Visualising Technologies and the Ethics and Aesthetics of Screening Death

Abstract

Technological innovations in the generation and circulation of images have altered both the way death looks to contemporary audiences and the access publics have to representations of death and dying. While Western mainstream news providers conceal the corpse from public view, entertainment media renders death and the dead body in increasingly spectacular fashion, and documentary imagery of death proliferates online. I interrogate the historical relationship between imagery of death within newsmaking and the emergence of Hollywood's ultraviolent aesthetic, and explore the recent technological advances which enable novel regimes of post-mortem representation and their dissemination. Contemplating the traffic between fictional and documentary images, I develop my analysis around imagery of the dead produced during the current conflict in Iraq. I frame this analysis around footage of fatalities within recent documentary films and digital images posted online by coalition soldiers. These regimes of representation present unique issues regarding the ethics of representing the dead, the way in which ‘the real’ is signified, and the proximity of viewing publics to horrific imagery.

Keywords:

• Graphic violence
• realism
• cinematography
• war imagery
• digital effects
• Internet
• ethics

Notes

My focus in this paper is warfare in which the US is directly involved, and films about war produced by major Hollywood studios. As Sontag (2003, pp. 70–71) observes, Western audiences are more likely to have access to the ‘exotic’ dead and dying. Imagery of fatalities among one's own military, or its victims, are largely avoided (Silcock et al., 2008).

In The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception Michel Foucault traces the emergence of modern medicine. The clinic, or teaching hospital, is the characteristic institution in which the physician develops a ‘medical gaze’. Knowledge of anatomy, and the symptoms of disease, enables the doctor to read the signs of illness and imagine the interior pathologies that have manifest them. As a corollary, the patient becomes reduced to a set of symptoms.

In other films, the ethics (and potential legal ramifications) of screening images of Iraqis killed by the US military have been dealt with by depersonalising the corpse. Faces of the dead were digitised in Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company (2006), and eyes were obscured with black strips in the closing montage of documentary photographs of war casualties and fatalities at the end of Brian De Palma's fictional Redacted (2007).