Reaction and notes on Berger and Sontag

Excuse me if everything I write from here forward is bitter and well... generally downbeat in mood. My girlfriend of 6 months broke up with me. And we need to remain best friends. And it helps as much as it hurts. Whatever, now's not the time.

What I think about Berger:

Berger suggests that women are objectified, in the sense that they are an exercise in aesthetic pleasure and revered for those qualities. Of the first four images, two of them depict women who are explicitly being watched, reinforcing the fact that they are, in a vulgarmost sense, art. Their qualities fit a narrow criterium of art, in that they take on certain aesthetic forms and qualities, i.e. shape and beauty. Though a stretch, they are "art." The second two-page spread takes this suggestion to the extreme, encapsulating various forms of nudes over the ages. From right to left we see examples of classical, modernist, and impressionistic pieces that depict the same thing with the same exigencies: naked women unaware they are being observed. Is this voyeurism or the highest expression of what is deemed most beautiful, the female figure? The photographs suggest the former, in that they are pornographic and overtly sexual in the sense that we are most used to as members of a relatively hypersexualized culture. Could the other pieces, especially the more life-like, be deemed pornography for the 18th and 19th century? Probably. But these were considered high art and a component of high culture of the time, not something that would be put into a centerfold, or more appropriately for the era, a tawdry woodblock cutting.

The last two sets of photographs completely scrap whatever that idea held, revering the female figure for cruder purposes. It's too irresistable to say that "sex sells," because it does. And sex sells for sex's sake, the products depicted in the third set in particular suggest that you too can be pretty and looked at in an overtly sexual manner if you wear our stockings, our cosmetics, our spray deodorant. The depictions of women in sexually suggestive poses would belong in pornographic print if not for a few key pieces of clothing and their obvious target demographic of women who read fashion magazines. The last has an even more completely different message, in that women are narcissistic and hold themselves and their beauty far and above any ideal, simply for the sake of beauty. I can't really assume much about the classical depiction of some religious or mythological allusion, but I'll just assume it fits in with the photo of the woman being photographed, the final remark on male society's reverence for femaleness and female willingness to self-debasement.

Yes, that was bitter. The "sex sells" part is probably true of all of these paintings. Except maybe the impressionistic or modern pieces, all of these had some sort of financial exigency, some artist was commissioned, some designer salaried, all to profit off the image of women, and to appeal to the proponents of what was and stilll is male-dominated, misogynistic culture. We would really have to ask the painter, the sculptor what their original intent was, but it is safe and convenient to assume the most nefarious of purposes.

What differentiates Berger's second and third essays are words on a superficial level, but meaning on a deeper one. The sum of the uncaptioned images is explicit in the differing ways we've seen women in history. Berger then extends the montage by filling in the blanks with his second essay, addressing a lot of the issues with how the images depict vanity, express the power struggle between genders, and in particular how the works address the audience. It is completely different to step back as a casual observer, as it is to step back as a 14-19th century nobleman and see a painting you've commissioned, obstensibly for your pleasure or sexual gratification. It is not enough to be male in a lopsided world, you have to be reminded you're a male, as if your gender will change without this constant bombardment.

Thus, regarding his statement that "men act, women appear," I believe this is true for the time it was written or for the time of the pieces depicted, and the realist in me must accept the fact that this is still true. The time of high art is dead. There are no classical depictions of recumbent nudes, but in its place, a series of well-shot black and white photographs of nearly-nude, skeletal women inside Vogue. The female body has been usurped to sell fashion or diet cola, whatever kids and not-kids today wear and drink. We do not support realistic views of femininity in the media, we have lost the concept of the ideal woman. She has lost an unhealthy amount of weight and in the next fifteen to thirty years will be dead or the width of toothpick.

It is thus more ethical to represent someone realistically, in an unadultured fashion. Some women are models. Most women aren't. One could choose either to represent and follow around with a camera, but it is more likely going to be one who isn't. Because models are merely figments of our imagination, they're not real. In a similar vein, politicians are people too, just people with sexual deviancies and poor voting records in regards to subsidizing beet farmers. I'm sure they've done good things too, like help a child to read or saving kittens from trees. The latter things are left unnoticed, and are by necessity, not a good thing to include in something negatively subjective. Thus, objectivity is reality. Objectivity is balance. An ethical consideration of anything regards both sides of an argument or situation, and leaves the opinions of the filmmaker or artist out of the picture.

