Speak, image

timturner — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:12:31 +0000

Manohla Dargis just published her NYT review of Lake of Fire, a new documentary directed by Tony Kaye about the "abortion wars" in the U.S. (Kaye is probably most famous as the director of American History X.) Apparently, Kaye has been making this film for over sixteen years, and the duration of his effort may show in the length of the film, which clocks in at 152 minutes.

In her review, Dargis reflects on the film's use of 35mm film ("disquietingly beautiful"), black-and-white ("too much red might well have sent audiences fleeing from theaters"), and its use of graphic images. Of the latter, Dargis writes, "My initial and admittedly angry first thought about these images was that the director, Tony Kaye, was just resorting to shock tactics. The film doesn't employ narration or on-screen texts that reveal his views on abortion; instead, there are 152 minutes of talking-head testimonials, on-the-street interviews and archival and new visuals. This means that you have to pay extra-special attention to his filmmaking choices, to the way he juxtaposes sights and sounds and who gets to speak and when."

Dargis's review, and presumably the film itself, highlight the central role images have played in the abortion debate; as she puts it, "one lesson of Lake of Fire is the galvanizing power of the visual image." At UT, this issue came to the fore when a pro-life group erected some large signs with images of aborted fetuses in a "free-speech" zone on campus. (You can read more about that event here.) As students involved in that first display put it, "The images depict the act, and if you don't like the images, maybe you need to rethink the act." Or, as another student put it, "It kind of gives you the reality which you don't get to see...The images speak for themselves."

But of course, in the particular display at issue here, the images were not permitted "to speak for themselves": "One panel in the display likened abortion to genocide, showing an aborted fetus under pictures of the Holocaust, Native-American slaughter, the Cambodian genocide and lynchings of African-Americans." These juxtapositions indicate part of what is specious about the logic of arguments along the lines of "let the images speak for themselves," but Dargis's review does a good job of being honest about, from a pro-choice perspective, a fear that this might be true. As she writes, "Not everyone will agree about the abortion visuals, including, perhaps, those who worry that such explicit imagery can speak louder than any pro-abortion rights argument."

So, finally, she concludes that "One lesson of Lake of Fire is the galvanizing power of the visual image. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes pictures are not enough." She then explains the context of a famous image of a women who died in a motel room after a botched abortion in the days before it was legal. "Before she was a symbol," Dargis argues, "she was a person." Is she concluding that pro-life images need no explanation, while pro-choice images do?

viz. - social issues

Speak, image