This text is dedicated to my mother,
for so many years of words.
To Sergio, Macu, Antonella and especially
for Amalia Pereira for the dialogue.
There is more
and more recording of what people do, by themselves. Andy Warhol's ideal of filming real
events in real time — life isn't edited, why should its record be edited?
— has become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people record their
day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am — waking and yawning
and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school.
People record all aspects of their lives, store them in computer files and send
the files around. Family life goes with the recording of family life —
even when, or especially when, the family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace.
Surely the dedicated, incessant home videoing of one another, in conversation
and monologue, over many years was the most astonishing material in Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jerecki 2003)
Susan Sontag, “Regarding
the Torture of Others,” The New York Times, Sunday May 23, 2004.
Memory, Non-fiction Storylines and Fractures
The motivation that drives this text
is to situate a place of action in the representation of gender violence and its
fractures. A place that will open up an interpretive possibility about the narrative
strategies of non-fiction storylines in film and video practices, that will situate
a reflection and propose open paths, ways out related to a closed definition of
gender as social, historical and political violence.
The investigative work begun over a year
and a half ago to put together a film and video cycle, which has now produced
this book, attempts to approach the problematic relation between representation
and visual mechanisms, artistic practices, media discourses, violence and gender:
a critical reading of how the exercise of power has deeply influenced the experience
of real and symbolic gender violence in the discourse of visual culture. This
perspective stems from the deep-rooted conviction that the exercise of violence,
and more specifically, the symbolic representation of this violence, situated
between cultural and historic memory, involves the emergence of a reality which,
owing to its dimensions, goes beyond any interpretation that does not confirm
the cultural failure of the modern West.
The manifestations of violence represented
in non-fiction storylines and reflections created about violence are not recent,
nor do they belong to a certain degree of media opportunism. For a long time in
the memory of humanity, in its spheres of social and/or political coexistence,
violence surfaces as an agent that citizens and governments must come up against.
In this sense, collective violence includes social violence, political violence
and economic violence. The direct violence
that women suffer from can be divided into five forms, ranging from physical aggression
— many times resulting in death — to sexual, psychological, economic and symbolic
violence. Structural violence is consolidated in the feminization of poverty,
wage discrimination, the glass ceiling, the sexual segregation of the job market
and the double-triple shift. As for social violence, it is evident in the slavery
and traffic of individuals. Political violence is detected in rape as a war weapon,
a widespread, traumatic practice in the history and memory of humanity.
In this film and video cycle, the insertion
of gender violence in visual culture has led me, during my research, to reflect
on a connection with non-fiction storylines. This research and the development
of this cycle proposes a reflection on the aesthetics and narrative practices
of film and video. To do this, numerous archive networks, authors and distributors
in Europe and the United States have been referenced, including: Blickpilotin
(Berlin), Video Femmes (Quebec), Film Archive Imaginaria (Bologna), Women Make
Movies (New York), Cinenova (London), Electronic Intermix and Frameline (San Francisco).
My thanks goes out to all of them. Thus, the core of this research is grounded
on feminist practices from the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties to the present.
In 1975 the artist Cara DeVito made Ama
l´uomo tuo. Using
early video technology she recorded the story of her maternal grandmother Adeline
LeJudas who, for the first time, appears as testimony of domestic violence in
the family environment, an exhibition of patriarchal rules unleashed before the
camera as a way of recording the invisibilization of a generation of silenced
women. The subjective production of the knowledge and memory of this experience
recorded by video technology embarked on a path of visibilization with no return
through the narration and exchange of intergenerational personal histories. Two
other utopian moments in video were
Losing a Conversation with the Parents
by Martha Rosler (1977),
a video made in tandem with Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (1977). After these
came How to Sleep at Night or A Simple Case for Torture, 1983, where
Rosler addresses, through a voiceover narration and an assortment of print media
excerpts, cases related to human rights violations, unemployment and the global
economy. This gathering of media fragments exposes the support of the U.S. government
and its business interests of regimes that systematically use torture. Rosler
challenges the American press about its role as a disinformation agent through selective news coverage, its
use of language and the implicit legitimation of a point of view that justifies
the use of torture. The deliberately fractured narrative strategy recalls the
fragmentation of the voiceover used in Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, which situates
the female body in a discursive position, in an ideological place of struggle,
a psychic place of domination constructed of different levels of demands and gratifications.
In the case of Losing a Conversation with the Parents, the staging of an interview
that simulates the traditional codes of the television interview presents two
of the problems perpetuated by Capitalism and patriarchal values: anorexia nervosa
and global hunger. The staging of actors and the dialogue between a mother and
a father reveal the causes that have made their daughter ill, reflecting the impossibility
of comprehending the consequences of the symbolic universe that fashion imposes
upon the culture of youth consumption. However, the contact of documentary forms
with non-fiction storylines and the representation of symbolic violence and gender
violence can be traced back to the Sixties and the emergence of the so-called
New German Cinema and its ties to the
women's movement. Frauenfilm was politically
committed to the feminist positions of the period and its narrative forms emphasized
the subjective perspective. From the mid-Seventies to the late Eighties, female
German directors showed the relationship between state power and its effects on
women's lives and urged them to become aware of the patriarchal structure encouraged
by institutions. This was when the first women's film festival was set up (Berlin,
1973) as well as the feminist film culture magazine Frauen und Film, 1974,
in which Helke Sander, Jutta Brückner, Helma Sander-Brahms and Margarette Von
Trotta played key roles. The goal of these filmmakers was to create a platform
for spreading film, showing feminism's inclination towards an international movement
of women on one hand, and on a smaller scale, towards everyday policies about
"the personal", offering a new political vision between the dichotomy
body/State as a consequence of political and social disillusionment after 1968.
