KILLING IN THE NAME OF: NOTES ON THE UTILITY OF IMAGES
Feelings on the state of the world and how we represent it.
In the shadow of the multiple genocides occurring right now, a debate which has raged constantly has flared up once again. We are talking about the efficacy of images in spaces of discourse more now than we have in ages, and it feels like a very important time to discuss that. As the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians accelerates yet again; as the RSF ravages Sudan in the name of power, ethnic cleansing, and foreign interests; the Congo is bled dry once again in both the M23 and Ituri region conflicts; deaths and persecution continue in Tigray as tensions heat up further throughout the Horn; and many other conflicts continue to rage. More and more, there is a feeling that we cannot turn away. Here in the imperial core, we have watched many of our social services, cultural institutions, and political systems rot externally after centuries of internal degradation. Since the COVID-19 pandemic (which has not ended yet, and most likely won’t any time soon) began four years ago this month, the veil seems to have been lifted for many of us. We can no longer ignore the way we’re all getting cheated out of a good life. The longer we try to ignore it, the sharper the teeth gnawing at the back of our minds get.
As an aspiring artist who gives lots of fucks about the world around me, I can’t help but pay attention to the debates about the images of conflict. In a time where so much art feels more frivolous than ever, what can we really do to address the times and circumstances we live in? The Berlin International Film Festival just closed after a torturous, controversial run, and it exposed the fraying edges of the film world and the promises it’s built upon. Throughout the festival, the proprietors of the Berlinale congratulated themselves over curating an event that expressed their belief in the “power of cinema,” yet castigated the attempts by filmmakers and hackers alike to address the material reality of the Palestinian genocide. Festival organizers Carlo Chatrian and Mark Peranson released a statement after the festival castigating the takeover of “…another form of communication…one which weaponizes and instrumentalizes anti-Semitism for political means.” This, of course, coming on the heels of a public outcry over the festival inviting members of the extreme far-right political party Alternative for Germany to the opening ceremony. Seeing Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham get up and talk frankly about the apartheid conditions that their different lives illustrate was perhaps the most vivid image the festival produced-and it casts a shadow over Chatrian and Peranson’s decision to “…stand for cinema, which doesn’t belong to any political party.”
All the handwringing over creating a perfectly apolitical cinema which has no politics attached brought me back to Harun Farocki, who I was obsessed with when I was a bit younger. What I admired in Farocki traced back to the nakedly political bent his work had. He was a film artist concerned so wholly with the image, its meaning, and its utility that it rendered me unable to watch films the same way after I encountered his work. Anyone who knows me knows of my obsession with Bertolt Brecht and the principles that guided his work, and Farocki, as well as his many compatriots and collaborators like the masters Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, favored tearing apart the conventions of cinema in order to tear apart the perception of reality we accept. I consider him many things—a complicated artist, a progenitor of the video essay, a sharp-eyed cultural critic—and his methods and mindset inform how I perceive media to this day.
In the past week, my Twitter (I’m not calling it X) feed has been covered in debates about the images of the ethnic cleansing in Gaza. This is not new. But in the face of the heightened media coverage of the IDF’s attacks, I saw someone invoke Farocki’s 1969 film essay The Inextinguishable Fire. Considered his first major work, Farocki spends most of the film reciting the testimony of Thai Binh-Dahn, a survivor of the U.S. army’s napalm bombing raids in the Vietnam War. He reads the testimony, delivered at the 1967 Second Russell Tribunal in Roskilde, in a flat tone. But when he finishes reciting the testimony, he offers up a question which haunts me every single day.
How can we show you the injuries caused by napalm? If we show you pictures of napalm burns, you’ll close your eyes. First you’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close your eyes to the memory. Then you’ll close your eyes to the facts. Then you’ll close your eyes to the entire context. If we show you someone with napalm burns, we will hurt your feelings. If we hurt your feelings, you will feel like we’d tried napalm on you. We can give you only a hint of how napalm works.
