films. I focus on films about the violence enacted by military dictatorships and colonial regimes, drawing my examples primarily from films about the Algerian War for Independence (1954-1962), the Troubles in Northern Ireland

(1966- 8) Argentina’s Dirty War ( 6-1983), and the Bosnian War (1992-1995), with reference to other related conflicts. Filmmakers who address these conflicts tend to make fiction films (often dramas or thrillers) based on general historical events and details gathered from firsthand accounts, as is the case with Le Petit Soldat (dir. Jean-

Luc Godard, 1960, France), La Historia Oficial (dir. Luis Puenzo, 1985, Argentina),

Garage Olimpo (dir. Marco Bechis, 1999, Argentina, Italy, France), and The Wind that

Shakes the Barley (dir. Ken Loach, 2006, Ireland, UK). Other directors make docudramas that present stylized reenactments of firsthand experiences, such as La

Question (dir. Laurent Heynemann, 1977, France), La Noche de los Lápices (dir. Héctor

Olivera, 1986, Argentina), and Missing (dir. Costa-Gavras, 1982, USA). Still other films address these conflicts in other ways, be they absurdist meditations (N M ’ d, dir. Danis Tanovic, 2001, Bosnia and Herzegovina, France, Slovenia) or ghost stories

(Aparecidos, dir. Paco Cabezas, 2007, Argentina, Spain, Sweden).

These films represent torture and other instances of state violence in various ways; however, they have in common the exploration of how to represent state violence without replicating the objectification, exploitation, and sadism inherent in the violent acts being depicted. This issue is central to many critiques of documentary images of atrocities. Yet it has not been theorized in regards to narrative fiction film. Many critics

and scholars dismiss narrative fiction as inherently too profit-driven to be anything but exploitative of the real life victims and emotionally manipulative of audiences. Yet, documentary photographs and footage are emotionally manipulative, while fiction filmmakers often act on the same ethical and political imperatives as documentarians when addressing instances of state violence. The filmmakers act on an ethical commitment to tell the victims’ stories which becomes a political concern because he or she must combat the silence imposed by the governments that perpetrated the crimes, and expose the corrupt nature of their power.

Although some scholars would view ethical criticism as separate from ideological criticism, both are equally necessary when directors make films about state violence that has otherwise been suppressed in dominant historical, political, or popular narratives. While ideological criticism is well established, ethics and trauma studies are still in the early phases of their development as critical approaches to understanding film. As a discipline and a theoretical approach, trauma studies, has its roots in the

Holocaust. Studies on the traumatic effects of the Holocaust appeared as early as

19681 and increased during the s and ’8 s as sur i ors continued to gi e accounts of their experiences in different media. Scholars across many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences sought to understand the effects of the Holocaust on memory, creative processes, and everyday life. As Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider argue around this time a “cosmopolitanization of Holocaust memory” started taking place in which the Holocaust’s “meanings e ol e[d] from the encounters of global interpretations and local sensibilities.…These cosmopolitanized memories refer to concrete social spaces that are characterized by a high degree of reflexivity and the

1 See de Wind, Jaffe, Krystal, Rappaport, and Simenauer.

ongoing encounter with different cultures” ( ). I hold that this cosmopolitanization precipitated the expansion of trauma studies to include other atrocities—particularly the

Dirty War in Argentina and the Bosnian War—as the Holocaust increasingly became “a moral touchstone in an age of uncertainty and the absence of master ideological narrati es” after the end of the Cold War ( 3). As a result there has been an international call to action against genocide and other forms of state violence because

“the Holocaust future (and not the past) is now considered in absolutely uni ersal terms it can happen to anyone at any time and e eryone is responsible” ( ).

E. Ann aplan’s book Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (Rutgers UP, 2005) provides a strong synthesis of how trauma studies can be used in film and visual media.2 aplan’s book examines a ariety of films including Spellbound (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1945, USA), Dances with Wolves (dir. Kevin

Costner, 1990, USA, UK), Where the Green Ants Dream (dir. Werner Herzog, 1984,

West Germany, Australia), Meshes of the Afternoon (dir. Maya Deren, Alexander

Hammid, 1943, USA), and Night Cries—A Rural Tragedy (dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1990,

Australia), as well as photographs from World War II, September 11th, and the Iraq War.

In addition to examining the psychological processes involved in films that address traumatic experiences, Kaplan analyzes the underlying ideologies of such films. She also traces a broad genealogy for trauma studies from its origins in Freud’s writings through current work in the humanities, psychiatry, and neuroscience.

Kaplan explains the emergence of trauma studies in the humanities by linking two important events in the 1980s: the official recognition of Post-Traumatic Stress

2 The “and iterature” in aplan’s title refers to one chapter on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Marguerite Duras’s La Douleur and Sarah ofman’s Rue Ordener, Rue Labat.

Disorder (PTSD) as a psychological diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and the creation of the Fortunoff Video Archive Project to house and exhibit recordings of Holocaust sur i ors’ stories (33). In the s the term

PTSD gained wider exposure through the accounts of Vietnam War veterans (32-33).

Humanities scholars turned to the DSM definitions of PTSD and trauma to understand the effects of trauma on an indi idual’s thought processes and interactions with the world (34). This understanding was used as a way to analyze the accounts of trauma survivors, and fictional stories about traumatic experiences. The mid-1990s saw the publication of such central texts as Cathy Caruth’s edited collection Trauma:

Explorations in Memory (Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) and her book Unclaimed

Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), Shoshana

Felman and Dori aub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (Routledge ) and Dominick aCapra’s Representing the Holocaust:

History, Theory, Trauma (Cornell UP, 1994). Eventually, the psychological underpinnings of trauma studies in the humanities encompassed the ways in which literature, art, music, and film can be used by trauma survivors to process their experiences—the topic of several chapters in aplan’s book and Frances Guerin and

Roger Hallas’s collection The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual

Culture (Wallflower, 2007).

Another important text for my work has been isa Downing and ibby Saxton’s book Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (Routledge, 2009), which traces major trends in ethics and gives a brief critique of existing work in the field. Their book applies ethics to a variety of films across genres, time periods, and nations. Because much

scholarship already examines ethics in relation to documentary films, Downing and

Saxton’s goal is to show how ethics can be used to examine a wide ariety of narrati e fiction films; thus, they predominantly focus on fictional works. My hope is that by combining these strands of ethical film criticism that address documentary with those that address fiction films, ethical criticism can be specifically applied to historical fictions.

Downing and Saxton also introduce the term “ethico-political” as a direct response to those who accuse ethical criticism of “e acuating the political significance of the phenomena it analyses” ( ). They define the ethico-political as “the recognition that ethics and politics are mutually implicated and enabling yet irreducible to one another”

(11). In other words, ethical questions are implied in political questions, and vice versa.

This is a central concept in my work as I weave together the political and ethical implications of torture scenes.

My own study differs from current film scholarship on trauma and ethics in several ways; first, it focuses on torture and other acts of state violence as opposed to war or violence in general. Torture is often represented on film as staged violence; torture is violence carried out with precision, as opposed to the chaos of a battle or a shoot-out. Additionally, scenes of torture place greater emphasis on the tensions between individual trauma and collective trauma. With these differences in mind, scenes of torture must be analyzed separately from other scenes of violence. My work uniquely focuses on historical fiction films—fiction films that are based in real conflicts.

Historical fiction films carry with them a unique set of ethical questions; they deal with stories that have actually been lived through to some capacity. Making films based on lived experience raises questions of fidelity, respect, responsibility, testimony, and

justice that do not apply to other narratives in the same way. In this respect, historical fictions raise many of the same ethical questions as documentaries do. However, the position of historical fictions on the threshold of truth (historical reality) and fiction

(narrative) means that they must be analyzed with special attention to the ethical questions that arise from the clashes between these two narrative modes. Finally, combining ethical, ideological, and trauma studies approaches will give my work a distinct theoretical approach. By combining these three analytical modes, I will be able to examine the ethical questions surrounding filming and viewing torture, the political stakes in ol ed in telling these stories and film’s relationship to representing understanding, and working through trauma.

Ethics and Its Uses

Before proceeding, it is useful to examine role ethics can play in film analysis and criticism. Despite the abundance of scholarship on film and philosophy, existing scholarship on film and ethics has not yet provided such an extended inquiry. Even Lisa

Downing and ibby Saxton’s excellent book spends little time in its introduction on this central question, instead delving into an overview of major trends in ethics and a brief critique of existing work in the field. Downing and Saxton do not give a strong sense of the usefulness of ethics to Film Studies, but rather focus on the ways in which they hope to engage with ethics in their work. Downing and Saxton also introduce the term

“ethico-political” in their introduction but again only gi e a brief definition of what this means without fully examining the interrelatedness of ethics and politics, and the ways the ethico-political can be put to use in Film Studies. This essay hopes to give a fuller explanation of the ways both ethics and the ethico-political can be of use to film scholars.

Existing scholarship on film and ethics, as Downing and Saxton point out is limited, and has predominantly appeared in the journal Film-Philosophy, in addition to several recent book-length volumes.3 Most of these contributions focus on a single genre, filmmaker, or national cinema. Downing and Saxton’s book applies ethics to a variety of films across genres, time periods, and nations. However, their use of ethics sometimes gets lost in their analyses, or seems to only serve the purpose of tying together different strands of their argument in each chapter’s conclusion. What I am seeking is a fuller integration of ethics into the act of film analysis, at both the formal and narrative levels.

My invocation of ethics and the ethico-political in this dissertation also marks another important point of departure from Downing and Saxton, and from previous scholarship on film and ethics. Because much scholarship already examines ethics in relation to documentary films Downing and Saxton’s goal is to show how ethics can be used to examine a wide variety of narrative fiction films; thus, they predominantly focus on wholly fictional works. Here, I bring ethical criticism to bear on historical fictions.

Historical fiction films carry with them a unique set of ethical questions because they deal with stories that have actually been lived through to some capacity. Making films based on lived experience raises questions of fidelity, respect, responsibility, testimony and justice that do not apply to other narratives in the same way. In this respect, historical fictions raise many of the same ethical questions that documentaries raise.

However, the unique position of historical fictions on the threshold of truth (historical reality) and fiction (narrative) means that they must be analyzed differently and with

3 This does not include the much larger number of works that address ethics or morality in a specifically religious context or the popular “and Philosophy” series published by the Uni ersity of entucky Press.

special attention to the ethical questions that arise from the clashes between these two modes.

First, it is necessary to briefly define what is meant by ethics in the context of this dissertation. Here, ethics should not be taken to mean the process of forming positive or negative value judgments based on a specific moral code—this is what I would like to call the “popular notion” of ethics. Rather ethics should be understood as the discursi e process of negotiating the encounter between the self and the Other(s) and its inherent power dynamic. This negotiation takes the form of “self-questioning that continually rearticulates boundaries norms sel es and ‘others’” (Garber Hanssen and Walkowitz viii). This definition of ethics comes out of poststructuralist philosophy and is related to the work of thinkers as diverse as Alain Badiou, Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques

Lacan, Lévinas and Sla oj ižek. While some may focus more on the responsibility toward the Other (Lévinas, Derrida) and some on the responsibility toward the self

( acan Foucault ižek) each of these philosophers has an approach to ethics that generally falls under the above definition.

Ethics also provides me with a framework for examining how specific shots and scenes provide an ethical way of viewing or provoke ethical questions in the viewer.

This formal type of ethical analysis allows the critic to move beyond thematic concerns, or the overall ethical implications of a given film, and to look at the ways in which film, as a specifically audio-visual medium, can address ethical questions. Edith Wyschogrod introduces the idea that anyone seeking to tell a story about the past becomes a historian, whether this telling is pursued in a documentary or fictive mode. In An Ethics

of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others (U Chicago P, 1998), she writes,

What is it that must precede the conveying of history? Must there not be the declaration of a double passion, an eros for the past and an ardor for the others in whose name there is a felt urgency to speak? To convey that- which-was in the light of this passion is to become a historian. Because the past is irrecoverable and the others in whose stead the historian speaks are dead, unknowable, she cannot hope that her passion will be reciprocated. To be a historian then is to accept the destiny of the spurned lover—to write, photograph, film, televise, archive, and simulate the past not merely as its memory bank but as binding oneself by a promise to the dead to tell the truth about the past. (xi)

Wyschogrod concei es of the “con eying of history” in any form as an ethical relation between the historian (as writer, photographer, director, archivist, etc.) and the Others whose story he or she is telling. The historian’s responsibility takes the form of “the promise to tell the truth about the past.” Wyschogrod holds that it is still possible to tell the truth e en when the past is “simulated ” not just documented. I take this to mean any form of simulated reconstruction, not just the piecing together of historical artifacts and documents, but the reconstruction that takes place in writing and directing a film.

This goes beyond representations of the past based on historical research done in preparation for a film and includes the more intangible aspects of a film—the dialogue and gestures of characters, lighting, sound, color—that may be unverifiable, and aspects of film form that do not have a direct correlation to lived experience—framing, camera angles, editing, the use of music, etc. These elements of film form are implicated in the telling of the truth about the past in that they still affect the story being told and the way that the viewer understands or reacts to that story.

To this extent, ethics can be used to analyze the role of a film’s director in creating and shaping the narrative, constructing the characters, and controlling the

actors. The director-actor power dynamic creates an ethical relation between the two whereby the director must take responsibility for the treatment of his or her actors and not expose them to undue oppression or exploitation both in production and in the final presentation of the images.4 The director must always keep the humanity of the actors in mind, just as the documentarian is expected to respect and give a just depiction of his or her subjects. The responsibility of a director toward his or her actors then extends into the depiction of the characters being played. As Wyschogrod has stated, the historian is compelled to tell the truth about his or her subjects. In film, both the director and the actor act as the historians telling the story of a given character. Both the actor and the director must recognize the humanity of the character and strive for a just portrayal that is not exploitati e of the character’s experience. The narrati e should also acknowledge the essential difference of the character-as-Other while still allowing for viewer identification in the hope of fostering an understanding and sense of responsibility in the viewer that goes beyond mere sympathy.

On Lévinas and Derrida

I have chosen to use the work of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida in my analysis of the representation of torture and state violence for several reasons. First, their theorization of an ethics of the Other is well suited to analyzing cinematic encounters. It also allows for a strong critique of the ideological context that situates the

Other as other and the place of oppression in film and in history. Additionally, Lévinas and Derrida have both engaged with cinematic language, if not with film directly,5 through their use of terms such as the face, the gaze, mourning, testimony, the trace,

4 Samuel Beckett’s play Catastrophe (1982), written for then-imprisoned Vaclav Havel, is a meditation on the similarities between the manipulation of actors by directors and torture. 5 See Brunette and Wills, and Derrida “Le cin ma et ses fantômes.”

and the ghost or haunting. Lévinas and Derrida are also important in that their work explicitly addresses political and ideological issues, and is exemplary of the connections to be made between ethics and politics. Lastly, these two philosophers share an interesting bond Derrida was one of the first commentators on Lévinas’ work offering critical readings that expose important tensions in Lévinas’ attempt to depart from traditional, egocentric notions of ethics.

Lévinas’ phenomenological approach to an ethics of the Other makes his work especially applicable to my research. Lévinas bases ethics on the subjective experience of the self’s encounter with the Other and the self-interrogation that takes place as a result of this encounter. This framework can be translated to film viewership. In this mode, the viewer takes the place of the self, while the actor and character on-screen take the place of the Other. Lévinas’ writings on ethics pro ide another way of examining the subjective encounter with screen images. The experience of watching a film becomes an ethical encounter and should allow for ethical reflection and analysis. It is Lévinas’ theorization of an ethics of the Other that allows his work to be incorporated in analyses of film form and spectatorship, rather than simply using his work as a critical lens through which thematic issues can be addressed. It is just as important to analyze the structure of the encounter of the self with the Other, meaning the ways in which formal aspects of a shot or scene position and frame the Other for viewing, as it is to examine the possible outcomes of such an encounter.

Lévinasian ethics are also important to my work because they are based on power relations and a recognition of difference, rather than on explicit delineations of what is good and what is evil. Recognizing that the self has power over the Other

because we understand the self and do not understand the Other is key to Lévinas’ ethical encounter. This power relation is also at work in the spectator-character relation of film viewing.6 The viewer has the power of the gaze and the character exists only in that there is an audience for the film. Since Lévinas says that the self must always act for and out of responsibility to the Other, it can be said that there is an ethical dimension to the act of film viewing. In other words, the viewer, upon entering into a theater or pressing play on a recording, has an obligation to watch the film, to allow the character to exist for the duration of the feature. The iewer is obligated to let the Other’s story be told. The narrative and form of a film can then make additional ethical demands on the spectator by framing the character in a certain way and by taking on issues of oppression, exploitation, or suffering. Any oppression a film character experiences heightens the iewer’s responsibility because he or she has become a third party to that oppression.

This is perhaps where Lévinas becomes most useful to my critique of representations of torture and state iolence and where Derrida’s work is also rele ant.

Traditional views of the spectator as a third party to on-screen violence or oppression generally argue that the structure of the camera’s gaze and the narrati e hold the viewer captive, making him or her passive and complicit in whatever is taking place on- screen by virtue of his or her inability to intervene. Lévinas argues that it is the impossibility of understanding, acting, or intervening that opens the space for ethical reflection. That is to say that the self is not passive when confronted with the gaze of the

Other and that the self must be put in this impossible situation in order to think about how to act ethically—even if that act cannot actually be carried out. That is precisely the

6 I will address the place of the director in ethical film analysis later in this chapter.

position of the film viewer—unable to act, but nonetheless compelled to act, or at least to contemplate the possibility of acting on the behalf of the screen-Other.

In critiquing Lévinas, Derrida raises the question of how responsibility to the ultimate Other—God—can conflict with the responsibility toward other human beings in

The Gift of Death (1999). This is not an unwarranted question, given the grounding of

Lévinas’ thought in udaic theology. For Derrida this conflict creates an impasse in making ethical decisions. How does one decide between acting for God and acting for another human when the two choices conflict? Derrida uses this question (based on a reading of God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac) to interrogate the place of women in ethics, arguing that ethics has a gendered genealogy and that women have been left out, or sacrificed by, many historical considerations of ethics.

This observation points to the need to consider the place of woman in ethical discourse, and echoes recent developments in feminist ethics that examine the role of the woman as the helper or caregiver. For Alison M. Jaggar, traditional ethics has persistently belittled traits associated with women including “interdependence community connection, sharing, emotion, body, trust, absence of hierarchy, nature, immanence, process joy peace and life ” and ignored “female” moral reasoning that emphasizes relationships and responsibilities (363-4). Lévinas does not exclude women from his discourse, and indeed his theorization of the Other would seem to include gender difference. His writings are centered on the type interdependence, community, relationships, and responsibility that feminist ethics want to reclaim. Lévinasian ethics embraces women and gives them equal status in the consideration of the encounter of the self with the Other. This difference in Lévinas’ philosophy will be important in later

chapters where I address violence against women. And yet, Lévinas’ work is still implicated in the Western tradition of ethics that alternately marginalized, demonized, and idolized women.

In “ iolence and Metaphysics ” a commentary on Lévinas’ work Derrida emphasizes the philosophical inheritance of the term “ethics” while also marking

Lévinas’ break with the Western tradition of “moral philosophy.” There seems to ha e been a shift in the mid-20th century from referring to this area of philosophical inquiry as

“moral philosophy” to calling it “ethics.” I ha e found no concrete reason for the shift in terms, but I suspect it is related to Lévinas’ redefinition of the term ethics and Derrida’s commentary on this difference. For Lévinas, ethics is not a question of deciding between good and evil. Rather, it is completely separate from popular notions of morality and any concept of judgment. There is no judgment for Lévinas, only the imperative to act in the interests of the Other. Lévinas’ conception of ethics is based on phenomenology; what determines ethical action is the subjective experience of the self’s encounter with the Other and the ensuing self-interrogation. The only universal aspect of Lévinasian ethics is its imperative to act for the Other. Details of the self-Other encounter are determined by individual subjective experience. Thus Lévinas’ ethics depart from previous attempts at theorizing morality because he refuses absolutes as precepts for moral judgment. He is also not concerned with personal goodness, freedom, or pleasure. Lévinasian ethics are not centered on the self, despite the fact that it is the self who acts. It is never the self who benefits from the ethical encounter for

Lévinas, but the Other.

Ethics and Politics

Lévinas makes observations on the perceived antagonism between morality and politics in a series of passages in Totality and Infinity (Duquesne UP, 1969). He argues that morality and politics only conflict in their involvement in peace and war. The possibility of peace seems to separate morality from politics, and he argues that such a separation is only possible when “the certitude of peace dominates the e idence of war”

(22). For Lévinas this means that there would be a redefinition of “being” that would establish identity anew, as identity had previously been attached to the differences that are manipulated in war, leaving human beings alienated from each other. As an utopian ideal this “certitude of peace” remo es this alienation by erasing all old identities wrapped up in history’s conflicts and by eliminating the notion of “being” as defined by actions and relations. In the absence of this utopic peace, Lévinas continues, morality does not conflict with politics in its adherence to “functions of prudence or the canons of the beautiful to proclaim itself unconditional and uni ersal” ( ). For Lévinas, philosophers “found morality on politics” in the absence of certain peace—a peace he says is only guaranteed by the coming of the messiah and the final judgment of humanity when “all the causes are ready to be heard” ( 3). Essentially there is no antagonism between morality and politics because Western morality is only a function of politics. As Lévinas writes morality “plays out its stakes in ancient and present-day wars” ( ). The only way to separate morality from politics is to remo e conflict from the equation. In a Judeo-Christian context, this is only possible in the final judgment by the ultimate Other, God. Lévinas’ ethics of the Other can be seen as working toward a separation of morality and politics in his rejection of categories of goodness. But in that

he recognizes the influence of difference in the self’s encounter with the Other he is still working within existing notions of being and identity.

Derrida follows Lévinas’ idea of the interdependence of morality and politics in less theological terms, when he writes in Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas (Stanford UP,

) “ et us assume that one cannot deduce from Lévinas’ ethical discourse on hospitality a law and a politics” ( ). Derrida calls this untranslatability a hiatus in the full sense of the word. It is not a break or a lack, but a gap in the sense of an opening through which we are “require[d] to think law and politics otherwise” ( -21). For

Derrida this means that “decisions must be made and a responsibility as we say taken without an ontological foundation” ( ). To put it another way Derrida asserts that there is no set of laws or judicial precepts that exist a priori that must be considered in making a decision. Derrida adds that “the absence of a law or politics in the strict and determined sense of these terms would be just an illusion ” because they do not exist a priori and there is no reason for them to (21). When faced with the illusory nature of law and politics Derrida argues that “a return to the conditions of responsibility and of the decision would impose itself between ethics law and politics” ( ). The decision and responsibility—terms taken from Lévinas’ elaboration of the ethical encounter with the

Other—link ethics, law, and politics together and fill the hiatus between these realms of discourse.

Downing and Saxton introduce the term “ethico-political” in the introduction to

Film and Ethics as a direct response to those who accuse ethical criticism of

“e acuating the political significance of the phenomena it analyses” ( ). They define the ethico-political as “the recognition that ethics and politics are mutually implicated

and enabling, yet irreducible to one another” ( ). In other words ethical questions are implied in political questions, and vice versa. When pursued under a Lévinasian or

Derridean model, ethical questions are inherently political questions, and as I have already discussed, both Lévinas and Derrida addressed the perceived opposition of the two. Lévinas’ examination of the self’s relationship to the Other can be understood as an examination of all power relations, and thus of all political relations. Lévinas and

Derrida directly combat the imperialist, colonialist, and authoritarian practices that dominated politics in the 20th century and beyond by invoking the rights of the oppressed Other through their notions of respect, responsibility, hospitality, and justice.

In Lévinasian terms, it is impossible to respect the Other and the Other’s demands upon the self, within any political system that seeks to subjugate and exploit the people being governed. Colonial governments obviously fall into this category, but so do authoritarian regimes that seek to consolidate the power of the government at the expense of the citizenry, that refuse to relinquish power and that repress any signs of political opposition or rebellion. It is for these reasons that Lévinasian ethics (or at least its vocabulary) has been adopted by postcolonial and feminist criticism. Lévinasian and

Derridean ethical thought is inherently anti-hegemonic in its insistence on the self’s eternal responsibility to the Other.

This is not to say that political questions can be reduced to ethical questions, or vice versa. What is needed is an acknowledgement that the two areas are intertwined, and that political and ethical questions often arise together from the same situation. Yet there are moments when the ethical implications of a given situation surpass its political context. Lévinasian ethical discourse is admittedly humanist, and as such, there are

moments in history when the concern for human life and human dignity overwhelm any political considerations. These moments point to the necessity of considering the ethical alongside the political as a means of questioning and understanding political actions.

Moreo er Downing and Saxton argue that following Derrida’s comments on the role of politics in Lévinas’ work “Ethics becomes unethical if it does not expose itself to the possibility of betrayal and contamination inherent in political and juridical discourse, in the attempt to establish laws and rights” ( -11).

So what exactly does this mean for the ethico-political as a mode of criticism?

First, the critic must seek to understand the political relations that underlie a given ethical encounter, or the ethical relations underlying a political relation. This goes beyond a mere acknowledgement of the two. There must be an analysis of how the ethical and political are intertwined in a given relation and a discussion of the conclusions to be drawn from each perspective. Second, there must be an intervention made by the critic into the political or ethical discourse—an assertion must be made that upholds the rights of the oppressed and points toward a just resolution of the encounter.

This intervention or assertion is the ethico-political responsibility of the critic, and without it, such criticism would lack a purpose.

The interrelation of ethical and political or ideological criticism can be mined for insights into the way films work. At the same time, film provides an excellent ground for bringing the two together. For example, many ideological approaches take as their primary target the illusion of reality created by the film-world and the cinematic apparatus. These critiques assert that the illusion of reality—temporal and spatial continuity, along with verisimilitude—and the spectatorial identification created by

classical or mainstream cinema reinforce the dominant ideology and make that ideology invisible to the spectator. Radical breaks in film form and narrative structure are thus necessary to make the viewer aware of the ways in which ideology is at work within a film. The spectator must be made aware of his or her distance from the action on- screen and of his or her own subjectivity as separate from that of the camera or the film’s protagonist. The ethical encounter functions in much the same way. It is only in the recognition of difference (from the protagonist and actor) that the viewer can reflect on the status of the Other on-screen. This reflection inherently requires understanding of the ways in which the character has been formed, controlled, or oppressed by an ideology. As is the case in ideological criticism, this oppressive ideology can exist at the level of both the narrative and film form.

Only within this recognition of difference, or this alienation from the film-world, does the impossibility of intervening in the narrative fully impact the viewer. Just as the viewer cannot directly intervene in the screen ideology, he or she cannot act out against the oppression of the screen-Other. Political critique can only take place within the mind of the viewer once the viewer has been distanced from the film world, and that is the only condition under which ethical reflection can occur. The impossibility of intervening in the film allows for political or ideological critique and ethical reflection.

The Filmmaker’s Role

I would like to return to the question of whether the makers of narrative fiction films can be said to have any sort of ethical responsibility. Following Edith

Wyschogrod’s argument I ha e already shown how the filmmaker as historian has a responsibility to “tell the truth about the past.” Furthermore I would argue that narrati e filmmakers have an ethical responsibility based on the concept of haunting put forward

by both Lévinas and Derrida. Narrative fiction—and the case is especially true in regards to historical fiction—is informed by the “nameless others” who exist outside the film text but nevertheless inform, or haunt, the story being told. It is to these nameless

Others who haunt the film text that narrative filmmakers are responsible. I say the case is particularly strong in regards to historical fictions because not only are filmmakers confronted with real life experiences that inform their films, but with political divisions, traumatic legacies, and historically recorded facts that must be acknowledged and respected in the filmmaking process.

This responsibility gives rise to the need to apply ethical criticism to fiction films, especially when films attempt to depict historical traumas that have largely gone un- filmed, for which there is no (or is little) visual record in the collective memory. This is also the case for films that address historical events that have been suppressed, omitted or ignored by dominant historical narrati es because of a gi en state’s role in violent oppression or genocide. It is the filmmaker’s ability to depict the historically

“unseen” that allows him or her to raise ethical questions about political discourse and historical memory in his or her attempt to “tell the truth about the past ” and to present his or her viewers with these questions, inviting them to reflect on what they are seeing.

In this dissertation, I examine how certain elements of film form have been used by directors to make viewers aware of the impossibility of their ethical position vis-à-vis the events of the film, and to open up a space for ethical reflection. Film form takes on an ethical charge because the director can manipulate elements of form including the close-up, framing, editing, and mise-en-scène beyond their conventional uses, jarring the viewer out of a passive watching state. The depiction of historical trauma, across the

range of political violence, is thus capable of moving beyond mere spectacle to being an agent of the ethical.

Overview

As Belá Balász wrote, the close-up of the face is the most powerful tool cinema has for re ealing a character’s subjecti ity. My second chapter “The Close Up and the

‘Gaze of the Other upon Me ’” shows how se eral works including Le Petit Soldat (dir.

