Chris Wei
Chris Wei is a PhD student at the University of Iowa, where he has conducted research on doppelgängers, digitality, documentary studies, Left Bank cinema, posthumanism, genre theory, epistolary aesthetics, collectivist ontology, and cinematic depictions of the afterlife. He has presented some of this research (including an earlier draft of this paper, and also a paper about Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, entitled “‘We’re Bringing These Guys Back to Life’: The Necromantic Ventriloquism of the Cinematic Apparatus”) at the Film Studies Association of Canada Graduate Colloquium, hosted by the Cinema Studies Graduate Union and co-sponsored by the University of Toronto, the Cinema Studies Institute, and the Film Studies Association of Canada. In 2021, alongside Tim Arnold and Katie Hassman, Wei hosted and co-produced an interactive pedagogical video series about research and disinformation (as a collaborative project between the Rhetoric department and the University of Iowa Libraries). He has also edited and contributed to a book project: an anthology of essays about theology and film (Mormonism and the Movies, written between 2015-2020 and published by BCC Press in 2021). In 2019, He earned an MFA from Boston University, where he researched Meiko Kaji, Breaking Bad, and Stan Brakhage; there he wrote his Master’s thesis (“Now is the Envy of All of the Dead”) on temporality and consciousness in the films of experimental animator Don Hertzfeldt. Currently, Wei is an instructor (he has served as a TA for a Contemporary Cinema course, and has taught stand-alone courses in Rhetoric, Film Theory, Writing Film Criticism, and Independent Animation). Wei’s upcoming publications (beyond this essay about subalternity for Ampersand) include a book review of Randy Astle’s Mormon Cinema: Origins to 1952 (New York: Mormon Arts Center, 2018) set to be published in the Spring 2023 issue of Utah Historical Quarterly.
Speakers for the Dead:
Examining subalternity and the “stolen gaze” in documentary film
I. Introduction: Spivak and the sulbaltern
In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s landmark essay about the subaltern, she recounts the story of “the Hindu widow [who] ascends the pyre of the dead husband and immolates herself upon it,” i.e. the story of the sacrificial ritual of sati.[1] Early British colonizers abolished this rite in the Bengal Sati Regulation in 1829,[2] but the discourses surrounding its abolition have not been without controversy; indeed “the sati woman [has come to represent] an ideological battleground for the dispute between Eastern and Western colonial discourse.”[3] As Spivak explains, the religious practice was usually framed in one of two ways. On one hand, it was described by some as a barbarous, inhumane act of patriarchal violence (Spivak pithily describes this framing as “white men saving brown women from brown men”).[4] These notions of barbarity and inhumanity perhaps unsurprisingly served a particular political (colonial) purpose: as Stephen Morton puts it, this narrative allowed “the British [to] justify imperialism as a civilizing mission,” by which Indian women could be ostensibly rescued.[5] On the other hand, sati was described by others as a transcendent act of bravery and sacred self-sacrifice, through which the women are heroically “able to withstand the raging blaze of the funeral pyre”[6] (Spivak’s summation of this framing is again pithy, calling it “a parody of the nostalgia for lost origins,” and paraphrasing its sentiment as “the women actually wanted to die”).[7]
The problem with both framings—“white men saving brown women from brown men” on the one hand, and “the women actually wanted to die” on the other—is that they are both externally imposed narrative structures, constructed by outside voices. Neither framing represents the perspective of the widows themselves—how could they? The widows can never speak to their own experiences. This profound voicelessness, this extra-marginal existence beyond hegemonic discourse, wholly outside the boundaries of theorization itself (in other words, this position as neither Subject nor Object, neither colonizer nor colonized) is central to contemporary historians’ conceptualization of the subaltern in general. Spivak warns us that “everybody thinks the subaltern is just a classy word for ‘oppressed,’ for [the] Other, for somebody who’s not getting a piece of the pie,”[8] but the term subalternity describes a much more specific condition than just “oppression.” Subalternist historians have taken the word from Antonio Gramsci (who used it as a political necessity to avoid the censorship of the word ‘proletariat’),[9] and, as Spivak explains, they have “change[d] it—define[d] it as the people … in various kinds of situations: every[one who] has limited or no access” to the machinery of “cultural imperialism,”[10] or in other words, anyone outside of “the circuit of hegemony.”[11] Thus, she concludes, the subaltern cannot speak.
It is both intuitive and crucial to point out that death is at the core of the epistemic and political problem here. In the story of the sati, for example, the voicelessness of the sacrificial widows seems an inevitable conclusion. To put it bluntly: of course they cannot speak. They are dead.