When I first encountered this short film in college, the words stunned me, but I think I was still a bit too young to let them sink in. When I came across them in a tweet a few days ago, they pounded around in my skull. Farocki takes the Dow chemical plant to task in The Inextinguishable Fire, but ultimately his finger is pointed directly at the viewer, without any hint of pretense. Every part of the chain comes back to us, from the corporations which manufacture the weapons of mass death to the impulse we have as civilians to ignore the images of that mass death that are fed back to us in the spectacle-obsessed media. The brilliant Black anarchist writer William C. Anderson wrote a fantastic piece on this, which you can read here, that I’ll no doubt be talking about further down the line. I’m not sure where I’ve landed on it yet, but it got me thinking all the same.
What complicates the problem further, for me, is the issue of Aaron Bushnell. Self-immolation is not a new method of political protest. Bushnell’s act of resistance isn’t even the first self-immolation protesting the ongoing Palestinian genocide that was carried out in front of an Israeli embassy—I’m sure most of you know that one occurred in Atlanta last December, and we still don’t know the identity of the protestor, possibly by design. But Bushnell, as a young, able-bodied white man who was serving in the Air Force, represents a revolt from inside the system against itself. I’ve seen people have been handwringing over what’s been perceived as the lionization of a white man’s sacrifice over the myriad people of color who have been taking principled stances against the apartheid for ages, and faced social ostracization as a result. Personally, I see Bushnell’s sacrifice as exemplary.
The image of a white man in military fatigues lighting himself on fire supersedes most of the images the average film can conjure up. I watched the video. His screams are earth-shattering, his resolve ironclad. Learning more about his political journey in the months prior to his death, it’s hard not to see Bushnell as a conscientious objector in a way, intentionally aligning himself with the scores of dogged protestors who fought against the Vietnam War. At the same time Farocki was indicting both those who turn away from images of war and those who spread its images without intention, men and women across the country were fighting in any way they could, with the Quaker Norman Morrison’s self-immolation being one of the most famous. The image was bracing enough to set off a chain reaction of discourse online, but just about anything is. What’s more inspiring are the vigils he inspired, the renewed sorrow which forced people to look at the way these horrible things come back to us.
Originally, this post was going to be about my first real experiences with rock music. When I first moved to Florida, I was introduced to the genre in earnest. I was going to talk about the first three rock bands to really make an impact on me: System of a Down, The Mars Volta, and Rage Against the Machine. But Bushnell’s self-immolation brought me back to Rage’s 1992 self titled debut album. It’s no understatement to note that these bands formed the bedrock of my political and aesthetic consciousness as I crossed into middle school, and Rage’s passionate message (and thoroughness in citing their sources) was an incredible wellspring of education for me. The image adorning the cover, Malcolm Browne’s photograph of Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức’s 1963 self-immolation, was the first time I was confronted with such a graphic, intense image. Looking into it was the first time I learned about the Vietnam War, and understood what war really was. Of course, I was just a kid. But it was the first domino leading to an avalanche.
This wasn’t really a structured post. It’s more of a flood of brain vomit. But with all these images of death and debates around them floating in the atmosphere, I felt it would have been actively harmful to go another week without addressing how I feel about it all. It’s a dark world we live in. I don’t pretend to have any answers. My intent was moreso to share these thorny issues in the hopes of commiserating about this sorrow. All we can do is communicate with each other and keep the hope of liberation alive.
Thanks for reading my disorganized thoughts this week. Next post will be more structured for sure. If you’re looking for places to donate, try the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, HealAfrica, FreeTigray, or Hope for Haiti. Shouts out to Dylan Green AKA CineMasai’s Nu Musique Friday newsletter for highlighting these charities and fundraisers on top of being a fantastic new music resource. If you’re looking for other content to enjoy, please watch my wonderful friend Jai’s amazing video on Gordon Ramsay, or my wonderful friend Shy’s review of a little-known but fantastic Haruomi Hosono collaboration from 1995. Thanks so much for reading!
resonates mad hard