phenomenon – transmitted atrocities

mo

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).

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