[Reader-list] images of violence

[lush inkk]

Images of violence.

 

The continuing discussion on this forum about images of violence has spurred me to write too.  I hope I am able to flash blindly this way and that in the dark and find some thought somewhere.

    (The image is from this linux screen saver- a little insect with a headlight attached turns around the screen-again and again, to no end except- filling time while saving the screen, trying to be a bit entertaining- I am not trying to be the last but I hope the ramble does not become too tedious. Images of violence, how violence as an image can be shown, or not, where or when it can be shown, what it means to us, what it says about us, have been part of some discussions( for discussions are few in my life at least, in recent years, and are looked for sometimes) and many thoughts and indignant flashes of emotion.

 

Death, humiliation- that which should not be filmed- because filming and then shameless uncontrolled broadcast makes it become normal-/ indignified, pornographic.

A hotmail attatchment that might open out to show a silly condom cartoon, might equally show a spectacle of violence- and both might be watched on office desks using the same casual procedures, trying to get away from routine work.

 

This is a squabble a friend of mine and I have been having for a long time- an argument that I had with another friend-

The imaging of violence and its broadcast in the public media- 

How effective is it, or is it deadening?

 

The image no longer moral. I was aghast to see the image of a family, the window they were framed in about to burn, during the Gujarat riots. I hated the Mid day( with all its tabloidy desires anyway) carrying the image of the man with the briefcase jumping to his death during september 11th.

I refused to look at the image of the plane anymore- after the first viewing that had happened I suppose inadvertently?  ( I find myself plunging hereon into these ways of narrating, eventually salacious, but also horrified- that have existed even pre the television image�

� I just happened to get up late that evening- I came out blearily into the living room and saw this horrible image of the plane crashing..)

part of the reaction, even at that moment, across t.v.�s is � perhaps- not cynical- 

( perhaps because it was the newness and shock of seeing that violence in america, I feel even the tv reporters standing there could not have been cynical, perhaps- having met some photographers who work in magazines etcetra- cynicism does not come so easily to the person experiencing the ground violence anyway. there was a sense that this was just horrible and� we do not know how to react �. What do they feel about the lines they mouth there and then before the tv camera. Beyond commerce, are there just human moments, where we can look beyond the rubbish standardized language they habitually speak to see them as people who somehow had to see the violence- what did it make them feel? Is the desire to know that also salacious? ) there was a sense that this was just horrible and we did not know how to react 

 

but on the other hand- does the language of the violent television image actually deaden us? I am not sure. Beyond all the rubbish editing and the shouting and newsmaking and competing of the various channels- the violence still shakes us? 

 

I have not had a t.v. for a long time- the evening news with dinner getting ready sounds really like terminal cynicism. But??is it?

Are saas bahu serials the alternative? 

But I hear of awful real crime �events� where reporters interrogate the criminals, taking on themselves the role of the indignant public, and playing that role out with no nuance.

I remember arguments with friends who said the Gujarat images shook so many previously complacent right wing relatives.

That the middle class should be forced to see( and thence experience at least some of) the grisly reality of violence.

 

I work in a archive trying to keep video images of Kashmir. I wonder what would be the relevance of collecting bits and pieces of footage captured by television cameramen to provide the image asked for in the �market�- the one for the Indian government channel, the one for the foreign channel etcetra. Are these images then commodities? 

But there remains the footage of a protest as people try to retrieve the body of their loved one, from police custody, and try to make it the centre of a demonstration. His brains hang out. Women wail. Policemen do their job with stolid faces. This has not become pornography for me, it wont. I cant see it, I would rather not see it. It stuns and numbs me.

Is it because I am seeing it in silence, alone, unedited, without a manic voice, that I am forced to face it. Do they show Kashmir as a site of violence- do they show the violence on tv? What do they show? 

I see the familiar irritating violence of a news channel doing a story on kashmiris passing out of the Indian army. It is of interest and amusement to me as an archivist. It is a violent story, I know. I know people who wont think it so. There must be stories I do not think are violent that are very very violent.

 

My friend who argued about the middle class needing to see violence- was not just making a ( stereotypical) Marxist teacher kind of remark. He was remembering from his experience of an image that he had actually viewed- that had singed him., he saw the police carting away, on the footboard of a cycle rickshaw, a �convict� whose limbs were tied- he was trussed up like a fowl. It is a image that has stayed with him forever like a block before him. That he cannot wish away-

 

The image of the Manipuri women protesting naked- but that was a spectacle- humiliating to the viewer, that they wanted seen. It is about unbearable anger and grief. I have not seen the image, but I flinch from the description. A friend who has relatives in the army- a brother in the north east says she is haunted by the image.

 

A photograph from Kashmir taken in the early nineties. Me, a mainlander in the end, watching- a (motley) bunch of thin people, in army fatigues, mouth covered- stand before a large banner. They are armed. Young terrorists. They don�t look too impressive I might have thought. And there is the sense of �seeing the news image�( salacious) seeing the terrorist- this moment frozen, giving a mirage of it containing their real corporeal bodies, of containing that slice of space on which they were standing � real terrorists- not the mission kashmir/roja variety. I scan the image to make sense of it.

It is a  news photograph for a srinagar newspaper, black and white for reasons of what they printed in, I suppose- but it makes it strange- though it is a photo of the early nineties, its format, with a border at the end, its aging, yellowing edges- make it seem like  long ago, like our childhoods( my generation) to which black and white photos belonged. 

Taken- with what motive- can I tell? Early nineties- was it important to give space to the militants in newsprint- did it come of pressure, belief, or simply a newsmans desire to be able to show- what he knows is, what exists, not far from where he is living? 

The kashmiri man sitting with me looked at me and said- not one of these boys must be alive now. It shook me a bit, his gaze at the photograph.

And then-

We fear that we become, when we are complacent outsiders, salacious in the consumption of narratives about death- especially �abnormal� over narrativised death. It is a phenomenon that predates the image. Gossip. I read a taylor Caldwell from my mothers collection as a adolescent? I think- bits of it, while searching for dirty parts-

 

It spoke of how a bus had crashed, some kids had been killed and some had not. And how the parents who still had their kids had a certain complacency.

Then I felt I guiltily understood what it said. Now I feel people also have a genuine compassion. 

 

In preimage times, everyone sat in their various corners of the earth and made their own complacencies and own salacious comments. That also bore at their heart- horror and the inability of deal with it, and the recognition that it is horrific.

 

A friend in a mnc who wanted to email a horrific beheading circulating on the internet. What does the image mean to him? Can I know? I know I do not want to see it. The idea of that circulation disgusts me. 

 

And then there is the film maker who wants to show the deep violence we have done- of replacing our eye with a machine called the camera and where the shaky ethics of image making have also led us to-

To dull comfortable wars where the eye does not see what it kills. 

My friend and I argued after this film- not with the zest of knowing you are sure you want to stand your ground that we might have had some time ago, but stating ours and conceding not knowing, perhaps the other one was right.

 

I hated �Night and Fog� when I saw it now- alain resnais� film using footage of the nzi concentration camps-

He showed a tractor with a big trowel attatched in the front picking up bodies by the dozen and dumping them carelessly. This was the filmed horror post the defeat of the Nazis- showing what the Nazis had done-

This was where our argument had started- my friend and mine.

 

 

 

 


		
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