From: Fred Camper (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Jan 14 2009 - 17:09:04 PST
Chuck Kleinhans wrote:
> But surely Fred would agree that photography and cinema can provide
> documents that change history and the comprehension of historical
> events....
Yes, of course. My post was a polemic meant for a particular context.
But:
> ...the Abu Graib photos, for example....
But in some ways this makes my point. Seen alone, they were meaningless
porn, and they were widely misunderstood as reflecting on the bad
character of particular soldiers (rather than, for example, particular
Presidents and Vice Presidents). What did they tell us, without the
knowledge of what the participating American soldiers had bee told about
how to treat the prisoners, and about how untrained soldiers very often
respond to being basically told to abuse prisoners? What made me so
angry about the Abu Gharaib photos, aside rom the actual abuse they
showed, is that notably lacking in the discourse around them was a
statement the simple fact that things like that happen in virtually ALL
wars. That's what war does: it brutalizes almost everyone. Not all
soldiers behave that way, of course, but you start a war with a lot of
soldiers in it, some will.
In our popular culture, though, it's images without context that
dominate. It's the perverse images that people remember, not the larger
contextualizing truths.
How do you convey the real truth about all wars in a film, except with
voiceover and text, in which case, wouldn't an essay on the subject be
better and clearer?
> ...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....
I haven't seen 'em, but I'll take your word for it.
Fred Camper
Chicago
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