The Burden of Sensation and the Ethics of Form: Watching Capturing the Friedmans  

Oleh:

Bell, Vikki

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Theory, Culture & Society vol. 25 no. 3 (May 2008), page 89-102.
Topik: child sexual abuse ¦ cinematic audiences ¦ Gilles Deleuze ¦ ethics ¦ Félix Guattari
Fulltext: 89.pdf (265.23KB)

Isi artikel

Capturing the Friedmans is remarkable for its combination of thematics of memory and child sexual abuse within a documentary film that also places the two themes historically, becoming in effect a reflection upon its own conditions of possibility. The questions raised in terms of memory and the politics of vision lend themselves to a rumination on the experience of film-watching itself, and equally, on the nature of judgement. Addressing these, it will be argued here, is to force a consideration of the mode and the ethics of cinematic form. This short essay limits its focus to the fact that one cannot approach judgement of this film within an economy of opinion; developing the argument of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) in What is Philosophy? – that artists create compounds of affects into which we are drawn and by which we become – in relation to the film, it is argued that the comfort of the role of the perceiver is barred. But if there is no priority between the real and representation of the real, no ‘gap’ across which opinion and judgement can be made, what possibility is there for ethics? This essay considers this question in relation to the remarkable scenes in which the protagonist himself explicitly raises the issue of consent.

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