Well, have you seen the film? Maybe it's reactionary or simplistic to say, "Let the images speak for themselves," but I still find myself sympathetic to this argument. Whether you're for or against something - at least have the intellectual honesty to really understand what you're talking about before coming to judgment. And by understand, I really mean seeing - in the same sense that one intellectually understands their mortality always, but may not truly feel it viscerally until looking at, for instance, Brakhage's film on autopsy. It's a matter of confronting things, not falling prey to some notion of 'tact' which is already ideology.tavernier wrote:You can show the procedure without literally rubbing our noses in it. Bringing the pan filled with the remains up to the camera as the doctor splashes around in the bloody muck and we see a tiny shriveled arm or part of the head with two tiny eyes might be dramatic, but it's also unnecessary.
We get the point.
To raise another example, it's often been remarked that Frederick Wiseman's films are on some level enormously, gallingly tactless - and they're all the better for it, in my opinion. They capture more of what it is to be human, they give us a better picture of society and life in our times by deliberately showing us things that 'good taste' would seek to hide.
Just intuitively, I suspect the film won't be any great work of art, but that's separate from arguing whether or not certain images should or should not be seen. Of course they are emotionally loaded - the whole issue is, and I'm sure that's a large part of what the film is about. Maybe we should see the aftermath of an abortion clinic bombing in equally painful detail. That would be honest, too.
