Visual Occupations (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe) by Gil Z. Hochberg

Author:Gil Z. Hochberg [Hochberg, Gil Z.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822375517
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2015-05-16T18:30:00+00:00

The film’s directors, Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, account for their avoidance of testimony and sensation in an interview with Irmgard Emmelhainz. “The film does not offer an ethnographic shortcut to empathy,” Eshun explains in defense of the camera’s “failure” to produce something for us to look at (“A Trialogue” 129). Instead of providing information and testimony, the majority of the people the camera captures explicitly turn away from it, or turn their backs on it, avoiding its scrutinizing lens. In other words, the filmmakers replace the common practice of appealing to spectators’ sense of outrage and sympathy (by means of rendering atrocities visible) with a practice that draws attention instead to the violence involved in such common documentary practices. The accusatory mode of documentary filmmaking, as Dabashi writes, “aims at speaking truth to power,” whereas the idea of turning one’s back on power implies that within the dominate structures of representations and knowledge production it is hardly possible to escape the trap of reproducing familiar hegemonic images. Under such circumstances, the only way to articulate a more radical and liberatory position may indeed involve a certain negation of visibility and the refusal to cooperate with the camera’s inspection (see figure 5.2).

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