phenomenon – transmitted atrocities
The arcticle by Michael Ignatieff PHENOMENON: The Terrorist as Auteur had been online and commented the recent days several times. Beneath the just recently here on this blog mentioned masterpiece The Battle of Algiers the text also uses the film ‘One Day in September’, to to point to some differences, which guarantee a deeper insight to the phenomenon of terrorism. An other important fact is the mentioning of the torturer as video artist as the painful message of the Abu Ghraib images showed. ... so to direct towards the endles vortex of atrocities depending on each other.
In Iraq, imagery has replaced argument; indeed, atrocity footage has become its own argument. One horrendous picture seems not just to follow the other but also to justify it. From Abu Ghraib to decapitation footage and back again, we the audience are caught in a loop: one atrocity begetting another in a darkening vortex, without end.
The main points of the article though have to do with the pornography of terror, our complicity as viewers, mutual degradation... Besides these points known from arguments around the interrogation of reality tv development, the text does not answer any questions and still it would be an issue to analyze the images of those footages and compare them to the image usage and the visual language of Gillo Pontecorvo’s “Battle of Algiers” (1965).
... between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (Heterotopias, M.Foucault, 1967)
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- phenomenon – transmitted atrocities
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- 11.19.04 / 8pm
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- mo
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