Film and Ethics

Foreclosed Encounters

Lisa Downing, Libby Saxton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135231996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Film & Ethics considers a range of films and texts of film criticism alongside disparate philosophical discourses of ethics by Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Lacanian psychoanalysts and postmodern theorists.

Section 1
Introduction to Section 1

Representation and spectatorship

Perhaps the most obvious way of thinking about the ethical in film is to consider representations of agents facing ethical dilemmas on screen. The most popular forms of film recurrently stage battles between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ or virtue and vice. Many Hollywood narratives, regardless of genre, inscribe themselves within a moral framework in which virtue often manifests as self-sacrifice for the greater good. An obvious example is the denouement of Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942), in which the protagonist chooses duty to the ideal of democracy over the personal aims of romantic love and desire. The emphasis on self-sacrifice is recognizable as an inheritance of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which is more explicitly evoked in films such as the theological thriller The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), in which good and evil are not metaphorized, but theological absolutes.

Self-sacrifice is often represented alongside other traditional virtues, including courage, loyalty and wisdom. Dominant forms of narrative film typically present us with a hero who embarks upon a quest which is coded as moral, in the course of which he is called upon to display these virtues. In the introduction, we made mention of Kupfer’s Visions of Virtue as a work which deals directly with such moral protagonists. As well as the reservations we expressed there concerning his conception of a unified subject, a further problem with Kupfer’s application of ‘virtue theory’ to film is its tendency to elide the differences between real and represented agents. It ignores the specificity of the filmic medium and the ways in which the apparatus manipulates and conditions our responses to the hero’s actions. In classical Hollywood cinema, the agent embodying the role of ‘hero’ is typically a straight, white man. Criticism such as Kupfer’s does nothing to dispel the myth of neutrality contained within the model of the universal subject proposed by humanism (oft deconstructed by feminist, queer and postcolonial theory). Kupfer’s account exemplifies the danger of ethical theory without sensitivity to the politics of identity. With one exception, the agents of virtue he discusses are white males, the nuclear family and a heterosexual couple.

Certain recent films have explored what happens to the moral structure defined above when the ‘hero’ figure, or the focus of our identification, has a different identity. This moves us properly from the concerns of ‘virtue theory’ into the realm of the ethico-political, and from the universal self to plural subjects whose differences are foregrounded. When women and members of ethnic and sexual minority groups occupy the role traditionally allotted to the male hero of the moral quest or dilemma, the narrative implicitly affirms this sensitivity to difference. The question of positive representation is at stake here.

The kind of sensitivity to difference to which ideas of positive representation appeal – often pejoratively labeled ‘political correctness’–would be anathema to an anti-humanist philosopher such as Badiou, who calls such discourses ‘“ethical” ideology’ to distinguish them from a search for ‘truth’. However, what Badiou overlooks is that certain strands within feminist, queer and postcolonial thought self-reflexively problematize the reification of identity and resist the solidification of political impulses into ethical ideology. Moreover, Badiou’s strategic attempt to recuperate the category of the universal as an alternative to both neoliberal discourses of tolerance and the ‘ethics of otherness’ exemplified by Levinas, may be premature. It runs the risk of assuming that the work these strands of thought and politics need to do to highlight real instances of oppression has already been done, and that we are thereby in a position to consider them obsolete and abandon them. Recognition of the necessity of this work is reflected in the structure of this book. Before moving on to a consideration of such radical refusals of commonsense notions of ethics, we need to interrogate the potential of representational ethics and identity politics. This will also involve examining their own points of resistance to categories of identity, as found in ‘queer’ and in deconstructive strands of feminism and postcolonial theory.

Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate that, in order to think through these questions of identity and representation, it is essential to take account of the registers into which cinema translates power relations. This is to avoid the pitfalls of reflection theory and its assumption of the possibility of straightforward mimetic replication of social reality. These registers include the manipulation of generic and narrative codes, the organization of cinematic space (how our attention is directed to certain characters or objects through their positioning within the field of vision), the ascription of optical and figural point of view to a given character, and the means of spectatorial position. More generally, we argue that any formal decision (e.g. a fixed camera, a tracking shot, or a cut) functions as an imprint of the film’s ethical valences. If we accept that filmmaking takes place in the realm of the ethical since these decisions involve a negotiation between desire and responsibility, as argued in the introduction, then every aesthetic decision has an ethical dimension.