Regarding this subject, the theorist
Julia Knight, in her essay Woman and the
New German Cinema, recalls that the problematics that concerned women were
focused on non-fiction storylines and the documentary forms that contributed to
the appearance of film and video narrations tied to the production and dissemination
of knowledge about the women's movement (Knight 1992). In this way, documentary
forms were combined with other forms of production that were rarely "authentic"
fictions with staging. This small scale production of knowledge meant, in turn,
in the films of Sander, Brückner, Sander-Brahms or Von Trotta, an exploration
of the relationships between state control of the body through the institution
of the family and specifically through institutions such as prisons or mental
hospitals. They postulated that the disciplinary institutions of the administration
of power were trying to psychosomatically turn the repression of historic traumas
into a mental and physical pathology. In short, they proposed the creation of
an aesthetic based on this reversal of history and trauma into a process of knowledge
production. Helke Sander's All-round Reduced Personality (Die
allseite redurziete persönlickeit, 1977) evokes, through a series of dramatic,
often ironic sequences, the difficulties encountered by a Berlin photographer
who tries to apply her idea of justice to her emotional relationships. Sander's
contribution was confirmed with The Subjective Factor (Der subjektive
faktor, 1981), which built on the previous film by evoking the struggles of
the women's movement and its demand for civil rights between 1967 and 1980. The relationship
between body and State becomes the key to interpreting non-fiction storylines,
their relationship to everyday politics, the identities and uses of visual recording
and reproduction devices through the movie and video camera. Cultural and gender
memory deploy a "new subjectivity" which some experts like Michael Renov
define as a personalized way of tackling non-fiction storylines (Renov 1993),
enunciating that subjectivity is no longer constructed as something shameful but
rather as a filter through which the Real (Foster 2001) enters the discourse,
like a kind of fluctuation of the experience that guides the work in terms of
the way of producing knowledge, and by extension the story. Around 1992, Helke
Sander once again addressed the relationship between body and State in the film
Liberators Take Liberties
(Befreier und befreite, 1992), based on a non-fiction storyline. That is,
the systematic mass rape of German women at the end of World War II by the Red
Army. The experience of brutal force shown in the first part of this documentary
investigates the exhibition of trauma using the technique of in-depth interview.
With regard to this, Sander explains: “Many of us begin to see with increasing
clarity the connection between medium-range missiles and romantic relationships.
In other words, the man-woman relationship between militarism and patriarchy;
between technical destruction and the domination of nature and violence against
women. Women, nature, foreign peoples and countries are the colonies of the White
Man.”
The memory of the survivors of this story
remained hidden, a repeated story although lacking any film or video representation
until that moment. The second part of the commentary is about the serious consequences
suffered by the affected women and the children conceived during those rapes.
Renov situates the period Post-truth between 1970-1995 to show
the reflexivity of the I through documentary strategies; that is, the appearance
of New Subjectivities (Renov 1999)
in documentary enunciations. On the other hand, Post-reality defines the times
that concern us, tying narrative production to the media and defining the coordinates
between gender, violence and culture. As shown by the extensive research that
the filmmaker Helk Sander enunciated via film technology in Liberators
Take Liberties, the consequences
can still be felt: "There are women who were never able to talk about this
and whose husbands forbade them to do so. Then there are their children, who are
now finding out that they are the product of rape. Finally, there are those who
are trying to find out the identity of their fathers."
The concept of the Real beats in these
documentary statements, a return that Hal Foster analyzes in his essay from the mid-1990s,
The Return of the Real. Art and Theory at the End of the Century, giving
two referents: one comes from Lacan's psychoanalytic theories and alludes to the reality
of the obscene, traumatic and abject; that which resists the symbolic, which speaks
of an injured body, a raped individual. The other involves the real in a socio-reality
understood as a new field of art, in which the real functions as identity or community.
To the latter, we would also add a revision of the symbolic forms of violence,
history and memory.
The
objectivization, media globalization, colonized visual codes, the panoptism of
biopower denounced by the philosopher Michel Foucault; scientific taxonomization,
social regulation through the visual regime and the construction of the gaze as
a strategy proposed in the Seventies and Eighties were the starting point for
revisions based on Laura Mulvey's 1975 text Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,
in which she went into the notion of voyeuristic scopophilia in fictional cinema
(Mulvey 1988). With regard to
this subject I would like to point out that inversely, the codes governing non-fiction
storylines allude to a displacement of the politics of truth I will discuss again
later in relation to Hito Steyerl's text Documentarism as Politics of Truth.