In arguing that death is at the core of the epistemic and political problem of subalternity, I do not mean to imply that the categories of death and subalternity are interchangeable; surely there are some subaltern persons who are not dead, whose voices are silenced and whose perspectives are made invisible by the workings of empire and hegemony. But it may be the case that all dead persons are, to some extent, subaltern—or at least that there is a way of thinking of death that necessarily incorporates subalternity. This is because the dead cannot speak for themselves: they are always spoken of, or for, or about, by those who survive them. Even in moments during which the departed are colloquially described as having spoken from beyond the grave, the nature of that ‘speaking’ is always heavily mediated by the political and social needs of the living. In antiquity, the dead’s loss of agency was made explicit through mythology: for Homer, the afterlife was not a life at all, but only a semi-conscious existence without knowledge or embodiment, without pleasure or vibrancy; the underworld was a “joyless kingdom.”[12] In modern Western society, we seem to insist that the dead indeed survive, but the management of this survival is entrusted only to a select few. As legal theorist Riccardo Baldissone argues, “historians are nowadays securely in charge of communicating with the dead. More precisely, historians are not requested to speak to the dead, but rather to make the dead speak.”[13]
To make the dead speak, though, is to make the dead speak for you: the necromantic practice of discursive reanimation, like any ventriloquist act, only reveals the values and ideologies of the puppeteer, not of the puppet. As Margaret Schwartz outlines in her book Dead Matter, “the legacies of the iconic dead” (i.e. people whose deaths have become public narratives) “touch on key notions of identity, ethics, and politics.”[14] As soon as a person has died, their “remains” (a term by which I mean to refer both to the physical matter of the corpse as such and to the more metaphorical matter of “legacy”) are discursively and symbolically distributed among their survivors; that is, the dead become a shared memory, with perpetually renegotiated meanings. If they are filmed or photographed, the dead may become a Benjaminian “transportable image,”[15] but even the unphotographed dead become transportable iconography, at least until they are no longer remembered at all. In other words, objectification (through remembrance) and/or annihilation (through forgetting) inevitably await the dead—neither of which can offer any agency. Death, therefore, is always a kind of subalternity.
The relationship between death and subalternity becomes especially pronounced when considering media representation. Schwartz (channeling Friedrich Kittler) reminds us that “any time we watch a silent film or flip through a book of old photographs, we are entering the realm of the dead,” because “as our capacities to capture and transmit the real [have] expand[ed], we [have found] ourselves with an ever-growing archive of dead (but animated) souls.”[16] A mediated body-image, like a corpse, seems to represent a liminal space between here and there (elsewhere I have referred to this liminality as a sort of “temporal paradox”).[17] Thus, the purpose of this essay is to closely examine the relationship between death and subalternity especially in media, and specifically in the context of how dead and dying subjects are treated on camera, for example in documentary film and in news footage.
When cinema captures a glimpse of the dead and dying, is it always (to borrow a phrase from Assia Djebar) a “stolen glance?”[18] When film documentarians focus on dead or dying subjects (e.g. Alain Resnais in Night and Fog [1955] or Robert J. Flaherty in Nanook of the North [1922], among others), is the result always a sort of imperialist invasion—a symbolically violent penetration of the temporal veil between the living and the dead?[19] What are the ethical and political ramifications of the ways in which film tends to speak for (or over) the dead?
II. Oppenheimer’s haunting diptych
In thinking through these questions, we would do well to examine American documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer’s recent films about the Indonesian Communist Purge—The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014)—as particularly notable case studies.[20] In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer interviews paramilitary gangster Anwar Congo, a half-century after the aforementioned genocide of 1965-66, during which Anwar is said to have personally killed 1,000 suspected communists. The film is famous not only for its (shocking enough) content but also for its choice to center Anwar’s perspective and to prominently feature Anwar’s surreal filmic re-enactments of his own crimes. The man describes and dramatizes these brutal acts with an increasingly unsettling sense of smug impunity, until eventually he breaks down and repeatedly retches in a long, somewhat ambiguous scene that hints at the possibility of catharsis and remorse without landing safely on a tonal or narrative conclusion about either.[21] Herein lies the film’s driving tension, between, as Warren Crichlow puts it, “the killers’ celebratory, self-aggrandizing intentions” (the performance) and the emotional landscape they traverse, marked by the “horrific ruins of human life and dignity” (the truth); as these two collide, the film “reveal[s] how impossible it is” (despite their being enabled and emboldened by the propaganda and ideology of the state) for the killers “to make history in their image.”[22]
Praise from critics was nearly unanimous upon The Act of Killing’s release: its reviews include effusive phrases like “staggeringly original,” “brilliant and horrible,” and “breathtakingly daring.”[23] But the film was not without its detractors, notably including documentary producer and journalist Nick Fraser, who argued in Film Quarterly that, especially in a world now shaped by Hannah Arendt’s legacy,[24] “the proximity of impunity” in the film does not “confer [any] sort of wisdom.”[25] Fraser rejects Erol Morris’ comparison between The Act of Killing and Hamlet (both of which use performance to “reveal dirty deeds”), and offers a comparison to The Scottish Play, instead. He asks: “what would we think if Macbeth and his scheming wife were summarily written out of the action, replaced by the low-level thugs paid to do bad business on their behalf?” Fraser answers his own question with unambiguously prescriptive finality: “we would conclude that putting paid psychos center stage was perverse,” he says, “and we would be right.”[26] For Fraser, the real perversion in The Act of Killing comes from its focus on the perpetrators’ perspectives, and from its obsession with “contemplat[ing] its own methodology” in the service of a laborious meta-game rather than in the pursuit of some greater truth or insight.[27] Another way to articulate this complaint would be to say that the film is haunted by the conspicuous absence of the victims’ perspectives. We hear about these victims’ deaths; we even see their killings re-enacted. We grimace at the glib, violent laughter of their murderers, and we struggle to make sense of the wide affective and political gap between this laughter and the half-million screams we imagine must have filled the same air five decades prior.
