From: Chuck Kleinhans (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Jan 11 2009 - 17:42:24 PST
On Jan 11, 2009, at 10:39 AM, Fred Camper wrote:
>
> Cinema has in general not done a good job of making intellectual
> arguments.
> In most cases, I have found political documentaries sadly lacking
> in comparison with even a mediocre newspaper or magazine article.
> Moving pictures not only don't add much to my understanding of the
> issues; they can often help obscure understanding.
>
> On the other hand, I'm not sure that banning reporting from Gaza is
> such a good idea either! Was the US military's ban on images of the
> coffins of and funerals of American soldiers killed in Iraq a good
> idea?
>
> I don't know of a cinema that can sensibly debate, or even ask,
> these kinds of questions, so in that sense I agree with Malgosia's
> "require words" argument. Dziga Vertov made a tentative stab,
> though, at trying to edit images in a way that widens the context
> of what you see, as in, for example, his famous reverse montage
> starting with a dinner table back through the phases of meat
> production.
>
But surely Fred would agree that photography and cinema can provide
documents that change history and the comprehension of historical
events. Some examples: the images of WW2 concentration camps
liberated by the Allies; images of dogs and fire hoses used against
children marching for civil rights in the US South; the Zapruder
footage of the Kennedy assassination. And, of course, the same
images can be used in different ways: the Rodney King beating as
"interpreted" by the prosecution and defense in the trial of the police.
There are films which analyze the images they use: Godard-Gorin's
Letter to Jane, or which analyze how images are made (some of Harun
Farocki's films).
But images can often serve to document, however controversially or
contradictorily, events that would not be known or dramatized without
the images: the Abu Graib photos, for example. Taken together, Rory
Kennedy's Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side,
and Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure provide an
astonishing understanding of images AND the Abu Graib events. The
last word? No. But something that really isn't fully understood
without the images.
Given the official Israeli prohibition on reporters entering Gaza, it
seems they do have something to hide. Let's see what it is.
CHUCK KLEINHANS
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