In parallel with these revisions, feminist
visual practices started constructing autobiographies and videojournals, making
use of the politics and technologies of gender which, following
Michel Foucault and Teresa de Lauretis, they took into account when considering
the metaphoric use of the term "technology." Beyond any sort of techno-determinism,
these theorists demonstrated that the construction of body and gender has always
been technological. Therefore, I argue that politically committed aesthetic strategies
should go beyond coded fantasies, both private and public, socially and visually
controlled to give way to the relation between alternative figurations of subjectivity and the forms
of real and represented violence, so as to create new spaces for identity and
culture. I believe that identity politics are still a key issue that directs and
"produces" subjects and multiple, hybrid and politically differentiated
codification agents. From a distant approach, video and cinema technology united
with the notion of experimentation, the idea of portrait and oral portrait, embarked
on a path of no return. Feminist visual practices have been developing a criticism
of gender violence and following this idea, the biographical resumed a lively
strategy until the 1990s. Sadie Benning's video A Place Called Lovely (1991)
reveals a society in which violence and its diverse forms are a part of our everyday
lives. It shows us a racist, homophobic North America. Sadie Benning uses her
voice to describe the discovery of violence: one hot, humid July day in 1979,
a woman walking along Niskey Lake Road in southwestern Atlanta came across the
bloody limb of a corpse. When the police arrived, they found the bodies of two
adolescent boys, Alfred Evans and Edward Hope Smith. The bodies of twenty-seven
more boys were found in the next few years. Benning's voice explains: "I
never met them but I'll never forget those boys because when those kids were murdered,
all of us kids died a little." Allusions to the unsettling proximity of firearms
are mixed with violent images of video games or clips from films like Psycho.
The video ends with a scene in which Benning, in front of a U.S. flag, presents
her discourse about the signs of a culture of violence. In another attempt at
video as biography, Mindy Faber en Delirium, 1993, constructs the personal
experience of the creator's mother via Jean-Martin Charcot's 19th-century classification
of “feminine hysterics," which would lay the foundation for modern neurology.
While at no point is her mother's position reduced to a simple explanation, Delirium relates her mother's illness to the historic position
of women subject to patriarchal culture. Popular culture imaginary and humorous
iconoclasm are thrown together, juxtaposing episodes of the American television
series l Love Lucy with photographs
of sick bodies taken by Charcot in La Salpétriére. Delirium stresses the need to understand female mental illness
within a political and social context and the reactions of many women to situations
of gender violence. On this note, the 1997 videographic performance La
voz humana ("The Human Voice"), by María
Ruido, silences and makes stammer a complex relationship between the deprivation
of language and the difficulty of public enunciation of the word subordinated
to enunciation. At the same time, it uses stuttering and silence to reveal the
collision of the voice in the double folds of language. Ruido's performance explores
the possibilities of concretion of the human voice as a way of identifying of
gender roles and their mechanisms in society; what the historic mechanisms
responsible for the relative dehistoricization and the eternalization
of the structures of sexual division and the corresponding principles of division
are. To present the problem on these terms means to advance in the order of knowledge
that can lie at the beginning of decisive progress in the order of action. To
remember that what, in history, appears to be eternal is only the product of a
labor of eternalization by certain (interconnected) institutions such as the Family,
the Church, the State, and Education is to reinsert in history and thus return
to historic action the relationship between the sexes that the naturalist, essentialist
view denies them (and not, as some have tried to have me say, attempt to stop
history and deprive women of their role as historic agents). In this sense, Pierre
Bourdieu, in the preface to the German edition of his Masculine Domination,
published in November 1998, argues: “Against these historical forces of dehistoricization,
a mobilizing enterprise should be directed that tends to put history back in motion
by neutralizing the mechanisms that have neutralized history. This typically political
mobilization that will open up the possibility of collective resistance to women,
directed at legal and political reforms, opposes both the resignation that drives
all essentialist views (biologist and psychoanalytic) of the difference between the
sexes as well as resistance reduced to individual acts or those constantly restarted
discursive happenings that some feminist theorists advocate: heroic breaks from
daily routine, such as the parodic performances Judith Butler is so fond of, surely
demand too much for such a small, uncertain result” (Bourdieu 2000, 8). In reality,
rebellion against symbolic discrimination resides in collective forms of organization
and action as well as effective tools, especially symbolic ones, capable of creating
fractures in the state and legal institutions that contribute to eternalizing
their subordination to forms of real and represented violence. By describing,
as I have elsewhere (Villaplana 2003), the fragmented narrative forms
that make up the discourse of neotelevisión.
These questions related to the symbolic production of mass media bring
us to the educational processes that violence produces via behavior guidelines
learned during childhood. In the short, intense story The Origin of Violence, 2004-2005,
the filmmaker Cecilia Barriga emphasizes that subjectivated gaze through the presence
of the camera: “When I shot that scene in the Amazon jungle and watched
that young and innocent boy playing with his kitty, I discovered the awakening
of violence. What was it that turned that friendly game with the little animal
into an act of pure force? Perhaps it was my gaze; perhaps it was the camera.