One possible defense against the charge of perversity here would be to claim that the film’s choice of central subjects is borne from necessity—that is, to point out that Oppenheimer initially wanted to interview survivors and descendants (subjects that might arguably come closer to the perspectives of the deceased themselves), but due to fear of retribution, these men and women could not bring themselves to bear witness on camera,[28] so a new strategy emerged: perhaps “the victors of the military coup might be more willing to speak,” thus the victims’ stories “might be told indirectly.”[29] The problem addressed here is not only about fear and power; it is also about knowledge (or the lack thereof): “if you want to study killing,” says Oppenheimer, “you have to look at the people who do it.” This is because everything else is shrouded in a fog of epistemic uncertainty: “all that the survivors knew was that their relatives had been taken away and never came back.”[30] An alternate defense against the charge of perversity would be to claim, more simply, that the perversity is the whole point—that is, if the dead can never speak for themselves, someone else must do it in their stead, a necessarily perverse proposition made all the more glaring and self-reflexive in something like The Act of Killing. According to this argument, one can hardly imagine a more striking way to be jarringly reminded of the dead’s conspicuous absence than by watching their killers perform (with very little interruption) an infuriating and disturbing parade of lies, boasts, excuses, and confessions.
This strange dialectic relationship between perverse spectacle and investigative truth-telling (between “performance” and “something real”)[31] is at the heart of what the film is trying to confront and is exacerbated by the voicelessness of the dead, the subaltern who cannot tell us their own stories but whose traumatic experiences serve as the film’s political and narrative centerpiece. This voicelessness is made even more complicated in Oppenheimer’s follow-up companion film, The Look of Silence, which follows a middle-aged optometrist named Adi Rukun as he seeks out and confronts the men responsible for the torture and murder of his brother Ramli. As in The Act of Killing, here we again see footage of killers “playing perpetrator and victim,” in one scene taking Oppenheimer to the riverbank where they had helped to kill over ten thousand people. They produce “knives and props, complaining they hadn’t thought to bring along better props,” Oppenheimer recalls. “This was the most horrible afternoon of my life.”[32]
Still, scenes like this riverside re-enactment are rare; most of The Look of Silence is concerned with Adi’s perspective. Because the film follows Adi so closely, it arguably approaches the possibility of giving a voice to the subaltern—but here, too, the dead are deafeningly silent. The complex chorus of voices (some questioning, some equivocating, some dismissing, some mourning) that covers their silence is perhaps not as uniformly grotesque here as it is in The Act of Killing, but it still represents the living’s earnest but futile attempt to make sense of the experiences of the dead—and to hold the rest of us accountable.[33] The Look of Silence knows this. The film constantly reflects on its own mediation; some of its most arresting sequences involve documenting the witnessing of (or in some cases the refusal to witness) other documents. Adi watches murderers’ gleeful interviews on a television screen alone, bathed in the dim light of scant revelations and intercut with reaction shots, his furrowed brow indicating a mixture of disbelief and pain. Later, the surviving family of one of the perpetrators watches the same footage on a laptop screen. One of them angrily protests (“I don’t want to see this. Let’s just talk. I can’t stand this. Turn it off!”), but another offers brief consolation (“Adi, we apologize. We feel the same way you do”). The absurd impotence of these responses—both the anger (which is unable to meaningfully resist the past) and the apology (which is unable to meaningfully atone for it)—produces an infuriating, almost unbearable emotional tension: we are left unsatisfied, and we wonder to what extent any utterance might have been similarly unsatisfying.