Jean-Luc Godard, 1960), The Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966), Grbavica:

The Land of My Dreams (dir. Jasmila Zbanic, 2006), and Hunger (dir. Steve McQueen,

2008), use the close-up to incite ethical reflection in iewers. The iewer’s identification with the face on-screen is entangled with the recognition of difference from that face. I suggest that this recognition of sameness and difference is akin to Emmanuel Lévinas’ positing of the Other as the neighbor and fellow human. In both cases, the viewer feels the impossibility of his or her ethical situation. Despite the desire, the viewer cannot change a film’s course and is subjected to iolent images on-screen. I argue that this impossible position allows for ethical reflection as the viewer considers what he or she could do in the situation on-screen. Spectators should not be understood as entirely passive or complicit in images of suffering if the director allows a space for ethical reflection through the manipulation of spectator identification.

Understanding the subjective experience of violence is central to preventing the exploitation of iolence. In the third chapter “Broken Bodies ” I argue that films about state violence and torture show violence against the body precisely to foreground the role of the body in the experience of torture. Because these films focus on realistic depictions of the body, they combat the stylization and fetishization of violence in other genres and the disappearance of the body in popular and political discourses about

torture. Furthermore, the editing of violent torture scenes can convey the conscious experience of the split between the self and the body, which only comes in moments of physical agony, according to Elaine Scarry. I analyze key moments from Warriors (dir.

Peter Kosminsky, 1999), The Wind that Shakes the Barley (dir. Ken Loach, 2006), As if

I Am Not There (dir. Juanita Wilson, 2010), and other works to show how visual fragmentation contributes to a iewer’s understanding of the self/body split.

The fourth chapter “The Unseen and the Unseeable ” addresses the refusal to show images of torture and state violence through the use of ellipsis, voiceovers, and dialogue. In La Question (dir. Laurent Heynemann, 1977), Missing (dir. Costa-Gavras,

1982), and Salvador (dir. Oliver Stone, 1986) I argue that ellipsis is primarily used in two ways. Frequently ellipsis reflects the fragmented li es of ictims’ family members and friends. Alternately it represents the ictim or sur i or’s experience of torture. Both uses of ellipsis mirror the “not knowing” experienced by characters. In contrast, films that primarily use dialogue or voiceovers to recount the experience of torture, like La Historia

Oficial (dir. Luis Puenzo, 1985) and Death and the Maiden (dir. Roman Polanski, 1994),

I show that the technique is tied to the sur i or’s ability to remember their experiences. I argue that the voice becomes a testimony to survival because it emphasizes the physical presence of the survivor. The use of the voice also creates ethical impossibility for viewers and characters who listen but cannot inter ene in the sur i or’s past. The listener’s ethical agency is complicated because he or she is placed in both the torturer’s position hearing the confession and the sur i or’s position through icarious trauma. I explore how viewing films and television productions depicting torture and

state iolence may inflict trauma by drawing on E. Ann aplan’s work on icarious trauma.

In the fifth chapter “Through a Familiar Maze The Distortion of Banal Spaces in

Scenes of Torture ” I show how the camerawork and mise-en-scène of these works convey the isolation, restriction, and the labyrinthine structures of familiar places transformed into unfamiliar spaces. I assert that works such as Garage Olimpo (dir.

Marco Bechis, 1999), N M ’ d (dir. Danis Tanovic, 2001), and ’

(dir. Florent-Emilio Siri, 2007), distort familiar places into unfamiliar prisons, to show the disfiguration of everyday life under regimes of terror. Trauma becomes inscribed into a nation’s ery architecture. In these works, the viewer does not have a privileged, centralized iew but is instead led to feel the ictim’s disorientation. Consequently these works become spaces for memory, giving us a museum-like glimpse of the experience of detention and serving as memorials to the real victims.

In my concluding chapter “Hauntings The Continued Imperati e ” I broaden my theorization of the ethics and politics of filming torture and state violence through the concept of haunting. Filmmakers must acknowledge and respect the real experiences that inform their works, political divisions, traumatic legacies, and recorded facts. To complement this chapter’s theoretical discussion I address recent films that depict different hauntings, including Aparecidos (dir. Paco Cabezas, 2007) and Ghost Game

(dir. Sarawut Wichiensarn, 2006). These works mark a tonal and generational shift in how films address state violence. The concern is no longer solely exposing what has happened; it is thinking through the cross-generational impacts of historical trauma.

These films follow characters who were children when the traumas took place, but who

must negotiate how to live in the shadow of past events. I argue that adopting the ghost story genre is not a sensational choice but a thoughtful meditation on what happens to a society when repeating the past becomes the most terrifying thing imaginable and history haunts everyday life.

However they represent torture and state violence, these films attempt to do so without replicating the objectification and exploitation inherent in the politically-motivated violence they depict. This issue is central to many critiques of documentary images of atrocities, but it has not been theorized in regard to historical fiction films. By combining formal analysis, ethics, ideological film criticism, and trauma studies I show how these films thoughtfully comment on the nature of state violence and the role of fiction film in representing historical trauma. This dissertation aims to be the first substantial study of depictions of torture in historically-based fiction films.7 Through my analyses of several techniques used to depict torture, I contribute to ongoing work in ethical approaches to film while adding to the existing bodies of trauma studies and ideological criticism.

7 Michael Flynn and Fabiola F. Salek’s recent edited collection Screening Torture: Media Representations of State Terror and Political Domination variously covers historical fiction films, documentary, and popular film and television.

CHAPTER 2 THE CLOSE-UP AND THE “GAZE OF THE OTHER UPON ME”

The close-up is the deeper gaze the director’s sensibility. The close-up is the poetry of the cinema.

—Belá Balázs “Sketches For a Theory of Film The Close-up” (4 )

Even the earliest close-ups, then, enabled us to perceive subtleties of facial expression: nuances that cannot be detected with the naked eye and yet which use our eyes to make a decisive impact, like a bacillus that we do not notice when we inhale it, but which is lethal nonetheless.

—Belá Balázs “The Spirit of Film The Close-up” ( 4)

Both soul and destiny can be seen in the human face. …The deepest secrets of the inner life are revealed here and to see them is as exciting as the vivisection of a heartbeat.

—Belá Balázs “Sketches For a Theory of Film Type and Physiognomy” (31)

The close-up of the face in cinema is known for its affective power, but it also holds tremendous potential to be used to incite ethical reflection in viewers. The

iewer’s identification with the face on-screen is entangled with his or her recognition of difference from that face. This recognition of sameness and difference is akin to

Emmanuel Lévinas’s positing of the Other as the neighbor and fellow human but someone who is different from me. Cinematic scale and shot framing inform this paradoxical relation of identification and recognized difference. The larger-than-life

Other, shown in different proportions and often fragmented by shot scale, is recognizably different from me. In Lévinas’ encounter between the self and the Other and the encounter between the viewer and filmic images of torture and state violence, the self-as-viewer feels the impossibility of his or her ethical situation. Despite the desire, the viewer cannot change a film’s course and is subjected to iolent images on- screen. I argue that this impossible position allows for ethical reflection as the viewer

considers what he or she could do in the situation on-screen, and what his or her role in the person’s suffering is. Spectators should not be understood as entirely passive or complicit in images of suffering because directors create spaces for ethical reflection through the use of cinematic techniques. Here, I argue that facial close-up are able to stage significant ethical encounters because they are the cinematic form of address to the viewer.

The facial close-up has been considered a mode of communication from Belá

Balázs’ early film writings to contemporary work by film scholars like Noa Steimatsky who calls the face “a mode and an ethic of address” ( 5 ). Balázs endowed the face with almost supernatural powers in his writings. He argued that the close-up of the face existed in its own dimension outside of space and time, as opposed to being an image that could freeze time and push spatial context out of the frame. The facial close-up’s existence in its own dimension was central to Balázs’ argument that the face expresses a unique aspect of the soul, and the close-up can reveal the unconscious.1 For Balázs, emotions, thoughts, and the unconscious do not exist in space, nor do they exist discretely in time; they flow into each other in gradual transformations, and the limits of one emotion or thought are indistinguishable from the next. Only when the camera pushes the boundaries of closeness, and space, time, and language fall away, do these flows become apparent. As Balázs writes,

To say nothing is by no means the same as having nothing to say. Those who remain silent can still be overflowing with things to say, which, however, can be uttered only in forms, pictures, gestures and facial expressions. ...His gestures do not signify concepts at all, but are the direct

1 Balász was influenced by Freud’s writings on the unconscious which he considers herein relation to facial expression and perception. A psychoanalytical analysis of images of torture can provide fruitful insights into images of violence, but that is not what I intend to focus on in this work.

expression of his own non-rational self, and whatever is expressed in his face and his movements arises from a stratum of the soul that can never be brought to the light of day by words. Here, the body becomes unmediated spirit, spirit rendered visible, wordless. (9)

Though this passage comes from his 4 work “ isible Man” that only addresses silent films Balázs maintains his emphasis on “those who remain silent” in his 1949 collection, Theory of the Film. The idea that a facial close-up can re eal “a stratum of the soul that can ne er be brought to the light of day by words ” so that “the body becomes unmediated spirit spirit rendered isible wordless” allows us to consider the act of viewing a close-up as an ethical encounter. In this encounter, we, the selves- as-viewers, are made responsible for the soul or unmediated spirit of the on-screen

Other.

The most important contribution ethics has made that can be incorporated into a formal analysis of film is its discussion of the face of the Other. Lévinas originally used the term “visage” to denote the total presence of the Other rather than a person’s face, echoing Balázs’ arguments about the close-up re ealing the “unmediated spirit.” E en when considered pragmatically, cinema endows the face with power that exceeds that of any other single filmic element. As Noa Steimatsky writes,

In the cinema the human face is a traditional measure of the shot: the range of close-up, medium close-up, medium shot, and so on is firstly defined by the face. For the face is positioned high in a hierarchy of attention and meaning that routinely follows anthropomorphic projection and identification—with regard to figure and ground, orientation, narrative focalization and other varieties of relations unfolding within and across shots. (166)

Because of the ways in which it structures the image directs the camera’s gaze and controls the iewers’ attention the face in cinema like Lévinas’ visage, is more than simply the face of a person. The relationship between the visage and cinema’s face

allows for an ethical analysis of both shot composition and performance, as the face present on-screen is always the doubled face of the character and the actor or actress playing that character. Indeed, the presence of the performer on-screen invokes the ethical encounter of the self with the Other. In the world of film the iewer’s identification with the face on-screen conflicts with the iewer’s recognition of difference from that face and recognition that the face belongs to an actor playing a character. This simultaneous recognition of sameness and difference is akin to Lévinas’ positing of the

Other as the neighbor and fellow human. The Other, though my neighbor, is still distant from me just as the fourth wall separates the face on-screen from me and marks the division of the fictional film-world from the lived world. Cinematic scale and shot framing inform this paradoxical relation of identification and recognized difference. The larger- than-life Other, shown in different proportions and often fragmented by the shot scale is recognizably different from me and the iewer’s knowledge of the actor/character split reinforces this difference (there is always a double presence on-screen, as opposed to the iewer’s singular presence). Yet mainstream narrati e film is built around the idea that editing, shot composition, and other elements of form can overcome this recognition of difference and compel the spectator to identify with the characters on- screen without question.2 Aside from adhering to strict notions of verisimilitude to make the film world appear as an extension of the lived world, shot composition can create encounters between the character and viewer that force the bond of recognition.

2 I will address the Brechtian idea of purposefully distancing the viewer from the events on-screen later in this chapter.

The most important example of this kind of encounter is the close-up of a face.

The close-up forces the Lévinasian encounter of the self with the face of the Other. In

“Ethics as First Philosophy ” Lévinas writes of this encounter,

The proximity of the Other is the face’s meaning … there is the nakedness and destitution of the expression as such, that is to say extreme exposure, defencelessness ulnerability itself. … The Other becomes my neighbour precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility and calls me into question … as if I were devoted to the other man before being devoted to myself. (82-83)

The face is the ultimate site of human recognition and surpasses all other markers that would present boundaries to the recognition of sameness. The recognition of sameness in the face of the Other invokes the ethical feeling of responsibility that takes primacy over the self and the cinematic feeling of identification, which is itself a kind of responsibility. The viewer becomes tied to the character and feels compelled to watch his or her story—often to the point of wanting to intervene in the narrative.

Lévinas argues that it is the impossibility of the ethical situation that opens the space for ethical thought and action. The situation of the spectator can be said to be an impossible one. The iewer cannot act to change a film’s course, but is still subjected to the images on-screen. It is the impossibility of the spectator’s position that allows for ethical reflection in film viewing. The spectator need not always be understood as entirely passive or complicit in the images of suffering placed before them if the director allows a space for ethical reflection through the manipulation of spectator identification.

There are other methods of displaying the face that a director can employ in an attempt to invoke ethical reflection in his or her viewers. While traditional, mainstream strategies of framing and continuity are meant to ensure complete absorption in a narrative, they risk fostering complacency in viewers if viewers are not led to reflection

(or given a clear didactic message). Bertolt Brecht actively worked against the complacency that theater could elicit when he formulated his concept of “epic theater.”

Brecht sought to remove the illusion of reality and seamless identification with characters by drawing attention to the theater’s constructed nature. In doing so he hoped to provoke a critical awareness that would allow viewers to reflect on the events on-stage. Brecht’s attempts to distance iewers from theater’s artifice are a defining moment for modern theater, and they had a significant effect on film as well. Following

Brecht, filmmakers have attempted to make their viewers question the images they see and recognize the difference between the film-world and reality. The most recognizable effect Brecht has had on film is in the breaking of the fourth wall—when a character looks directly into the camera, and thus, at the viewer. Breaking the fourth wall breaks the illusion of the film-world as a contained world. Viewers are shocked out of their privileged position as an all-knowing, all-seeing independent, clandestine observer.

When a character looks across the fourth wall he or she acknowledges the audience’s presence. In turn, the audience is forced to acknowledge that they are being presented with a fully constructed story, not just observing a sealed-off reality.

Lévinasian ethics are based on power relations and a recognition of difference, rather than on explicit delineations of what is good and what is evil. Recognizing that the self has power over the Other because we understand the self and do not understand the Other is key to Lévinas’ ethical encounter. This power relation is also at work in the spectator-character relation of film viewing. The viewer has the power of the gaze and the character exists only in that there is an audience for the film. Since Lévinas says that the self must always act for and out of responsibility to the Other, it can be said that

there is an ethical dimension to the act of film viewing. In other words, the viewer, upon entering into a theater or pressing play on a recording, has an obligation to watch the film, to allow the character to exist for the duration of the feature. The viewer is obligated to let the Other’s story be told. The narrati e and form of a film can then make additional ethical demands on the spectator by framing the character in a certain way and by taking on issues of oppression, exploitation, or suffering. Any oppression a film character experiences heightens the iewer’s responsibility because he or she has become a third party to that oppression.

The face is what is expected in cinema because of the importance of the face in everyday life in its role as a marker of identity and its role in conveying emotions.

However, the face in film is almost always viewed askance, indirectly, and at an angle.

Any film that deviates from our expectations of seeing the face can frustrate viewers. It must be emphasized here that how to show, or not show, the face is a conscious aesthetic decision made by the director. In the remainder of this chapter, I will focus on three films that approach the face in distinct, nontraditional ways to frustrate (if not shock) viewers out of their normal watching habits and attempt to induce a state of ethical reflection: Hunger, Grbavica: Land of My Dreams, and Le Petit Soldat.

Facing the Viewer

In the theatre, even the most important face is never more than one element in the play. In the film, however, when a face spreads over the entire screen in a close-up this face becomes ‘the whole thing’ that contains the entire drama for minutes on end.

—Belá Balázs “Sketches For a Theory of Film The Play of Facial Expressions” (3 )

Ste e McQueen’s 8 film Hunger uses repeated frontal close-ups of Bobby

Sands’ (Michael Fassbender) face to challenge the power of the iewer and Sands’

oppressors. The film is a biopic that chronicles the escalation of protests by Irish republican paramilitary prisoners at HM Prison Maze in Northern Ireland after the British go ernment withdrew the prisoners’ Special Category Status that marked them as political prisoners. The protests culminated in the 1981 hunger strike and the deaths of

Bobby Sands and ten other prisoners. Bobby Sands became a standout member of the group because he was elected as the Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South

Tyrone during the strike. However, the film is unique in that it does not begin by following Sands. Instead, the film opens with images of a woman participating in the blanket and no wash protests banging a metal lid on the prison floor, surrounded by others doing the same. Then the film follows prison guard Raymond Lohan going through his daily routine. Ten minutes into the film, we meet our first prisoner, Davey

Gillen as he is processed into the facility. We follow Da ey’s and his cellmate Gerry

Campbell’s daily life for another minutes until Bobby Sands enters the film. At this point, only viewers who know Michael Fassbender plays him know that the man being forcibly groomed and washed is Sands (his mother calls him Bobby in a visitation scene a few minutes later).

All told, Bobby Sands does not appear until a third of the way through the film.

This decision allows the film to address the brutality and oppression the Irish republican prisoners underwent and their repeated protests as a shared, collective experience before limiting itself to the specifics of one person’s story. This shift is marked by the first close-up of Sands, as he sits at a visitation table with his parents. The frontal close- up becomes the image most closely associated with Sands throughout the last two- thirds of Hunger. These close-ups specifically appear either immediately before or after

something violent happens to Sands or other prisoners, or a retaliatory plan or protests is put into action. The number of frontal close-ups of Sands increases as the film progresses, including a close-up of Sands face as he finally dies.

The persistent use of the close-up in Hunger does not lose its force because of the different meanings Bobby Sands’ face takes on in each shot. Often, his face conveys the contempt for his captors that fuels his acts of resistance. In other shots though, his face becomes the means by which the brutality of the British prison guards and the British government is conveyed. Sands looks directly into the camera as his face displays his cuts, bruises, and the blood drawn by the guards. The look across the cinematic fourth wall is a direct address to the audience, a staged confrontation between the viewer and the character. The close-ups momentarily freeze the film’s action, and force the viewer to focus on the effects of the frenzied, procedural violence that defines the prison (a subject I will address further in chapter three). When Sands looks directly into the camera, his gaze demands a response from iewers. Sands’ look acknowledges the audience, and makes it known that the film is not meant to be watched as a conventional biopic or historical, educational dramatization. Director

McQueen’s inclusion of the repeated close-ups that break the fourth wall implicates the audience in the film’s story. ust as the prisoners’ protests were directed toward the global public in hopes of changing their status and treatment, the film involves viewers in the history and politics of Northern Ireland, state violence, and incarceration. The contemporary viewer, like the public and the British government in 1981, is given the choice of his or her response—support for the prisoners, the government, or complicit silence.

The close-ups that overwhelm the final section of Hunger that depicts the actual hunger strike have a strong affective and ethical charge because they depict something unfamiliar to viewers—a person willfully starving himself, inflicting suffering on his own body, and the transformations that take place during that process. The images re erberate with the real physical transformation of Michael Fassbender’s body as he notably lost 16 kilograms (a little over 35 pounds) over the course of ten weeks to film this final section (Addley). As Esther Addley notes in an interview with Fassbender for the Guardian “the lowest weight Fassbender reached 58 kg [about 8 pounds] is the weight at which in my edition of Sands’ diaries the Republican made his last entry.”

The images of Fassbender/Sands’ emaciated face replace the dialogue in the final section of the film. Sands’ gaze across the fourth wall becomes his only means of communication because he can no longer speak through his dry, sore-covered mouth. It is his gaze that binds the viewer to him as he slowly dies, and his gaze that demands recognition of his protest, his rights, and his humanity. The viewer is left to fill the silence with his or her own thoughts in response to the close-ups of Sands’ face. In these moments, McQueen opens the film up to ethical reflection because he anchors

Sands’ star ation and death to his face his gaze his will and his suffering. McQueen renders the images of Sands’ star ation human not spectacular as the film asks viewers how we are supposed to respond to this kind of self-inflicted suffering. The dialogue the film sets up between Sands and the viewer does not end with his death.

McQueen carries the ethical encounter forward beyond Sands’ death to the present by maintaining the close-up’s framing after Sands dies. McQueen films Sands’ sheet- covered corpse with the same framing used in the close-ups of Sands’ li ing face. This

consistent framing implies that even after his death, we are bound to Bobby Sands, that we are still trying to sort out the implications of our ethical encounter with him, both in the film and in the world.

The close-ups in Hunger make the viewer keenly aware of his or her inability to intervene in the past. For Lévinas, this impossibility is the key to ethical reflection.

However, with Hunger, as with many of the other films I discuss, the viewer is also drawn to reexamine his or her past attitudes and actions while watching these retellings of recent events. These films do not only allow viewers to pose hypothetical ethical questions, but can lead them to consider their earlier, real-life reactions to these conflicts in light of their current reactions to the films. So, not only do the close-ups in

Hunger allow for the viewer to ethically reflect on how he or she could have intervened on the behalf of the oppressed prisoners, they try lead the viewer to relive his or her past and draw it through to the future. Indeed, in writing about films concerning the

Troubles in Northern Ireland and the Bosnian War, I have been led back to my childhood responses to these events as I experienced them through the mass media (a topic I will address in chapter three).

Overwhelming Faciality

I think what we can accept is that a face, at different times, so fills my field of perception that, in the space of an instant, it is me. That is, ontological claims about it as same or as other, prove undecidable. Moreover, its ‘power’ or efficacy lies in that it while other than I, is ‘me’ in an instant which thereby becomes an inaugural instant, the (recurring) moment of a sort of birth unto speaking-to…

—Bettina Bergo “The Face in Lévinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution” (25)

While Hunger consistently presents the viewer with images of one face, Jasmila

Zbanic’s Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams (2006) overwhelms its viewers with faces in

its opening and closing scenes to convey and hold in tension the collective and individual experiences of women during the Bosnian War. The film opens with a slow pan, from left to right, across a room of women sitting at various angles to and distances from the camera. The opening credits play over the image, in the center. The room is quiet as one woman sings a Bosnian folk song. The camera’s slow e en pace allows the viewer to absorb the faces of these many women and their reactions to the song as they lay and sit in various positions. Unless the viewer knows who actress Mirjana

arano ic is and that she plays the film’s protagonist Esma there is no way for the viewer to know which one, if any, of these women the film will follow until the camera fixes on Esma at the end and she looks across the fourth wall. Indeed, only the woman singing stands out in this scene, but we will not see her until near the film’s end. The diffusion of spectator identification in Grbavica’s opening scene prepares viewers for what they are about to see—one (hypothetical) story out of many possible stories of women’s experiences of the Bosnian War—but it also stages an ethical encounter between the viewer and these women who have survived the war. The film invites the viewer to ask whose story is going to be told because the protagonist is not immediately shown and made known to us.

The opening scene of Grbavica invites viewers into a privileged space, as this is clearly an intimate, emotional gathering of women but the slow pan and the camera’s refusal to stay on any one face allows the viewer to contemplate his or her role in the story on screen, and what ethical responsibilities might be involved in being allowed into this group. In some ways, we learn the answer to this question at the end of a second, similar sequence, when we find out that this is a group therapy session Bosnian women

are required to attend in order to receive their restitution payments. We watch in close- up as one woman talks about nightmares she has about an attacker’s oice but the shot cuts between her, a younger woman giggling at her story, and a third woman trying to sell Esma some sort of lotion. Many of the women, including Esma, do not share anything with the group, and they cannot be forced to do so. They simply attend and collect their money. The opening scene places the iewer alongside the group’s leader rather than among the women. Like the leader, we are simultaneously inside and outside the group, and can only intervene to the extent that our interventions are desired.

Viewers are introduced to Esma at the end of the opening sequence, and the film follows her as she tries to balance everyday survival, raising her teenage daughter

Sara, and her past. The main drama of the film re ol es around Sara’s desire to go on a class trip and Esma’s struggle to earn and borrow enough money to pay for it. A thread that wea es throughout the film is Sara’s absent father. Esma has told Sara that her father was a shahid—a martyr who died fighting for the Bosnians. Sara keeps telling her mother that she can get a fee waiver for the trip since her father was a shahid, but

Esma repeatedly fails to produce the necessary paperwork for the wai er’s completion.

It is not surprising to learn in an explosive scene between the mother and daughter that

Sara’s father was no shahid, but a Serbian soldier who raped Esma.

It is only after she tells her daughter the truth about her father that Esma can talk to the therapy group. Two of the last scenes of Grbavica repeats its opening. Once again, the camera slowly pans across the room full of women, from left to right, with singing in the background. This time, we face the women directly, and we do get to see

the singer’s face. The three-minute long take ends on Esma again, only this time she is crying. The scene cuts to other action (following Sara), but quickly returns to Esma. We watch in close-up as she tells the women about her rape and her inner conflicts about her daughter’s identity. The slow pan and this second, more detailed testimony by Esma allows the viewer to focus on her words and on the faces of the women again, women who now share Esma’s experience. This scene also gi es the iewer space to reflect on the healing process and what that might entail when such intimate violence is experienced on such a large scale. Zbanic designs the opening and closing scenes of

Grbavica to overwhelm viewers with faces because she wants to impress upon us the tension between collective and individual experience. Esma’s face appears last in both scenes because hers is not the story of Bosnian women during the war, but a story of one Bosnian woman among many who suffered—the exact image that Zbanic offers us.

These two scenes ask us what to do in the face of this intimate and collective suffering.

For Grbavica and Esma, money or humanitarian aid is not the answer. The healing can only begin through a dialogue: through compassionate testimony and witnessing.

Looking Away

Combined with lack of facial expression, the averted look implies the avoidance of face- to- face reciprocity as a basis of social interaction. In this category we find inseparable, then, the face and the look as bound up d …T d’ w d w bedded in k x , w y, ’ y d k … w d w predicated on diffusion of a subject warding off an acute experience of separateness, isolation, and vacuity.

—N S ky, “ , R ” (162)

In contrast to Hunger and Grbavica, Jean- uc Godard’s second full-length motion picture, Le Petit Soldat (1960/1963), does not make repetitive use of the close-up or

overwhelm the viewer with faces. Rather, it is because Godard withholds the image of the protagonist Bruno’s face in one scene that the iewer can acutely feel his or her ethical responsibility when confronted with torture. Le Petit Soldat is a deeply ambiguous film that has been classified as a “political thriller.” The Algerian War ( 54-

1962), provides the framework for this film. Le Petit Soldat focuses on how individuals act when confronted with politics and ideologies in general. Godard asks his viewers to think about the reasons why people take political action, why people adopt ideologies, and how ideologies are developed. To initiate this thought process, Godard makes the protagonist of his film an anti-hero, Bruno Forrestier (Michel Subor), who refuses to claim an ideological stake in the war. As a Swiss national, the Algerian War was not

Godard’s national conflict; howe er his French cultural ties and position as a left-wing intellectual brought him close to the issues surrounding the war. Godard’s ambiguous position as someone who was not-French, but who had a very French cultural and intellectual identity also becomes a part of Bruno’s difficult position and the film develops a strong correlation between Bruno and Godard.

Bruno introduces himself to us through voiceover as a deserter from the French army who has taken refuge in Switzerland. Bruno works as a lower-level agent for la main rouge, a covert branch of the French secret services (Lack 107).3 Bruno’s political involvement parallels his love affair with Véronica Dreyer, who works for the Algerian

3 Godard never names the organization Bruno is working for; he only names the business that is a front for their operations – the B d’I ç , which has caused some critical confusion. As Lack notes, despite the insistence of many critics that Bruno works for the OAS, the OAS was not formed until the year after the film was made, therefore it is impossible for this to be the secret organization Bruno was working for. ack describes la main rouge as “the semi-mythical agency created by the French secret services (SDECE) to take the blame for government-sponsored terrorist actions” ( ). a main rouge translates as “the red hand.”

Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN).4 E entually Bruno’s in ol ement with la main rouge leads to his abduction and torture by members of the FLN. The French censors denied certification to Le Petit Soldat for three years because of its discussion of the

Algerian War and its frank depiction of torture (Sterritt, DVD Commentary). Yet, despite its political content and the polemic nature of several of its scenes, Le Petit Soldat has received little critical attention. In Colin MacCabe’s 3 biography Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, most of the space devoted to Le Petit Soldat is comprised of

MacCabe’s discussion of the film as the first collaboration between Godard and Anna

Karina and as the beginning of their courtship.

Part of the lack of critical attention paid to Le Petit Soldat is probably because of its initial ban and then lukewarm reception when it finally was released (Sterritt, DVD

Commentary). Another reason for this void is the political ambiguity of Le Petit Soldat, which makes it difficult to construct any coherent message from the film. Bruno

Forrestier is a highly ambiguous figure because his links to la main rouge, place Bruno on the French national, right-wing side of the conflict—making him an awkward protagonist for a left-wing F N supporting audience like the people in Godard’s intellectual circles. Howe er Bruno’s in ol ement with la main rouge resulted from him deserting the army (presumably in Algeria), , and he repeatedly fails to carry out the assassination of a prominent FLN supporter. Yet while he refuses to buy into the ideology of la main rouge, Bruno also refuses to be indoctrinated by the FLN rebels. At the same time, French censorship of all media critical of the Algerian War and Godard’s citation of Henri Alleg’s anti-torture essay La Question and the F N leader’s comment

4 Trans.: National Liberation Front.

that “The French torture too ” allow for the argument that Le Petit Soldat is a response to France’s use of torture in Algeria.