Whatever happened stirred in that child a desire for notoriety that surely led
him to force and finally to the brutality of violence, to the irrefutable demonstration
of his power." Her account of the scene reveals a direct and even incisive
symbolic gaze towards that much-traveled, uncertain path that are childhood games
and the socialization of violence.
Social violence having
to do with rape as a war weapon is the focus of Karin Jurschick's documentary
The Peacekeepers and the Women (2003). The international intervention in
Bosnia and Kosovo was coming to an end after years of war. Peace was planned with
the presence of the peacekeeping forces SPOR and KFOR. One of the most lucrative
areas of the new postwar economy was the trafficking of women, a process of violence
that came from the Ukraine, Rumania and Moldavia. Women were forced to prostitute
themselves, their clients were oftentimes the very members of the international
peacekeeping forces, who earned €150 per day, half the monthly salary of a Bosnian
professor. The investigation carried out by this documentary shows how the trafficking
of women became an exercise of violence against the women's human rights. Testimonies
from the peacekeeping forces and nightclub owners and the individual testimonies
of the women clearly describe that the presence of the international forces in
Bosnia and Kosovo was an important factor in the rise of prostitution. On their
part, Calling the Ghosts by Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelincic,
1996, and Daughters of War by Maria Barea, 1998, are two other documentaries
which, in the mid-Nineties, suggested the need to fight for the political violence
of rape to be recognized as a war crime. Calling the Ghosts tells in first
person the story of two women, Jadranka Cigelj and Nusreta Sivac, who lived in
Bosnia-Herzegovina until they were captured and deported to Omarska, one of the
Serb concentration camps, where they were systematically raped and humiliated
by their Serb captors along with other Croat and Muslim women. The documentary
Daughters of War explores the context of the Peruvian guerrilla
war, where norms of coexistence have been destroyed and violence and abuse of women
have become new social norms of conduct. Through the lives of Gabriela and a group
of friends made up of 17-year-old girls in Ayacucho we see how these survivors
reflect on the effects of the civil war that took place in Peru during the Eighties,
where drugs and poverty marked an entire generation wrapped up in the trauma of
their country's war-ravished history.
Reconstruction of memory and violence
tied to history have been studied by the theorists and historians Barbie Zelizer
(1998) and Marita Sturken (1997). Both examine how the process of
memory and its images have in this case been constructed by filling in
the gaps of oblivion. The memories of the survivors come from their own experiences
or from documentary photos or Hollywood films. This means that the photos, filmed
or videotaped images can capture and create memories but that they also have the
capacity, through the power of their presence, to substitute experience. This
is why for Sturken it is necessary to examine the role of the image in the production
of both memory as well as amnesia, cultural memory as well as history. In the
case of gender violence as explored in the videographic works Syntagma
by Valie Export, (1984); A Room of Her Own
by Teresa Serrano (2005); and Deshaciendo nudos by Beth Moysés (2000),
memory and amnesia take on contradictory meanings: both can be active, voluntary,
traumatic or culpable. With these contradictions, it is hard to trace how far
the media's capacity to construct identities has gone: if the media acted as reproducers
of the official discourse, is it possible to separate the two? Or is that traumatic
fracture always present in subjects constructed in this way?
At the same time, it might well be that
the reflection on the relationship between memory / media and cultural identity
necessarily departs from any possible nostalgia and makes more evident something
that is often obscured in other discourses. Along these lines the short film Consolation
Service by Eija-Liisa Ahtila (1999) shows how identities are constructed by
contradictory elements. What constitutes us as subjects is subjectivity and that
which memory organizes in the form of a story which, giving memories continuity,
is often tainted by nostalgia and therefore cannot be evaluated any other way.
The circle of domestic violence in Fathers, Husbands, Sons by Kevin McCourt
and Gabriel Martínez, 2002, and The Eye
of the Needle by Terry Berkowitz
and Blerti Murataj, 2004, which involves the features of the process of aggression,
would not require any further clarification if it weren't for the omnipresence
of a media discourse — let us recall the Lorena Bobbitt case back in 1993 — that
confirms the existence of the notion of testimony before it questions it. In The
Eye of the Needle, Lorena Bobbitt's testimony of reproaches and pain is interspersed
with subtle, sensual images which show that in the domestic, marital sphere in
the United States, not all is what it seems. Regarding this subject, Fathers, Husbands, Sons is established as a complement to an exploited
version, symbolized by the mass media; this is the pattern of the behavior of
violence against women which some call the "Cycle of Violence," and
which is generally divided into three phases: tension-building, the acute or explosion
phase and the "honeymoon" or romantic reconciliation.
The relationship between memory / media
and identities demands to be questioned. The media hegemony keeps functioning
retrospectively and the accumulation of memory fragments should not be a legitimation
in itself. It might be said that the conservative belief that cultural museumization
can compensate for the ravages caused by accelerated modernization in the social
world is too ideological. It does not recognize that post-industrial culture and
the production of visual representation through the mass media destabilizes any
kind of security that the past might offer. The juxtaposition is disheartening.