Throughout the film, we hear two oft-repeated lines: one indicating an epistemic gap and an implicit denial of ethical culpability—“I know nothing of this!”—and the other indicating a temporal gap and an implicit denial of emotional connection—“past is past!” These lines usually come from the perpetrators and collaborators, giving them an air of dismissiveness or at least defensiveness, a sense of trying to brush aside their guilt, but we often hear the latter axiom (“past is past!”) erupting from the mouth of survivors, too. Regardless of who uses it, the sentiment always seems to be used as a sort of tautological mantra, a (self-)assurance that what’s done is done, and that fifty years later, old wounds can heal—but only if the past is utterly left behind. In the world of The Look of Silence, the dead can never be truly known, accounted for, present, felt, or mourned. In a sense they cannot even be truly remembered. This is most intimately thematized by Ramli’s father, whose memory is failing in his old age. But a failure to remember also has broad political ramifications: as Olle Törnquist warns us, “almost all sections of the national and international elite … do not want to remember.”[34] Ramli is not only gone, but profoundly inaccessible.[35] So it is not only the case that the dead are themselves voiceless; our own voices, too, cannot approach them without faltering, wavering, and ultimately failing. This lends the whole project an air of yearning futility. To engage with The Look of Silence is to desperately grasp at something that cannot be held.
III. Abstraction and introspection: on Stan Brakhage
In this context, the manual metaphors of “grasping” and “holding” recall Stan Brakhage’s half-hour experimental film The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), which graphically documents autopsy procedures, and which often focuses on the hands and handheld tools of the forensic pathologists doing their work: peeling back the skin, cutting through the ribs, removing the organs, cleaning the corpse, etc. The unsettling visual contrast emerges, then, from the interaction between living and dead, between a hand that manipulates and grasps and one that cannot; between a face that converses and reacts (Emmanuel Levinas famously suggests that “the face is meaning all by itself”)[36] and one that remains inert; between a body that moves and navigates through space and one that can only be acted upon. The work depicted feels at once both nauseatingly visceral and oddly gentle—even reverent. But in this film the dead have no perspectives. They have no names. They have no voices (in fact, in a strictly auditory sense, no one in the film has a voice; the soundtrack is wholly silent). They are reduced to gore: their faces often literally folded over the crown of the head, concealing their identities in what could be an effort to preserve their dignity, yet at the same time exacerbating their objectification by the gaze of the camera.[37]
As its title suggests, The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes foregrounds the subjective experience of the viewer.[38] As the film progresses and its horrific imagery becomes increasingly abstract, we are invited to identify with the corpses on display; we are inevitably led to ask ourselves, “is this all I am inside?” Surely this introspective invocation can be generative, even insightful—and sheds light on what Bruno Latour and Vivian Sobchack might call “interobjectivity”[39]—but it is also indicative of how cinema fails to give voice to the subaltern dead, replacing any considerations of their interiority (in this case, both psychological and physical) with considerations of our own. Their bodies become a mere cavity into which we pour our own anxieties. Thus, we cover their voicelessness with our own terrified inner voice—a monologue in lieu of a dialogue—desperate to get to the bottom of what it is that separates our realm from theirs.
Much more could be said about death and bodies in Brakhage’s work, especially nonhuman bodies (the disembodied insect fragments that make up his most famous short film, Mothlight [1963], come to mind), but a full exploration of how cinema negotiates fascination, solidarity, exploitation, and violence with regard to animal bodies is beyond the scope of this paper.[40] For our purposes here, I reiterate only that Brakhage’s experimental approach tends to turn everyday occurrences into abstractions;[41] Brakhage’s interest is “creat[ing] a field of vision upon which the spectator [can] exercise his imagination.”[42] The spectator is in charge: not the image, not the artist, and certainly not the dead. With that, I leave Brakhage behind.
IV. Herzog’s exegesis
Another filmmaker worth considering, alongside Oppenheimer and Brakhage, is Werner Herzog. Oppenheimer uses the dead to comment on the political, material, and psychological ramifications of their voicelessness; Brakhage uses the dead to invite the spectator into a co-authorial and introspective space; Herzog, then, uses the (nearly) dead to wrest meaning from, and to comment on, the frailty and precarity of life. Oppenheimer’s dead are invisibilized; Brakhage’s dead are abstracted; Herzog’s dead are exegetical. For all three, the dead are subaltern.