Despite his vague alliances and lack of ideological commitment, the viewer still sympathizes with Bruno’s suffering during his torture. The first sustained close-up in the film’s infamous torture sequence contrasts two different perceptions of time. The camera is steady and fixed, giving the feeling of time being stretched out; however,

Bruno’s narration is all about speed. Bruno says “All that I know is that I forced myself not to cry out, and that I quickly ceased to struggle ” and then the oiceo er shifts from

Bruno’s reflections, to his thoughts in the moment.5 He says,

Think of something else go quick doesn’t matter what a oid the pain quick. The sea the beach the sun. Think so fast that you can’t think any more about anything. Write to Véronica, quick! Quick! Avoid thinking about the pain. Quick! Write a letter. Always faster. Beat the pain with speed. To Véronica, a letter even more beautiful than the one from Robert Desnos to his wife. ronica….6

If as Bruno says earlier in the film torture is “monotonous and sad ” then the steady close-up reflects that monotony in this scene. But the viewer, because of the rapidity of Bruno’s oiced thoughts can forget what is actually happening to him (his palms are being burned). Bruno’s thoughts distract him and the oiceo er distracts the

iewer from the burning. Godard’s use of the close-up enhances the feeling of distraction because the iewer cannot see what is happening to Bruno’s hands. The burning is done off-screen but Bruno’s face is rarely made isible to the iewer. The

iewer can see Bruno’s face in profile when he either looks toward his restrained hands

5 Original: “Tout ce que je sais c’est que je me suis ai forc de ne pas crier et que très ite je cessais de me débattre.” 6 Original “Penser à autre chose allez ite n’importe de quoi, éviter la douleur, vite. La mer, la plage, le soleil. Penser tellement ite qu’on ne pense plus à rien. Écrire à ronica ite! ite! É iter de penser à la douleur. Vite! Écrire une lettre. Toujours plus vite. Battre la douleur de vitesse. A Véronica, une letter encore plus belle que celle de Robert Desnos à sa femme. ronica….”

or looks down, but he often looks directly away from the camera. The viewer perhaps hopes Bruno will look toward the camera so he or she can express empathy and experience a catharsis after the emotionally intense scene. This desire to empathize with Bruno is challenged at the end of the scene. Bruno holds the camera’s gaze for ten seconds e en mo ing closer with his final “‘ ronica….’” The oiceo er and the withholding of the look draw the viewer closer to Bruno in this moment. Godard films the torture scenes so that Bruno’s emotions (romantic longing desire for escape distraction) are replicated in the iewer but Bruno’s final long look into the camera changes the tenor of this relationship between viewer and character. As Steimatsky notes “Pri ileged object of representation imprint of identity figure of subjecti ity the face is also a mode and an ethic of address” ( 5 ). Here the address becomes excruciatingly direct. Bruno looks the viewers in the eyes, and thus makes them aware of their position as a safe, removed onlooker. His gaze makes viewers uncomfortable because they must cede that despite their sympathy with him, they are not actually experiencing what he experiences, and they can do nothing to stop his tortures. The torture scene draws iewers into an ethical encounter by presenting Bruno’s suffering and the effects it has on his mental state. The film crystallizes the impossibility of its viewers’ ethical position when Bruno looks directly at them. Bruno’s gaze implicates the viewer as an observer who can only desire an end to the torture; the duration of his gaze allows the necessary space for viewers to recognize and reflect on this reality.

This moment of ethical reflection incited by Bruno’s looking across the fourth wall, connects to the philosophical discourse on action that grew out of the French military’s use of torture against Algerians. For many intellectuals of the time (such as

Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Jean-Paul Sartre), if a person did not take action for

Algerian Independence, their silence could be seen as signaling their complicity in the actions of the French government, regardless of whether the person actually voiced support for the French. As Sartre writes in his 6 preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth “...if the entire regime e en your non iolent thoughts is go erned by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors” (Sartre l iii). While Bruno works for a right-wing French organization, and is tortured by FLN members in the film, Godard essentially shows the torture of Bruno as a substitute for the torture of Algerians as Bruno’s captors tell him they have learned to torture from the French example.7 Bruno’s gaze at his audience is the isual equi alent of Sartre’s call to action. While his gaze makes iewers aware that they cannot do anything to stop the violence occurring in the film, it raises the question of what can be done to stop the real violence of the Algerian War, and the real torture being carried out by the French.

The scenes and images I have discussed from Hunger, Grbavica: Land of My

Dreams, and Le Petit Soldat present three different ways that the facial close-up can be used to engage the viewer in an ethical encounter with the characters on the screen. In

Hunger, the close-ups of Bobby Sands directly addresses the viewer across the cinematic fourth wall, beckoning him or her to respond to Sands’ and the other prisoners’ oppression. Grbavica takes a different approach, and director Jasmila Zbanic presents the iewer with a multitude of women’s faces in the opening and closing scenes in order to raise ethical questions about testimony, witnessing, and how we heal from traumas that are both collective and distinctly intimate. In contrast to these two

7 This dynamic will be discussed further in Chapter 4.

films, the facial close-up in Le Petit Soldat gains its ethical power through being withheld. When director Jean-Luc Godard has Bruno turn his back on the camera, the image leads the viewer to desire to see his face—to desire the staging of the ethical encounter. For Lévinas, the ethical encounter between the self and the Other calls upon the self to act on the behalf of the Other to lessen the Other’s suffering and oppression.

If the self cannot act for the Other, than the ethical response to this impossibility is ethical reflection. While the film viewer cannot intervene in the plot of a film, or the past events depicted, techniques like the uses of the facial close-up discussed in this chapter address and engage the viewer, opening a space in viewership for ethical reflection.

The power that the cinema has endowed the close-up of the face with enables the facial close-up to engage viewers in an ethical encounter whereby they are confronted with the “unmediated spirit” of the character-as-Other (Balázs 9). These facial close-ups lead the characters on-screen to surpass their fictional existence as they provoke the

iewer’s humanistic, ethical inquiry.

Figure 2- . The first image of Bobby Sands’ face. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD.

Figure 2-2. Sands looks into the camera. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD.

Figure 2-3. Sands dying. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD.

Figure 2-4. Maintaining the framing. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD.

Figure 2-5. Faces of women in Grbavica. Grbavica the and of My Dreams. Dir. asmila bani . Strand Releasing Home ideo . D D.

Figure 2-6. Esma looks into the camera at the end of the opening scene. Grbavica the and of My Dreams. Dir. asmila bani . Strand Releasing Home ideo 2007. DVD.

Figure 2-7. Esma cries as she testifies to her experiences. Grbavica the and of My Dreams. Dir. asmila bani . Strand Releasing Home ideo . D D.

Figure 2-8. Bruno looks away in Le Petit Soldat. Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier]. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Fox Lorber, 2001. DVD.

Figure 2-9. Bruno looks down. Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier]. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Fox Lorber, 2001. DVD.

Figure 2-10. Bruno avoids the camera. Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier]. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Fox Lorber, 2001. DVD.

Figure 2-11. Bruno finally looks into the camera. Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier]. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Fox Lorber, 2001. DVD.

CHAPTER 3 BROKEN BODIES

Pain too drops out of the picture. …Hence the power (both appealing and off-putting) of those few films that remind us that bodily damage hurts, that violently wasting lives has grave consequences. Hence the immense popularity of Saving Private Ryan, a movie in whcich the massive quantity of graphic physical damage and the iolent “squandering” of bodies and li es is “redeemed” to social purpose and meaning its senselessness made sensible by its (re)insertion in a clearly defined (and clearly past) moral context. Hence, also, the popular neglect of Beloved or Affliction, movies in which iolence is represented “close up” as singularly felt graphically linked to bodily pain and its destruction of subjectivity. In these films violence is not dramatized quantitatively or technologically and thus becomes extremely difficult to watch: that is, even though an image, understood by one’s own flesh as real.

— i ian Sobchak “The iolent Dance A Personal Memoir of Death in the Mo ies” ( 4)

The second half of the twentieth century saw the proliferation of “clean torture” techniques, torture which leaves minor to no physical marks. Clean torture was most recently foregrounded in the United States’ use of such techniques in the War on Terror.

The photos released of torture in Abu Ghraib in 2004 mainly depict clean torture— sensory deprivation through hooding, stress positions, intimidation by dogs, sexual humiliation, and electrocution. These images contributed to popular discourse about what constitutes torture, and an attempt to redefine torture according only to visible physical effects, rather than invisible ones (Lazreg 263-4). The release of the Abu

Ghraib photos coincided with the rise of the torture-porn subgenre of horror films, notably Saw (dir. James Wan, 2004), Wolf Creek (dir. Greg Mclean, 2005), T ’

Rejects (dir. Rob Zombie, 2005) and Hostel (dir. Eli Roth, 2005). Some would argue that torture porn reinforces the redefinition of torture proposed by clean torture techniques.

The extreme violence depicted in torture porn films is not what is depicted in the Abu

Ghraib photos or discussions of waterboarding; therefore, these clean techniques are

not torture because they do not look like what we call torture.1 The predominance of clean techniques in contemporary discussions of torture ignores both the mental and physical effects of all kinds of torture—discounting the mental effects of sexual humiliation, for example, and covering over the continued use of “dirty” torture techniques. The invocation of torture porn films achieves much the same ends: saying that this extreme violence is not the torture happening now ignores the physical violence that is taking place. At the same time, critiques of torture porn often omit the motivations behind watching such films, or relegate them to base sadism and masochism. But watching horror films has always been aligned with a masochistic impulse; people watch horror films to be scared. In the case of torture porn, the terror is the product of the extreme violence shown on screen, a product of the viewer imagining that violence being enacted on his or her own body. So in some respects, the torture porn genre foregrounds the violated body in ways that the current discourse around clean torture suppresses.

Understanding the subjective experience of violence is central to preventing the exploitation of violence. Horror films often do not provide the character development necessary to place the iewer in a gi en character’s subject position, but more important is the role camerawork and editing play in depicting the bodies experiencing violence. Scenes of violence in horror films are frequently filmed from an ambiguous position that oscillates between a removed position and the position of the person enacting the violence. The case is very different in historical fiction films that depict instances of state violence and torture. These films foster a connection with the person

(or persons) experiencing or encountering violence. Whether they show instances of

1 For the earliest scholarly instance of this I have found, see Hetland.

clean or dirty torture, historical fiction films consistently attempt to comment on the experience of violence through their camerawork and editing. They address the interrelationship of the physical and mental effects of violence through images that focus on the body while gi ing insight into a character’s subjecti e experience and mental life. Faced with the rise of clean torture, historical fiction films attempt to preserve the subjectivity of the person experiencing violence, even as that subjectivity recedes in popular discourse. The result is an ethical objection not only to the use of torture, but to the ways in which torture is being redefined. These films foreground violence against the body precisely to foreground the role of the body and pain in the experience of torture. Because these films focus on realistic depictions of the body, they combat the stylization and fetishization of violence in other genres and the disappearance of the body in popular and political discourses about torture.

In film the iewer’s identification with the body on-screen competes with the

iewer’s recognition of difference from that body. At the same time the iewer becomes more aware of his or her own body via visceral reactions to the on-screen violence. The complexities of spectator identification allow viewers to empathize with the victim of screen violence, but often at a distance—both literal and figurative. While encountering a fictional medium creates a figurative distance between viewers and characters, the filmmaker controls the literal distance between them through shot scale and editing.

When a film shows acts of torture the camera’s relationship to the body on screen can re eal what the filmmaker’s goal may be in a gi en scene, and what effect that scene may have on a viewer. Having already discussed the use of facial close-ups, here I will focus on the ways in which historical fiction films depict bodies being subjected to

torture and state violence. 2 First, I will examine scenes which directly present violence to the viewer. I argue that in these scenes, the cinematography reflects the nature of the violence being experienced in order to convey the subjective experience of torture to viewers. Next, I will look at works that mediate the presentation of violence, either by invoking news media, or by providing characters who act as surrogates for the viewers in encounters with violence. In the first case, the films comment on the ways in which news venues which foster an active sense of distance when they present images of real violence. In the second case, the viewer surrogates become ethical guides through encounters with state violence. I will then return to unmediated images of violence to explore the different approaches several films take to represent the subjective split that occurs between the self and the body, a central element of the experience of undergoing torture.

Watching Torture

A political and an ethical concern on the behalf of the filmmaker drives him or her to tell the stories of the silenced victims of political atrocities, and a simultaneously ethical and political sensibility drives the filmmaker's choice of how to tell and show those stories. These atrocities were not just wrong in a humanist, ethical sense, but also in a legal and political sense in that they involved the abuse of power in carrying out false persecution, illegal detention, the denial of trials, and the erosion of individual and civil rights. The victims of these crimes had no political power—this enabled official narratives to deny the systematic use of forced disappearance, torture, and murder and prevent their victims from having any voice. Efforts to give the protagonists of these stories as much narrative agency as possible while also preventing them from becoming

2 I examine instances where torture or state violence remains unseen in chapter four.

objects of visual fetishization resist the unethical practices of deriving pleasure from someone else’s forced suffering (whether that person is real or fictional) and perpetually silencing or discrediting the victims of any kind of violence. In film, this means fully developing the subjectivity of characters who experience torture or state violence so that they may speak about their experiences. In the films under study in this chapter, narrative and aesthetic choices necessarily involve giving power and giving a voice to people who had been stripped of all their political power and legal recourse, and so these choices have a political dimension as well. The political and the ethical do not conflict in these films, or in this analysis, but rather they both must be considered when one attempts to speak for the living, the dead, and the disappeared victims of state violence. In her book An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the

Nameless Others Edith Wyschogrod notes, “It has often been pointed out that in the age of atrocity the plethora of images of death, injury, and mutilation, a saturation point may be reached and the in ocation of images rendered futile. But the isual historian’s promise to present the res gestae is a promise to struggle against these odds” ( ). The films discussed in this chapter also struggle against these odds, if not against greater odds when one considers the omnipresence of violent images in all visual media.

Wyschogrod continues “But the historian as filmmaker … can in films of memory make absence manifest through the creation of signs that exhibit forgetting, distortion, and the time gap between e ent and memory” ( -93). Visual and narrative techniques that convey memory, forgetting, distortion, and the passage of time combine to create a sense of subjecti ity that separates films that show the “things done” from films that only show violence for fetishistic purposes.

The two dominant approaches to filming torture are the use of close-ups and shots from a distance (a medium-long shot or further out). The viewer is denied pri ileged access to a character’s thoughts through the in ocation of distance. The film takes the character away from us, distances us from his or her thoughts, and privileges the body; however, they also place the viewer at a remove from the violence. The same holds true for the second formal tendency exhibited by scenes of torture: the use of close-ups of specific parts of the body, arranged through editing. I argue that this approach brings the viewer closer to the subject of torture through the direction of the

iewer’s attention. Instead of being left to absorb the effects of torture on the entire body, the shots lead viewers see and think about what specifically happens to a hand, a finger, a torso, etc. The use of close-ups and montage heightens the immediacy of the violence for the viewer, resulting in a different conception of the body and a different sense of subjectivity. The use of multiple close-ups combined via editing fragments the body and reassembles it, giving the viewer a visual sense of disjuncture, and capturing the specific ways in which a body can react to pain.

State of Siege (1972, dir. Konstantinos Costa-Gavras) uses close-ups to put viewers into intimate contact with the tortured body. In doing so, the film comments on the logic of torture and the denial of humanity that torture requires. The film depicts the go ernment of Uruguay’s persecution of leftist organizations including the Tupamaros a real communist guerilla group. However, the film focuses on the abduction of an

American official from USAID by the Tupamaros. The Tupamaros do not torture Philip

Santore—they interrogate him about his role in training the police forces of Uruguay,

Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and other countries in the use of torture against so-

called sub ersi e groups. Santore’s confession itself is a formality—the Tupamaros have well-documented evidence of the training provided by USAID. They want Santore to take responsibility and make a public statement that the government of Uruguay uses torture and forced disappearances to counter the go ernment’s official statements that the Tupamaros are propagating fictitious claims.

While the interrogator questions Santore and lines up his evidence, the film illustrates his claims through flashbacks one of which shows the film’s only instance of torture as a dehumanized experiment. At one point during their “training ” representatives from USAID in Brazil give a demonstration of electrocution, using a live subject as the interrogator notes. The scene’s establishing shot shows the anonymous man being tortured strapped to a stretcher, blindfolded but otherwise naked, and propped upright in the center of a stage. Military officials surround him on stage, while other members of the military and police fill the audience. We do not know how the anonymous man came to be used for this demonstration. Because we know nothing about this man, the images that make up the torture montage do not convey a sense of the self—a reflection of the fact that to those present, this man is nothing but a prop.

The montage showing the electrocution thus focuses on his body and on the military audience’s perspecti e on what they watch. The montage breaks the man’s body apart.

The images come in extreme close-ups on each body part as the man experiences shocks in his testicles, his septum, his nipples, and finally in his eye. After each extreme close-up, we see a counter shot of the audience watching, emotionless—save for one man who runs out of the room, about to vomit. The men who have come to be trained in torture no longer have any concept of humanity—of what it means to be a self and a

body. They are able to distance themselves from the man being tortured so that he becomes an inhuman Other. He is not a man, or a body, but a prop—something to be acted upon without consequence. The dehumanization is, of course, reflected in the rhetoric of torture, as displayed in the pseudo-scientific demonstration of electrocution.

This montage, while involving an anonymous subject, reveals something important about the experience of torture in general: its cruel logic. Torture displays power through the control it gives torturers over the body of another, but for the man on stage, this violence is being done to him without provocation, without reason. Torture is widely acknowledged as an ineffective way to obtain information3 so “interrogation” serves as nothing more than the pretense for committing violent acts. In this scene, pretense is stripped away. The officials only want to show what happens when a body is electrocuted. The audience members at the training session have come to learn the amount of physical pain they can create, what progression of places to shock, and what

oltages to use in alleged attempts to extract information from “sub ersi es.”4

But the montage as a whole also has the same motivation within the context of the film—to show State of Siege’s iewers what happens when a body is electrocuted.

The narrati e context (the description by the Tupamaros’s interrogator) and the use of extreme close-ups produce the difference in reactions between the military and police audience within the film and the iewers outside the film. The film’s narrati e places the montage in the context of an attempt to make it clear to a non-military public that the government of Uruguay uses torture, and to tell the public just what kinds of torture the

3 Torture is far less effective than using informers (Rejali 225). 4 Electrocution, more so than other forms of torture, gives the illusion of being a scientific, objective way of committing violence, which can make it a more palatable technique (Rejali 222, 232).

government uses. The film places its viewers in a position similar to that of the non- military public of Uruguay, rather than the audience of the demonstration.

This placement is partially insured by the extradiegetic context of this being a film by Costa-Gavras, who was already well-known as a leftist filmmaker after the release of several earlier films, most notably Z (1969). Furthermore, State of Siege was initially to be shown at the opening of the Kennedy Center, but then cancelled because of its political content leading other filmmakers to pull their films from the Center’s opening

(New York Times). This historical context means that most viewers, then and now, are probably aware of Costa-Ga ras and the film’s politics. The film’s iewers would therefore be more likely to sympathize with the Tupamaros than not, and to object to the use of torture and the U.S. intervention presented by the film.5 The electrocution montage maintains this difference between the demonstration’s audience and the film’s viewers. The film never shows the demonstration from the point of view of an audience member. The establishing shot keeps the film’s iewers at a further remo e from the stage, while the extreme close-ups plunge us in much closer than any audience member. The counter shots of the audience again separate the film viewers, in effect asking “ ook at them; are your reactions the same as theirs? How could they passi ely and dispassionately watch this man’s pain?” The montage allows iewers to reflect on their own reactions to the torture in the face of the demonstration’s audience’s placidity.

The use of extreme close-ups in the montage achieves something else, too. Not only does the film consistently distance its iewers from the demonstration’s audience

5 Ironically, State of Siege was released December 30, 1972, just eight months before the unofficially C.I.A.-backed coup that deposed socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile and instated U.S.-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet. The coup would become the subject of Costa-Ga ras’s 8 film Missing, discussed elsewhere in this dissertation.

but it puts them into intimate contact with the body of the man being tortured. We see the exact locus of the pain just as the man experiences it when the wires touch his skin.

The torture is no longer diffuse, but concentrated through the placement of the wires, and so we see the place where the pain is most acute before emanating through the man’s body. The acute onset of pain structures the montage and tears the body apart.

The body aches, but the close-ups show where it burns. The acute pain experienced by each body part where the electrodes are placed severs that part from the whole of the body, and at the same time, overwhelms the body. The man becomes only his testicles, only his nipple, only his septum, and perhaps most unimaginably, only his eye. The film presents the eye as the last location of electrocution in the montage, and recalls other cinematic images of tortured eyes—specifically those in Un Chien Andalou (1929) and

A Clockwork Orange ( ). As inda Williams notes in her brief essay “An Eye for an

Eye ” seeing iolence against the eye is one of the most extreme and rarest acts of film violence because it attacks vision, the act of seeing without which cinema would be impossible (14). Within the electrocution montage it makes for a startling final image and a reminder that the whole of this scene has been an assault on seeing, on the eye, and on the primary traits associated with the eye and seeing: truth and reason. This truth defies reason by defying humanity and ethics. No ethical explanation allows for subjecting another human being to such violence; therefore, the subject must have ceased to be considered human to those enacting the iolence. We the film’s iewers can clearly see that this is not the case. We see the man suffering on stage each time he is shocked. Only the fact that torture negates humanity can explain this demonstration.

In contrast to State of Siege’s use of a flashback to show torture as it happened

Hidden Agenda (1990, dir. Ken Loach) produces another kind of visual testimony as two characters reenact and describe their experiences for the international commission investigating the treatment of Irish republican prisoners by British forces. This scene of testimony gives agency to the survivors through their bodies, while presenting the action as therapeutic. In the film’s opening scene two men describe the ways in which British police tortured them, including physical abuse and waterboarding. The commission asks one of the men to demonstrate how guards made him stand for over 30 hours. We see a medium close-up as the man approaches a wall and stands about two feet from it. He places his feet shoulder-width apart and does the same with his hands. The commission asks him a few questions, and he repeats how long the guards made him stand in this position. He tells the commission that if he tried to relax guards ga e him “the crab treatment ” and again the commission asks him to demonstrate. The shot pans down and tracks in closer as the man describes his actions and the form of his torture. He sits on a chair sideways, and then moves his feet out until he can put his back across the seat. Then he reaches over his head and places his hands on the ground below and behind him. While maintaining this position he says that the prison guards repeatedly punched him in his stretched stomach and torso. As he says this he begins to shake and cry.

The nature of this testimonial setting should be a comfort—the man should not feel danger since the commission is independent (though clearly compassionate to the former prisoners). The man’s erbal and physical testimony is what makes this scene unusual. Typically, testimony is only verbal, or if physical, entails the showing of scars

or documentation of injuries. Here though, the man effectively relives his torture though the reenactment— an authoritative presence tells him to assume certain physical positions by and he complies. They ask him questions, mirroring the experience of interrogation. The man, perhaps because he subconsciously knows he is safe, does not experience any sort of self/body split, which I will elaborate on later in this chapter. In fact, the reenactment reveals the fact that his self and his body are the same and that they both experienced this torture—his body through his physical positions and his self though his memories of what happened to him. The act of speaking while in the crab position pulls his body through his self; he mentally processes and then describes his physical sensations to the commission. The physical pain he experienced in the past reroutes itself as mental or emotional pain in the present. This scene bears out almost like a psychotherapy session—the man repeats what happened to him, reliving the torture mentally and physically, in the hopes of some sort of healing—though here the healing would presumably come as a result of the commission’s findings and recommendations. Because of the potential outcome and the safety of his surroundings, the man’s breakdown can be read as a type of catharsis—a venting of the emotions that he could not express while detained because of the various pressures of imprisonment.

His ability to express both his emotions and his physical sensations presents itself as a sort of healing—the remaking whole of something that had been rent apart. The man’s body is no longer a source of betrayal, but a reassurance of his survival. As the next chapter shows, films rarely show both torture and a survivor testifying to it—a film usually pursues one or the other option, not both. Here though, we see the processing of the experience of torture as not just a mental act—an act of the self—but as a

physical act that goes beyond the healing of cuts, burns, bruises, or broken limbs. The physical reenactment of torture in this scene gives credit to the primacy of the body in torture—these acts torment not only the self (the mind, the spirit), but the body as it is abused, contorted, and turned against itself. The physical reenactment by the man emphasizes the importance of physical testimony in the healing of the survivor. Without it, treatment only addresses half of the problem, and the self/body split remains in effect.

Borstal Boy (2000, dir. Peter Sheridan) and Hunger (2008, dir. Steve

McQueen)—both set during the long-lasting conflict between England and republican groups over Northern Ireland—use shot scale and camera movements to reflect the experience of violence as it happens. In these two films, we see beatings by prison guards performed from a distance, and yet this space does not allow for the type of emotional reflection present in Hidden Agenda. In Borstal Boy, the beating occurs unexpectedly, while in Hunger beatings appear routinely throughout the film, thus giving an impression that they routinely occur in the life of imprisoned IRA (Irish Republican

Army) members.

In Borstal Boy the decision to film the beatings from a distance reflects the indiscriminate nature of this type of violence. In Borstal, a 16 year-old Brendan Behan has been arrested for bomb-making in England. The British authorities imprison

Brendan in a regular jail prior to his trial, in which the judge spares him hanging because of his age and sentences him to the Borstal youth prison. When police first bring Brendan to his cell in the adult prison, two young IRA members are being led to their executions. Brendan salutes them and whispers “Up the Republic!” a gesture of rebellion that infuriates his guards and many of the other prisoners. The guards insult

Brendan and then begin to beat him. They strike him with their clubs, catching him wherever they can, until they beat Brendan into his room. The attack surprises Brendan, who has surely heard stories about the treatment of Irish prisoners by the British, but never experienced it first-hand. He has no time to react or mentally process the attack; his reactions are physical and instinctive; he must try to protect himself. The form of the violence here dictates the visual form of the scene—Brendan enters an almost purely physical state and we watch what happens to his body and how his body reacts as a whole in a full shot. Reflection on the attack only comes once Brendan separates himself from his attackers.

In Hunger several of the beatings we see take a similar visual form as the scene discussed above in Borstal Boy, but not because of the spontaneous nature of the violence. In Hunger, the prison guards, the British state, or the IRA meticulously plan every act of violence. Instead, the use of distanced shots by director Steve McQueen emphasizes the mayhem of the violence enacted by the prison guards. The speed of their mo ements the camera’s mo ements, the editing, and the efficiency with which the violence progresses from one phase to the next reflects a persistent sense of frenzy in the acts they carry out. One of the most violent scenes of Hunger shows Davey

Gillen, Gerry Campbell, and then Bobby Sands being dragged from their cells, washed, having their hair cut, and being beaten all along the way. This forced cleaning was a response to the Blanket and Dirty Protests by IRA and INLA (Irish National Liberation

Army) prisoners in Maze prison and Armagh women’s prison in Northern Ireland. In turn, the Dirty Protest had begun as a reaction to repeated brutal attacks by the prison guards.

The distance of the camera and the speed of the scenes emphasizes efficiency with which the guards move prisoners through each phase of what I call the “clean attack.” Guards outnumber the prisoners so guards easily subdue any the resistance the prisoners put up. The repetition of images as guards attack each subsequent prisoner also adds to the sense of efficiency of the clean attack. The actual action by the guards and the resistance of the prisoners gives the sequence a sense of frenzy bordering on chaos. The efficiency of the attack releases the actions of the bodies in the scene from mental control by the, and so the physical movements become unrestrained in their violence and resistance. The flailing of Davey, Gerry, and Bobby cannot be fully captured in anything other than a full shot, and neither can the blows of the guards, or the use of a broom to scrub the prisoners clean. The distance of the camera throughout this sequence allows the viewer to understand that the mental states of each side have been set—either to cruelty or resistance. With those determinations made, the bodies act accordingly.

Mediated Encounters with State Violence

While the films discussed above present violence immediately to viewers, other works about torture and state violence choose to mediate the presentation of violence.

Some films adopt the strategy of incorporating news media into the narrative or appropriating stock news footage as part of their visual style. These films use news media to simultaneously comment on the selection of images intended to evoke empathy in a wide audience, and the detachment elicited by media reports that consistently position atrocities as happening elsewhere. The other strategy that historical fiction works use to mediate encounters with state violence presents viewers with a character (or characters) who serve as their on-screen surrogates. These

surrogates become ethical guides through the act of witnessing violence as viewers empathize with and share elements of their subjective experiences.

News Media Images

The films Before the Rain (1994, dir. Milcho Manchevski) and Welcome to

Sarajevo (1997, dir. Michael Winterbottom) display the tension between the personal experience of state violence and the experience of state violence through media images. Rain and Sarajevo both feature main characters who are (or have been) journalists in Bosnia. Their presence in these films emphasizes the perceived distance between the violence in the Balkans and audiences in the West (specifically, in the UK).

Furthermore, media outlets capture and broadcast anonymous violence—the victims and survivors seen have no names, and frequently have no backstories. These media images contrast with the film images we see which create an immediate relation between the person experiencing violence, the journalists, and by extension the viewers. This split in ways of seeing violence points to one of the values of portraying torture and state violence in narrative films—giving an experience narrative form is integral to the therapeutic function of testimony. This is not to imply that all narrative films are therapeutic, but rather to acknowledge the role that historical fiction films can play in creating healing cultural narratives.