However, it can also give us a clue: now more than ever, memory and amnesia are
not opposite or contradictory terms. They are found in the same places and it
is essential to consider their implications simultaneously.
Media
stories, Overrepresentation and The Politics of Truth
December 1997 must be regarded as a before
and after in the media representation of violence against women in Spain. Prior
to this date, this problem had never regularly appeared on the front page of newspapers
or opened news programs on television, despite mobilizations by other social agents
such as women's organizations for whom the issue of violence against women had
been the object of attention and mobilization since the Seventies. In December
1997 was the case of Ana Orantes (Altés 1998), the woman who told her story as
a victim of domestic abuse on an Andalusian television channel. A few days later,
she was burned alive by her husband, who she was separated from. This incident,
no more serious than many acts of violence against women before it, became a salutary
lesson that the media slapped on the front page. Some of the media kept featuring
on the issue in the two months following the Orantes story, reporting on new cases
of murdered women. The reasons for this change of direction have to do with the
endogamous nature of the media's news agenda: television offers a woman's live
confession; in doing so, television becomes the source of information so it is able to show a post-produced document
of the real, whose construction and coverage would multiply the effect of “reality.”
It was not an anonymous woman who was killed, but the woman who had appeared on
the small screen. To the extent that she had been socially represented by the
media, she lingered in the media memory far longer than any other kind of structural,
everyday violence. Gender violence as political violence has multiple, heterogeneous
problematics. It includes the physical, sexual and psychological violence that
occurs within the family or any other interpersonal relationship. It also includes
rape, abuse, sexual abuse, sexual harassment in the workplace, educational and/or
public health institutions as well as violence exerted because of the victim's
ethnic group or sexuality; torture, the trafficking of individuals, forced prostitution
and kidnapping, among others. In the media news discourse, the stereotype of the
victim, just as the sexual
stereotype, appear as an overrepresentation of women within gender conflicts.
Women are more personified, more close-up shots are taken of them and they are
more likely to be the focus of sensationalist coverage. As Marian Meyers points
out in her book News Coverage of Violence Against Women, the news is part
of the problem of violence against women if it represents victims as being responsible
for the abuse (Meyers 1997, 117). When the news excuses the aggressor because
“he was obsessed,” “he was in love" or some other such thing; and then it
represents the aggressor as a monster or a psychopath when it report on this situation
of conflict, ignoring the systematic nature of violence against women. In these
cases a norm of visibility of violent acts is established, considered as "natural,"
whereby the public — violence as a reality people suffer from — intermeshes with
the private — the privacy of abused individuals. The story — whether in print,
radio, advertising or television — becomes ostentatious, almost obscene when it
promotes a hypertrophy of listening and watching. The works of Beth B. call into
question this voyeuristic tendency to become fascinated with film and video: Belladona
(1989), for instance, stresses this
fascination by transforming characters into puppets somewhere between fiction
and documentary. Likewise, Sabine Massenet, using the videographic micro-narrations
gathered in Sans titre (2002), revises
the media landscape offered by advertising as a violent object of delight and
consummation. The growing popularity of reality and talk shows and the tendency
of certain television and radio news programs displace the site of gender violence,
inserting it into the lives of those who watch or listen to it as just another
event. However, focusing on the use of physical force overlooks other acts of
violence that we have explored in this project, those acts where physical force
is not used, but social or psychological pressure is imposed: emotional, invisible,
symbolic and economic violence, which cause as many or more damaging effects than
physical violence. These different forms of violence can be seen in the dichotomy
trauma-history and their investigation
in gender studies has allowed them to be identified and tied to cultural and social
norms. Naming forms of violence —- what is not named does not exist — and continuing
to work on symbolic violence is essential so they are given a social and critical
existence and are not reduced to individual and/or coincidental experiences. On
the other hand, omitting them can be understood as a strategy of gender inequality:
if the violence is considered "invisible" or "natural," arbitrary
action is legitimated and justified as usual in the relation between the genders.
Therefore, defining political violence against women involves exposing a multiplicity
of acts, events and omissions that harm them, have damaging effects on various
aspects of their lives and are a violation of their human rights.
Domestic violence in Spain has of late
taken on a greater public dimension than in the past due to the profusion of interpretations
made by different sources; this is what is addressed in the documentaries 10
años con Tamaia by Isabel Coixet (2003); Amores que matan by
Icíar Bollaín (2000); and Empezar de nuevo by Lisa Berger and Claudia
Hosta (2001). A similar situation occurs in Mexico and Latin America, where preventative,
non-punishable laws have proliferated,
although it is the only region in the world with a Convention Against All Forms
of Violence Against Women. This is where the phenomenon of femicide has broken
out, the murder of women for reasons related to their gender. "Femicide is
the most extreme form of violence based on gender inequality,
this being understood as violence exercised by men against women in their desire
to obtain power, domination or control. It includes murders produced by intrafamily
violence and sexual violence. Femicide can take on two forms: private or non-private
femicide.” The experience of working with women
who have suffered from different forms of violence opened up a whole new host
of questions for me. These questions made me realize that the theoretical and
technical tools available to contemplate the forms of political violence were
insufficient in a historical moment in which violence has various presences through
the mass media and especially because the motivation was also going to be centered
on the added value of that media exchange. This is the social
value that symbolic violence exerts on this flow of disorganized codes and messages
that also showed different outcomes, knowing that these experiences and stories
would continue in the production of the “real” (Friedman 2002). I had to include
and articulate the theoretical contributions about memory and trauma, subjective
and technological, in which film narrations, videographic stories and incomplete
stories were presented like an unfinished story via interdisciplinary counterimages
positioned against the overrepresentation that the media focus from a single point
of view. In other words, it is a question of considering other cycles where the
representation of the relations between violence and gender are situated between
the narrative strategies and the telling of the facts via non-fiction storylines.