For two examples of Herzog’s treatment of the dead as a site of exegesis, consider Grizzly Man (2005) and Into the Abyss (2011). In both films, we follow someone who we know is going to die. The threat of death is, of course, fundamental to how film works in general, and to what it offers: as film theorist André Bazin provocatively argues in “Death Every Afternoon,” the possibility of death is one of the profoundly unique “desecrat[ions]” that cinema provides; in its grotesque repeatability, cinema gives death “a material eternity.” This is why, for Bazin, cinema alone can defy the ostensibly intuitive and “temporally inalienable” maxim that “we do not die twice.” Through “the eternal dead-again of the cinema,” surely, we can die every afternoon.[43] In both Grizzly Man and Into the Abyss, this notion of the “eternal dead-again” is explicitly foreshadowed and foregrounded throughout. Grizzly Man is about nature enthusiast Timothy Treadwell, killed by a bear on October 6, 2003. And Into the Abyss is about death row inmate Michael Perry, executed by the state of Texas on July 1, 2010. In both films, death hovers over every scene. Of both Timothy Treadwell and Michael Perry, we know, just as Roland Barthes knew of the condemned Alexander Gardner, that at once “[they are] dead, and [they are] going to die.”[44]
This knowledge arguably means we have a sort of edge over Treadwell, who does not know what will happen to him (compared to Perry, who knows all too well). Arguably, Herzog’s interventions in Grizzly Man could be read as an attempt to level that playing field—I am referring particularly to the scene in which Herzog denies us (and Treadwell’s ex-girlfriend Jewel Palovak) access to the moment of death, which we perhaps have no right to witness—not even aurally. Instead, Herzog listens to the audio himself, and the camera shows us Palovak’s reaction to his listening. After removing his headphones, Herzog quietly but firmly commands: “Jewel, you must never listen to this.” She says she knows. “And you must never look at the photos I have seen at the coroner’s office.” Again, she solemnly assures him—and, by extension, assures us—that she never will. It is not easy to decide with confidence whether or not this scene offers Treadwell a moment of posthumous dignity (as one critic asks: “is Herzog being a responsible custodian of volatile material, or is he just feigning responsibility while still giving viewers a morbid thrill?”).[45] Either way, it is almost as if the film is subtly, implicitly breaking the fourth wall, daring us to protest, rhetorically asking us: if Palovak should not listen to this tape, why should we? Why should anyone? Notably, in this scene, Herzog himself is excluded from the category of “anyone,” as he partakes of the knowledge which he withholds from the rest of us. Still, the film seems to suggest we ought to see this as a sacrificial act of mediation. The tape, then, is not a forbidden fruit—it is a bitter cup.
But what is the nature of that bitter cup—or in other words, what does it mean to witness the ostensible “moment” of death? Part of the epistemic problem with death is that to some extent it is hard to pin down. Definitions of “life” invariably change in response to evolving scientific and political paradigms, and therefore definitions of “death” are also constantly in flux, in both philosophy and medicine.[46] As zoologist Jules Howard explains, invoking and expanding upon the rigid-but-indeterminate binary of Schrödinger’s dead (or not) cat, “for the Victorians a stopped heart meant you were dead. It was as simple as that. But now it doesn’t. Because of defibrillators, a stopped heart is only a symptom that can be potentially fixed, provided too much time hasn’t elapsed. Death hasn’t occurred.” Howard maintains that this fuzziness persists even today, though the Victorian era is long gone: “things we consider ‘dead’ now may not always be so.”[47] Perhaps this is why cinematic depictions of death tend to obscure the moment—if death is liminal and ambiguous, the most truthful way to approach it onscreen may be to “show” it only by implication.[48]
V. Implications and ramifications
Joe Bonham, the hospitalized WWI soldier who serves as the protagonist of Dalton Trumbo’s 1938 antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun, personifies this liminality and ambiguity (and its political ramifications). His tragic situation lies primarily in his inability to meaningfully communicate, and when he finally finds a way to converse despite having lost his limbs, eyes, ears, teeth, and tongue, he is asked flatly: “what do you want?”[49] Joe receives this question with a justified rush of resentment (“who did they think they were and what did they think he wanted that they could give him?”).[50] The ineffability of the experience of the dead and dying—the way in which this experience is alienated from that of the living—is a central theme in Trumbo’s book, and a central component of his antiwar critique. How can we blithely send our young citizens to die in wars when the only ones who know what war really means are those killed by it—i.e., those whom we will not and cannot hear, because, to return to Spivak, we have put them in a position from which they cannot speak?
And yet, subalternity, much like death, can be hard to pin down. To what extent is a person deprived of their voice? Is there a hard line, on one side of which someone can meaningfully engage in hegemonic discourse (either as oppressed or oppressor), and on the other side of which such engagement suddenly becomes untenable?