Before the Rain shows the process of selecting media images for their affect and comments on the distant manner in which these images can be consumed. Anne looks at proofs and prints of images from Bosnia—images that presumably could have been taken by her lover Aleksander, who has just returned to London from a photo assignment in Bosnia. The film initially represents her relationship to these images as detached when we see her flip through several prints in the same way one would flip

through a magazine. However, Anne gradually slows her pace, and returns to the first image to look at it more closely. As she puts the pictures down, she knocks over her mug of coffee, which spills over another print—an image of a topless woman in a black below-the-breast corset. The image could easily be part of a feature or print for an ad.

We cannot see the woman’s face because the coffee mug co ers it. The coffee spill that motivates the cut from one image to another has the effect of equating the two images—anonymous, titillating, exploitative, and designed to elicit a specific range of responses (arousal, purchase of a specific product, condemnation of the atrocities committed by the Serbs, support for military intervention in Bosnia, etc.). Instead of being allowed to think about the images for long, or know what Anne thinks or feels in reaction to them, we see her evaluating them, judging their effectiveness. Only the spilling of her coffee indicates that the images—particularly the one of the emaciated man that she returns to—affect her at all. This scene reminds viewers that all images, including those in Rain, are judged on the way they affect their intended audience, and that some images produce stronger reactions than others.

The invocation of media images affects the plot and form of Welcome to

Sarajevo more significantly than that of Rain as the film incorporates stock video footage into the narrative to bring viewers closer to those media images. Sarajevo’s story predominantly follows British reporter Michael Henderson’s efforts to e acuate a

Bosnian orphanage (and then adopt Emira, one of the orphans) during the siege of

Sarajevo. These efforts stem from a news report Henderson filmed at the orphanage in competition for airtime with Flynn, an adventurous American freelance reporter. Not only do we see these men and other journalists filming reports, but director Michael

Winterbottom makes extensive use of stock news footage. Stock footage serves as the film’s introduction behind the opening credits and recurs throughout the film. Because of its persistent presence, the footage goes beyond just providing the real-life context of the story (based on Michael Nicholson’s memoir W S j : N ’

Story). Rather, the stock footage takes the place of what would otherwise be recreated scenes of state violence. Winterbottom often moves seamlessly from a staged image to its stock inspiration and vice-versa. He allows the viewer to see how the real has been staged for the screen. The difference in image quality—sleek film for the fiction, grainy video for the stock footage—assures that the viewer knows which images belong to which realm. The editing, lack of sound, or presence of music separates the experience of these ideo clips within the film from a iewer’s experience of these images in T news broadcasts.

Traditional TV voiceovers only accompany the video images twice in the film.

These voiceovers occur when we see Michael’s report on the orphanage and when we see Annie’s report from the Omarska and Trnopolje concentration camps; howe er the film explicitly presents these two instances as being news reports. Yet, even these reports make extensive use of silence, again suggesting that these are not quite TV- ready images—that their function here differs from a news report. The film premiered at

Cannes Film Festi al in (as a Palme d’Or nominee) a little more than a year after the end of the Bosnian War. By this logic, images of the siege of Sarajevo and reports from Bosnia would likely have been fresh in the memories of viewers. The idea of reviewing these images, and viewing them in a new context, shifts their meaning. The images do not become more meaningful or become fictional because they are now part

of a fiction film. Simply put, viewers of Sarajevo experience these media images differently as part of the film than they did on TV.

The key to this different viewing experience is the question of distance. Images of war and violence in TV news broadcasts are predicated on the idea of distance—the effect of the designations “local news ” “national news ” and “world news.” In world news broadcasts reports are often prefaced with phrases like “We go to…” or “And now to…” with the lead anchor filling in the location blank. World news broadcasts introduce on-location reporting as elsewhere, in a far-off place requiring travel, often illustrated by map graphics. Sarajevo does not make this assertion of distance. The cinematic suspension of disbelief places the iewer in the setting(s) of the film. We do not “go to”

Bosnia; the narrative has already placed us there. Thus the film makes the media images immediate—they become the here and the now of the film and of the iewer’s experience of the film. So while some of these stock images may capture violence from a distance, their immersion in the film renders them closer than they would otherwise appear. The stock ideo doesn’t bring the iewers intimately close to the violence as do the recreated and staged images. The video images do not give us direct insight into the subjectivity of the victims and survivors they depict. These people remain anonymous. Instead, these images can give viewers a sense of what it was like to live in Sarajevo during the siege.6 The video images convey the pervasiveness of state

iolence in Saraje o in the early s and the ulnerability of the city’s entire population to that violence and the counter-attacks it elicited. One of the most banal video clips used by Winterbottom captures this violent atmosphere—a shot of people of

6 Director Konstantinos Costa-Gavras attempts to do the same in his films State of Siege and Missing, but he does not use stock footage, only restagings.

all ages and backgrounds intermittently running through a crosswalk, trying to avoid gunfire while going about their everyday lives.

Guided Encounters

Historical fiction films often use characters within the narrative as surrogates for the viewers in order to guide a specific ethical response to images of state violence and torture. Hunger uses a young riot police officer as such a surrogate in one sequence to acknowledge the conflicted position of viewers who are disturbed by the violence they see, but cannot stop. After the murder of Raymond Lohan (the guard in charge of scrubbing down the prisoners in the clean attack discussed earlier), it becomes clear to the prison administration in Hunger that IRA and INLA members pass messages into and out of the prison. In response to this breach of conduct, the prison brings in riot police and subjects the prisoners to cavity searches after being run through a gauntlet.

The long shots of the prison hall as the prisoners go through the gauntlet allow the viewers to see the number of men subjected to this treatment, and just what each one of them endures. After the riot police beat on their shields with their batons to create deafening noise in the narrow hall, they start beating and kicking the men who pass between their ranks, first walking, then crawling. Then the sequence cuts to a room where, one by one, guards make the men to straddle a mirror, anally probe (digitally sodomize) them, and then orally probe them. The same officer probes from anus to mouth, from man to man, without ever changing his gloves.

Medium close-ups of the young riot police officer whose eyes shift nervously as he takes in his surroundings and the violent actions of his peers interrupt this sequence se eral times and his position as an obser er reflects the position of the film’s iewers.

Of all the people present, only this young man expresses a sense of disbelief at these

events, let alone a reluctance to act. The structure of the editing leads the viewers to see these events through his mental frame even though the scene rarely provides a direct eye line match. The young man’s expressions and placement in the scenes puts him in a third position in relation to the prisoners and the police. He does not appear unquestioningly complicit in the violence. He does not bear hatred or malice in his comportment, but he does not actively resist either. He does not appear on the side of the guards and police, nor does he take the side of the prisoners—figuratively or literally in the mise-en-scène. His facial expressions never match those of the other officers or guards, the camera singles him out by centering on his face, his uniform sets him apart from the prisoners, and yet, he stands alone near a corner of the room where a guard probes the men. His role as a riot police officer tramps him in a state of non-action, but his placement in the scene makes him a surrogate for the film’s iewers. ike the viewers, what he witnesses shocks him. His lack of refusal to participate can be read as individual complicity (though film never makes clear the extent of his participation, a point to which I will return). However, by reading him as a surrogate for the viewer, I suggest that this young man raises Lévinas’s problem of the impossibility of ethical action. It has been documented by experiments such as the famous Milgram

Experiment that the proximity of figures of authority and the proximity of others who engage in objectionable acts (the physical harm of others) significantly decreases the likelihood of individual resistance (Milgram). This psychological and sociological condition presents a sort of impossibility of ethical action, and the situation of the young riot police officer fully exemplifies Milgram’s obser ations. His fellow officers and prison guards who eagerly abuse the prisoners surround him, and his superior officer and

several prison officials accompany him. Even the prison itself surrounds him and represents the impassive authority of the law and the British crown. These conditions make his resistance almost unimaginable. And yet, the expressions on his face and the movements of his eyes convey his objections and indicate that he has imagined resisting his duty and what it would mean. His presence reflects the position of viewers troubled by the images on screen about which they can do nothing. The shots of the young riot police officer provide a pause in the overwhelming violence of the sequence that can allow for ethical reflection by the viewers and prevents them from simply becoming overwhelmed by the brutality of what they see.

As I mentioned before, the young man whose presence guides the audience stands alone near a corner of the room where the prisoners undergo cavity searches and further beatings, and his separation from the violence is what allows him and the viewers to reflect on the scene. What initially came across as nervousness or disbelief in his expression quickly turns to terror. When Gerry head-butts the guard doing the ca ity searches we watch from the young man’s point of iew as another riot police officer beats Gerry with increasing force and speed. Later, when we see Bobby thrown on the floor of his cell, McQueen uses a split screen to juxtapose a slow zoom in on

Bobby’s bloody motionless face with a medium close-up of the young riot police officer standing in the corner of another room, crying. He has either ceased to participate in the violence going on at the prison or it has ended (the constant sound of batons on shields could indicate its continuation or its lasting effects). In either case, his emotional reaction paired with his earlier facial expressions and position in the mise-en-scène constitute his resistance to the violence being asked of him when juxtaposed with the

eagerness and complacency of the other riot police officers and prison guards involved.

McQueen frames both the young man and Bobby from the chest up, on the right of the screen. The cuts between images of Bobby and this young man put them in the same place as a resistant to the police and the government. Since the young man has been the iewers’ guide through this sequence we too are placed on Bobby’s side; we too have been subjected to the deafening noise through elaborate theater sound systems and we have witnessed the violence alongside the young man so that in effect, we too ha e been brutalized by the police and the British go ernment’s policies toward IRA and

INLA prisoners. The shot of the young man crying, along with the close-up of Bobby that follows7, allows viewers space and time for ethical reflection in the midst of the violence, and it dares us to li e up to the film’s ethical demands. It dares us to take our place alongside Bobby Sands.

The three-part UK series Warriors (1999, dir. Peter Kosminsky) attempts to convey the effects of repeated encounters with the aftermath of state violence as viewers follow the experiences of members of a UK UNPROFOR squad from the announcement of their deployment to a Croat-controlled area of the former Yugoslavia, to their post-traumatic stress once they return home. Most of the state violence shown in Warriors takes the form of military attacks by the Croatian army and paramilitary groups. Viewers do not actually witness the more intimate instances of state violence carried out by the Croats (raids on homes, one-on-one confrontations, and the razing of neighborhoods), only their aftermath. The second installment of the series shows three specific instances in which members of the U ’s UNPROFOR squad encounter the

7 Discussed in Chapter 2.

corpses of Bosnians they knew. The proximity of the troops and the camera to the corpses reflects the relationship between the men and the dead. These repeated encounters with corpses of people they knew conveys, on the one hand, their distance from and inability to understand the workings of the Bosnian War, and on the other, the futility of their presence as the bureaucracy of the UN persistently prevents them from taking any meaningful action against the Croats.

Initially, Warriors invokes distance to convey the precarious emotional situation of the UNPROFOR troops as their sense of empathy compels them to intervene, but such interventions lead to increased danger. Early in the second installment, Almira takes Lt.

Feeley to see the former site of a WWII concentration camp. While driving back to the

UN base, Almira makes him stop to look at three new graves near a farm. As they stand at the graves, three cars with Croatian flags pull up at the farm. Three men approach the farmhouse and start to harass its elderly inhabitants. After one man shoots their dog, more Croats start to clear the house of any potentially valuable items. Lt. Feeley intervenes, and makes the men leave by questioning whether this raid follows official orders from Dario ordi . t. Feeley and Almira comfort the couple before lea ing. The scene uses only long shots until Lt. Feeley confronts the Croats.

The next day, Lt. Feeley returns to the farm with Pte. James and Sgt. Sochanik, only to find the man and the woman dead, and this scene makes explicit the ways in which the war and the UN’s policy of non-intervention render emotions dangerous. The woman’s body lays crumpled in the yard and the Croats ha e hung the man’s body between two windows. Both ha e been shot multiple times. We can see the man’s body as soon as the UN Land Rover turns a corner to the farm, and the scene maintains that

initial distance. The camera stays in a long shot in order to keep the three UN soldiers and the two bodies in the frame. The action of the scene reinforces this visual distance; when Pte. ames approaches the barn to cut down the man’s corpse Sgt. Sochanik stops him because the bodies may be booby-trapped. Lt. Feeley appears visibly upset, and Pte. James goes into a rage over the fact that the UN has done and can do nothing for these two people, even in death. The distance between the troops and the corpses, and by extension, the distance between the camera and the corpses in this scene becomes a visual marker of the UNPROFOR troops’ situation. They ha e been put in the middle of the war, but they must keep a distance, as the repeated admonitions from higher-ups “not to get in ol ed” remind us. This official sentiment presumes that t.

Feeley and the others can maintain the distance presented by the camera—that they can keep their emotions on one side of the frame and not cross to the other side.

However, even his name points out this impossibility—he is Lt. Feeley, not Lt. Stoic. In effect, regardless of whether any mines had been placed under the corpses, the UN has booby-trapped the bodies of the man and the woman at the farm by rendering emotions psychologically dangerous through the prohibition on direct action. Lt. Feeley, Pte.

James, and Sgt. Sochanik have been trapped by their empathy for these people (and other Bosnians they befriend). The UN command, however, has no room for empathy and simply does not address its role in the UNPROFOR mission or the daily lives of the soldiers. The effects of this trap become startlingly clear at the end of the series when we see the different ways in which each soldier experiences post-traumatic stress disorder.

In an encounter that runs parallel to t. Feeley’s at the farm the proximity of the soldiers with the bodies of the dead reflects an even greater sense of moral responsibility and failure. Lt. Loughrey takes several men into the village of Ahmici where they befriend Emir and his large family. They share a meal, and the soldiers take turns playing video games with Emir’s son Admir. This sequence pro ides one of the few glimpses we get of “normal life” in Yugosla ia but it also ser es as a reminder of normal life back home. The levity of this encounter does not last. As the soldiers leave

Ahmici, the appearance of blue “X”es spray-painted on several houses puzzles them.

The next day, they discover that Croat forces attacked the village. In the basement of

Emir’s home t. oughrey disco ers the charred remains of Emir and his family. The soldiers take turns coming to see the bodies piled together in the small room, as if at a funeral. Their range from grief to disbelief to acute panic. The camera initially stays distant to keep all of the bodies in the frame and capture the UN soldiers’ reactions.

However, in contrast to t. Feeley’s open-air encounter at the farm, the closed space of the basement puts the soldiers in almost immediate contact with the dead. The mise-en- scène provides little space for them to move about amongst the remains. The scene cuts closer when the soldiers begin to recognize individual bodies. The organization of space in the scene and the use of medium close-ups of the father and son’s bodies reflect the bond that the soldiers shared with Emir’s family. Again though the sense of futility felt by the troops is apparent. One soldier has to leave the scene almost immediately because the sight overwhelms him. When Lt. Loughrey leaves the basement and returns outside, he has the belated realization that the houses with the blue “X”es like the one across from Emir’s home ha e been untouched. The marks are

crosses not “X”es meant to mark the Christian homes in the town so the Croats will not attack them. This foreshadowing may have been clear to viewers, given our knowledge of the Bosnian War, but in an instance of dramatic irony, the UNPROFOR troops fail to understand the marks’ significance. t. oughrey begins to fume as he realizes what the marks meant, and perhaps thinks that if he had understood sooner, he could have sa ed Emir’s family and others. His guilt progresses to rage as he destroys a flowerbed at this house—his anger targets the Christians who watched their neighbors get murdered, himself for not understanding, and the UN for repeatedly prohibiting his group from moving Bosnians to safety for fear of being seen as aiding the ethnic cleansing. The proximity of the corpses and the warm relationship between the soldiers and Emir’s family forces t. oughrey’s and others’ reactions beyond frustration at the

UN to a personal sense of guilt and complicity in the Serbs’ and Croats’ crimes—just the sense of complicity the UN officially denies.

When Warriors shows direct physical contact with the dead, it becomes a sign of mourning and grief without guilt. Lt. Feeley brings Almira (with whom he has an emotional affair) and her daughter to live at the UN base after her husband disappears to join the Bosnian resistance and Croat forces close in on her home. Human nature pro es stronger than t. Feeley’s efforts though when Almira’s daughter con inces her to return to the house to retrieve the prom dress Almira had just finished sewing for her.

We see them in one scene collecting personal items before the episode cuts to other action. Then, as Lt. Feeley returns from evacuating a makeshift shelter, he drives past the row of homes where he and t. oughrey had been Almira’s neighbors and sees that they are on fire. He arrives to find Almira and her daughter lying face down in the

driveway. The scene shows a medium close-up of their bodies, the closest image of intact corpses in the film so far. Lt. Feeley and the viewers immediately recognize

Almira and her daughter in opposition to the presentation of Emir’s family’s remains.

We see Almira’s body in a close-up profile shot as Lt. Feeley brushes her hair away from her face. The distance present in the other encounters with the dead closes as Lt.

Feeley reaches out to touch Almira. In this moment, Lt. Feeley only expresses grief, not disbelief or guilt. Lt. Feeley understands that he could not have prevented this from happening—Almira would not ha e asked him to accompany them and he couldn’t have stopped her from trying to give her daughter one small happiness.

The last scene I would like to discuss from Warriors differs from the others because it involves Bosnians that the UN soldiers do not know, but it depicts the closest contact with bodies the soldiers will experience and shifts both the soldiers’ and iewers perspective on the war from frustration and guilt to disgust. At an arranged body swap in which the Bosnians have four Croat bodies and the Croats have 98 Bosnians, the

Croats inform the UN troops that one living man lies in the pile of corpses in their dump truck. This re elation points to the Croats’ excessi e cruelty. The Bosnians ha e wrapped and identified the corpses they will exchange, but the Croats have thrown all of the corpses into the bed of the dump truck as-is. When Pte. James approaches the dump truck to find the living man, we see a close-up of various fluids dripping from its bumper—blood, pus, and other putrefaction. Pte. James must climb up the slick ladder and into the bed to dig through the corpses. After some time, he finds the living man and pulls him out. While the camera stays distant—we never see into the bed—Pte.

James and the survivor emerge covered in the liquid remains of others. (Later we will

learn that most of these were not even entire corpses, but fragments of men and children’s bodies.) The camera does not reflect the proximity of Pte. ames to the bodies, but his physical appearance does in an unimaginable way. In part, Warriors refrains from showing the truck’s contents because we cannot begin to imagine what they look like. But I argue that since we see the body bags the soldiers place the remains in, and hear graphic descriptions of their contents later, the episode withholds images of the truck bed for another reason—because the UNPROFOR squad finally, successfully intervenes in a showdown with the Croats. Previously, the bodies have been shown to signify the violence as a fait accompli, emphasizing the feelings of helplessness, guilt, and grief in the soldiers. Pte. James comes away from his horrific experience in the truck with a sense of triumph, having found and saved the lone survivor (who turns out to be Almira’s husband). The liquid remains on Pte. ames’s uniform and the shots of the truck’s bumper disgust us but Warriors gives this sense of disgust greater significance. At this moment, the UN soldiers can finally vent their conflicted emotions in an o erwhelming sense of disgust at the magnitude of the Croats’ disregard for human life and the UN’s repeated indictments against action.

While Warriors frequently shifts its narrative point of view between different members of the UNPROFOR squad, they all convey similar experiences of violence.

The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006, dir. Ken Loach), set during the Anglo-Irish War and the subsequent Irish Civil War, acknowledges its male-centered perspective and uses Damien O’Dono an as a guide in one scene to comment on how women may experience state violence differently than men. After an attack on a group of British soldiers the IRA group returns to Sinead’s home only to find the Black and Tans

attacking her and ransacking the house. The men can only watch from a distance because the Black and Tans out-arm and outnumber them, and intervention would put

Sinead, her mother, and her grandmother in too much danger. Damien—who by this point is romantically involved with Sinead—can only look on while his brother and others repeatedly restrain him to keep him from charging down the hill and onto the scene. The camera alternates between long shots and closer shots using a telephoto zoom to show us the e ents from Damien’s point of iew. We see Sinead dragged from her home while Black and Tans detain her mother and grandmother in the yard. Men drag Sinead across the yard and force her to sit on a crate. The shot cuts closer as one of the men produces a pair of shears and crudely begins to cut off Sinead’s shoulder-length hair

(frequently taking pieces of her scalp with it). Sinead cries, writhes about, and kicks at the man as he rubs clumps of her hair across her face and into her mouth. Throughout this act, the film cuts back to see Damien becoming more and more distraught and incensed. The shot cuts from the men to Sinead and then pans to the stone house, and we see flames coming from the upper windows. The three women wail at the destruction of their home as the Black and Tans leave. Damien and the men descend, and Damien immediately goes to take care of Sinead in her state of acute shock. We watch in a medium close-up as he tends to the wounds on her scalp and she begins to calm down somewhat.

The shot/counter shot pattern of the scene up to the point where Damien goes to

Sinead consistently places the iewer in Damien’s subjecti e position as he can do nothing but watch the violence against the woman he loves. The film places Damien in an impossible ethical situation, following Lévinas. Damien comes face-to-face with the

oppressed Other in the form of Sinead and her family, but he cannot act because to do so would only cause more suffering. The viewer inhabits a similar position when director

Ken Loach uses point of view shots to show us what Damien sees and then counter shots to show us his suffering under the Black and Tans at this moment. Like Damien and the other members of the IRA group, the viewer can only watch as the man shears off Sinead’s hair and wish for an end to the act or imagine how the iolence could be stopped. The film compels iewers to want Sinead’s suffering to stop which will in turn relie e Damien’s suffering. This relief comes when Damien and Sinead’s separation ends and a two-shot of the couple resolves the visual tension of the scene. The comfort that Damien gives Sinead and that the group gives her family provides the ethical resolution of the scene, even though no political resolution occurs.

While this scene ties the iewer to Damien’s ethical dilemma it also maintains an important sense of difference for viewers by keeping them distant for Sinead. Because male characters guide the narrative and visual perspective of The Wind that Shakes the

Barley, the film does not presume to understand female-specific types of violence.

Damien and the other men cannot imagine what it would mean for a woman to have her hair forcibly and crudely cut off and then stuffed in her mouth. Damien, our guide through the film, cannot truly share this experience with her, despite his own torture, and so this scene intentionally presents his perspective as being removed, not just spatially, but subjectively. He can only experience the attack as British brutality against the Irish, and vicious violence against the woman he loves. While the film never presents Sinead as a vain person, Damien and the viewers might not understand the symbolism of the Black and Tans shearing her hair. The forcible cutting of hair creates

feelings of a loss of identity and control, relegates the victim to the position of an animal

(sheep are sheared), and has historically been used to mark women for their crimes

(the Bible associates head shaving with prostitution in 1 Corinthians 11). The film does not attempt to supply this understanding through the cinematography; Sinead’s appearance and the way Orla Fitzgerald acts out her shock attest to her experience.

Sinead never speaks about her hair, but she reveals the effects of the shearing in one line. When Sinead’s grandmother says that she won’t lea e her home and will instead clean out and li e in the chicken coop where police beat Sinead’s brother Micheail to death Sinead protests that she won’t do it. The tall thin shorn Sinead says to her short, plump, long-haired grandmother “I’m not as strong as you gran.” These words and the visual contrast between the two women provide an allusion to the biblical story of Samson and Delilah, in which Samson loses his strength when Delilah cuts off his long hair. Here, the woman, Sinead, loses her strength through the forced removal of her hair. Sinead has been a strong character throughout the film (she serves as an officer of the local, underground IRA government), but in this moment she has been beaten and becomes weak under the emotional and physical stress of the attack. She cries to Damien to take her away and that she doesn’t want to turn into her grandmother—unable to fathom leaving her family home—despite the fact that she already has by pledging her life to the IRA and the idea of a free Ireland.

The Self/Body Split

Historical fiction films about torture and state violence take advantage of the audio- isual medium’s ersatility in order to portray the physical and mental effects of violence while also showing how the self can become disassociated from the body during the experience of violence. In her book The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry argues

that the experience of torture e okes “the e er present but except in the extremity of sickness and death only latent distinction between a self and a body between a ‘me’ and ‘my body’” (48-49). The person experiencing physical torture becomes acutely aware that the self or one’s mental life exists in a non-physical realm which cannot be physically harmed. Torture foregrounds the feebleness and failure of the body—its physical presence is the body’s weakness what makes it susceptible to iolence while the self remains untouchable. At the same time, the sensation of physical pain becomes a sort of self-betrayal—the self cannot exist without a body, but the body betrays the self through its susceptibility to the abuse of others (Scarry 47). Thus a distance arises between the two, between the self which cannot be grasped and the body that cannot be controlled or protected by the self. This distinction can be a powerful guard against the mental effects of torture (“They are only harming my body”) or a powerful tool for them (“My body has turned against me”).

The Wind that Shakes the Barley uses the brothers Teddy and Damien

O’Dono an to explore two manifestations of the self/body split. We follow brothers

Teddy and Damien O’Dono an against the British and then against each other as they support opposite sides of the pro-Treaty, anti-Treaty split. The film’s scenes of torture take place during the first half of the film—during the conflict between the Irish republicans and the British. The initial episode of torture occurs off-screen—Black and

Tans beat Sinead’s brother Micheail to death after he refuses to gi e them his

Anglicized name. This incident incites Teddy, Damien, and their friends to active resistance—they join the IRA and begin attacking British soldiers. Eventually, one member reveals their hideout when threatened by his employer and the police. The

police capture the men and imprison them. The police start by interrogating Teddy, the group’s leader, after Damien attempts to go in his place. When Teddy refuses to speak, the interrogator vows to make him talk and produces a pair of pliers. We see the pliers in a shallow focus close-up from Teddy’s point of iew before the man taunts him with the nursery rhyme “This old man he played one he played knick-knack on my thumb.”

Again we see from Teddy’s point of iew in a close-up as the pliers grasp his thumbnail.

The image cuts as the man pulls it off and we then see another shallow focus close-up when the man holds up the nail in the pliers for Teddy to see. Teddy screams, but he does not say anything. The shot cuts to the cell where the other group members remain as the interrogator pulls out another and Teddy screams again. The group calls out to him and then begins to sing to show their support. The sequence returns to the other room to show Teddy slumped in his chair, hands in his lap. We see an extreme close-up of his raw, swollen, and bloody fingers as men approach to carry him back to the holding cell.

The editing of this sequence puts the iewer in Teddy’s position through the use of point of view shots as he faces his captors and undergoes tortured. More importantly though the camerawork and editing con eys Teddy’s resistance by making his self/body split manifest in the sequence’s construction. Teddy’s form of resistance— silence—assigns his self to another location. He separates his self from his body so that he can keep himself from talking. His knowledge of IRA activities is no longer present; it is elsewhere. His self watches from a remove when the interrogator holds his detached thumbnail up to him. We see the thumbnail in a close-up from an angle because Teddy experiences the moment from an altered perspective, as if watching another person.

The nail does not belong to his self, only to his body. When the camera leaves the room, it reveals the final location of his self—in the cell with the rest of the group, singing in support of Ireland’s independence. Because his self cannot speak without the body (and vice versa) the group supplies the words of resistance he cannot utter. Only when Teddy returns to the cell in a state of shock do his self and body reconnect, and he speaks, repeatedly telling Damien that he did not talk. I read the arc of the scene, from Damien standing up and saying “I’m Teddy O’Dono an ” to Teddy telling Damien “I didn’t talk ” as a transfer of Teddy’s self to his brother. Though they do not swap identities, Teddy leaves his self with his brother, giving only his body to the British. His solidarity remains with his brother and the group, which makes his physical suffering bearable. The viewer sees Teddy as he sees himself, a silent suffering body, but a resistant will.

When the police sentence Damien to death, we see the opposite dynamic from the sequence in which they tortured Teddy. Damien becomes wholly self in this scene and his body does not concern him, initially. He repeatedly calls the British Empire a foreign occupation of Ireland, and demands to be treated as a political prisoner, rather than as a common criminal. The beginning of the scene shows Damien standing in a medium close-up while the officer sits behind his desk. Another young soldier stands in the room, off-screen. Damien’s posture and facial expressions convey his certitude in his rights and his political position—in short, in his thoughts. The scene cuts closer as the officer slams Damien into a wall and uses his forearm to strangle him. Damien barely reacts. The officer throws Damien to the ground, takes out his pistol, and spins the chamber. We see Damien crouching in the fetal position, his hands up next to his

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head in a tightly framed medium close-up. The officer then takes the rifle away from the young soldier in the room and gives him his pistol. The young man stands frozen.

Damien is now standing,but he sweats and shakes as he mumbles pleas for his life, his hands still covering his head. The officer shouts “Do it it’s an order ” and the young man cowers before slowly pulling the trigger to a click—it is a mock execution. Damien collapses and the young man trembles in horror and relief. In contrast to his brother,

Damien repeatedly asserts his self throughout this scene in his statements to the officer and his lack of reaction to the initial attack. His body does not matter to him in a different way than it does not matter to Teddy. Teddy can absorb the violence done to his body because he has separated his self and made it safe. However, the film consistently portrays Damien as a man of words (he has been to university) as well as a man of action. His resistance needs his body, without which he cannot speak his objections.

Having said his piece, Damien sees no threat when the officer initially attacks him.

Damien only shuts down when the young soldier puts a gun to his head—his self within his body. This immediate chance of death (as opposed to the execution he has been sentenced to) threatens Damien because it will silence him forever. When the pro-

Treaty forces under Teddy’s command execute Damien at the end of the film, Damien meets his death with a different attitude. He has written a final letter to Sinead, returned her dead brother Micheail’s medal and stands assured that his execution by his brother will continue to speak for itself after his death.