Regarding this subject, the documentary by Frederick Wiseman, Domestic Violence,
2001; Macho by Lucinda Broadbent, 2000; and the animated documentary
short film Survivors by Sheila M. Sofian, 1997,
explore the cycle of domestic violence in two different societies, the United
States and Nicaragua. These works, which employ documentary strategies, suggest
dynamics of social support via the monitoring of work groups on domestic violence.
The oral source is an excellent access route to notions of collective historical
memory and political culture in the history of the present. Its importance increases
insofar as the recent past has not yet crystallized as autobiographical memory.
The weakness of autobiographical literature to depict the most recent past can
only be supplemented by oral sources. Accessing the autobiographic and collective
experience of a member of a social group or human association in the present depends,
to a large extent, on resorting to the oral source. What's more, it must be taken
into account that generations are more permeable to grafts of historic memory
at the time they are formed, that is, formed as a generational group. That memory
then acts as a form of representation by which an invisibilized collective history
is reconstructed in the circle of blood and shit. Intrafamily violence and childhood
violence are the central themes of the documentary Loud and Clear / Laut und
deutlich by Maria Arlamovsky, 2001. In them, the interview space is
defined as an area of therapy and appropriation of experience through biographic
narration in front of the camera, without showing the dialogue between interviewer
and interviewee. Family and violence, tradition and cultural memory come together
in Jean-Marie Teno's
Le mariage d’Alex, 2002. The dramatic and veiled reality of polygamous
marriage in Cameroon are revealed through a delicate look at the wedding ceremony
and the wedding night. A ritual of customs and rites that speak of submission
and the position of women and men in patriarchal society. Tracey Moffatt also
addressed this situation around 1987 in Nice Coloured Girls, through an
experimental fiction exploring the attitude of urban,
aborigine women in Australia and male supremacy. In this film, Moffatt develops
a postcolonial criticism based on the urban ritual of picking up white men. The
film contrasts the relationships of Aboriginal women with their "colonizers"
some 200 years ago with the attempts of urban Aboriginal women to reverse their
fortunes. Nice Coloured Girls uses the plausible juxtaposition of images
and a voiceover that reads extracts from the diary of a colonizer to question
the representation of the so-called "Aboriginal Cinema." By trying to
avoid a specific narrative style, Moffatt extracts the film account from the realist
tradition of traditional ethnographic documentaries and traditional Australian
Aboriginal plays. Nice Coloured Girls alludes to ethnographic films through
the use of subtitles and avoids the cliché of the so-called realistic reconstructions.
The documentary Señorita extraviada ("Missing Young Woman") by
Lourdes Portillo, (2003) explores a system of gender violence outside the family,
centered on the idea of disappearance. Since the film was shot in 2002, over 100
women have died and the disappearances continue. As a result of the publicity
that the film is starting to get, now the bodies of the disappeared women are
simply not found and both Portillo as well as the organizations involved in this
struggle have received threats. In this sense, gender is a place where — or through
which — power is articulated and as Joan W. Scott proposes, gender is involved
in the actual construction of power (Scott 1992). Señorita
extraviada does not offer solutions, it only presents the facts; it is the
Mexican government that has to provide a solution. Thus, Portillo issues an appeal
to sign a petition to be sent to the president of Mexico and the governor of Chihuahua:
“solve the terrible crimes committed against our women in Ciudad Juárez, which
both levels of the government are avoiding.” The Ciudad Juárez murders are currently
being repeated with identical characteristics in Chihuahua, Nuevo Laredo, Nogales,
Zihuatanejo and Guatemala: non-fiction storylines that keep popping up
in a dramatic way, and which behind these lines you the reader are now interpreting
mark this plot.
In this range
of approaches, the notion of gender (Colaizzi 1990) appeared as a
key element in gender studies, political theory, cultural studies, film narrative,
sociology, studies deriving from communication theory and social education, cultural
anthropology, aesthetic critical theory, post-Western and post-colonial studies,
studies of visual culture and the positions of queer feminist criticism recently
revisited centered on violence.
Failing to take gender into account in the study of political violence is a dead-end
road as today, gender violence continues to be a democratic practice. Gender entails
looking at sexual difference considered as social construction, it means an alternative
interpretation to the essentialist interpretation of feminine and masculine identities.
