Art and Harm
Monday, July 19th, 2010 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mothwingThere are such a lot of discussions on art and violence these days which make my skin crawl so much I can't speak about them coherently and this probably clouds my judgement on them. Still, I'd like to say this: art can be harmful to people who didn't consent to be a part of it.
Directly, if they were exploited to make art by their creepy parents who filmed them without their consent and interviewed them about their growing breasts, but also indirectly. If art perpetrates racism and sexism and rape culture, that may not make it less artistic, but I don't see how anyone in their right mind would think that this is something that should be encouraged and deserves funding.
Speaking about the Serbian Film, if you want to make a movie about the conditio humana (or inhumana, as the case may be) of the Serbian people and use sexual imagery to get your point across, you are appropriating the experiences of violated women. If you're doing so by using porno male POV shots, you're on your way to make porn for an audience with a rather high resistance to violence in their porn, especially if you have women's bodies as props. If you want to show someone being "fucked from birth through death", as the makers say, it makes infinitely more sense in my opinion to make the movie from the POV of the fuckee rather than the fucker, especially if it's gender neutral. Especially if its supposed to be about this:
Of course you could argue that making a movie that contains fucking dead bodies is the logical extension of an industry which treats women as objects, but again, why make that movie from the POV of the perpetrator? Is this about complicity in exploitation? Is it, "being forced to fuck ourselves from birth to death while creepy people look on and make us"? Really, movie? Also, porn, with the specific background of rape as a war crime in the area? Really, movie? Focusing on the rapist and how he is made to do it by a madman? Really, movie??
This doesn't seem to be what's going on here, at least not from what I can tell, and the overtones of run-of-the-mill exploitative torture porn are too strong for me to care. Rape as a metaphor for anything but rape is an instant fail.
If people use one oppression as a ~metaphor~ for another that is harmful to the party whose experiences it exploits to express yourself. It's the limit of freedom of expressing yourself - the moment your freedom touches that of another person and you take on their voice to speak about experiences you made, and I'd like to see more self-limitation at work.
I guess the question I'd like to put to people who argue that things like these are important enough to be made regardless is if they consider the message or artistic value of this particular piece to be more important than the problematic content and exploitation of others and why.
Because I don't see it.
Directly, if they were exploited to make art by their creepy parents who filmed them without their consent and interviewed them about their growing breasts, but also indirectly. If art perpetrates racism and sexism and rape culture, that may not make it less artistic, but I don't see how anyone in their right mind would think that this is something that should be encouraged and deserves funding.
Speaking about the Serbian Film, if you want to make a movie about the conditio humana (or inhumana, as the case may be) of the Serbian people and use sexual imagery to get your point across, you are appropriating the experiences of violated women. If you're doing so by using porno male POV shots, you're on your way to make porn for an audience with a rather high resistance to violence in their porn, especially if you have women's bodies as props. If you want to show someone being "fucked from birth through death", as the makers say, it makes infinitely more sense in my opinion to make the movie from the POV of the fuckee rather than the fucker, especially if it's gender neutral. Especially if its supposed to be about this:
"A SERBIAN FILM is firmly rooted in the frustration and despair of living in Serbia today. It reinvents the horror genre to suit its own purpose, turning it into a powerful cinematic scream of anger and frustration. It offers a stylized version of what it feels like to grow up in a country humiliated, denigrated, impoverished, bombed-out, stripped of its territory, labeled genocidal and haunted by the spirits of war crimes both real and constructed. " (source)
Only that it doesn't sound like that at all, really does it? In terms of "fucked from birth through death", this movie seems less about the baby fucked to death in the movie, and more about the person fucking it. If this is the goal, why make a movie about the perpetrator and a complicit audience rather than Serbians fucked? But of course, seeing some dude grunting away on top of you is far less sexay and makes the audience far less likely to watch your movie.Of course you could argue that making a movie that contains fucking dead bodies is the logical extension of an industry which treats women as objects, but again, why make that movie from the POV of the perpetrator? Is this about complicity in exploitation? Is it, "being forced to fuck ourselves from birth to death while creepy people look on and make us"? Really, movie? Also, porn, with the specific background of rape as a war crime in the area? Really, movie? Focusing on the rapist and how he is made to do it by a madman? Really, movie??
This doesn't seem to be what's going on here, at least not from what I can tell, and the overtones of run-of-the-mill exploitative torture porn are too strong for me to care. Rape as a metaphor for anything but rape is an instant fail.
If people use one oppression as a ~metaphor~ for another that is harmful to the party whose experiences it exploits to express yourself. It's the limit of freedom of expressing yourself - the moment your freedom touches that of another person and you take on their voice to speak about experiences you made, and I'd like to see more self-limitation at work.
I guess the question I'd like to put to people who argue that things like these are important enough to be made regardless is if they consider the message or artistic value of this particular piece to be more important than the problematic content and exploitation of others and why.
Because I don't see it.