Whereas The Wind that Shakes the Barley uses distance to show Damien’s initial disassociation from his body, the images of torture in Crónica de una fuga (2006, dir. Adrián Caetano) bring us into intimate contact with the tortured body and make

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dynamic use of a claustrophobic space to show Claudio Tamburrini’s experience of dissociation. When men initially torture Claudio, we do not see him being shocked; we only see the men watching his electrocution. When they torture him a second time, we see the entire incident. The scene opens with the camera underwater, and we hear a

oice say “Do you play water polo? Come on! Man o erboard!” before one man plunges Claudio’s head into the water. We watch him struggle through a steady close- up in profile. When the man pulls Claudio out, the shot cuts to outside the tub. We follow

Claudio from one side of his torture to the other as he tries to make his captors believe that he doesn’t ha e and hasn’t used a mimeograph to produce sub ersi e materials.

We consistently see him in a close-up as one of the men pulls his hair and shakes his head. The handheld camera moves quickly around the room and the majority of the shots use canted angles throughout this sequence. A few shots look into the room from the hall where Lucas sits with a gun, and one extreme high angle shot shows the room in its entirety. Five captors stand in the room with Claudio and Tano, who gave his name to the men. The room is narrow and long, covered with dark floral wallpaper, with

Islamic tiling on the floor and the farthest, shortest wall. The tub sits along this short wall opposite the door. The room also contains a pedestal sink on the long wall to the right of the door (when looking in), with a toilet and bidet opposite. The window above the tub has been shuttered and boarded shut. This crowded space contrasts with the large, undecorated room Claudio shares with one other prisoner.

The multiple voices talking in the room combine with the presence of the captors, the plumbing fixtures, and the clashing decorative patterns to make this an extremely claustrophobic space. Claudio’s sensations become immediate and after the initial

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submerged shot, the camera does not follow Claudio into the water anymore. The submersion shot provides the only break from the claustrophobia of the scene. Even the long shot from the empty hall emphasizes the fullness of the bathroom; Lucas sits out there because there is simply no room for him with the others. The feeling of claustrophobia created by the mise-en-scène reflects the inescapability of Claudio’s situation—nothing he can do will con ince the men that he is not a “sub ersi e.” The men decide to torture Tano alongside Claudio, under the pretense that one of the two men must be lying since they contradict each other. Thus, once the men stop drowning

Claudio, he hears them drowning Tano. Presumably, the men expect Claudio to admit his lie and protect his friend (really, a friend of his sister), but the opposite happens by chance. Tano says he called Claudio about the mimeograph, and Claudio repeatedly yells that he does not own a telephone, which the men know to be true from having searched his apartment. This inversion of their expectation puzzles them, but they cannot admit their mistake, so they keep both men detained. Eventually, Tano will be disappeared on a death flight.

The pace of the camera movements, the angles, and the editing of this scene reflect Claudio’s experience of his torture. After his initial submersion when he first becomes aware of what they will be doing to him, his self and his body are no longer united. He separates the two in order to try to survive. The camera no longer shows submerged shots because Claudio does not focus on his abuse. He physically resists, but he does not cry out. He continues pleading his innocence each time he emerges from the water. The movement of the camera around the room reflects the movement of

Claudio’s thoughts as he tries to figure out who Tano is and how Tano came to gi e his

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name. His mind continues working while he is submerged, and the camera retreats to high angle shots to reflect his thought. Claudio’s self separates furthest from his body when the man submerges his head so he cannot speak. The camera only begins to still and steady itself when Tano mentions the telephone. Tano’s lie assures Claudio of his innocence and his immediate safety when the interrogators silently concede that

Claudio had no phone. In this moment his body and self reunite, and Claudio lashes out at Tano and one of the men. His previously mental resistance now takes physical form in his punches. Even though one man hits him back, Claudio barely reacts. His victory o er the telephone has made it so that he cannot be hurt anymore. We see Claudio’s sense of physical invulnerability again later, when one of the captors fires several machine gun rounds at the ceiling of Claudio’s new room. Of the four prisoners only

Claudio remains standing when the man fires the shots. Claudio’s success in the forced drowning scene ensures his sense of invincibility and survival throughout the rest of the film.

While Claudio comes to feel physically invincible in Crónica de una fuga,

Samira’s experience of the self/body split in As If I Am Not There (dir. Juanita Wilson,

2010) reassures her of the integrity of her self and allows her to defiantly proclaim her identity through her body. The scene showing Samira’s first gang rape con eys the splitting of her self and body without completely eliminating either part. We watch the rapes in a medium close-up, with the camera placed directly in front of Samira while three men keep her she bent over a table. We see a section of the torsos of the men behind her, the motions of her hands and her head, and her facial expressions as they rape her three times. At one point during the second rape, her face goes expressionless

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and her gaze becomes blank. The image cuts to an eye line match of what she stares at—a fly on the wall. This image might remind iewers of Emily Dickinson’s poem “I heard a Fly buzz (465) ” and the poem too attests to a split between the body and the self. The images of Samira reflect the poem “The stillness round my form / was like the stillness in the air / Between the hea es of storm ” and “I willed my keepsakes signed away / What portion of me I / Could make assignable,—and then / There interposed a fly, / With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz, / Between the light and me; / and then the windows failed and then / I could not see to see.” Samira’s body has gone still—she has ceased to physically resist her attackers, and her lack of reaction lends an eerie stillness to the shots. The “hea es of storm” can of course be read as the onset of each rape or e en as each thrust. Samira “sign[s] away whate er portion of [herself she] could make assignable” by seeming to detach herself from her body when her expression slackens, and then we see, interposed in the scene, the fly she stares at.

The sound cuts out here replaced by the fly’s buzz and the whole scene (including

Samira’s denim shirt) has a blue tint, echoing the blue of the poem. The fly becomes

Samira’s point of focus stopping her mind from seeking refuge in some other thought— unless as a teacher and English-speaker she too remembers Dickinson’s poem.

The film shows Samira’s further disassociation with a cut to a slow-motion scene through a window of several soldiers playing soccer as Samira begins to slide off of the table when the rapes stop. When the image returns to the room, violence confronts the viewers again. We see the three men in focus in the foreground, purposefully urinating on the point on the floor where Samira should be laying. But remarkably, we see an intact Samira standing in the back of the room, out of focus, but centered in the frame,

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watching. Then the shot cuts to a close-up of Samira, with urine streaming over her.

The shot cuts to a low angle, medium close-up of the intact Samira standing to the right of the frame. The image cuts to a point of view shot as intact Samira approaches

Samira and the men, who we see in slow-motion buttoning their pants and fastening their belts. The men stand around the abused Samira laying on the floor in shock, and we see intact Samira approach from abused Samira’s point of iew. This second Samira touches the abused Samira on the shoulder comfortingly then wipes the blood from under her nose and looks at her as one of the men says “Get up. You ha e more entertaining to do ” and the image cuts to black.

The appearance of the second, intact Samira completely visualizes the self/body split. While her body lies broken on the floor, her self remains a source of comfort and strength. Samira sees that she still exists, that part of her remains whole even though she has been unspeakably iolated. ater the film reinforces Samira’s awareness of her wholeness when one of the other women kept to “entertain” the Serbs says “That’s all we are to them animals.” Samira replies emphatically “No. We are not animals ” and she goes into their bathroom to put on the lipstick that she still has in her pack. The other women chastise and insult her but she says “I look like me...It’s not for them. This is who I am. A woman.” Samira marks her own body with the lipstick in direct response to the soldiers marking the body of a young girl who was also kept as a sex slave. The soldiers carved a large cross into the back of the Muslim girl, who dies of her wounds.

The Serbs clearly do not care about the physical appearance of the women since they regularly beat them and keep them in a dirty, crowded room. Samira appropriates an otherwise problematic marker of femininity, the lipstick, in order to reassert her identity

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when faced with the Serbs’ attempts to erase it. In the end Samira’s ability to separate but reconcile her self and her body ensures her survival, and the survival of the other women who were forced to become sex slaves.

These close readings have illuminated several important strategies for representing torture and political violence. I will now address how these images of violence relate to those in horror films, which have received the most critical attention in regards to the function of violence in the media, and its potential for exploitation. A complex question arises from each of these films: how do you represent state violence without replicating the objectification, exploitation, and sadism inherent in those practices? Since the publication of aura Mul ey’s influential essay, “ isual Pleasure and Narrati e Cinema ” it has been commonly accepted that the cinema has enormous potential for replicating systems of objectification and fetishization—sexual, racial, cultural or otherwise. The danger lies in the control the director has o er the spectator’s gaze; the spectator can only see what the director allows to be shown onscreen.

Representations that encourage objectification, exploitation, and fetishism foster passive spectatorship. So to answer the question of how to represent state violence without replicating these effects, films must attempt to disrupt the viewer from a passive viewing state. This is both an ethical and a political imperative—the filmmaker often acts on an ethical compulsion to tell the stories of the victims of such crimes, which becomes a political concern because of the necessity of combating the silence imposed by the governments that perpetrated the crimes, and exposing the corrupt nature of their power. While some scholars would separate the two, or privilege one over the other, films need both an ethics and politics of representation when they undertake the task of

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representing state violence that has otherwise been suppressed in dominant historical, political or popular narrati es. In films depicting state iolence and torture the camera’s gaze can be used to put the viewer in the position of the victim or the perpetrator through the use of subjective shots; however, historical fiction films rarely make this aesthetic choice. As we have seen, the camera uses the distance between itself and the victims and survivors of state violence in order to guide the viewer’s response either through intermediary characters, like the UN troops in Warriors, or by focusing on the bodies of the characters undergoing torture and commenting on the self/body split they experience. All of these techniques allow for ethical reflection on behalf of the viewer by guiding the viewer into a critical relationship with the violence on screen. As I have shown in the films where other characters ser e as intermediaries in iewers’ encounters with iolence the characters’ reactions to what they see guides ethical reflection. Without intermediaries the structure of a film’s editing which often includes pauses or the iewer’s body’s sympathetic responses to the iolence can prompt ethical reflection.

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Figure 3-1. Electrocution of the eye in State of Siege. State of Siege. Dir. Costa-Gavras. Columbia Pictures Home Entertainment, 1980. VHS.

Figure 3- . Former prisoner demonstrates the “crab position” in Hidden Agenda. Hidden Agenda. Dir. Ken Loach. MGM Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD.

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Figure 3-3. Anne looks at pictures from Bosnia in Before the Rain. Before the Rain. Dir. Milcho Manchevski. Criterion Collection, 2008. DVD.

Figure 3-4. Anne spills her coffee in a picture of a woman in an under-breast corset. Before the Rain. Dir. Milcho Manchevski. Criterion Collection, 2008. DVD.

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Figure 3-5. News footage from a concentration camp in Welcome to Sarajevo. Welcome to Sarajevo. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2004.

Figure 3-6. News footage of men at a concentration camp. Welcome to Sarajevo. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2004.

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Figure 3-7. Prison guards throw Davey into the gauntlet in Hunger. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD.

Figure 3-8. Riot police beat Davey in the gauntlet. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD.

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Figure 3-9. A young riot police member stands aside while the prisoners are probed in Hunger. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD.

Figure 3-10. The young riot police officer cries alone in the middle of the violence. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD.

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Figure 3-11. The young riot police officer is framed in a split screen, opposite an image of the gauntlet. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD.

Figure 3-12. Bobby Sands is shown on the same half of the screen as the riot police officer after he has been beaten. Hunger. Dir. Steve McQueen. Criterion Collection, 2009. DVD.

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Figure 3-13. Booby-trapped bodies in Warriors. Warriors Bosni . Dir.Peter Kosminsky. Memphis Belle, 2000. DVD.

Figure 3-14. Lt. Feely brushes the hair out of the face of Almira’s corpse. Warriors Bosni . Dir.Peter osminsky. Memphis Belle . D D.

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Figure 3-15. Blood and pus seep out of the truck that Pte. James will climb into. Warriors Bosni . Dir.Peter osminsky. Memphis Belle . D D.

Figure 3-16. Damien watches as Black and Tans attack Sinead and her family in The Wind that Shakes the Barley. The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Dir. Ken Loach. Genius Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

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Figure 3-17. Damien sees the Black and Tans shearing Sinead’s head. The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Dir. Ken Loach. Genius Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

Figure 3-18. Damien and Sinead reunited. The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Dir. Ken Loach. Genius Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

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Figure 3- . Damien tries to take Teddy’s place. The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Dir. Ken Loach. Genius Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

Figure 3- . We see from Teddy’s point of iew as his thumb nail is pulled out. The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Dir. Ken Loach. Genius Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

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Figure 3-21. Damien covers his head in the mock execution. The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Dir. Ken Loach. Genius Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

Figure 3-22. The camera retreats as Claudio thinks during his torture in Chronicle of an Escape. Chronicle of an Escape . Dir. Israel Adrián Caetano. Genius Products, 2008. DVD.

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Figure 3-23. Samira sees a fly in As If I Am Not There. As if I Am Not There. Dir. Juanita Wilson. Wide Eye Films: Element Pictures, 2011. DVD.

Figure 3- 4. Samira’s unharmed double watches as the men urinate on her. As if I Am Not There. Dir. Juanita Wilson. Wide Eye Films: Element Pictures, 2011. DVD.

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CHAPTER 4 THE UNSEEN AND THE UNSEEABLE: NOT SHOWING VIOLENCE

Fiction films about state violence and torture often attempt to serve as testimony to historical realities even if they work outside the realm of documentary. While film is an audiovisual medium, the emphasis (popular and scholarly) almost always falls on the visual—film has the special ability to show us moving images of things that we have not experienced or encountered. We go to the movies not just to be told a story, but to see a story or another life and way of living. Films about state violence and torture emphasize often the display of violence; they show us what it might look like to be waterboarded, electrocuted, flayed, raped, beaten, and so on. That is part of the attraction of these films—they attempt to provide visual testimony to the physical experience of undergoing torture, whether their goal is educational, moral, or to make a profit.

So then what does it mean when, at a certain moment, or throughout its duration, a film refuses to show state violence or torture? While the choice not to show violence may be wrapped up in debates about violent images in the media, or the inability of fictional images to accurately represent reality, I am interested in the meanings these gaps or absences produce within specific films and in relation to each other. By looking at a number of films depicting state iolence and torture (ranging from 6 ’s Le Petit

Soldat to ’s Behind Enemy Lines), I argue that withholding images of violence has less to do with popular debates about violence and more to do with the question of access to trauma. The absence of iolent images reflects the sur i or’s trauma and the competing desires to alternately block out memories of violence, or overcome the inability to access those memories. The elision of iolent images reflects the narrati e’s

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point of view—whether the camera is positioned as the person experiencing violence, as an obser er as an “in estigator” figure with limited access to e ents or as a sur i or recounting events from his or her past. The narrative position of the camera dictates what the iewers do and do not ha e access to. The camera’s proximity to the sur i or determines iewers’ access to e ents. This results in a visual and narrative style that relies on some combination of ellipses, fragments, and narration.

Traditional views of viewers as a third party to on-screen violence or oppression argue that both the structuring of the camera’s gaze and the narrati e hold iewers captive, making them passive or even complicit in whatever takes place on-screen.

Viewers are unable to intervene in what they see. Howe er in “Ethics as First

Philosophy” Emmanuel Lévinas argues that it is the moment, precisely, of the impossibility of understanding, acting, or intervening opens the space for ethical reflection. The self must be put in this impossible situation in order to think about how to act ethically, even if that act cannot be carried out. This is the position of the film viewer—unable to act, but nonetheless compelled to act, or at least compelled to contemplate the possibility of acting. The impossibility of intervening is even more evident when a film excludes or elides images of violence so that it denies viewers the illusion of presence at the moment when violence occurs.

With my title, I intend to draw a distinction between two different ways of withholding images of torture and state violence. “Unseen” iolence occurs in the narrative present, but is not filmed. Under this heading I place films that use ellipses to cut away from violence at a certain point. In contrast the “unseeable” cannot be seen cannot be filmed because it does not exist in the narrative present. In this category I

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place films that tell about e ents from a character’s past that are inaccessible to the film.

These films replace images of violence with narration, typically through a monologue.

The Unseen

The decision not to show violence deserves to be placed into a larger framework of testimony and ethics. What is left out and how it is left out is important to consider in the context of each film. The use of ellipsis can be ethically responsible or irresponsible—an issue of neglect or sympathy—depending on how it works to tell the stories of victims or survivors of state violence and torture. If ellipses are used irresponsibly and the violence is elided, so are the victims and survivors. This is the case in Behind Enemy Lines (2001, dir. John Moore), in which the violence of the

Bosnian War is largely elided to focus on the heroics of a lone American pilot. The story hea ily fictionalizes USAF Captain Scott O’Grady’s experiences and in this adaptation the war becomes fictionalized itself as details are changed— the film refers to the fictional “Cincinnati Accords” requiring a complete NATO withdrawal from Bosnia, instead of the real Dayton Accords that allowed NATO peacekeeping forces to remain in

Bosnia in 1995. The film stages the conflict as one between the U.S. (in the guise of predominantly American NATO forces) and Serbia. Bosnia only provides the setting for the film. The war’s effects on Bosnian ci ilians are only caught in the background. There are few Bosnian characters. There is no extended discussion of bombings, ethnic cleansing, or genocide. Almost the entire context for the U.S./NATO presence is left out.

ieutenant Chris Burnett (Owen Wilson based on Capt. O’Grady) and his partner

Stackhouse (Gabriel Macht) fly off course on a reconnaissance mission. They capture aerial photographs of a Serbian troop mobilization. The Serbs shoot down their plane.

Stackhouse is immediately caught and executed. Burnett flees through various

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landscapes of destruction. Eventually the Serbs pursue him through a forest. Having established contact with Burnett, the NATO command tracks him using a body heat sensitive GPS satellite. The film rapidly cuts between shots of Burnett running, shots of his pursuers, and shots at NATO headquarters.

Just as the Serbs start to make gains on him, we see Burnett slide down an embankment past corpses and land in mud, surrounded by bodies. We see the Serbs approaching the edge of the ravine in a low angle long shot. The camera is momentarily still, and then begins a slow track in accompanied by discordant music. The scene cuts to a shot overhead and behind the Serbs. The camera tracks in toward the pit until the

Serbs are out of frame. The scene cuts to NATO command and then back to the Serbs as the camera rapidly zooms in on Bazda (Marko Igonda), the leader of the group. The focus on Bazda initiates a flashback, which shows the Serbs emptying a busload of

Bosnians, executing them, and then planting saplings over the mass grave.

The film assumes that viewers will understand this as an act of genocide without any explanation. We see several of the Bosnians in medium close-ups, and one close- up of a Bosnian boy, but they are anonymous victims. Their lives are not a part of

Burnett’s story so no backstory is gi en to the ictims. The experience of the Bosnian

War is flattened to a single dimension—death.

Back in the present, Bazda orders his men into the ravine to stab their bayonets into the mud. Once they are gone, the camera slowly tracks in at ground level on the body at the center of the frame, and Burnett emerges from underneath it. There is a medium close-up from above Burnett, which quickly cranes out and pans to show more dead bodies, with several faces sticking out of the mud looking at Burnett. This is the

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first time that we see Burnett express any awareness of being in a mass grave. The camera tracks back as Burnett crawls forward over corpses, keeping him in a close-up.

Burnett runs through the saplings, and the sequence ends with a close-up of Burnett

(shot with Wilson wearing a camera mounted on a harness), looking dazed and his face covered in mud, running away from the forest.

The mass grave sequence lasts no longer than 2:37 in a 106-minute film. The flashback lasts 12 seconds and the scene where Burnett emerges and runs away lasts

26 seconds. The sequence emphasizes Burnett’s safety more than the genocide the

Serbs carried out against the Bosniak Muslims. What gets lost in the film is the utter failure of the U.S. and NATO to acknowledge or stop genocide in any meaningful way, either during the Bosnian War (1992-1995) or the Kosovo War (February 1998-June

) which was an aftershock of the earlier conflict and a result of the West’s failure to stop Slobodan Miloše i or the Serbian military. In U.S. politics and media, the genocide had the same presence as it does in the film—something already accomplished about which nothing can be done.1 The film’s release came three months before Miloše i ’s war crimes trial. It helped build on the narrative of a successful

Western intervention and dispensation of justice. Yet the film’s narrati e of justice distinctly denies justice to survivors and victims by not leaving any space for their voices or experiences in the larger narrative of the war. The dead bodies only represent part of the story. Bosnians’ absence in the film except as dead bodies reflects their absence in the West’s narrati e of the Bosnian War except in images of mass gra es (or as an afterthought, as refugees). In Behind Enemy Lines, the Bosnians only appear as part of

1 For more on the treatment of genocide in U.S. politics and media see the chapters on Bosnia, Srebrenica, and Kosovo in Powers.

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the existing Western narrative of the war. Any other possibilities are elided, cut out, and all we are allowed to see are the bodies. The mass grave sequence sparks a moment of self-assured recognition in the viewer, but it does not raise the stakes of the narrative or reveal anything new or particular about the Bosnian War.

In contrast, the use of ellipses in other films addressing state violence often has a significant role in the iewers’ understanding of the protagonist. This holds true for other

Hollywood productions, as well as independent and foreign features. Similar to Behind

Enemy Lines, Salvador (1986, dir. Oliver Stone) uses ellipses sparingly, but the effect is strikingly different. Salvador charts Richard Boyle’s ( ames Woods) experiences as they unfold. Boyle leaves for El Salvador with hopes of exploiting the civil war to send exclusive photographs to newspapers in the U.S. Boyle and his friend, Dr. Rock (James

Belushi), arrive in the country to find the military dictatorship exerting violent control. A favorable article Boyle once wrote about Colonel Figueroa for a right-wing paper protects them from the violence. While Boyle sets out with the intent of exploiting the civil war to turn a profit, this quickly becomes an impossible task as his disgust at the

U.S. go ernment’s support of the dictatorship and his friendship with Cathy Moore (an

American working with a human rights organization, played by Cynthia Gibb) pull him into the conflict.

Richard Boyle makes it out of El Salvador physically unharmed, but his encounters with state violence, which largely occur out of his direct sight, deeply affect him. In one instance, viewers see an attack that Boyle only encounters after the fact—a paramilitary patrol ambushes, rapes, and murders Cathy Moore and a group of

American nuns on their way back from picking up a new arrival at the airport. This is the

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most important moment as far as Boyle’s in ol ement in the ci il war is concerned, and

Cathy Moore’s fate contradicts the claims Elizabeth Goldberg makes about Western observer characters in her book Beyond Terror: Gender, Narrative, Human Rights. She argues that films about state violence, including Salvador, consistently privilege the

Western observer to the extent that no matter what violence occurs, the Western protagonists always come through unharmed.2 The attack on Cathy and the nuns is one of the most horrific scenes in the film because we see not just corpses in the aftermath of violence, but the actual acts as they are perpetrated.

And yet, we do not see much. The acts of rape and the subsequent murders of the nuns happen off-screen, or from a limited point of view. In a long shot, men carry off the nuns one by one, and we see the women resisting their attackers. We see a shot from ground-level, with the nuns scattered throughout the depth of the shot. Then the scene cuts between close-up point of view shots from an attacker then from the oldest nun (the new arri al) whom he is raping then from Cathy’s attacker and Cathy. These point of view shots are interspersed with medium close-ups of other nuns being raped.

The scene cuts from the initial onslaught to a medium close-up of a man walking from truck with a rifle. He calls his men away, and the shot cuts to Cathy Moore buttoning her shirt as seen from the man’s point of iew the camera swaying as he walks. We cut to a shot from Cathy’s point of iew of the man loading and pointing his rifle at her. Then we see a reverse shot of Cathy crossing herself. The scene cuts to a medium close-up in the daytime of feet at the edge of a ditch and hands pulling ropes. The camera pans

2 Goldberg’s claim is also false in the case of Missing (1982, dir. Costa-Gavras), which I will discuss later in this chapter.

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and tilts down and right to show a body (presumably Cathy’s) being dragged out of the ground. We can see that the woman has been shot in face.

It is important to the film that Cathy Moore and the nuns be attacked, not just to represent the real life rapes and murders of Sisters Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy

Kazel, and laywoman Jean Donovan. The act of rape assumes a specific horror for the nuns who have vowed chastity. Presenting these images also reveals the unfathomable reality that e en they are not safe from the dictatorship’s iolence (Dickey). So while

Boyle escapes El Salvador alive, he is not unscathed. A strong sense of personal guilt over his inability to change anything and his failure to protect Cathy plagues him. When a shaken Boyle appears at the exhumation of their bodies as a bystander, and not as one of the many photographers taking pictures, viewers can sense the effect the attack has on him. The real-life Rich Boyle’s in ol ement in the production of Salvador testifies to the continued impact of his experiences on his life.

Films dealing with acts of state violence face the challenges of suppressed information, of official denial, and of the inability to know what happened to victims who did not survive. Filmmakers can only attempt to present visions of what might have happened to these silenced victims. Yet in some cases, filmmakers have chosen not to speculate about the treatment of those who cannot speak. Costa-Gavras takes this approach in Missing (1982), the true story of American journalist Charles Horman (John

Shea) who disappeared in Chile after the coup that deposed Salvador Allende.

Charles’s father Ed ( ack emmon) comes to Chile to find him after Charles’s wife Beth

(real name Joyce, played by Sissy Spacek) repeatedly receives misinformation from

Chilean and American officials in Santiago. Ellipsis surpasses being just a visual

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technique (as in Behind Enemy Lines and Salvador). It characterizes Missing’s narrati e style. This stylistic choice corresponds to the experience of having a loved one disappeared, which is itself filled with ellipses. The desaparecidos’s experience can only be pieced together from scraps of information painfully extracted from other victims, witnesses, and perpetrators. These fragments form ellipses themselves—glimpses of the disappeared that do not add up to provide a continuous narrative.

Missing centers on Charles, but gives a broader view of what Chileans experienced after the coup. The collective story of the Chilean people primarily constitutes the background, yet occasionally intersects with the lives of the main characters. Machinegun fire periodically breaks out during conversations. The nightly curfew constantly impacts the characters’ actions starting with the initial separation of

Charles and Beth. At a hospital, viewers see Ed and Beth watch a body floating down a river after a patient yells “Another one!” Hundreds of unidentified bodies are shown in streets, alleys, and morgues. Each of these images can be understood as an ellipsis extracted from the life of an anonymous person. Taken together, they recreate the atmosphere of terror experienced by Chileans, not just the individual characters who are a part of Charles’s narrati e. The extreme violence experienced by the collective in the background informs Charles’s incomplete story.

Even when Missing tells viewers the fate of a character, such as Charles or his friend Frank Teruggi, the details of the violence they experienced are left out—they were killed, and their story ends. When David Holloway describes his and Frank

Teruggi’s detention at the national stadium accompanied by a flashback. We see Frank and Da id in a two shot. With a ca alier attitude Frank says “They can't kill us our

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embassy'll go bananas.” Trying to reassure Da id he says “Bet you dinner at Arturo's we'll be out of here by tomorrow.” At that moment Frank is called away by the military, protesting his treatment as an American. The flashback lingers on a last full shot of

Frank standing in a doorway then cuts back to Da id who says “That's the last time I ever saw Frank. They released me the next day.” After Ed suggests that maybe Frank is in hiding as he belie es Charles to be Da id says “I looked for him e erywhere even in the morgue, he's just gone, vanished. Sometimes I get the feeling I'm never gonna see him again.” Da id’s comment paired with the visual ellipses where Frank disappears from the narrative, reflect the acute sense of incompleteness caused by forced disappearances, which deny closure in their abruptness and clandestine nature.

The enhanced official secrecy about Charles Horman’s abduction because he was an American further limits the possibility of showing what happens to him. Later in the film, Ed and Beth talk to Paris, a refugee at the Italian Embassy, who tells them that a friend of his saw Charles detained at the Ministry of Defense. As Paris talks, again we see flashback images—two shots of Charles. First we see him tied to a chair, centered in the frame in a full shot through a doorway. His left elbow is smeared with blood, and as Charles briefly looks up into the camera a bruise is visible on his left temple. Then the camera cuts to a wider shot showing the full interior of General utz’s office again framed through a second doorway, with Charles still framed through the inner door.

These two shots last about three seconds each, and are the only images of Charles in detention. Paris says that Charles had been “roughed up during interrogation ” but he will not say how much because he wasn’t there. The bruises are all the evidence of

Charles’s handling that Missing gives.

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Missing only shows images from the past that were witnessed by someone.

