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PLEASURE, PERVERSION AND
DEATH |
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3.0 |
3.7 The Sacrificial Face
The face in filmed death, especially in the forced ‘hand held’ shaky look of mondo films, is often fleeting or obscured, escaping the audience and close examination. A photographed face, in a forensic text or a film like Death Scenes (Nick Bougas, US, 1989) becomes the image alone, without even background to dilute the staring visage. A major and completely horrific exception is the final scene in the mondo documentary film Executions (also an exception because the filmmakers David Herman, Arun Kumar and David Monaghan are from Britain, a rare source of mondo film making). A Lebanese man is beaten and persecuted by members of his town, and then shot in the face. With his face spliced in two, and a section blown away, the man is given a single (camera) shot close up in which to die. He now looks monstrous, yet he still breathes in massive gasps, his eyes are not quite shut, and it takes approximately one and a half minutes of this close up for him to die. It is one of the single most horrific scenes in any film. This is due to its contextualization as ‘real’, due to its shameless single close-up shot (which resembles photography), due to the fact that the man looks as if he should be dead. The audience wants him dead because they do not want to look at his death or at the broken mess of his face. Once again the importance of this shot as representing death is in the ethnicity of the man. The majority of images sending a moral message against the barbarity of capital punishment in Executions occur within such an ‘ethnic’ context. The barbarity of death is seen as inextricable from the supposed barbarity of other races. The audience witnesses the diminishment of life and is made monster for their feelings of disgust at the way the man looks despite the fact that he is dying. (This film is available at most video stores in Australia, though its banning was attempted when it was first released straight-to-video in 1995.) Griggers locates the purpose of the sacrificial face as the opposite of the despotic face discussed earlier:
The social function of the sacrifice is to keep violence appropriately contained within the margins of the majoritarian social body… Whereas the despotic face incarnates difference as sameness, the face of the sacrifice incarnates difference as difference… the body of the sacrifice by definition is perpetually losing face - undergoing a process of effacement, a trial of humiliation, exile or victimization… [99]
Nowhere is this literal loss of face more evident than in the final Executions scene. Binarily opposed to the majoritarian despotic (white) face in forensic textbooks which apparently represents ‘us’, (which especially in Australia, conceals such social problems as Aboriginal deaths in custody, sexual violence against women and police violence towards minorities) the sacrificial face represents the majoritarian inability to ever be or become other. It is for this reason that improper use of forensic textbooks, looking for interest rather than for learning, is frowned upon, yet watching the supposedly didactic scene from Executions is made available for all video store patrons. The dying man in the scene literally loses the face that in a lesser manner was already lost in his de-contextualization in a mondo film as permanent and irrefutable other. In terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s facialization machine, the broken, shot face of the execution victim represents a corporeal reality in extreme what the face that does not ‘pass’ already represented in signification. Breaking the face to reveal flesh and a torso-like quality of gore in the racially other does not break its flow of signification as does the breaking of the white majoritarian face, where subject is transformed into meat. Through the presentation of such ethnic alterity as already meat, interchangeable with slaughtered beasts, this face becomes a spectacle of fascination rather than the despotic potential dead self of forensic textbooks.
Even in less ethnographic mondo films, the racially minoritarian sacrifice appears. The Killing of America, in many respects worthy of Kerekes and Slater’s judgement as “a superior production”, [100] exhibits as one of its most disturbing scenes, the murder by General Loan of a Vietnamese ‘protester’. Many of the scenes of ‘white death’ in The Killing of America are still photographs, such as the suicide who split his head in half with a shotgun held between his knees. But the live action footage of the Vietnamese protester (who goes nameless) being shot in the head, spurting blood and collapsing on the road to die, remains the most shocking scene. This murder, shown on American television in 1968, is ascribed to General Loan who is also Vietnamese. The horror of this sequence is set up to evince the brutality of even the American-sided Asian, who cannot be trusted to find the other in the face of his own. Even to a Vietnamese the suspected VC ‘looks the same as all the other Viets’; hence General Loan places a VC armband on the corpse. The armband places the protester as ‘unfacializable’ within a majoritarian context – he must be sacrificed so the becoming-American executioner is not. The armband is placed on the dead protester, the image rendered forensic, majoritarian knowledge of the truth the body is had and the political spatializing of the body stands in for the impossibility of this Vietnamese face ever ‘passing’. [101] The majoritarian facial machine, while orchestrating everything in this scene, is responsible for nothing except the perpetration of the myth of savages killing their own. While General Loan violently and literally flies in the face of his victim, the majoritarian viewer, supporting the majoritarian war, sees nothing of his own face in the scene while his facial machine territorializes every moment.
The face in film and photography, be it real or performed, does not represent ‘us’ in an identificatory way. It is that which allows the possibility of us, through racial and sexual alterity but also through the alterity of death and pain. In horror images the pain and destruction of the face, although diametrically opposed to the gore of the torso, is that which tells us, not only what has occurred, but also what enables the human to exist before death eradicates the flesh. Yet the face presents the opposite of humanity, it presents the flesh forced into symbolization and socialization. Death and pain, as well as racial and sexual alterity are presented in faciality then not as differentiating from the human, but from the social majoritarian, and from society itself. “A horror story, the face is a horror story” according to Deleuze and Guattari [102] which may be the reason why the horrors of forced alterity and violence toward the other and towards the self are found so readily in the significations of faciality. The horror story face could instigate our propulsion into becoming-probe-head.