From Word To Word

Many documentaries, because of the subjects that they address, are faced with the question of how to represent the image of death in film, of how to do justice to the image of death without reducing it to an object of mere voyeurism.

I first encountered this problem in Seeing is Believing, by Peter Wintonick and Katerina Cizek, where the filmmakers were faced with the question of how to include images of a man who had been shot in the thigh and who was rapidly bleeding to death. If they showed him actually expiring in the film, how would they avoid turning the scene into a snuff video, into an exercise of fetishism and voyeurism? Their solution was to fade away from the wounded man just before the moment of his death and then to fade back to him afterward, but I am not certain that this approach is all that effective, since it still makes a fetish of the moment and the image of death, only in reverse. It refuses to show the moment of death, but only in such a way that draws attention precisely to this absence. It occludes the voyeuristic gaze of the viewer, but only in order to arrest and fix this gaze on what has been occluded.

There is a similar moment in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. The film’s protagonist and a friend have gone into the wilderness to live among the grizzlies, and they have been attacked and killed by one of the bears. Their video camera happens to be running at the time, and though it is thrown aside so that there are no images of their deaths, the camera still captures an audio record of the attack. When Herzog is presented with this audio, he appears on camera and explicitly raises the question of whether to play it for his viewers. The film then shows him listening to the audio through earphones, so that the viewers cannot listen themselves but can only watch Herzog listening to it, and then the filmmaker declares that he will not include it in the film, having piqued and then disappointed his viewers’ interest. Here, again, the moment of death is omitted, but only in such a way as to fetishise it more entirely.

Spike Lee’s Four Little Girls, which I screened at this past Saturday’s Dinner and a Doc, faces a similar problem, but its solution is different and, in my estimation, more proper. The majority of the film is composed of interviews with the family members of the four young girls who were killed in a church bombing during the civil rights movement, with prominent civil rights activists who were operating in the area at the time, and with other celebrities. Lee inserts into these interviews the period footage that is relevant to them, and there comes a time when the interviews begin to discuss the physical condition of the girls when they were found dead, the wounds that they had sustained, and the process of preparing them for their funerals. The period footage that would be relevant to this discussion, however, raises once again the question of how to employ images of death. Would it be right to avoid these images entirely? Would this be a failure to confront the horror of the acts that were perpetrated? On the other hand, would it be any more right to put the images of these broken bodies on the screen as objects for the fetishising gaze of strangers?

Lee addresses this problem by including photos of the dead girls, but only very briefly. The images are introduced hardly long enough for the viewers to register what they are before the film returns to the person being interviewed. Rather than showing everything but death, and thereby fetishising death all the more, Lee shows death in a way that refuses to make it into an object of voyeurism. His approach does not shy away from the fact that these girls were broken and killed, but it refuses to dwell on this, refuses to let its viewers dwell on this, and chooses instead to emphasize how the girls are remembered by their families and friends and how they influenced the growing civil rights movement.

This, to me, is a more profound understanding of death, one that refuses either to avoid or to fetishize it, but that chooses instead to put death in its proper place in relation to the life that it follows and the memories that it precedes.