Because the circumstances of their deaths were unknown, the film does not speculate about what happened between the last appearances of Frank or Charles and their deaths. We never know the full story of what happened to Charles just as real-life relatives of the disappeared do not know what happened to their loved ones. The elliptical flashbacks maintain the emotional uncertainty experienced by David, Beth, and

Ed. They refuse any kind of neat narrativization—we do not follow Charles in his suffering. The film denies viewers the cathartic experience of seeing how violent the

Chilean military could be. The dissatisfaction produced by the elision of violence is an uneasy combination of the desire to see (and therefore to know) what violence occurred and a desire not to see any harm come to Charles, in the vain hope that by not seeing any violence, none will have occurred. The most one can hope for throughout Missing is a quick, painless death for Charles. Pain is the element the ellipses lea e out. Charles’s suffering remains as a last question. The inability to ever know what happened to

Charles Horman or the thousands like him is reinforced by the film’s epilogue. The epilogue tells viewers that when his body was finally shipped to his family, it was beyond the point where an autopsy could assess most injuries. Because Ed and Beth will never know what Charles endured before his death, and because not even

Charles’s corpse can tell what happened to him, the film refrains from imagining— rendering in images—the details of his fate.3

As in Missing, the use of ellipsis to control what the viewer can and cannot see is the visual strategy of the adaptation of Franco-Algerian journalist Henri Alleg’s 58

3 Costa- Gavras may have also been concerned with making the film too hard for audiences to watch, or exploiting images of torture. I address these issues in chapter 3 “Broken Bodies.”

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essay La Question, about his torture by French paratroopers during the Algerian War of

Independence. In the film (1977, dir. Laurent Heynemann), Henri Alleg becomes Henri

Charlegue. The first scene in which Charlegue is tortured provides the model that almost all of the torture scenes in La Question follow. The scene begins in a medium shot of Henri attached to a board, lying across the bottom of the frame, visible from his ankles up. Four paratroopers sit behind him, and three more stand behind them, with the frame cutting them off mid-chest. Lieutenant Charbonneau (seated, second from right) asks for something to write on and then commands one of his men “Show it to him.” A soldier comes in from the left of the frame carrying a hand-cranked electrical generator and Charbonneau lifts Henri’s head so he can see it. Charbonneau talks about how Henri had written about the paratrooper’s use of electrocution in torture as the soldier attaches the metal clips to Henri’s left pinky finger and ear. The film cuts to a close-up of Henri as the clip is attached to his ear. He protests the use of torture and his illegal detention. Charbonneau ignores him saying “Ok down to work.” The camera cuts back to the original medium shot as he drops Henri’s head onto the board. The camera pulls back to a medium long shot so Henri’s entire body is isible as the questioning begins. When Henri responds to the first question by saying “I will not talk ”

Charbonneau says “ ust for morale we’re gonna beat you up.” The camera then pans slightly to the right and tracks in on the generator as the soldier begins cranking the generator’s handle. The film cuts to a shot of the exterior of the compound at night.

After about seven seconds, the film cuts back to the torture scene, in a medium shot of Henri, still attached to the board, visible from his knees to the top of the board, with three soldiers behind him only visible from the shins down. Charbonneau

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commands the men to untie Henri, who is panting and convulsing. One of the officers throws Henri’s clothes at him and the camera cuts to him tying his tie. A paratrooper berates him, and they bring in his battered friend Oudinot as a warning of what will happen to him if he continues his silence. Charbonneau orders his men to start the electrocutions again. Henri is thrown back on the board and stripped. A man carries equipment into the room through the door on the left side of the frame. The camera cuts to a shot from Henri’s point of iew as the man shows him the machine and says “Now we’ll use the big generator.” The scene cuts once again to the exterior of the compound at night, with trucks bringing new prisoners.

This sequence establishes the fact that the film will not show the viewer the full extent of the torture Henri endures. There are only rare instances (the beatings, a waterboarding, and one instance where he is left hanging upside down) when the camera does not cut away from the violence. The power of Alleg’s La Question lays in its excruciatingly detailed first-person account of the horrors of his torture and confinement. The film spares the viewer much of that graphic detail. One could argue that cutting away leaves viewers complicit in the violence because they cannot do anything but “look away” from the torture. A reader of Alleg’s book can stop reading or skip over a section, but that is an active choice on his or her part. The camerawork in

Heynemann’s film does not gi e the iewer the option of choosing to see the horror. But more importantly, the camera does not position the viewer as one of the on-looking paratroopers—they remain in the room while the camera leaves. In this sense, the camera removes the viewer from true complicity—the viewer does not choose to look away. The film prevents viewers from seeing because seeing serves no purpose; the

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viewer can do nothing to stop the torture. Rather, the exterior shots of the compound serve as a pause, allowing the viewer to reflect on what happens to Henri in his or her absence, and what could be done if the viewer were present at such a moment. This is the logic of Lévinas’s ethical impossibility; in the e ent that action is impossible the ethical response is to contemplate what action could be taken, given the chance.

Interlude

To transition from the “unseen” to the “unseeable ” I will discuss ean-Luc

Godard’s Le Petit Soldat (1960/1963), set during the Algerian War for Independence.

Michel Subor actually underwent burning, waterboarding and electrocution in the course of filming Bruno’s torture scenes (Brody ). This may be a sadistic act on Godard’s part, but the impulse to subject Subor to the torture his character and countless real people underwent reflects Godard’s belief that “cinema [is] the touchstone of reality ” meaning that whatever happens on film happens in real life (ibid.). Godard pairs montages with ellipses and a past-tense voice-over from Bruno—techniques that alternately draw us into Bruno’s experiences but distance them from us as something unknowable to anyone but the survivor.

As he prepares to leave Switzerland, a small FLN cell kidnaps Bruno. After an initial interrogation, Laszlo, the leader, orders Bruno restrained in the bathroom, which becomes the main arena for his torture. Later, Laszlo paraphrases a passage from

Alleg’s La Question to testify to France’s use of torture against the F N. 4 Laszlo paraphrases a passage from the book “The French also torture. Prisoners awaited in

4 Despite the fact that the title of the work is clearly visible, and the passage identifiable, no other critics ha e discussed Godard’s use of Alleg’s La Question.

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darkness or prison or the ‘escape attempt ’ that is to say a machine gun burst in the back.” The actual passage Laszlo refers to reads:

They were constantly in darkness because the blinds were lowered so that you couldn’t see anything from the houses out front. For days, weeks— sometimes more than two months—they waited there for an interrogator, their transfer to the holding camp or the prison or else their ‘escape attempt ’ that is to say a machine gun blast in the back. (Alleg )

This passage comes near the end of La Question, notably after Alleg has finished his descriptions of the kinds of torture he suffered at the hands of the French military. In the film howe er aszlo reads the passage in the middle of Bruno’s capti ity during a lull in the torture. Bruno says that his captors “found that it was completely idiotic to resist because I have no ideals. and like any self-respecting revolutionary organization they then tried to indoctrinate me.” Bruno depicts it as the duty of those involved in the FLN to try to indoctrinate him. Of course, the ulterior motive of this

“indoctrination” is to get information out of Bruno—which is ultimately more important than what Bruno actually believes. Godard’s critique of torture and ideology comes in the juxtaposition of Alleg and Laszlo. Alleg supported Algerian independence, but he wrote about his experiences to con ince the French to condemn their military’s use of torture. aszlo misconstrues Alleg’s text as justification for the F N’s use of torture since the civilized nation of France has paved the way. Godard grounds the torture scenes in

Le Petit Soldat in Bruno’s narrati e making them much more intimate in the same way that Alleg’s account of his own torture is intimate in La Question. This is not to say that

Alleg and Godard use the same type of subjectivity; Bruno and Alleg narrate their own experiences, but there is an important difference. Alleg explicitly uses his experience of torture as a synecdoche that represents all instances of torture, a fact Alleg reinforces in

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his references to what he hears during his detainment, and his limited interaction with other detainees.

Godard leads his audience to believe that he has no intention of using Bruno as a universal representation of torture victims. Bruno says in a voice over during the torture sequence:

In Budapest I had already seen people tortured. I remembered that I had asked myself if I would be capable of taking the hits. So the moment came. … I know that to others they did much worse but martyred comrades that you cross in the hallways or screams through the walls I didn’t experience that. It is therefore impossible to talk about it.

This passage describes exactly the type of allusion one would find in La

Question—because he was a journalist, the FLN held Alleg in solitary confinement for most of his detention and he only heard the cries of others from his cell, or passed other prisoners in the halls on his way to torture sessions. Godard implies that Bruno’s experience is not to be taken as one that can be generalized because although the elements of it may appear true-to-life, there are several other elements that make his

(albeit fictional) experience distinct.

Likewise, no matter how much the viewer might sympathize with him, Bruno is not supposed to become a martyr for the anti-torture cause, or for the pro-colonial cause. The viewer sympathizes with Bruno because he is the protagonist of the film, not because he is a political crusader. In fact, part of what makes Bruno real, if not likable, is his ambivalence toward his own situation. He only becomes involved with the French agents through chance and necessity—he has already deserted from the French Army in Algeria. Bruno’s job with the B d’I ç (and thus his work for la main rouge) insures that he will have asylum in Switzerland and not be prosecuted by the French government. His apathy becomes more apparent during his torture. He says

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in oiceo er “It doesn’t matter to me to tell you contrary to what you belie e. But I don’t want to. I won’t do it. That’s what I told them. They proposed that I work for them. I asked for a bit of money in advance. They didn’t want to [gi e it] so I told them to show their hand.” Of course we don’t actually see this exchange happening between Bruno and his captors; we don’t e en see Bruno’s face. This occurs during a slow panoramic shot across the nighttime façade of the apartment building where Bruno is being kept.

The shot only cuts back to the interior of the apartment at the very end of the voiceover.

Godard uses the panoramic shot, the swish pan, and the close-up as the three most defining cinematographic techniques of the torture sequence. These three techniques divide the torture sequence into distinct sections, each with a different impact. The first scene of the sequence uses swish pans in close shots to show key elements of the situation: Laszlo, the gun he is holding, another FLN agent handcuffing

Bruno’s right hand to the faucet that man in the mirror back to the faucet Bruno’s face

aszlo cocking the gun Bruno’s left hand already handcuffed to the towel rack and the other agent spraying Bruno with the shower. This scene lasts 20 seconds, averaging slightly more than two seconds per shot. The fast pace of the shots and the disorienting effect of the swish pans reflect Bruno’s anxiety about his impending torture. Godard also consistently uses camera movements to imitate the physical effects of the torture.

aszlo wa es matches under Bruno’s palm; the camera mimics the back-and-forth motion as the burning sensation comes and goes in Bruno’s hand. In contrast, when

Bruno is held underwater there are fewer swish pans. The camerawork is calmer, reflecting the length of Bruno’s submersion. The camera only pans away to the faces of his captors for signs that they will relent, or in anticipation of Bruno emerging from the

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water. When Bruno undergoes waterboarding, Godard films the scene in the same manner.

The most profound insights into Bruno’s psychology come from oiceo ers that occur during a slow pan or a stable close-up (as discussed in Chapter 1). During the torture sequence there are three slow pans,5 the first one being perhaps the most significant. After Bruno is restrained in the bathroom, the scene cuts to a slow pan across the apartment building’s exterior. As soon as the scene changes, Bruno says,

“Torture is monotonous and sad. It is difficult to talk about it so I’ll only talk about it a little.” The pace of the pan the uniform exterior of the apartment building and the repetition of this image throughout the torture sequence reflect the monotony that Bruno describes. The contrast between this scene and the previous, chaotic scene in the bathroom heightens this sense of enduring monotony. Both scenes last about 20 seconds, but rapidly changing images compress time in the first scene, while the second scene stretches time out endlessly and the camera never reaches the end of the building.

In many ways the ambiguities surrounding Bruno’s situation reflect the ambiguity of Godard’s politics while making this film. In a special feature on the DVD of Le Petit

Soldat film scholar and critic Da id Sterritt says of Godard’s politics

I don’t think he was quite certain exactly what his politics were with regard to the subject that he was making this movie about, and it was a hugely controversial subject; namely, the Algerian War for Independence, and France’s reluctance to let Algeria go and all the bloodshed and iolence and other horrors that were going on right at this time around that issue. So, Godard set out to make a movie that was by its very nature going to be controversial, without having a particular set of arguments that he hoped to persuade people toward. He wanted to explore what he felt was a very confused and confusing situation, and kind of bring out that confused and

5 There are two other slow pans before the torture begins. Both of them follow the patterns I discuss here.

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confusing quality, without necessarily taking strong stands on it himself. (Godard)

Godard’s lack of distinct opinions on the war makes the Algerian War “confused and confusing” in Le Petit Soldat. These qualities are not only apparent in the weaving storyline and the disorienting cinematography, but in the character of Bruno himself— the man who has no ideals, and will not give in to torture simply because he does not want to. Both Godard and Bruno explore the problems surrounding the Algerian War, even while they see that they may never be able to fully resolve them all.

Bruno and Godard are connected not only through the writer-character relationship, but also through the fact that they are both artists dealing in similar media.

The most quoted line from the film—and maybe any of Godard’s films—occurs when

Bruno remarks to ronica “Photography is truth. and cinema is truth 24 times per second.” Many scholars ha e contested that Godard himself would ne er belie e or pretend to believe such a statement. Howe er one of Godard’s aesthetic values is capturing the reality or truth of the moment of filming. It seems as though critics ignore this and focus on the notion of representing historical or ideological truths, which is definitely not Godard’s artistic goal. Bruno makes this comment on the truth of photography and cinema while he photographs Véronica in her apartment. The line is a response to her remark that his questions, meant to relax her in front of his camera, feel like a police interrogation. In his commentary on the film, David Sterritt remarks that in this scene, Anna Karina, who plays Véronica, is a model and actress playing a woman acting like a model. Sterritt does not comment on the similarity between Michel Subor’s position while playing Bruno and Godard’s position as director. Subor plays at being the photographer in love with Véronica while Godard was in love with Karina and was

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actually filming her (MacCabe 128-129). In this instance, both men are questioning

Véronica/Karina while trying to develop a relationship with her—Bruno through his questions while photographing her, and Godard through his acting prompts and movie camera.

It is hard not to see Bruno as some sort of reflection of Godard when such evidence is considered. The relationship between the two does nothing to clarify

Godard’s personal iews on the Algerian War but it does throw into relief the question of the artist’s responsibility in the face of war’s atrocities. What becomes clear in this scene is that for Godard the camera is only capable of capturing the truths of human interaction: the relationships between lovers (Bruno and Véronica), between superiors and subordinates (Jacques and Paul over Bruno), and between supposed enemies

(Laszlo and Bruno). The camera does not capture ideological or historical truths.

Godard acknowledges that the camera can only capture the intimate and personal in a very limited scope, not a broad and universal one. Godard said in a 1960 interview,

I have made an adventure film, but it remains an individualistic one; Le Petit Soldat is a sort of essay on the behaviour of a secret agent which deals with the problems of an individual. If one wants to deal with generalities, then one writes books of philosophy or goes into politics, but that is not the case with me. (Garnham 11)

Godard works with the particulars of human interaction. He focuses on individuals and limits Le Petit Soldat to examining the specific dynamics between Véronica and Bruno,

Bruno and Jacques, or Laszlo and Bruno. The intimate nature of many scenes in the film (the torture scenes in the small bathroom in ronica’s apartment and in acques’ car) emphasizes the fact that Bruno’s story is situated in a specific set of circumstances and thus cannot be universalized. Bruno’s story cannot be taken as a political message because not only is it a fiction but the message of the film only applies to Bruno’s story.

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The images of the film are only capturing Bruno’s story not some greater political or historical truth.

Godard discounts his political motives in the same 1960 interview, stating that Le

Petit Soldat is political only because the Algerian War is the frame for its action. He says “But one can say that the film is not a political one because I do not take sides and the subject is not ‘slanted’ in the manner of Russian films ” referencing So iet montage films (Garnham 10-11). Godard commented separately in 1960 on the shooting of the film:

Personally I was speaking about things which concerned me in 1960 as a Parisian belonging to no political party. The thing which I was concerned with was the problem of war and its moral repercussions. So I showed a character who sets himself all kinds of problems. He doesn’t know how to resolve them, but to formulate them even in a confused way is already to try and resolve them. It is perhaps better to ask oneself some questions rather than to refuse to face any problems, or to believe oneself capable of resolving everything. (Garnham 9)

This seems to be both Godard’s aesthetic model and ideological goal with Le Petit

Soldat—not only is the film Godard’s own process of questioning of the political e ents of the time, but it seems that he wants to inspire his audience to undertake the same questioning process in regards to both the war and his film. With Bruno’s disillusioned and apathetic iewpoint as the iewer’s guide the iewer can criticize the actions of both the Algerians and the French without questioning who might be justified in taking extreme actions, because perhaps the answer is that neither party is. The film, and

Bruno, becomes political by allowing viewers to step outside the pro-Algerian/pro-

French binary.

The question of who has the right to govern Algeria is never posed during the film because that question does not concern Godard. The question of the propriety of the

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war has come down to personal experience, personal reasons for reacting in a certain way to the conflict and the situations it produces. Torture is one of the situations produced by the war, possibly the most polemic, and definitely the most intimate, due to the vulnerability of the person being tortured. This vulnerability is not only physical, but mental and emotional. Because of this vulnerability the viewer gains some sense of

Bruno’s personality and interiority during the torture scenes—throughout the rest of the film he is emotionally guarded.6 However, none of this helps to answer why Bruno is involved in the war and why he is vaguely aligned with the political right. Godard does not come out as a supporter of either side, but he does seem to be a supporter of what

Bruno represents as a deeply conflicted and uncertain individual. When asked if he felt close to the character of Bruno, Godard replied,

I find it easy to identify myself with him. Although none of the things which happen in the film have happened to me, I can imagine myself as a deserter, or this slightly naïve adventurer who resembles the students in Nizan’s La Conspiration, and who finally allows himself to be dragged into this affair. […] What I really show is a man who analyzes himself and discovers that he is different from the concept that he had of himself. Personally, when I look at myself in a mirror I have the same feeling. (Garnham 12)

Le Petit Soldat is only a political thriller on its surface. Bruno’s struggle with the questions raised by his involvement in the conflict is the heart of the film. When Bruno telephones Jacques just before the FLN abducts him, Jacques allegedly quotes

Napoleon when he says “Today tragedy is politics.” Bruno’s tragedy is the ambivalence he de elops because he is “dragged into this affair” without being able to work through his questions about the politics of the Algerian War. Godard’s tragedy

6 This is especially apparent in the scene where he first photographs Véronica. Bruno’s interrogation of ronica and her dislike of the emotional ulnerability she feels prefigures Bruno’s own interrogation torture, and emotional breakdown in the scene where he writes his imaginary letter to her.

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while not as dramatic as the events that befall Bruno, was that Le Petit Soldat would be banned for three years as a direct result of his own questioning of the politics of the

Algerian War through the film.

For Godard, Le Petit Soldat is not about a specific ideology, but about how individuals act when confronted with different ideologies. It is not about history or politics, but about how individuals become caught up in a series of events without any real explanation. Bruno’s instinct of self-preservation overrides any ideological impulses he might have. Perhaps this is why he is alive at the end of the film while Véronica is tortured to death. Bruno is willing to keep secrets for la main rouge, but he is not willing to be killed or become a martyr for them. Similarly, Bruno is willing to discuss politics and philosophy with Véronica and Laszlo, but he is not willing to commit himself to one set viewpoint. Bruno recognizes the constantly changing nature of human interactions better than any other character in the film, and it is in recognition of this uncertainty that he refuses to become trapped in one ideology. Godard himself sees no full resolution of the problems surrounding the Algerian War because he knows he cannot even see all of the problems. Godard does not attempt to resolve the war into clear-cut moral oppositions; he knows that it is a much more complex situation than such a depiction would suggest. Le Petit Soldat does not simplify the Algerian War into an opposition between good and bad because that opposition does not exist. For Godard, identifying which side is “good” or “right” means less than thinking about the questions involvement on either side would raise. Bruno tries to work through these questions in a detached manner, despite persistent attempts by both sides to indoctrinate him. In the end, Bruno still asks questions, but now the questions are personal and not political. Alone, he

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wonders how to get o er the traumas of torture and ronica’s death without becoming bitter.

The Unseeable

The second distinction I want to make among films that refrain from showing state violence or torture are films in which relegate violence to an inaccessible past.

Films such as La Historia Oficial and Death and the Maiden use verbal testimony to tell about iolence experienced in a character’s past without the accompaniment of flashbacks. The inability to see the past aligns viewers with characters who serve as second-hand witnesses in each narrative. The inability to see the violence reflects these characters’ differing encounters with state iolence and their processes of understanding. The use of the voice also implies a distance between the survivor and her experiences. As Mary Ann Doane points out,

The aural illusion of position constructed by the approximation of sound perspective and by techniques which spatialize the voice and endow it with “presence” guarantees the singularity and stability of a point of audition thus holding at bay the potential trauma of dispersal, dismemberment, difference…the recorded oice which presupposes a certain depth is in contradiction with the flatness of the two-dimensional image…the spectator is always aware of this divergence, of the inevitable gap between the represented body and its voice. (327)

The cinema never issues the voice heard from precisely the body seen on screen because of the mechanics of sound transmission. In the films I will discuss, I argue that the voice becomes a testimony to survival because it emphasizes the physical presence of the survivor. The divergence of the voice that describes torture from the body on- screen foregrounds the presence of the sur i or’s body by referencing an unseeable body—the tortured body. Furthermore, the spatialization of the voice draws the viewer/listener closer to the speaking subject, thus enabling ethical reflection based on

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the impossibility of action by the viewers and characters who must listen but cannot inter ene in the ictim’s past. These witnesses also assume the ictim’s position through vicarious trauma inflicted by listening.

La Historia Fficial’s ( 85 dir. uis Puenzo) protagonist is Alicia, an upper-middle class woman who teaches high school history. Her husband has close ties to government officials, and they have an adopted daughter. When her students and an

English teacher at the school reveal the realities of the Dirty War to her, Alicia begins to suspect that maybe her daughter was the child of a desaparecida. Early in the film,

Alicia reunites with a friend from her childhood, Ana, who has lived in exile for the seven years since the start of the Dirty War. That night, Ana tells Alicia about her husband’s disappearance and her own abduction before she went into exile. The film presents this revelation as a conversation, with shots alternating between close-ups of Ana and Alicia as Ana details the torture she underwent, including forced drowning and electrocution.

The film does not show Ana’s experiences but emphasizes Ana’s indi idual experience through an intense focus on her words and the expressions on her and Alicia’s faces.

The shot/counter-shot pattern of this scene forms a chiastic structure where Ana and Alicia’s stories intersect momentarily when Ana mentions that the babies of pregnant and raped prisoners were stolen to sell to families. Ana’s telling was initially meant to be cathartic and to elicit empathy from Alicia. The revelation ends up being traumatic for both women when Alicia becomes implicated in the violence to which Ana and other women were subjected. That Alicia also realizes her own ignorance and complicity in the violent oppression only amplifies her trauma. This shock does not

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produce catharsis but guilt on Ana’s behalf perhaps for making her friend suffer and perhaps for being a survivor who did not suffer as much as others.

The use of the voice—with the speaking subject both on-screen and off—in La

Historia Oficial points to a gap in scholarship on the voice in cinema. The voice assumes power at the expense of the body, but scholars of film sound have not addressed the role of the voice when it speaks about the body. Michel Chion argues that once a voice is matched to an image of a speaking mouth, the voice ceases to be a

“complete acousmêtre” and loses “its power omniscience and (ob iously) ubiquity.

Embodying the voice is a sort of symbolic act, dooming the acousmêtre to the fate of ordinary mortals. De-acousmatization roots the acousmêtre to a place and says ‘here is your body you’ll be there and not elsewhere’” ( -8). Similarly, Kaja Silverman argues that in mainstream cinema, the female voice is always equated with the body, even when the speaker is not seen. Sil erman writing against the construction of woman’s body as spectacle in mainstream cinema, argues that,

For the most part woman’s speech is synchronized with her image and even when it is transmitted as a voice-off, the divorce is only temporary; the body connected to the female voice is understood to be in the next room, just out of frame, at the other end of a telephone line. In short, it is fully recoverable. The female voice seldom functions as a voice-over, and when it does it enjoys a comparable status to the embodied male voice-over in film noir—i.e., it is autobiographical, evoking in a reminiscent fashion a fiction within which the speaker figures centrally as a bodily “presence.” (165)

Both Chion and Sil erman reject Doane’s assertion that the viewer is aware that the voice is always elsewhere from the body seen on screen. When Chion and Silverman are read alongside scenes like the one I described above in La Historia Oficial, two questions emerge: What power does the female voice have when the subject of the

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dialogue is the speaker’s body? And what is the status of the oice when the body being discussed does not exist in the present, i.e., cannot be seen?

It is impossible to address the experience of torture or rape without talking about the body, but as I have shown, film can address torture without showing the tortured body. In the scene above, the tortured body exists elsewhere. It is not Ana’s body as we see it; yet the presence of Ana’s body the formerly tortured body is necessary because her presence as a survivor enables her story to be told. Ana’s image on-screen pro ides one element of her testimony (“this is my body the body that sur i ed torture and bears the scars”). Her oice pro ides the other (“these are the things that were done to my body”). Ana’s testimony di erges between her body and her oice. Her voice still holds its acousmêtrical power because the body to which she refers (the body actively being tortured) is not seen and is not recoverable. While some might argue that psychological torture could be described without reference to the body, my discussion of

Death and the Maiden makes it clear that psychological torture is tied to the experience of the tortured body.

The testimony in Death and the Maiden (1994, dir. Roman Polanski) is similar to that in La Historia Oficial, but made in a different context. Paulina Escobar has detained

Dr. Roberto Miranda after he gives her husband Gerardo a ride home during a storm; she believes he tortured and raped her during the rule of a fascist military dictatorship in the unnamed South American country where they live. Paulina decides she will put

Miranda on trial, with Gerardo acting as his defense attorney. Halfway through the film, she gives Gerardo a full account of her first encounter with Dr. Miranda to convince him to participate in the mock trial.

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Paulina reveals her memories of torture to Gerardo on their porch, in one of a few moments when the film’s action lea es the inside of their house. Filmed in a shot/counter-shot pattern modified by the length of the takes and the reserved use of pans and tracking in, the scene always focuses on Paulina—her words, her voice, her gestures, her expressions. The shots showing Paulina are markedly longer than the shots showing Gerardo, resulting in several long takes (the average shot length for the scene is 26.1 seconds). The iewer becomes absorbed by Paulina’s articulation of her experience; the reverse shots showing Gerardo are less about his restrained reactions than they are about seeing through her eyes and inhabiting her subjective position. At the moment when Paulina describes the aspect of her torture that affected her most— the doctor playing Schubert, whose music she loves, while raping her—the camera pans and circles around to be in front of her while tracking in closer. When she reenacts how she enthusiastically told the doctor that she loves Schubert, Paulina turns to face the camera. Then she describes how without seeing what was happening, she knew that the doctor was about to rape her because she could hear the change jingling in his pockets as he dropped his pants, and then his belt dragging on the floor as he approached her. The viewer, and by extension Gerardo, takes the place of Paulina in this moment. We do not see what is happening, we only hear it as Paulina describes it, with strains of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden coming from inside the house, where she has put it on to torment Dr. Miranda. We inhabit her trauma as the unseeing victim who must listen to the approaching horrors.

At the end of this scene Paulina brushes away Gerardo’s doubts about her mental state. He eventually believes that she does not want to kill Dr. Miranda. When he

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asks her why she crashed his car, the viewers catch her in a lie. Paulina tells Gerardo that she parked Dr. Miranda’s car on the side of the road but the iewers ha e seen

Paulina push the car over a cliff. She proceeds to torture Dr. Miranda physically and psychologically until he confesses to raping and torturing her, even though in the scene

I ha e described she tells Gerardo “I know it’s ridiculous because no re enge can satisfy me.” Indeed Death and the Maiden, like Le Petit Soldat, seems to condemn the use of torture and violence on both sides—we do not disbelie e Paulina’s testimony of the torture she experiences, but we are acutely aware of the ways in which governments used against people like Paulina to obtain false confessions. It is disturbing to watch Paulina co-opt the torture techniques to which she was submitted in playing out her revenge fantasy, a fantasy she knows will be unsatisfying. Yet as viewers, we want Dr. Miranda to corroborate her testimony—we want to assign guilt to him and see him punished, although perhaps not in the ways Paulina punishes him. As a result of these central contradictions, the film provides no sense of healing, justice, or release when it becomes clear that the night’s e ents ha e multiplied Paulina’s trauma.

She lets Dr. Miranda return home after he confesses during a mock execution. It is an intriguing side effect of the film that the iewers’ sympathy for Paulina erodes as she asserts her denial of victimhood by transforming herself into a perpetrator of torture.

Paulina the film and Ariel Dorfman’s play from which the film was adapted, cannot imagine an alternate form of survivorship for her that evades the victim/perpetrator binary because as Paulina says, she cannot imagine any healing or reconciliation for the violence she endured.

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The Unseen and the Unseeable represent two strategies adopted by films about torture and state violence that choose at one moment or another, not to show the violence at the center of their stories. While films in which the violence is unseen leave the viewer to imagine what takes place in the ellipses, films in which the violence is unseeable often describe the experience of torture in unrelenting detail. In both cases, the possibility of intervening in the events is removed, whether because the violence has happened in the past, or because we have been taken away from it. These films do not render their viewers complicit by having to watch the violence, but rather the decision not to show torture confirms the medium’s status as a constructed fiction and one produced after-the-fact. These films acknowledge that the feeling of wanting to intervene and the possibility of stopping the violence is an illusion, so they either cut out the torture or relegate it to a narrati e past that is as inaccessible to the stories’ characters as it is to viewers. Both techniques recall the mental processes of some trauma victims—the fragmentation, blockages, and repetition that are inherent in these films’ uses of ellipsis and testimony. The viewer is simultaneously put in the place of the victim/survivor and the confidant: unable to access the experience of torture in its totality and absorbing the reenactment of those experiences in fragmented visions or a stream of words. Because the films remove and refuse the possibility of intervening in the violence—there is never a hero who saves the day, stops the torture, or ensures a happy ending—the viewer must decide what it means to be a responsible witness to these historical truths at the remove of time and fictionalization.