One can too easily distort the message of raw, unedited footage. For example, I took a lot of shots of the Pro-chief rally the monday after the Board of Trustees announcement. A lot of people were there in their orange shirts and hats and signs. I depicted the speakers, I depicted the crowd swaying back and forth while singing the alma mater, I depicted the crowd chanting "save the chief" ad infinitum. I also captured the tv film crews that were there, and the exchange of money for Chief T-shirts. I could have spliced those images in between any of the former images and create a false context, like how the pro-Chief movement is motivated to keep selling an image and profit from his demise, or how Paul Schmitt, the leader of Students for the Chief is media-hungry and wants to use airtime to help his student trustee campaign. I could have done a lot of things. They could have been real, they could have not been, but they're all distortions of the truth. In an objective reality, one avoids commentary and biased narrative and lets the film or artwork actually speak for itself.

What I think about Sontag:

In choosing images that depict warfare, it is important they reflect an neutral agenda. This is, however, impossible. There is no neutral agenda. There is neutrality, but that doesn't sell. Christian Science Monitor does neutrality, as a newsource that is not backed by a major media conglomeration. How they choose images, however, I'm unaware of. Ideally, you don't want images that depict the process of death, like from a gunshot wound or a mortar blast. Body parts and blood in animation are no-no, especially in our sanitized, sensitized world. There's a certain level of gross bodily disfiguration that is not acceptable. Obviously, it's unsafe to capture images of war as it happens, it's always the aftermath or a talking head speaking about an event. One would want to be able to sit a child down and explain what is happening in a frank manner so as not to disturb a child. It is not appropriate ever to sanitize images, like discolor blood so it is less apparent, or crop dead bodies from a photograph. This kind of adultery is avoided online where images are disseminated rapidly and without censorship.

I believe we are desensitized to images of war because of their omnipresence, but we do not see what real carnage is. Real carnage is what happens to those who do not fight. They lose limbs, they lose their skin to third-degree burns, they lose family members, they lose houses. We do not see these. We do not want to see these. We want to see headshots of recently fallen soldiers, as Jim Lehrer does every night on the NewsHour. We see the faces of those who have fallen, but not their faces as they have fallen. We are desensitized to the memory of dead but have no real conception of what goes on during a war besides the exchange of fire and the dropping of bombs. What we gain from this is a lack of appreciation for the gravity of the situation, and an expected reverence for those slain servicemen and servicewomen. If they did show the realities of war, we would have completely different reactions, like disgust or anger or maybe indifference. It is a moot point, however, because of this sanitization.

We have thus far not finished Iraq Stories, but overall it is successful in that it is not a major, mainstream depiction of what the war is. The film is mainly about people, in my opinion, and their stories, rather than groups of people or rulings or geopolitical struggles. It is simply about people. There's a certain veracity in the images, like the images Sontag menttioned in Krieg Dem Kriege, they tell the truth, and a not a propagandistic message. What there is to Iraq Stories is this truth, the Jordanian Armor-plated SUV driver, the American soldier who installed an xbox in the barracks, the old Kurdish woman speaking praises of George Bush. These were all new to me when I saw them. I had no idea how controlled and stable Iraq was, and how backwards it is now because of the war. One could derive a negative meaning from the film, like how our intrusion resulted in a lot of unrepaired damage and disorder, but at the same time some semblance of hope within certain people. Before I pass holistic criticism on the film, I would need to watch it in entirety.

I think embedding journalists is a great idea, in theory. Geraldo Rivera kind of screwed that one up, showing troop positions and potentially giving them away to the enemy. I doubt, however, that an entrenched Iraqi soldier would have gotten CNN or Fox News to have much of an effect on the battlefield. In practice, it is necessary. It is necessary and it is right as an American citizen to see exactly what is going on before one passes premature judgement on a situation. It is also a method of independent oversight. There will always be some discrepency between what the top brass reports and what a journalist would. They both reflect seperate agendas. Nevertheless, it is important as a tax payer to see exactly what your portion of the billion or so dollars is going towards. The problem with embedded journalists, however, is that they are limited just to combat, not like Iraq Stories where the filmmaker hoofed it around the country and didn't attach himself to a unit. This provides for more balance and more exposure to something we might not otherwise see.

...Okay, this is where I rip into Iraq days after having seen it in entirety. Yes, the approach is great, and frankly the images we saw we probably hadn't seen, but I can't get the feeling that it does offer the viewer a clear bias, that we're screwing up in there and not taking things with grains of salt, and I can only assume that's the same case four years later. Which is unfortunate, but in our mindset, we should be depicting things without adding our bits of commentary. We should be doing what Fox News advertises, reporting and letting the viewer decide. Evidently his work led up to a conclusion which we can't fault him on for coming to, but rather for presenting it in the way he did. You have to give him props for doing something so brash and idiotic like embedding himself in an armored patrol and getting ordinance certified, that takes cajones which I can say I don't have. I like my life, and I'm sure he likes his, but he values the art that comes out of a bad situation and shared with us what he saw, but unfortunately also how he saw it.