Consider the ramifications here not only in cinema but in news footage and mass media: when Derek Chauvin purposefully knelt on George Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes on May 25, 2021, committing murder, the video captured of the killing spread across the globe, and catalyzed worldwide protests against police brutality.[51] It’s undeniable that these protests have been monumentally galvanizing and historically significant (Noam Chomsky has gone so far as to say that there has been “nothing comparable in American history” to the outcry for racial justice that has precipitated Floyd’s murder),[52] but it’s also worth mentioning the way in which Mr. Floyd’s death has become a “discursively and symbolically distributed” event, to recycle a phrase I used earlier (or that his image, to recycle another phrase, has become “portable iconography”). George Floyd cannot speak for himself, so he has been made to speak for others; he has been made to stand in for a movement. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called his murder a “sacrific[e] for justice” (this sentiment, while likely well-intentioned, was quickly and roundly criticized as pedestalizing and objectifying; as Sewell Chan notes, Pelosi’s comments inadvertently underscore “the fact that Black martyrdom has been an all-too-real phenomenon throughout America’s troubled history”).[53]
When activist discourses take it upon themselves to decide what George Floyd ostensibly “would have wanted,” they are putting words into his mouth for political purposes, exacerbating his subaltern position; what is more likely than his holding any specific policy position is that he would have wanted to be alive. In a sense, he will always be alive—iconographically, politically, symbolically—but in another sense, he is indisputably gone. Crucial to our engagement with the subaltern dead is the question of how to discern and articulate the difference between these (sometimes admittedly fuzzy) senses.
The difficulties here—in how death is defined, mediated, and discursively contextualized—become especially fraught when the voices who purport to speak for the dead speak from a colonizing point of view. It is not only a question of whether the camera is inherently a violent instrument (i.e., perhaps “to photograph people is to violate them,” as Susan Sontag argues, because “it turns people into objects”).[54] It is also a question of whether the person behind the camera occupies a position of relative privilege and power that problematizes their relationship to the subaltern dead. It is significant, for example, that Joshua Oppenheimer is a white American man trying to recover Indonesian history. We must also consider to what extent Stan Brakhage’s or Werner Herzog’s positionalities (as white men) complicate what it means to give voice to the voiceless. Surely it is not impossible for a white male documentarian to meaningfully empower subjects from the margins, but the issue of how this empowerment works (and to what extent it is compromised by an imbalance of power) is an open question.
There may not be easy answers to these questions. And none of this is to say that it is necessarily a moral error to try to make sense of needless death; the process of mourning is unavoidably messy and will often involve the impulse to converse, even if imaginarily, with the dead. What is important is that we retain a healthy understanding of what these conversations do and do not mean. Put another way: even in films that ostensibly give voice to them, when speaking for the dead, we are really speaking for ourselves.
End Notes
[1]Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 93.
[2] Mia Carter & Barbara Harlow, eds. Archives of Empire: From the East India Company to the Suez Canal (Duke University Press: 2003), 361.
[3] Eleanor Ross. “In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’…” Innervate vol. 2 (University of Nottingham: 2009-2010), 386.
[4] Spivak (1994), 93.
[5] Stephen Morton, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: Routledge, 2003), 63.
[6] Lisa Mani. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (London: University of California Press, 1998), 162.
[7] Spivak (1994), 93.
[8] Leon de Kock. “Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in South Africa.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 23:3 (1992), 45.
[9] Stephen Morton. “The Subaltern: Genealogy of a Concept.” Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Malden, MA: Polity, 2007), 96-97; see also Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s “Terminology” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971; reprinted in 1989), xiii-xiv.
[10] De Kock (1992), 45.
[11] Ibid., 46.
[12] Homer. Odyssey 11:105 (8th Century BCE), trans. Robert Fagles (Viking, 1996), 230-248; see also Bart D. Ehrman’s “Life After Death Before There Was Life After Death.” Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife (Simon & Schuster, 2020), 39. It’s also worth noting here (as Ehrman’s book does) that Homer’s view wasn’t necessarily universal, of course. Antiquity was far from a philosophical monolith. Plato, for example, reversed Homer’s idea of physicality and materiality as ‘real’ and of the immaterial self as a mere ‘shade;’ for Plato (an idealist), the immortal ‘soul’ is inherently more real/refined/pure than the mortal body. A little later, Epicurus had major misgivings (on hedonistic and materialist grounds) about the notion of immortal souls, and about the way in which afterlife myths might terrorize innocent people.
[13] Riccardo Baldissone. “Does Reconciliation Need Truth? On the Legal Production of the Visibility of the Past.” See, eds. Andrea Pavoni, Danilo Mandic, Caterina Nirta, and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (University of Westminster Press, 2018), 119. Emphasis mine.
