Struggle for Exculpation After Apathy Towards the Tracking Shot in Kapo

Daney have already broken up with me: “I would definitely have nothing to do, nothing to share with anybody who wasn’t immediately upset by the abjection of ‘the tracking shot in Kapo’ “.

Before watching the scene, I was unaware of this divorce that was foreseen by Daney; even the quoted sentence did not take my attention at the first reading. The article was totally clear and agreeable for me with the images that I constructed in my mind of the tracking shot. I could no more agree with Daney on his uneasiness towards the “way of adding an extra parasitic beauty or complicit information to scenes that did not need it”. Such pornography was something that I was familiar and uncomfortable with.

The problem of me emerged after the screening of the scene at the class: I was not at all stroke by what I saw and I eventually got confused about what I had read. Now, I, as someone who is out of the profession of film-making, was convinced that it was my unfortunate illiteracy and/or, somehow, my dreadful insensitivity against the genocide to be not “immediately upset” by the scene in question. Yes, I seem to have taken it personal.

The struggle than began. I watched the scene over and over again. I read “On Abjection” of Rivette (can be retrieved from http://www.dvdbeaver.com/rivette/OK/abjection.html) and the article of Daney one more time.
The scene did not strike me in any of the consequent watches. It is not that the scene, for me, was beautiful or impressive. I, without enough knowledge on the techniques of film-making, could agree upon its vulgarity. Being able to differentiate the tracking shot in the scene, I could also consider the absurdity of the shot, because, I could not see the use of it as it seemed to be an excessive attempt to emphasize the death of the woman which was probably already grasped by the audience. Still, this shot was only an unnecessary or an inferior one for me; it was not a pornographic one that deserved such fevered attacks.

Perhaps, such a horror did really become a “part of the mental landscape of modern man” as Rivette claimed. Abasement accepted.

Watching Nuit et brouillard, which was compared to Kapo in the articles of Rivette and Daney, did not ease my confusion. I was certainly disturbed by and terrified of the history. In the film, the documented reality was so ugly that I find it hard to approach and discuss such documentation as an artifact. If the problem in consideration here is, as far as I understand, showing too much of death or aestheticizing death, then, I do question the showing of the vicious pauses on the open eyes of dead men in Nuit et brouillard. Why did not Resnais insisted on showing the scenes that concentrated on the eyes of the dead? Is this because the film judged not only the slaughter but also the coldblooded recording of it? Could be.

Then, is the issue the difference between showing the reality and narrating related to a reality? Perhaps, an emphasize on the spectacle of a dead wo/man in a documentary has its ground on reality which makes the scene reasonable (after all, the showing of such a harsh reality can not be worse than the reality itself), whereas in a fiction, in which everything is in the hands of the film maker, it is objected for redundantly aestheticizing death. Roughly, in the documentary the killer is someone else, whereas in the fiction the killer becomes the film-maker. What is the significance of Kapo? It seems to me that if the fiction is grounded on a historical reality, then aestheticization is perceived as being insensitive to the reality- the criticism targets at not only her/his artistic abilities but also her/his humanitarian side.

Being well aware of its irrelevancy to the discussion, I can not help questioning the screening of Nuit et brouillard at a middle school…

No conclusion. It is just me trying to understand what I read and watched and to exculpate myself.

Segah Sak