One answer that has been proposed to the question of responsible witnessing of historical fiction films is the concept of vicarious trauma. E. Ann Kaplan, Libby Saxton,

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Joshua Hirsch, and other scholars have argued that the phenomenon of vicarious torture (the trauma experienced by therapists, family members, and close friends by their repeated encounters with the trauma of a primary survivor) is applicable to the viewing of historical fiction films—that it is possible for the violent or dramatic content of a fiction film to inflict trauma on a viewer. While the stories may be fiction (or fictionalized), the acts of torture and state violence depicted or described in the films I have discussed are true to the films’ worlds. More importantly, they resonate with non- fictional historical documents—records, images, and survivor testimony. Saxton and

Hirsch have argued in the context of films about the Holocaust that the only way for a film about historical trauma to be ethically responsible is to replicate that trauma in the

iewer to keep “the shock in motion” or keep “the trauma mo ing”—to cause vicarious trauma (Hirsch 96, 118). The films I have discussed keep the trauma moving within the characters who serve as second-hand witnesses (Gerardo, Alicia, Richard Boyle, Ed and Beth Horman). For viewers, the films I have discussed keep the trauma moving, not only through the violence described or visually hinted at, but in their very structures, which present the experience of state violence to viewers in the blocked, elliptical, fragmented, and repetitive form in which a survivor may remember, attempt to remember, or forget his or her own trauma.

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Figure 4-1. Bosnians about to be executed, seen in flashback, in Behind Enemy Lines. Behind Enemy Lines. Dir. John Moore. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD.

Figure 4-2. Lt. Burnett emerges from the pile of bodies. Behind Enemy Lines. Dir. John Moore. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD.

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Figure 4-3. A man chases down one of the nuns in Salvador. Salvador. Dir. Oliver Stone. MGM Home Entertainment, 2001. DVD.

Figure 4-4. Cathy Moore’s rapist. Salvador. Dir. Oliver Stone. MGM Home Entertainment, 2001. DVD.

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Figure 4-5. Cathy Moore’s body is exhumed. Salvador. Dir. Oliver Stone. MGM Home Entertainment, 2001. DVD.

Figure 4-6. One of only two images of Charles Horman during his captivity in Missing. Missing. Dir. Costa-Gavras. Criterion Collection, 2008. DVD.

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Figure 4-7. The second image of Charles Horman. Missing. Dir. Costa-Gavras. Criterion Collection, 2008. DVD.

Figure 4-8. Henri Charlegue is about to be electrocuted for the first time in La Question. La Question. Dir. Laurent Heynemann. Doriane Films, 2003. DVD.

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Figure 4- . The shot cuts to this exterior shot before we see Henri’s torture. La Question. Dir. Laurent Heynemann. Doriane Films, 2003. DVD.

Figure 4- . An F N member chains Bruno’s right hand to the faucet. Still from the series of swish pans in Le Petit Soldat. Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier]. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Fox Lorber, 2001. DVD.

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Figure 4- . A slow pan across the apartment’s exterior during a monologue by Bruno. Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier]. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Fox Lorber, 2001. DVD.

Figure 4-12. Ana tells Alicia about her rape and imprisonment in La Historia Oficial. La Historia Oficial. Dir. Luis Puenzo. Koch Lorber Films, 2004. DVD.

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Figure 4-13. The camera faces Paulina as she tells her husband how Dr. Miranda raped her while playing Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden.” Death and the Maiden. Dir. Roman Polanski. New Line Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD.

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CHAPTER 5 THROUGH A FAMILIAR MAZE: THE DISTORTION OF BANAL SPACES IN SCENES OF TORTURE

The Escuela de Suboficiales de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA, or the Navy

Petty-Officers School of Mechanics) in Buenos Aires, Argentina became the Instituto

Espacio para la Memoria (Institute of the Space for Memory) on July 12, 2006—an act that transformed the epicenter of dictator Jorge Rafael Videla’s iolent repression into a museum and memorial to the thousands of victims of state terror. In reality, and then in films such as Garage Olimpo, ’ I , Le Petit Soldat, B d’ and

La Historia Oficial, everyday spaces including ESMA, apartments, schools, houses, and garages became makeshift prisons and arenas of torture. The distortion of familiar places into unfamiliar prisons in these films shows the real disfiguration of everyday life under regimes of terror, as trauma becomes inscribed in the very architecture of a nation.

In this chapter, I will focus on three places: the prison, the home, and the frontline of battle. Films depicting torture do not figure the prison as a Panopticon; they do not give the viewer a privileged, centralized view and they do not emphasize on surveillance. Rather, the jailors manipulate and reorganize familiar places into labyrinthine structures that disorient the prisoners and produce overwhelming senses of isolation, restriction, and impossible escape. The home becomes an arena for violence and intimidation when the state invades this most personal place. This invasion includes blatant intrusions by paramilitary groups and the slow buildup of violence in individual supporters of the state. When actual warfare operates alongside torture, films show how the per ersion of iolence undercuts the rules of war and soldiers’ expectations. In turn violence perverts the front, as space becomes carnivalesque and absurd. By depicting

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these manipulations and alterations of space, and by replicating the ictim’s disorientation in the viewer, all of these films become “spaces for memory.” They give us a glimpse of the experience of state violence, while serving as memorials to the real victims.

Spatial and Lexical Distortions of Imprisonment

In Garage Olimpo (1999, dir. Marco Bechis), men abduct 18-year-old Maria from her home with no explanation. They take her to Garage Olimpo, a garage that has been converted into a clandestine prison. On the first floor of the garage, the main office sits opposite the berths where mechanics would work on cars. Downstairs, the garage has a break room fitted with table games. Beyond the brake room are a series of rooms that have been converted into prison cells. The camerawork tries to make the viewer feel the confusion and disorientation that Maria feels during her detention. The interior of the garage is multiply fragmented. The film’s mise-en-scène and use of montage show the compartmentalization of space in the garage. The film provides countless shots of the garage’s narrow hallways doors strong ertical lines (in the auto shop on the first floor), and windows. Throughout the film, shots show the surveillance system in the main office. The limited views of the surveillance cameras produce images that elide the passages connecting the rooms. The surveillance video further segments the space inhabited by the prisoners. The frequent lining up of the prisoners for inspection or

"transfer" adds to the restriction present in the architecture. Yet, while space in the camp is very controlled, that does not mean it is easy to master. The winding hallways are nearly all identical and director Marco Bechis’s use of montage in the early scenes of Maria being led through the building breaks the space up into fragments, which makes it impossible for the viewer to formulate a mental map of the Garage upon a first

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viewing. The viewer often wonders where Maria is, how she got there, or where she might be going. This uncertainty reflects Maria's own experience of the space as men lead her around blindfolded, as well as her uncertainty about her fate. Like the viewer,

Maria does not know if the places the men take her to will lead to further captivity, torture or death.

Early in her imprisonment, the film signals that Maria will not be a typical prisoner. While Felix is the garage’s designated torturer a different man performs

Maria’s initial electrocution. This change renders Maria unconscious, leaving her nearly dead. Maria's resuscitation leads to her first encounter with Felix-as-torturer; he was pre iously known to the iewer as a boarder at her mother’s home. This encounter may change the viewer's expectations of the narrative as the story begins to alternate between a straightforward political thriller and a romance plot. The relationship that develops between Felix and Maria presents the viewer with a dramatic case of

Stockholm Syndrome.1 Maria's feelings for Felix are not always sincere, since she hopes to use him to get her freedom, but Felix shows genuine affection for her though he remains unable to change her fate. The romance plot hints at the perplexing, even revolting notion that the torturers during the Dirty War and other genocidal atrocities are also human beings who live regular lives outside of their "jobs."

This realization is supposed to be as perplexing for the audience as it is for the victims of such violence. The initial shock that the viewer experiences when Felix goes from being the nice boarder sharing a beer with Maria in the film’s opening to being

1 Stockholm syndrome appears in other films I discuss, and they predominantly follow the male captor, female captive model present in Garage Olimpo. The only film in this study to show a female torturer is Death and the Maiden, discussed in chapter 4. An analysis of films in which the woman is the torturer and Stockholm syndrome is portrayed would offer valuable insights into the gendered perception of violence and its relationship to sexuality.

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Garage Olimpo’s head torturer, resurfaces multiple times during the film: when he brings her flowers, sleeps in a cell with her, and takes her on a date. Perhaps the most shocking example of the collision of these worlds occurs when Felix brings Maria a grilled chicken. This seems almost a cruel gesture to those familiar with the Dirty War; the metal table prisoners were electrocuted, drowned, and otherwise tortured on was referred to as la parrilla or "the grill."2 Felix's two worlds collide in his act of buying chicken from a vendor. That this is his first offering to Maria indicates his inability to completely disconnect himself from his role as the torturer who roasts chickens like her on his grill with his picana. This moment also indicates the lexical perversions wrought by the Dirty War. As Marguerite Feitlowitz argues in A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, many words have become intolerable for survivors of the Dirty

War, and la parrilla is one of them. She writes “Stand on any street corner in Buenos

Aires and it comes at you from all directions: Parrilla, parrilla, parrilla—sustenance, pleasure, and annihilation, all present in a single quotidian word. No wonder the present government, which pardoned the ex-commanders—has so often advised the public to

‘turn the page’” (4 ). Yet, la parrilla is not just a word or an object. It is, as Feitlowitz points out “the classic horizontal grill—the centerpiece of the beloved social barbecque—and…the ubiquitous restaurants that ser e grilled meat” (4 ). The perversion of the term la parrilla warps Argentines’ interactions with traditional places

(the restaurants and the cities in which they abound).

2 This act recalls the martyrdom of St. Lawrence of Rome, who was martyred on a giant grill. The relationship of martyrdom and ethical responses is one that merits further study, but is beyond the scope of this work.

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La Noche de los Lápices (1986) also links the distortion of space to lexical distortions. In this film, however, director Héctor Olivera emphasizes the way a single room can be distorted through misappropriation. In La Noche de los Lápices most of the torture takes place in former police headquarters, including Pozo de Araña, de Banfield, and de Quilmes where the students abducted on “The Night of the Pencils” were taken.

Derived from to the testimony of survivor Pablo Diaz, the film shows how the subversion of the police during the dictatorship relates to the subversion of notions of truth and justice.

About halfway through La Noche de los Lápices, the film introduces the viewer

(and Pablo) to the “truth machine.” After Pablo’s initial interrogation in which the head of the camp warns him “You’ll li e if I want you to ” men pull Pablo out of the crowded holding room and take him to “Room 4.” The scene cuts from a close-up of the number

4 on the door to a close up of hands splashing water out of a bucket while Pablo asks,

“What's this?” The camera pans left to show Pablo being stripped, cutting away before he can be seen naked. The camera pans left again from a darkened part of the room to show Pablo being thrown against a mattress that is leaned up against the wall, and then being untied as he repeatedly asks what's going on. The film shows the hands sprinkling water in close-up again. The camera pans up from the hands to show the face of the man performing this action. The camera cuts to show two men moving a struggling, fully naked (except for his blindfold) Pablo to a metal table. The scene cuts to a medium shot of Pablo lying across the bottom of the frame (visible from his ribs to his wrists), with one of the three men sitting behind him, tightening his restraints. When

Pablo asks “What will you do to me?” this man replies by asking “Do you know the

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truth machine?” When Pablo shakes his head no the man says “Well now you will.”

Pablo responds saying “A lie detector will show I'm not lying.” The camera pans vertically as the man stands up with a sober face and says “So you want the machine?

Fine.” The camera cuts to a table holding only a lamp, a radio, a flashlight, a bottle of clear liquid (possibly alcohol), and a set of pliers. A hand reaches in from the right of the frame to turn up the radio. The camera cuts to another set of hands grabbing a picana

(cattle prod) to adjust the charge. The camera pans left as the hand holding the picana reaches and shocks Pablo in his left nipple. The camera cuts to a high angle shot to show Pablo's face being covered with a pillow as he screams. The man continues to shock Pablo, while the camera focuses on Pablo's clenched right hand. The head of the camp comes in and begins to interrogate Pablo. They refuse to believe him when he says he was not working for a superior in any sort of organization.

This scene plays heavily on what viewers see, but also what they do not see and what cannot be seen. The rapid camera movements, cuts, and the dark lighting of the room prevent the viewer from seeing what the splashing of water means, or what instruments of violence might be present. The film only permits the viewer to see glimpses of the torture Pablo experiences, preventing any fixation on the violence, rather the camera focuses on his suffering, through the image of his clenched fist. Like the blindfolded Pablo, viewers do not get a full sense of the room, nor do we have enough time to reorient ourselves before the next cut or pan. Pablo’s blindness extends to his naï e belief that the “truth machine” is actually a lie detector. The play on words is a cruel one, as it gives Pablo false hope. Beyond that the name “the truth machine” obscures the fact that the interrogators do not seek truth—they operate outside the

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bounds of the law and legitimate evidence, nor do they seek legitimate confessions.

One of the primary objections to the use of torture is that information obtained under duress is often not true, nor is it typically verified before being used. Here, the men use violence and pain as means of extracting information, but that information only qualifies as alid or “truth” when it meets the interrogator's expectations. Denials of subversive communist activities are not considered true, yet any names or locations given during torture are taken to be valid accusations.

Invading the Home

Public spaces are not the only spaces affected by state violence. La Historia

Oficial’s ending shows how clandestine violence can resurface in the home. Alicia discovers that her adopted daughter, Gaby, was actually stolen from a female desaparecida by her husband, Roberto. Alicia surprises Roberto with a meeting with

Gaby’s maternal grandmother. After Roberto has shown no sympathy for the grandmother or any women whose children and grandchildren were abducted, he goes to look for Gaby. The film shows the initial confrontation between Roberto and Alicia in close-ups and indicates that they are standing next to each other. However, when the film cuts to a medium shot mid-line, we see Roberto sitting on his bed, and Alicia standing in the hall. Roberto walks past Alicia to Gaby's room and discovers that she is gone. Alicia remarks, "Horrible, isn't it?...Not knowing where your daughter is." The film cuts back to close-ups as Roberto attacks Alicia, pulling her hair and twisting her arm.

The shot tracks back as he takes her to the door and beats her head against the corner of the door frame. The scene cuts to a long shot from the hall as the phone rings, and then cuts back to a close up of the two, as Roberto continues bashing Alicia’s head on the now bloody door frame. Alicia holds onto the frame. When Roberto realizes this, he

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smashes her hand with the door. He relents, and the two remain in a two-shot until he walks off frame to answer the telephone. This penultimate scene is the only depiction of violence in the film. While it is domestic, Roberto's ties to the government and military make it an analogy for the violence committed by the Argentine state against women.

The scene is terrifyingly moving as it all takes place in Gaby's room, which is supposed to be the child's innocent sanctuary. The room, symbolic of the womb, has been violated; in light of Alicia's inability to have children, it seems unlikely that Gaby will return to the room/womb again. The practices of the state have instituted sterility.

Women cannot nurture either, as their children have been taken away; either they have been killed or in Alicia’s case their children are not truly their own but rather like ghosts whose real identities haunt their adoptive parents and biological relatives.

In the opening sequence of Chronicle of an Escape, the action cuts between scenes of Claudio playing goalie for the Almagro soccer team and men interrogating his mother about his political activities and whereabouts. We see his mother on her hands and knees in her living room. She has clearly been beaten. The camera alternates between shots taken from her height, shots at the height of the men interrogating her, and shots following some of the men as they search the house for weapons. After an initial establishing shot that shows the spatial dynamics of the room, the scene almost exclusively uses medium close-ups to show Claudio’s mother. The camera placement, mo ement and angles throughout the scenes with Claudio’s mother become a reflection of both the power dynamics of the scene and her mental state.

Director Adrián Caetano does not use extreme low and high angle shots in this scene—these would show both Mrs. Tamborrini and her attackers in the same image.

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Instead, the camera completely shifts its position between the two planes (her height and theirs) so that we consistently see either the men or Mrs. Tamburrini (with the exception of seeing a few men from the knees down when they walk into the frame).

This stylistic choice creates a break between the two—they do not exist in the same world—which reflects Mrs. Tamburini’s mindset. Her responses to the men’s questions reflect her complete lack of understanding about what is happening to her. In one instance, for example, when she says her son is apolitical, the head interrogator asks if she is then calling him (the interrogator) a liar. She says no. For the interrogators, this contradiction becomes an admission of her son’s sub ersi e acti ities. For Mrs.

Tamburrini, it may be an act of self-preservation, but it is also the truth, since she has not actually called anyone a liar. She may not realize that her contradiction will be used against her and her son. Furthermore, she may not realize that nothing she says really matters. The men do not care what she thinks about her son, or whether she calls them liars. They only care about finding and detaining Claudio. His guilt has already been ascertained. Mrs. Tamburrini may not recognize that she has been trapped without the possibility of escape, but the way Caetano films her shows this to the viewers.

Trapped in her living room, on her hands and knees, Mrs. Tamburrini appears to viewers as a caged animal when we see her. Her furniture and the legs of the men surrounding her form strong vertical lines in the images that emphasize her entrapment.

At one point, the camera, at ground-level, circles around her. Since we see her from the ground, rather than in a high-angle shot, we sense her debasement. The encircling camera movement provides us with a point of view akin to that of a family pet, puzzled by what is happening. The camerawork con eys the scene’s per asi e atmosphere of

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threat and danger. The images show how the men have debased Mrs. Tamburrini to the state of a wounded animal, and the camerawork provides an intuitive sense of danger and incomprehension, just as Mrs. Tamburrini’s statements re eal that her situation is beyond her comprehension.

The split between the ground-level and mid-level shots in the sequence visualizes the gap that Mrs. Tamburrini cannot fill in order to make sense of her interrogation. The situation only becomes clear to her at the end of the sequence when the men bring in her daughter. The head interrogator informs her that she must choose between giving them her son or her daughter. There is no third option. The ultimatum makes it clear to her that innocence and guilt no longer have any meaning—they no longer exist as concepts in Argentina under the military junta. She has crossed the gap that formerly existed between ground- and mid-level images, and we see her in the shot with her daughter and the men, as she realizes that she will lose one of her children.

The Carnivalesque and the Absurd on the Frontlines

In ’ I , we see torture from the perspective of French military officers in Algeria, primarily of Lt. Terrien. Lt. Terrien is presented as our conscience throughout the film, and his shifts in attitude correspond to how the effects of the war change his ability to sympathize with the Algerian people. Terrien is new to the army—unlike Sgt.

Dougnac and others, he is too young to be a veteran of Indochina or the resistance during WWII. Sgt. Dougnac is Terrien’s second-in-command, and the film initially presents Dougnac as Terrien’s ideological foil. Terrien frames his objections to the

French presence in Algeria through Dougnac’s participation in the French Resistance.

He iews it as a foreign occupation; he doesn’t understand why the French peacefully gave independence to Tunisia and Morocco, but are fighting to keep Algeria. Sgt.

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Dougnac replies with the common refrain of “Alg rie c’est la France ” which seems to be beyond Terrien’s understanding. He still sees the two as separate countries, despite the French annexation of Algeria. Dougnac keenly understands Terrien’s idealism though, so he serves as a protector, mentor, and friend to him throughout the film.

’ I ’s first torture sequence shows Terrien’s incomprehension of

French ideology. After Terrien’s squad captures an old man in a village raid, the army sends a soldier to interrogate the man. Lt. Terrien presumes the soldier will simply take the prisoner to the command post. Lt. Terrien lies in his bunk, having fallen asleep while reading, when a noise awakens him. The disconcerting noise mixes human and inhuman sounds. The shot cuts from a full shot of Terrien in his bunk to a long shot through the window above his bed. As Terrien looks out, the audience sees Sgt.

Dougnac staggering around, drunkenly blowing a bugle with his right hand while his left hand blocks the noise from his ear. We follow Terrien as he goes to send Dougnac to his bunk—or at least to stop the noise. When Dougnac momentarily stops playing,

Terrien hears the noise again, slightly differently. He hears men cheering—is this what

Dougnac tried to block out? Terrien goes to the camp’s dining hall where most of the soldiers are found drinking, playing cards, socializing, and listening to music.3 Terrien turns down the radio. Terrien then hears the last layer of the noise that initially disturbed his reading—a muffled scream comes through the closed door at the other end of the room. Terrien opens the door. Viewers see the room in a full point-of-view shot. At its center is the old prisoner, now partially submerged in a small galvanized tub filled with

3 His entrance into the room recalls the scene in which Terrien first entered the mess hall, in the midst of a knife-throwing contest. The second man tells the thrower “Get her right in the tits!” We then see an extreme close-up counter shot of the knife indeed sticking right into the breast of a pin-up picture tacked onto a wooden board.

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water, with electrodes leading from his right ear and nipple to a hand-cranked generator on the left of the screen. The electrocution stops with the startling entrance of Terrien, who then pulls the electrodes off the man. Terrien prohibits the use of torture at his camp.

While this sequence does not focus on the man experiencing torture, it helps position its viewers alongside Terrien’s objections to the Algerian War and torture.

Director Florent-Emilio Siri presents Terrien as a complex character. He is a career officer and out of place at the front, as Sgt. Dougnac notes that his education could have secured him a desk job. Terrien ends up on the front, but the film consistently shows viewers that he does not fit in as a combatant. However, Terrien complies with his assignments. Perhaps naively, he believes that he can force his battalion to act as if in a normal war, not a guerilla war, by disallowing torture and attempting to foster relationships with the local Algerians. ’ I presents Terrien as a “good soldier” who uses his position to try to change the parameters of warfare. Terrien becomes a sympathetic guide for modern audiences because the film presents him as a man rebelling against the conditions in which he has been placed; he uses his power to try to change the system from within. His idealism at the beginning of the film also allows for the tidy plot that shows how his experiences of violence during the Algerian

War and the pressures of the army change him, making him more violent and pessimistic. Terrien’s change in character contrasts Sgt. Dougnac’s as Dougnac becomes disillusioned with the army to the point of desertion.

To return to the first torture sequence, though, these insights into Lt. Terriens’s character affirm his ideology and make him believable. Terrien has already voiced his

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support of Algerian independence and his opposition to torture; in this sequence he shows it. It does not matter that viewers do not know the man being tortured or view the torture from his perspective. The sequence following Terrien’s pre ious statements upholds his ethical stance. Terrien opposes the use of torture and the oppression of the

Algerians. It does not matter who the individual is. His intervention is an ethical action resulting from Terrien’s Lévinasian encounter with the oppressed Other in the form of the old man. He knows all that he needs to know the moment that he hears the scream from the other room. When he pulls the old man from the tub, Terrien proves his commitment to his sense of ethics by acting, rather than by simply restating his opposition. That Terrien follows his statements with actions solidifies him as the film’s ethical compass for the viewers.

This sequence also sets the template for the two other torture sequences in

’ I . They all involve an encounter with Dougnac, traversing the dining hall, and entering the back room to witness an electrocution. The initial sequence also provides viewers with the atmosphere in which torture occurs in the film—the carnivalesque. As I noted, the sequence opens with Terrien hearing, then seeing, Sgt.

Dougnac drunkenly playing the bugle and stumbling around the flagpole. Dougnac is typically pragmatic and controlled. He is the experienced and unemotional combat

eteran to Terrien’s new idealistic officer. That Dougnac appears in a drunken stupor, randomly blowing into the bugle immediately signals an inversion of the usual order. He does not honor the French flag with his playing, as he has done through his conversations with Terrien; he assaults and ridicules it. He is drunk, loosening his formerly absent emotions, and most tellingly, he uses his free hand to block the noise.

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While first the viewer might suspect that Dougnac is blocking the noise of his own bugle, by the end of the sequence it becomes clear that Dougnac has been blocking the same inhuman noise Terrien has heard. When the alcohol and his hands failed to stifle the sound of the screams, Dougnac resorted to the bugle. The sound of torture completely undoes this stalwart veteran.

The film makes the carnivalesque atmosphere of the sequence even more apparent when Terrien enters the dining hall-cum-beer hall. The men happily drink.

They feign playful rivalries in their various games. They completely ignore the noise coming from Sgt. Dougnac outside and the torture in the back room. They have music on and are enjoying themselves. The final inversion of order characteristic by the carnivalesque comes in the recollection of the knife-throwing game. The pin-up picture here no longer provides individual sexual pleasure. Furthermore it doesn’t act as a circus side-show—she is not the lovely (erotic) assistant that the performer will entrap with knives thrown expertly to outline her silhouette. This is target practice. The sexualized woman supposed to provide the soldiers with release and entertainment has become just another aspect of training, albeit informally. That one of the most highly fetishized parts of the female body “her tits ” ha e become the target of iolence signals that everything has turned upside-down in this sequence. Mockery has replaced reverence, dissonance has replaced melodic harmony, war has replaced recreation, and violence has replaced sexual fantasy. These inversions make up the carnivalesque atmosphere of torture in ’ I , and set the tone for the two later torture sequences.

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Sgt. Dougnac’s drunken bugling again introduces the second torture. The sound immediately alerts Lt. Terrien to what is happening since we have not heard it since the first torture sequence. It also strikes a personal blow to his authority by rendering his resistance meaningless. His previous intervention has done nothing to stop the torture of more Algerian prisoners. Rather than confront or attempt to silence Dougnac, this time Terrien ignores him, in an indication that he has been absorbed into the carnivalesque atmosphere of the camp. Terrien can no longer be an outside actor as he was when he was new to the camp. Almost an hour passes in the film between the first torture sequence and this one. In this time Lt. Terrien has seen the French army secretly use napalm against the Algerians; the mangled body of Rashid the group’s interpreter and a former FLN fighter; several of his men killed in ambush; the disfigured corpses of three of his soldiers; and his own group massacre a village in retaliation.

These experiences have deepened his mental conflict as he has seen horrific acts of violence carried out by both the French and Algerians. He becomes unable to tell any difference in the brutality, let alone any purpose. However, the carnivalesque atmosphere at the base distorts Terrien’s sense of the meaninglessness of iolence.

Rather than providing a reason to stop the violence, the meaninglessness presents no incentive for stopping—a distortion that combines with Terrien’s sense of futility o er his failed intervention to result in a perverse response to this second instance of torture.

Again Terrien enters the back room of the dining hall. We see the room in a full shot from Terrien’s point of iew as in the first torture sequence. This time though, there are two victims—another old man in the galvanized tub being electrocuted, and a younger man suspended by his arms behind and to the right of the tub. This man has

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been badly beaten, and the dialogue makes it clear that they are torturing the old man in order to make the young man talk. The noise in the room becomes unbearable as the old man moans. Terrien, visibly disturbed, begins to whisper “Talk ” then grabs the man by the ears and shouts “Talk!” in his face. Amar the roughly -year-old cousin of

Rashid who has joined Terrien’s group and acts as Terrien’s surrogate son yells at the old man in Arabic to “say something ” and at the young man to gi e up what he knows.

Where in the first sequence Terrien intervened to pull the man out of the tub, he does not do the same here. Since his first intervention only temporarily stopped the use of torture, Terrien concludes that he cannot stop the army from torturing, so his best option is to convince the men to talk.

Howe er Terrien’s pleas become frighteningly stringent. We see the strain in his face as the camera follows him in a low-angle medium close-up throughout the sequence. Something in Terrien’s panic shifts. He either does not understand the men’s resolve not to talk, or he does not understand that he has terrified the old man; he becomes impatient with the silence. The inversion that is part of the carnivalesque atmosphere signaled by Sgt. Dougnac’s bugling becomes complete when Terrien grabs the electrodes and begins to frantically shock the old man. Terrien continues to yell at both men to talk, and at the soldier to keep cranking the generator. The scene accelerates until finally Terrien applies the electrodes to the man’s chest but nothing happens. We watch from the doorway as a confused Terrien keeps reapplying the electrodes, and eventually concludes that the generator is broken. He does not understand that he has just killed the old man. In the carnivalesque, as reflected in the pace, extreme angles, shifting points of view, and the use of sound throughout this

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sequence, Terrien becomes the torturer, the senseless murderer that he has stated he despises. Amar witnesses Terrien’s in ersion. Amar tries to stop Terrien’s growing frenzy, but is thrown aside by the lead torturer. At the end of the sequence, we see

Terrien and Amar exchange a final glance as Amar leaves the camp. In this moment,

Terrien loses his closest friend, a reminder of his family (Terrien has a six-year-old son), and his humanity. Terrien is left alone once he has become an actor in the violence he abhors. The film reveals the perverse nature of his when the torturer says that Terrien has ruined everything—with the old man dead, the young man will never talk. Terrien has actually achieved his goal of stopping the torture, though through the opposite means he used before. Here Terrien causes death (the old man’s death and the young man’s e entual execution) as the ultimate end to the pain of torture.