[14] Margaret Schwartz. Dead Matter: the Meaning of Iconic Corpses (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 6. See also Schwartz’s “An Iconography of the Flesh: How Corpses Mean as Matter,” communication+1 1:2 (2014), 1-16.
[15] Catherine Russell. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Duke University Press, 1999); see also Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations (Schocken Books: 1969). What Benjamin means by the phrase “transportable image” is to invoke the idea that an actor captured by a camera is transformed into an object, something “separable [and] transportable,” and the “aura” of their presence is diminished—note that I am adapting his terminology here to extend to dead subjects while he was speaking mostly of the living. For Benjamin (paraphrasing Pirandello), part of what is extraordinary about art and performance in the age of mechanical reproduction—in contradistinction to art and performance in more theatrical or ritualistic eras—is that the actor’s “labor [and] also his whole self, his heart and soul,” has been taken “beyond his reach.” It will be cut up and recontextualized; it will be narrativized; it will be given to the public in a discursive context over which he has very little control; all of which is to say, it is something with which “he has as little contact [as] any article made in a factory.” Walter Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans. Harry Zohn, published by Schocken/Random House, edited by Hannah Arendt; transcribed by Andy Blunden 1998 (UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, 2005). See also Luigi Pirandello, as quoted in Léon Pierre-Quint. “Signification du Cinéma.” L’art cinématographique II (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1927).
[16] Schwartz (2014), 3; see also Friedrich A. Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford University Press, 1999).
[17] Chris Wei. “‘We’re Bringing These Guys Back to Life’: The Necromantic Ventriloquism of the Cinematic Apparatus.” The Annual Film Studies Association of Canada Graduate Colloquium, no. 23: SPECTRE (the Cinema Studies Graduate Student Union, 30 January 2021).
[18] Assia Djebar. “Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound.” Women of Algiers in their Apartment (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 133-152.
[19] We might think, for example, of the penetrated physical veil between the spectator and the harem in Delacroix’s Women of Algiers. The word “penetration” here invokes metaphors beyond the scope of this paper; for more on the ways in which imperialism can be described as a sexual allegory, see Laura Chrisman’s “The Imperial Unconscious? Representations of Imperial Discourse.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 498-516.
[20] Future expansions of this line of inquiry will have to consider the (as yet unpublished) anthology of essays on the films, On the Act of Looking: Reading Joshua Oppenheimer’s Diptych: The Act of Killing and the Look of Silence, eds. David Denny & Rex Butler (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).
[21] Perhaps the wordless retching is “the culmination of the doubts and nightmares he has referred to throughout the film,” but conversely, perhaps it is really just “[Anwar’s] idea of how a movie should end:” yet another performance steeped in genre expectations. See Bill Nichols’ “Irony, Cruelty, Evil (and a Wink) in The Act of Killing.” Film Quarterly 67:2 (Winter 2013), 27.
[22] Warren Crichlow. “‘It’s All About Finding the Right Excuse’ in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing.” Film Quarterly 67:2 (Winter 2013), 39.
[23] Dave Calhoun. “The Act of Killing.” Time Out (25 June 2013); Anthony Quinn. “Film Review: The Act of Killing.” The Independent (27 June 2013); and Larushka Ivan-Zadeh. “The Act of Killing: Simply the best film of the year.” Metro (28 June 2013).
[24] See Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Viking Press, 1963).
[25] Nick Fraser. “We Love Impunity: The Case of The Act of Killing.” Film Quarterly 67:2 (Winter 2013), 21.
[26] Ibid., 23.
[27] Ibid., 22.
[28] Adam Nayman. “Find Me Guilty: Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing.” Cinema Scope 53 (Winter 2013), 24-30.
[29] Homay King. “Born Free? Repetition and Fantasy in The Act of Killing.” Film Quarterly 67:2 (Winter 2013), 30.
[30] Joshua Oppenheimer as quoted in Irene Lusztig’s “The Fever Dream of Documentary: A Conversation with Joshua Oppenheimer.” Film Quarterly 67:2 (Winter 2013), 51.
[31] Oppenheimer as quoted in Erol Morris’s “The Murders of Gonzago: How Did We Forget the Mass Killings in Indonesia? And What Might They Have Taught Us About Vietnam?” (alternate title, “The Forgotten Mass Killings That Should Have Stopped the Vietnam War”). Slate Magazine: Politics, Business, Technology, and the Arts (10 July 2013), 15; see also Janet Walker’s “Referred Pain: The Act of Killing and the Production of a Crime Scene” in Film Quarterly 67:2 (Winter 2013), 16.
[32] Oppenheimer as quoted in Melis Behlil’s “The Look of Silence: An Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer and Adi Rukun.” Cineaste 40:3 (Summer 2015), 27.