The concept of gender makes the socio-cultural organization of sexual difference
the central axis of political and economic organization of society. That is, gender
discourses have constructed the various cultural representations that have originated
and reproduced popular archetypes of femininity and masculinity. Over time, these
played an important role in the reproduction and survival of social practices,
beliefs and behavior codes differentiated
according to sex. However, the gender discourse of this new century, despite its
chance to adapt to socio-cultural changes, is still not founded in the principle
of equality. And this inequality is one of the central causes of violence. The
center of the definition of gender will lie in the all-embracing connection of
two propositions: that gender is a constitutive element of social relations based
on the differences perceived between the sexes and that it is a primary way of
representing power relations. In this sense, documentary work during the Eighties
and the Nineties meant exploring the concept of gender. Red Sari by Pratibha
Parmar, 1988, portrays the racial and cultural conflict in Europe's major cities.
On a cultural level, the film offers a post-Colonial reflection of the
murder of the young Kalbinder Kaur Hayre in 1985. Violence against Asian women
in European cities is taken from the public sphere to the private sphere. To do
this, the voiceover is constructed as an intersubjective enunciation of the denouncement
of racism. Unlike approaches about sex that have spread around queer theory, it
is interesting to note that queer feminist texts, in this case explored in Red
Sari, underlines the question of race, gender and class through verbal enunciation,
adopting a poetic register. To do this she constructs a voiceover that acts as
the focus of the account of violence, showing that representation of violence
comes from both gender and social conflict, and in this case race conflict as
well. In the Nineties, he director Pratibha Parmar adapted, using documentary
forms, Alice Walker's novel Possessing the Secret of Joy. This film, Warrior
Marks, 1993, examines female genital mutilation without presenting the women
as victims, but as strong fighters who have managed to survive and keep surviving despite
the mutilation of their bodies, articulating ways of fighting against imposed
tradition. Warrior Marks tries to draw attention to the cultural and political
complexities surrounding this subject. Through interviews with women from Senegal,
Gambia, Burkina Faso, the United States and England who have suffered genital
mutilation, Parmar tries to show her personal vision of this situation in terms
of a conflict that remains unresolved, as shown in the recent Kim Longinotto film
The Day I Will Never Forget You,
2002. The concept of “violence” indicates a way of proceeding that offends
and harms someone though the exclusive or excessive use of force. Violence comes
from vis, force, an etymological origin shared by the worlds “violent"
and “violently.” “Violate” means to exercise violence upon someone to overcome
their resistance; to force them to do something that they do not wish to do. Real
violence, then, acquires, in postmodern cinema, forms of representation that lead
to the violence being represented as a code transferable to diverse images, from
big-screen cinema to television hyperreality, interactive video games and even
Internet hyperlinks. The impact of information and communication technology on social realities
are folds in the relations between violence, gender and power, violent behavior,
just as the treatment that the media gives violence and gender relations involves
a structure of rules. We wish to fulfill the task of intervening in the social
debate, questioning apparent certainties about the relation between the media
and violence, when the political and journalistic discourses have concealed one
of the social problems closest to everyday violence. The realm of the symbolic
and the relation between real and represented violence serve as a connection to
Ursula Biemann in Writing Desire, 2000.
This videographic essay on the ideal screen of the Internet shows the global circulation
of bodies from the Third World to the First World. The emergence of new technologies
and with them, Internet, has accelerated these transactions. Biemann proposes
a reflection on the political, economic, and gender inequalities
obvious in these exchanges, simulating the gaze of one looks for a docile, traditional,
pre-feminist partner on the Internet, the observer's implication in a new voyeurism
replete with sexual consumption. The documentary forms of the last decade of Post-Vérité
are defined as a site of conflict, which have correctly shown two mutually exclusive
questions: that the ambition driving the documentary is that of finding a way
to reproduce reality without detours or manipulations, and that this pursuit of
a non-adulterated reality is useless. Not only in recent years, but throughout
history, the task of formulating ideas, values, symbols, metaphors and rhetoric,
the task of appropriating reality —both on the imaginary and symbolic level as
well as on the practical and emotional level — is tied to a more violent, traumatic,
and long-lasting task, many times invisible and unrepresentable as social psychologist
point out, which is that of disciplining: the production of sensual-sexual features,
the production of the necessary bodies-spaces, the amnesias, the fears, in short
the historical production of human bodies, which enables us to speak of the production
of sensibilities and aesthetics — the colonial aesthetic, modern aesthetic, revolutionary
aesthetic, neoliberal aesthetic. With this in mind, we adopt the reflection posed
by Hito Steyerl in her text Documentarism as Politics of Truth.
That is, the documentary, in its role of structuring and intervening in the
social sphere adopts biopolitical tasks (Steyerl 2003). Thus, action through symbolic
products can be essentially developed in the terrain of culture, and this is where
mechanisms of diffusion will have to be constructed that allow a new way of seeing
and contribute to revealing the deceits of media hegemony. Documentary forms in
a context like Spain have to assume the function of biopolitical governmentality
which Steyerl situates in representation, a task which should not exclusively
be assigned to the mass media, since artistic practices and ways of doing things
are a space of symbolic exchange, proliferation
of representations and production of knowledge.