The final torture sequence completes Terrien’s journey through the in ersions of the carnivalesque. The unfolding of the sequence is a variation of the template established in the first two torture sequences—the absence of Sgt. Dougnac signals to

Terrien that something is wrong, in this case. Dougnac has just witnessed the death of

Captain Berthaut, a close friend from the war in Indochina, in an ambush he could do nothing to stop. To compound Dougnac’s grief, Berthaut was only present at the ambush because he volunteered to evacuate a wounded soldier as a favor to Dougnac.

On this night, Terrien is awoken by a door banging in the wind, then notices that

Dougnac is not in his bunk. Everything is quiet. Terrien sees one of the other soldiers standing near the flagpole, in shock. The shot cuts and we see the torture room independently of Terrien. We see Dougnac in the galvanized tub with a bottle of whiskey, pointing his gun at Sayeed, who cranks the generator while wearing a

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Christmas tree ornament from his lapel and garland around his wrist. Every time

Sayeed stops, Dougnac orders him to continue, or else be shot. Dougnac intends to commit suicide by proxy via this electrocution. Terrien enters, and we see the room in a full shot from his point of view again. Sayeed stops cranking the generator, and the man who stood outside enters behind Terrien. Dougnac aims his gun at Terrien, while saying that Terrien doesn’t belong in the war. Terrien tries to stop the suicide by pulling rank— ordering Dougnac to hand over his gun. Dougnac pauses as if he will comply, but instead cocks his gun and attempts to aim at his head. Terrien, Sayeed, and the other soldier restrain him, then Terrien knocks Dougnac out with the butt of the gun.

If Dougnac has lost his old friend Berthaut, then he still has Terrien, although the two differ significantly. Where Berthaut represented Dougnac’s past and his commitment to French colonial rule, Terrien represents his present and the fall of the

Empire—the different stakes of Dougnac’s position in the military. Terrien allows

Dougnac to feel the doubts about his position that Berthaut’s unwa ering allegiance forbade. Terrien allows Dougnac to face the real costs of war—the mental turmoil and friends killed—and this causes a profound change of character in Dougnac.

This last torture sequence completes the carnivalesque inversion initiated by the first. Terrien first intervened to stop the torture of an Algerian; here he intervenes to stop the self-torture (and suicide) of a fellow French soldier. He has to travel through the second phase—the frenzied participation in torture, causing the death of one or arguably two men—in order to be able to save Dougnac. Terrien must be exposed to the full extent of the madness of war—not just attacks, raids, the discovery of murdered

Algerians, the secret use of napalm by the French, but also the participation in torture—

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in order to understand what war does to soldiers like him. It is only through these experiences that Terrien can understand Dougnac’s desire to commit suicide by torture, because Terrien knows how he himself has changed. The sequence in which Dougnac forces Sayeed to torture him makes it clear to Terrien and the viewers that the violence of war and the systematic use of torture harms the soldiers too by distorting their sense of humanity and the value they place on even their own lives—as Dougnac says to

Sayeed “Me or a fellagha. What do you care?” Terrien’s inter ention makes this clear to Dougnac as well—he deserts the army shortly after this incident. In his closing voiceover, Dougnac implies that Terrien was in fact in the same position as he was, attempting suicide by proxy, when he went to look for the absent Dougnac a second time. Terrien saves Dougnac from the effects of the war, but he cannot save himself. It is Amar, who ran away after Terrien killed the old man in the second torture sequence, who leads the band of Algerian rebels that kills Terrien, and then, presumably, attacks the camp. Amar represents the final return of Terrien’s iew that the Algerians should be free. In the end, that freedom necessitates Terrien’s own death.

The use of visual repetition in ’ I , or what I have referred to as the template, brings the three torture sequences together, suggesting that they be read comparatively and viewed as a progression. The sequences are cumulative; each alters our perception of the next, creating expectations and contrasts. When the second sequence begins with Dougnac’s bugle the iewer expects to see torture again and expects Terrien to intervene again. However, in each sequence something changes slightly—the presence of the two prisoners in the second sequence, for example— which leads to a different outcome in each instance. The existence of the first sequence

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immediately tells the viewer at the start of the second that Terrien has failed to banish torture from the camp. The presence of two prisoners tells viewers that the stakes are different. What can Terrien do to make the torture stop? The answer seems to be nothing, as the men continue to torture even with Terrien in the room. The shift comes when Terrien takes over—the rules have changed. It becomes clear that Terrien will only end the torture by killing the man being tortured. This second sequence exposes viewers to a new level of violence in the film. This increased violence implies that other torture shown in the film will be just as grotesque. The third sequence, in contrast to the first two, surprises the viewer by virtue of its variation on the established template. The pre ious sequences ha e taught us to expect Dougnac’s bugle as the harbinger of torture, but here it is the absence of Dougnac signals that something violent is happening. The unexpected, unmotivated shot through the window of the back room shows us just how perverted the camp has become, as we see Dougnac effectively holding Sayeed hostage and forcing him to crank the generator. As promised by the second sequence, the violence is more grotesque as Dougnac forces Sayeed to participate in his self-torture and attempted suicide. However, the return to the form of the template—Terrien hearing a noise and going from the flagpole to the back room—is what leads iewers to expect Terrien’s inter ention (a reversion to the first sequence) and the sequence’s resolution (if not the film’s).

This journey through the three torture sequences leads us on Terrien’s ethical journey throughout the film. The first sequence, combined with conversations between

Terrien Dougnac and Berthaut posits Terrien as the film’s moral center. He supports the Algerians, despite working for the French army, and he opposes torture to the extent

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that he will intervene to stop an old man from being electrocuted. In short, the film’s opening and the first torture sequence present Terrien as a character with whom contemporary, liberal audiences can sympathize. The second sequence inverts

Terrien’s character as he becomes an actor in the intimate iolence of torture. When

Terrien comes unhinged, the audience loses its guide. We cannot feel good about liking

Terrien anymore because something has gone terribly wrong. In many ways, the audience takes on the position of Amar, who trusted Terrien after witnessing the first torture sequence, and eventually accompanies Terrien and his men on missions as a water boy, scout, and shooter. Amar accepts these acts as typical of war, as part of

Terrien’s job and so does the audience. The second torture sequence changes everything for Amar and for the viewers. Amar runs away because his trust in Terrien has been broken; for him, Terrien has become like the lead torturer. This is not the case for the iewers necessarily for whom Terrien’s inability to understand that he killed the old man implies that Terrien still differs from the lead torturer. The torturer uses violence to get information. Terrien uses violence to end violence. When Terrien comes to understand that he has killed the old man, he is just as surprised as the audience.

Neither Terrien nor the viewers know the full significance of what has just happened, but the departure of Amar, tells both that it is bad.

The third torture sequence presents another inversion, swapping Dougnac for the

Algerian prisoners; its significance for Terrien’s and the film’s ethical journey is more complex than a simple return to the beginning. Yes, Terrien intervenes and stops the torture, but he also stops the suicide of a friend. While the third sequence may initially read as heroic, compassionate, or a proof of friendship, it quickly becomes ethically

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ambiguous when considered in the light of Lacanian ethics of the self. Terrien stops the torture releasing Sayeed from Dougnac’s threats and Dougnac from physical pain but the physical pain is not the true problem here. No outside force has imposed physical torture on Dougnac—it is his will to be tortured. Terrien, in effect, oppresses Dougnac when he ends the torture by acting against Dougnac’s will. Terrien fails to address the mental pain Dougnac experiences, the psychical torture he has experienced because of the war. Terrien stops Dougnac’s body from suffering but he does nothing for his emotional or mental pain. Having been responsible for one death by torture, Terrien refuses to do so again, and yet Dougnac wants to die. Dougnac sees death as the only way to end his suffering, just as death becomes the only way to stop the torture in the second sequence. Here, the torture stops but the suffering exists on another level, and so continues. Dougnac’s experience of trauma throughout his military service has separated his self and his body through his mental pain, which has brought him to the brink of death via physical pain. For Dougnac, only torture can unite the two by making his body feel what his mind has been feeling all along. Does stopping Dougnac’s suicide mean Terrien ended the suffering caused by his oppressively painful thoughts? The film’s conclusion implies that there was no way for Terrien to help Dougnac. Terrien awakes one morning to find Dougnac’s personal effects including the bugle on his doorstep. Dougnac is allegedly out hunting; Terrien tries to find him because he naturally fears that Dougnac is planning to commit suicide. Dougnac knows this and uses the hunting story as a diversion so that he can desert from the army undetected.

His desertion is an act of will that Terrien cannot anticipate because it doesn’t fit with what he knows of Dougnac’s character. It doesn’t fit Terrien’s character either. Dougnac

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says that Terrien was “looking for a bullet”; unable to consider desertion or suicide, the only possible escape for Terrien is death in the line of duty. This is why we see Terrien smile when the Algerians shoot him for he recognizes that Amar has come to return his humanity to him, though in an act of rebellion and revenge.

While ’ I evokes the carnivalesque in its scenes of torture, No

M ’ d [Nicija Zemlja] (2001, dir. Danis Tanovic) relies on a setting borrowed from the theatre of the absurd in its depiction of the Bosnian War. After getting lost in the morning fog, a Bosnian squad is ambushed by the Serbs. Ciki, who thinks he is the only sur i or takes refuge in a trench in the no man’s land between the two lines. Nino and another Serb are sent to clear the trench. Ciki kills the other man, initiating a long standoff between him and Nino as they wait for a ceasefire and UN intervention so they can lea e. At first their predicament appears to be a ersion of Samuel Beckett’s play

Waiting for Godot, complete with the presence of a solitary tree, as Nino and Ciki endlessly wait for the UN to arrive. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy of the UN consistently forbids attempts by Colonel Marchand to rescue the men. The absurd not only presents itself in the setting and the UN’s bureaucracy but in the comedic dialogue. Nino and

Ciki argue over who started the war, who has committed the worst atrocities, with the answer decided by whichever one of them has possession of the only gun in the trench.

The two seem unaware of the fact that they are reenacting the conflict on a miniature scale.

The tone of the film shifts from absurdist comedy to absurdist drama when a second Bosnian, Cera, regains consciousness after being knocked out in the initial ambush. The viewers have already seen, however, that Nino and the soldier who

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initially accompanied him placed a bouncing mine under Cera’s body thinking that they were booby-trapping a corpse. Nino tells Ciki and Cera that there is no way for Cera to move without setting off the bomb. When Col. Marchand and his group of UN peacekeepers finally arrive at the trench, they must immediately leave to find a bomb expert to try to save Cera. From this point on, the film has more in common with

Beckett’s Endgame than Godot, as it becomes increasingly clear that Cera, like Hamm, will not be saved. When the bomb expert informs Marchand that it is impossible to move

Cera without acti ating the mine Marchand’s super isor orders a fake e acuation to be carried out for the benefit of Ciki, Nino, and the international news crew that has forced its way to the scene. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nino and Ciki both end up dead—Ciki rushes Nino with a knife he took from a corpse, Nino shoots Ciki, then a UN soldier shoots Nino. The film ends with a long take that slowly cranes out from above Cera, left alone in the trench to die in the next morning’s battle like Hamm is left alone at the conclusion of Endgame. This long take reinforces the tragic absurdity of the film as viewers reflect on the inability of the best intentions to undo human cruelty.

From the mundane parrilla to the institutional spaces of police headquarters, to the battlefield, to the home, nearly every space is touched by state violence and torture.

The films I have discussed attempt to represent the distortions undergone by these spaces and places through manipulation of the mise-en-scène and distinctive camera work. In many cases, as in Garage Olimpo, a haunting fidelity can be achieved because either building blueprints or first-hand accounts of captivity are available, or the actual structures still exist. In this respect, these films become documents or memorials in the same way that ESMA has become the Espacio para la Memoria. They preserve

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something of the structure of these sites of torture while giving life to them through the emotions evoked in the viewers or visitors who watch or visit in order to learn and to remember.

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Figure 5-1. Image of the Institutio Espacio para la Memoria. Espacio Memoria. Instituto Espacio para la Memoria. Web. 8 Sept. 2008.

Figure 5-2. Strong lines as Maria is brought into the prison in Garage Olimpo. Garage Olimpo. Dir. Marco Bechis. Videoteca Foco, 2001. VHS.

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Figure 5-3. Maria is led down one of the garage’s halls. Garage Olimpo. Dir. Marco Bechis. Videoteca Foco, 2001. VHS.

Figure 5-4. Pablo is led to room 4 to undergo torture in La Noche de los Lápices. Night of the Pencils [La Noche de los Lápices]. Video Archives, 1999. DVD.

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Figure 5-5. Pablo pressed against a mattress in room 4. Night of the Pencils [La Noche de los Lápices]. Dir. H ctor Oli era. atin American ideo Archi es . DVD.

Figure 5-6. Pablo experiences the “Truth Machine.” Night of the Pencils [La Noche de los Lápices]. Dir. H ctor Oli era. atin American Video Archives, 1999. DVD.

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Figure 5- . Alicia’s husband slams her head against the doorframe while their daughter’s toys can be seen in the background in La Historia Oficial. La Historia Oficial. Dir. Luis Puenzo. Koch Lorber Films, 2004. DVD.

Figure 5-8. Roberto closes his daughter’s sticker-co ered door on Alicia’s hand. La Historia Oficial. Dir. Luis Puenzo. Koch Lorber Films, 2004. DVD.

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Figure 5-9. Mrs. Tamburrini on the floor at the beginning of Chronicle of an Escape. Chronicle of an Escape [ Dir. Israel Adrián Caetano. Genius Products, 2008. DVD.

Figure 5- . Mrs. Tamburrini’s captor at mid-level, smoking on the couch. Chronicle of an Escape [ Dir. Israel Adrián Caetano. Genius Products, 2008. DVD.

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Figure 5-11. Mrs. Tamburrini behind her cage. Chronicle of an Escape [ Fuga]. Dir. Israel Adrián Caetano. Genius Products, 2008. DVD.

Figure 5-12. In the first torture sequence in ’ I , the torture stops when Lt. Terrien enters. L’Ennemi Intime. Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD.

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Figure 5-13. In the second sequence, Lt. Terrien begs the old man to talk before taking over the electrocution. L’Ennemi Intime. Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD.

Figure 5- 4. t. Terrien’s reaction when he realizes that he has killed the old man. L’Ennemi Intime. Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD.

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Figure 5-15. Sgt. Dougnac aims his gun at Lt. Terrien at the end of the second torture sequence. L’Ennemi Intime. Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD.

Figure 5-16. Sgt. Dougnac forces Sayeed to electrocute him as he attempts suicide by proxy. L’Ennemi Intime. Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD.

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Figure 5-17. Lt. Terrien enters the room, and Sgt. Dougnac points his gun at Terrien for the second time. L’Ennemi Intime. Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD.

Figure 5-18. Terrien, Sayeed, and another soldier prevent Sgt. Dougnac from shooting himself in the head. L’Ennemi Intime. Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD.

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Figure 5-19. Lt. Terrien smiles as he dies, once he sees Amar emerge from the group of Algerians. L’Ennemi Intime. Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD.

Figure 5-20. One Bosnian soldier reads about the genocide in Rwanda in N M ’ Land. No Man's Land [Nicija Zemlja]. Dir. Danis Tanovic. MGM DVD, 2002. DVD.

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Figure 5-21. Ciki and Nino try to attract attention so they will be rescued, but their plan fails since neither the Bosnians nor the Serbs can tell whose side the two are on. No Man's Land [Nicija Zemlja]. Dir. Danis Tanovic. MGM DVD, 2002. DVD.

Figure 5-22. An image of the sun setting over the Bosnian countryside dissolves over the final image of Cera, abandoned in the trench. No Man's Land [Nicija Zemlja]. Dir. Danis Tanovic. MGM DVD, 2002. DVD.

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CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION: HAUNTINGS, THE CONTINUED IMPERATIVE

The scene opens on a full shot of men, women, and children running up dirt stairs. Military-sounding voices shout in the background. The handheld camera follows as people try to escape through windows and onto the house’s roof as others at the back of the pack scream when they are captured. Gunfire can be heard as the camera passes through a window, behind a little girl, and emerges into an alleyway. The group of predominantly young adults and children runs, with the camera behind. The shot gradually dissolves to now show the group approaching a house on the edge of a field.

They have arrived in the middle of a party. The camera pans to look at different members of the group as they decide whether or not to approach. We see a long shot of the partygoers sitting at makeshift tables, standing and talking, or dancing before the camera mo es closer with the group’s decision to go to the house.

When they arrive, one man shouts angrily that the group should be turned away, that they are dangerous, but the woman who seems to be the matron insists that they at least have food and water. The children and young adults of the group greedily drink water while food is brought out. Through the commotion, no one hears the sound of military trucks approaching the house until it is too late. A few people try to run, but the camera pans left to show them being gunned down. The camera pans right to show the man in command of the military squad and several other soldiers. He asks whose home this is, and after the woman who served the group says it is her home, the commander orders everyone to stand in block formation. The handheld camera again moves to take a place within the group. It becomes apparent that the man who initially wanted to turn the group away is the husband of the woman as the camera pans left to show them

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stand together, exchanging nervous glances. The commander orders the women into the kitchen to bring food and drinks to the troops. The camera watches in a full shot as he and several soldiers follow them. About 30 seconds later, we hear a commotion that builds into female screams and broken dishes. The camera does a series of swish pans, showing close-ups of members of the group. Then there is a full shot showing men who were at the party rushing toward the house, only to become entangled in an altercation with the soldiers. There are more swish pans among the group, and then they are off running. The handheld camera follows them into a nearby overgrown field.

Machine gun-fire rings out behind them, getting closer, and closer, but intense breathing is the predominant sound. Then someone screams.

Only this is not a scene from a movie. The camera shows my point of view. I feel the earth and stone scraping my knees as I climb out of the window, my feet pounding on the ground, brush and bramble scratching at my legs, and tall stalks whipping me in the face and arms. Terror pushes me to run faster. I scream as I awaken, shaking. I am drenched in sweat. My pulse races my face is flushed and my body feels like it’s on fire. I can’t calm my breathing e en though I can now see that I am in my apartment, lying in bed next to my boyfriend and one of our cats. I don’t remember what day it was except that it was in the fall of 2011, between 4:00 and 6:00 in the morning. This is the third nightmare I’ll ha e while working on this dissertation.

It has been extremely difficult to repeatedly view, research, and write about these films. I do not enjoy violence or bloodshed on-screen. I am notorious among my fellow film scholars for my near-refusal to watch horror films, especially the gory ones. I have been known to hide behind my hands, eyes closed, during the most grotesque scenes. I

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will admit that there were times when I had to force myself to continue watching the over

60 films I surveyed for this dissertation. During my most intense screening periods, I de eloped intense nightmares (like the one abo e that I don’t think I will e er forget) panic attacks, and elements of vicarious trauma. What kept me writing was my own feeling of ethical responsibility based on my strong support of human rights and social justice that goes back to my childhood. Because I think stories like the ones in the films

I have discussed are important to tell, I maintain that we must understand how they are told— and how they are shown.

In my discussion of the representation of torture and state violence in historical fiction films, I have examined several strategies that filmmakers have employed to open a space of active viewership that allows for ethical reflection on these graphic images.

These strategies go beyond the forceful close-ups editing that manifests a character’s experience of the mind/body split, using ellipsis as both a narrative and visual strategy that prevents the viewer from seeing all of the violence or knowing all of the story at once, and careful attention to mise-en-scène that I have discussed here. The films discussed in this dissertation are by no means an exhaustive list of all the films that depict torture or address state violence that has historically been suppressed. These films are notable, however, for the narrative and aesthetic approaches they take to representing this violence.

One recent development that deserves more attention is the proliferation of what

I am calling “politicized historical ghost films.” These films in oke acques Derrida’s theoretical concept of haunting as they bring the ghosts of past acts of state violence into the present. These works mark a tonal and generational shift in how films address

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state violence. The concern is no longer solely exposing what has happened; it is thinking through the cross-generational impacts of historical trauma. These films follow characters who were children when the traumas took place, but who must negotiate how to live in the shadow of past events. I argue that adopting the ghost story genre is not a sensational choice but a thoughtful meditation on what happens to a society when repeating the past becomes the most terrifying thing imaginable and history haunts everyday life. Films that I would classify as politicized historical ghost films include films with obvious ghosts or monsters, like Aparecidos (dir. Paco Cabezas, 2007), Ghost

Game [ - - , Laa-thaa-phii, Hunting-Warning-Ghost] (dir. Sarawut Wichiensam, 2006,

Thailand), P ’ by (dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2006, Spain, Mexico, USA), and The

’ B kb (dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2001, Spain, Mexico). However, I would also include films with figurative ghost such as Caché (dir. Michael Haneke, 2005, France,

Austria, Germany, Italy, USA) in which the unresolved origins of the drawings and videos sent to George could be termed ghostly, and N M ’ d (discussed in ch. 5) in which Cera, trapped on the mine, becomes a ghost as he is trapped between the living and the dead.

The films I have just named endow history with a presence that is neither being nor non-being, yet somehow both at once. Many of these films bring the past into the present, forcing characters and viewers to acknowledge that their lives are a product of this past. In some cases, the only live because others have died. In Specters of Marx,

Derrida writes,

well this comes back, this returns, this insists in urgency, and this gives one to think, but this, which is each time irresistible enough, singular enough to engender as much anguish as do the future and death, this stems less from a “repetition automatism” (of the automatons that ha e been turning before

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us for such a long time) than it gives us to think all this, altogether other, every other, from which the repetition compulsion arises: that every other is altogether other. The impersonal ghostly returning of the “es spukt” produces an automatism of repetition, no less than it finds its principle of reason there. (217, italics original)

Derrida’s “ ,” the “es spukt ” is the past—is history. Here, it is the return of the past, the bringing forward of history into the present that makes think “that e ery other is altogether other.” By connecting Derrida with inas I would argue that haunting by history initiates an ethical encounter because the haunting makes us aware “that e ery other is altogether other” and this awareness of the other is the recognition that enters the self into a relationship of responsibility for the Other.1 By encountering history we become responsible for history.

The politicized ghost film Aparecidos addresses our perpetual responsibility to history by staging an encounter between the children of a doctor who tortured and murdered “sub ersi es” during idela’s dictatorship. With their father on life support in a hospital, Pablo and Malena travel to see their childhood home in southern Argentina.

On the first night of their trip, they witness a brutal attack on a family in their hotel. They watch while the father is killed, and a truck carries the pregnant mother and child away.

The camera alternates between shots of Pablo standing, looking at a map and the old journal he found hidden on his father’s car and counter-shots of Malena, sitting sideways in the driver's seat with the door open and her feet on the ground, smoking a cigarette isibly in shock. Pablo says “We ha e to do something right? We must help these people. We ha e to go to that factory.” When Malena objects and refuses to

1 Earlier on the same page, Derrida phrases the haunting in terms of hospitality and the visit of a stranger—terms he would expand upon in Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas while arguing that Lévinas was really writing about hospitality in Totality and Infinity (49). Derrida would then expand upon this idea in De ’ (1997).

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believe his theory that someone is copying the murders described in the journal, Pablo says “So you won't do anything? Then what happened?” Malena responds “Nothing happened.” Pablo uses this statement to trick her into following the trail of the journal.

While Malena is technically right—nothing happened because they were seeing ghosts—they are not yet aware of that. For those familiar with the Dirty War, this exchange sums up the experiences of those who lived through it: the dual impulse to help those being abducted and abused right in front of you, but to not put yourself at risk. It also reflects the official rhetoric of the conflict, with the Argentinean government refusing to acknowledge their role in the “disappearances” of innocent ci ilians. The official rhetoric effaced reality to assert that nothing happened by telling families that their missing loved ones were in hiding in another country or had been abducted by sub ersi es. The go ernment’s refusal to acknowledge reality made it impossible for anyone to do anything to help the desaparecidos aside from ask questions and follow whatever (usually empty) leads they could find.

Malena’s assertion that “nothing happened” can be applied to both their immediate experience with the ghosts and to the actual murders detailed in the journal because as far as the official discourse is concerned nothing did happen. The ghosts perpetually relive their deaths because their story has not yet been uncovered, because no one knows what really happened. The ghosts only stop reliving their deaths when

Malena takes responsibility for her father’s role in their deaths remo ing him from life support so he will die. History’s continual haunting of the present is beautifully rendered in the film's final scene when Malena and Pablo begin to see the thousands of desaparecidos suddenly appear in the middle of Buenos Aires. The final shots of

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Aparecidos reinforce the fact that Buenos Aires and Argentina were changed forever by the iolence of idela’s dictatorship. The ghosts that Malena and Pablo see populating the streets of Buenos Aires are marking out the spaces that changed their lives and changed the lives of their families.

Historical fictions are informed by the real victims of torture and state violence who exist outside the film text but nevertheless haunt the story being told. It is to these nameless Others that narrative filmmakers are ethically responsible. In historical fiction films, filmmakers are not only confronted with real life experiences that inform their films, but with political divisions, traumatic legacies, and historically recorded facts that must be acknowledged and respected in the filmmaking process. This responsibility becomes a challenge when films attempt to depict historical traumas that have largely gone un-filmed, leaving little or no visual record in the collective memory. This is also the case for films that address historical events that have been suppressed, omitted, or ignored by dominant historical narrati es because of a gi en state’s role in iolent oppression or genocide. The filmmaker has the ability to depict the historically “unseen ” raising ethical questions about political discourse, historical memory, and the filmmaker’s own attempts at filling in the gaps. These ambiguities confront the iewers with questions, allowing them to reflect on what they are seeing. The depiction of historical trauma, across the range of political violence, is thus capable of moving beyond mere spectacle to being an agent of the ethical.

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Figure 6-1. The haunting of Buenos Aires in the final shot of Aparecidos. Aparecidos [The Appeared]. Dir. Paco Cabezas. IFC Films, 2007. DVD.

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LIST OF REFERENCES

FILMOGRAPHY

50 Dead Men Walking. Dir. Kari Skogland. Phase 4 Films, 2009. DVD.

An American Crime. Dir. Tommy O'Haver. First Look Studios, 2008. DVD.

Aparecidos [The Appeared]. Dir. Paco Cabezas. IFC Films, 2007. DVD.

As if I Am Not There. Dir. Juanita Wilson. Wide Eye Films: Element Pictures, 2011. DVD.

The Baader Meinhof Complex. Dir. Uli Edel. MPI Home Video, 2010. DVD.

La Bataille d'Alger [The Battle of Algiers]. Dir. Gillo Pontecorvo. Criterion Collection, 2004. DVD.

Before the Rain. Dir. Milcho Manchevski. Criterion Collection, 2008. DVD.

Behind Enemy Lines. Dir. John Moore. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD.

Borstal Boy. Dir. Peter Sheridan. Strand Releasing Home Video, 2002. DVD.

Caché [Hidden]. Dir. Michael Haneke. Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD.

Carlos. Dir. Olivier Assayas. Criterion Collection, 2011. DVD.

Chronicle of an Escape [ ]. Dir. Israel Adrián Caetano. Genius Products, 2008. DVD.

Compliance. Dir. Craig Zobel. Magnolia Home Entertainment, 2013. DVD.

Dawson Isla 10: Diario De Un Prisionero De Guerra [Dawson Island 10 : Diary of a Prisoner of War]. Dir. Miguel itt n. ideo Chile . DVD.

The Day of the Jackal. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Universal Home Video, 1998. DVD.

Days of Glory [Indigènes]. Dir. Rachid Bouchareb. Weinstein Co. Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD.

Death and the Maiden. Dir. Roman Polanski. New Line Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD.

The Devil's Backbone [El Espinazo Del Diablo]. Dir. Guillermo del Toro. Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2004. DVD.

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Dogville. Dir. Lars von Trier. Lions Gate Home Entertainment, 2004. DVD.

L’Ennemi Intime. Dir. Florent-Emilio Siri. Dutch Filmworks, 2009. DVD.

Funny Little Dirty War [No b P N d ]. Dir. H ctor Oli era. Vanguard Cinema, 2001. DVD.

Garage Olimpo. Dir. Marco Bechis. Videoteca Foco, 2001. VHS.

Ghost Game Laa-Thaa-Phii. Dir. Sarawut Wichiensarn. Showbox Media Group, 2009. DVD.

Grbavica the Land of My Dreams. Dir. asmila bani . Strand Releasing Home Video, 2007. DVD.

A Grin without a Cat [Le Fond De l'Air Est Rouge]. Dir. Chris Marker. Icarus Films Home Video, 2009. DVD.

Hidden Agenda. Dir. Ken Loach. MGM Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD.

La Historia Oficial. Dir. Luis Puenzo. Koch Lorber Films, 2004. DVD.

L'Honneur d'Un Capitaine. Dir. Pierre Schoendoerffer. StudioCanal, 2008. DVD.

Hors La Loi [Outside the Law]. Dir. Rachid Bouchareb. Palisades Tartan Video, 2011. DVD.

Hotel Rwanda. Dir. Terry George. Metro Goldwyn Mayer Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Allison M. Rittmayer received her B.A. at Bucknell University in 2007, graduating magna cum laude with honors in English, a double major in French and Francophone

Studies, and completing the Humanistic Scholars Program. She went on to complete her M.A. in English at Bucknell in 2009, working with Prof. Harriet Pollack on her thesis

“They’re Not There Heteroglossia and the Fourteenth ision in the Work of William

Faulkner, Dave Eggers, and Todd Haynes.” She received her Ph.D. in English from the

University of Florida in August 2013. Her graduate work focused on film and media studies, with a special emphasis on world cinema and the relationship between film, history, and trauma.

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