[33] The United States, for example, does not have clean hands with regard to the violence discussed in The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. See Margaret Scott’s “The Indonesian Massacre: What Did the US Know?” The New York Review (2 November 2015). See also Amy Goodman’s “‘The Look of Silence’: Will New Film Force U.S. to Acknowledge Role in 1965 Indonesian Genocide?” Democracy Now! (3 August 2015).
[34] Olle Törnquist. “The Politics of Amnesia.” Economic and Political Weekly 50:40 (3 October 2015), 26. Emphasis mine.
[35] Adi was born two years after Ramli was killed; thus his whole life has been “haunted and tormented by what had happened,” a haunting made all the more poignant considering he had no direct access to memories of the victim himself. See Cara Buckley’s “Adi Rukun, Neither Silent Nor Intimidated.” The New York Times (12 February 2016).
[36] Emmanuel Levinas. Ethics and Infinity: Conversation with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 86-87; see also Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 50-51. Also relevant may be Noa Stematsky’s book The Face on Film (Oxford University Press, 2017), which argues that “the human face is already, itself, a moving image.”
[37] See Zack Hall’s “Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes.” LAS Magazine (10 March 2008).
[38] This becomes especially obvious when comparing Stan Brakhage’s approach to that of structuralist filmmaker Hollis Frampton—particularly in Magellan: At the Gates of Death, Part I: The Red Gate I, 0 (1976), which was a direct response to Brakhage’s Act of Seeing. While Brakhage emphasized subjectivity over analysis, Frampton pointedly did the opposite.
[39] See Bruno Latour’s “On interobjectivity.” Mind, Culture, and Activity: An International Journal 3 (1996), 228-245; see also Vivian Sobchack’s Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (University of California Press, 2004), 59.
[40] For some recent work along these lines, though, see Laura McMahon’s Animal Worlds: Film, Philosophy and Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
[41] I have discussed here how The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes abstracts dead bodies into heaps of flesh; likewise, Desistfilm (1954) abstracts a house party into a series of chaotic, fuzzy moments; Wedlock House, An Intercourse (1959) abstracts an argument and a sexual encounter into a procession of ebbing and flowing lights, of cigarette smoke and doorframes, of light and dark values writhing against each other in bed; Night Music (1986) abstracts the feeling of sorrow into a kaleidoscopic array of colors and textures; etc.
[42] Robert Sklar. “Hollywood’s Collapse.” Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (Vintage Books, 1994; originally Random House, 1975), 310-312.
[43] André Bazin. “Death Every Afternoon,” trans. Mark A. Cohen. In Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 30-31.
[44] Roland Barthes. Camera Lucida (Hill and Wang, 1981). Emphasis mine. Please note that this is not to say that both films are inexorably bleak. Grizzly Man is actually littered with quite a few moments of comedy and levity; as much as the film is a meditation on death and nature, it is also a tribute to its subject’s idiosyncratic, rambunctious, overflowing personality. But even these comedic moments always “bespeak death,” as Namwali Serpell argues. “The pleasures of humor and the pleasures of the sublime can placate our losses, but they can’t truly compensate for them. They can’t help us mourn.” See Namwali Serpell’s “Bear head.” Stranger Faces (Transit Books, 2020), 74-75.
[45] Jon Mooallem. “Mr. Know-It-All: When Someone Melts Down in Public, Can I Record It? (Please?)” Wired (11 August 2017).
[46] Thomas Nagel. “Death (1986),” The Philosophy of Death Reader: Cross-Cultural Readings on Immortality and the Afterlife (2019); see also Cody Gilmore. “What It Is to Die,” Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying (2020).
[47] Jules Howard. “Part One: This Is a Dead Frog.” Death on Earth: Adventures in Evolution and Mortality (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2016), 28-29.
[48] Garrett Stewart. “Deaths Seen.” Between Film and Screen (1999).
[49] Dalton Trumbo. Johnny Got His Gun (1938; reprinted by Bantam Books, 1982), 217-218.
[50] Ibid., 220. See also my brief treatment of this scene in my MFA Thesis for Boston University, “Now is the Envy of All of the Dead: an Introduction to Don Hertzfeldt, the Animator.” (ProQuest, 2019), 79.
[51] “Protests across the globe after George Floyd’s death.” CNN (13 June 2020).
[52] George Yancy. “Chomsky: Protests Unleashed by Murder of George Floyd Exceed All in US History.” Truthout (7 May 2021).
[53] Sewell Chan. “Nancy Pelosi’s gratitude, and the problem with Black martyrdom.” The Los Angeles Times (20 April 2021).
[54] Susan Sontag. On Photography (Penguin Books, 1977), 14.