The prehistory of this book is linked
to optimism. Faced with the bibliographical poverty that characterizes the Spanish
analysis of violence and its representation,
we have avoided the temptation to publish pioneer works that wind up becoming
definitive. Instead, we have opted to expose the gaps so others may fill them,
if they so desire. This has been our objective: to present the reader, on one
hand, with previously unpublished texts, and on the other hand, texts written
specifically for publication in Spain, Latin America, North American and Europe,
with the common denominator being the notion of symbolic representation and construction
of visual culture. We hope that this publication will be of use to those who work
to eradicate violence in post-industrial societies, and that its intellectual
perspective keeps it fresh over time. At the same time, we also hope that the
project has generally been aware of its limitations and has not pretended to bring
a recently-initiated journey to an artificial end. We have begun a story with
many sequences that have remained, although filmed, off-screen: the records and
counternarrations of video, the testimonies, the trauma, the causes, possible
ways out of this cycle of gender violence that is part of many women's lives,
the anonymous faces in the media that is plagued with cold and equally anonymous
numbers, and the desire to name the variants of gender violence as a way of making
the quotidian visible since, as Ana Navarrete put it in her text about the counterhistory
of artistic practices: This funeral is for many dead women.
Virginia Villaplana Ruiz
Mass media researcher and writer. Associate
Professor of Audiovisual Communication (UCH, Valencia). She has curated various
film and video cycles on gender and culture: Le détournement des technologies,
Constantvz, Laurence Rassel, Brussels, 2002; Miradas transversales al género,
Ecosofías, Madrid, 2000; Amores y deseos, Granada
Council and the Women's Assembly of Granada, 2003; Just do it and RealTV
with El Sueño Colectivo for the International Women's Film Fest of Barcelona,
2003-2004. From 1992-2001 she was the editorial coordinator of Ediciones de la
Mirada publishers and the magazine Banda Aparte, formas de ver.
She has published the book 24 Contratiempos and several texts in books
of essays such as Actos de escritura: género, narración e hipertextualidad,
Trompe la Mémoire. Historia y Visualidad, Cultura electrónica,
El
cine de Marguerite Duras, Chris
Marker. Retorno a la inmemoria, Historias sin argumentos,
El cine imposible, Un
minuto para una imagen televisiva. Agnès Varda
and El discurso televisivo de la violencia. She
has also received the following writing awards: the XV Alfons Roig Essay Prize (1998) and the Espais
Prize with Sueño Colectivo, RealTV, Gerona (2004). In audiovisual production she has directed the following
experimental documentaries, among others: Daydream Mechanics, Tras las
fronteras, Stop Transit, Anonymous Film Portrait, NUIT and
Doble Escenario.
Bibliographical
references
BOURDIEU, Pierre. Masculine
Domination. (Trans. by Richard Nice)
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001.
braidotti, Rosi. Nomad subjects: Embodiment and Sexual
Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994
Colaizzi,
Giulia
(ed.). Feminismo y Teoría del Discurso. Madrid: Cátedra, 1990.
FERNÁNDEZ DÍAZ, Natalia. La violencia
sexual y su representación en la prensa. Barcelona: Anthropos, Colección cultura
y diferencia, 2003.
FRIEDMAN, James.
Reality Squared. Televisual Discourse on the Real. London: Rutgers University
Press, 2002.
GAINE,
Jane M. and Michael RENOV (editors). Collecting Visible Evidence. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
HERMAN,
Judith. Trauma and Recovery:
The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York:
Basic Books, 1999.
Kaplan, Laurie. Over the Top in the Aftermath of The Great
War. Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2001.
Knight, Julia. Women and the New German Cinema. London: Verso,
1992.
LÓPEZ DÍEZ, Pilar. Representación
de género en los informativos de radio y televisión. Madrid: RTVE e Instituto
de la Mujer, 2002.
McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television.
Visual culture and public space. London: Duke University Press, 2001.
RUSSELL, Diana
and Jill RADFORD. Femicide: the Politics of Woman Killing. New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1992.
This notion
is further explored and revised by the author in her text “Afterthought on Visual
Pleasure” in Visual and Other Pleasures, London, Macmillan, 1989.
This
perspective in critical literary theory has been developed by Kaplan 2001. See also Herman 1999 and the text Captivity in this
publication.
This conceptual contribution has been made by the authors
Russell and Radford 1992, 42.
See also by the same author: Feminists Theorize the Political (edited by Judith Butler.) New York: Routledge,1992.
Schools of Thought: Twenty-five Years of
Interpretive Social Science (edited by Debra Keates), Princeton University
Press, 2001.
See the following edited volumes by this same theorist and professor:
Colaizzi, Giulia (ed.) (1995), Feminismo
y Teoría fílmica Valencia: Ed. Episteme. Lectora: Revista de dones i textualitat
7: Dones i Cinema, ed. by Giulia Colaizzi. Universitat de Barcelona: Centre
Dona i Literatura, 2001.