Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

My study focuses on documentary filmmakers who choose to position their camera as a critical, self-conscious eye examining conventions in the media governing the representation of suffering. The two films are part of a growing group of documentaries that avoid direct images and focus on alternative, almost abstract image. They relate to an ethical crisis concerning the image – a crisis of figurability. Questions concerning the ethics of representation grew more emphatic with new technology that enabled the photographing of horrors unfolding in the twentieth century (Saxton 2008). The films ‘handle’, injure and undermine the visual image, while the voice assumes a significant role. The faceless and bodiless voices in the films want us to be haunted by their absent presence; where the gaze failed, the voice is what calls people to awake, they force one to reflect on one’s blindness and deafness. Derrida leans back to the Greek mythology and notes that blindness is often the price to pay for insight- and calls it ‘revelatory blindness’.(1990-1)) Libby Saxton also reads blindness as an ethical stance and speaks of ’vigilant blindness’. Emanuel Levinas in his ethical philosophy intertwines the ethical term ‘face’ (l.e., visage, which is not necessarily visual) with ‘speech’ (l.e., dit, which is not necessarily verbal) and seeks a moment of epiphany through face or language, a moment which impels us to listen and arouses our ethical responsibility toward the Other (Levinas [1960] 1995).