Certain types of shot carry very obvious ethical implications, e.g. the closing shot of It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1947), where the camera homes in to frame the couple and their child, thereby re-establishing the film’s family values that had been temporarily threatened in the course of the narrative. In other cases, a normative moral message can be subversively undermined by a formal decision, as discussed in several chapters of this book. Other forms of shot that appear neutral, however, must also be understood to reflect an ethical perspective. The apparent neutrality of the camera does not necessarily imply moral indifference or the absence of any ethical position. For example, filming an act of violence from a fixed, seemingly objective, point of view (as in the rape scene of Irréversible, Gaspar Noé, 2002 or the suicide scene of Caché, Michael Haneke, 2005) may be a means of disorienting the viewer rather than indicating indifference to or complicity with the event. Such instances produce moments of ethical ambiguity, as witnessed by ongoing critical debates about the significance of these scenes. The camera refuses to inscribe a moral perspective or offer a prescription of appropriate spectator response. In certain cases, there may in fact be a moral perspective offered on the event, but it is communicated through cinematic means other than camerawork. In one scene of Code inconnu (Code Unknown, Haneke, 2001), for example, the apparent objectivity of a static shot of an underground train carriage is undermined by the narrative privileging of interest in one of the passengers. While information about the histories of the second-generation North African immigrant passengers is withheld, we are co-opted into sympathizing with the white middle-class woman (Juliette Binoche) who is insulted by them, both because we have been given the information about her back story, and because of Binoche’s star status that (however unconsciously) compels our complicity.

The points made above regarding the relationship between form and content may apply to both documentary and fiction films. However, documentary theorists have argued that distinctive ethical questions are raised by filming documentary subjects as opposed to actors playing fictional characters. While our analyses are informed by this critical assertion, they will also test its validity as a universal claim. We acknowledge that in documentary, the shot can be seen as a more direct imprint of the filmmaker’s relationship to his or her subjects, whereas in fiction film the filmmaker’s ethico-political position cannot be directly inferred in this way. However, the reification of these distinctions has led to a tendency to downplay the extent to which fiction film also directly embodies ethical perspectives. We would make the more nuanced claim that whereas in documentary, the ethical perspective reflected is more likely to be that of the director, in fiction film the diegetic world is apt to construct an ethical framework that may or may not directly align with the director’s ethico-political position. Moreover, these distinctions are further complicated by modes of documentary consumption (the assumptions with which we come to a film). The ethical values embedded in documentary space are discussed in relation to wider historical debates about ethics and aesthetics in Chapter 1.

The fact that ethical meaning does not reside purely in the flow of images but emerges more urgently in the course of the reception and circulation of these images – in the multifarious encounters between audiences and films – raises questions about the ethics of the act of viewing: who is looking at whom, and how, and what kind of relations are established or dismantled in this encounter? Explicitly or implicitly, such questions have remained a perennial preoccupation of theoretical accounts of spectatorship, from early sociological studies of film audiences, through psychoanalytic accounts of spectatorial identification and desire, to more recent analyses of spectatorial heterogeneity. Current debates about spectatorship revolve around the spectatorial differences (of gender, sexuality, class, race and ethnicity) that disrupt the fixity of earlier models of viewing relations. Drawing on the insights of queer theory and postcolonial theory, film theorists have asked whether viewing positions (and the ideologies they presuppose) are determined in advance by perspectives already inscribed in the image, or whether they can instead be subverted by resistant viewing practices which refuse to see ‘straight’ and instead ‘look awry’. In its critique of homogenous categorization, such work is insistently inflected by ethico-political concerns with difference and alter-ity, with marginalized voices and stigmatized communities.

In spite of the many discussions of plurality in spectatorship theory, the dynamics of spectatorship have yet to be fully unpacked in explicitly ethical terms. This is perhaps surprising, given that cinema was, in the early days of the medium, accused of being immoral due to the fascination it exerted over its viewers. In Chapters 4 and 5, we examine two types of spectacle that continue to be construed as particularly morally problematic: images of atrocity and suffering, and so-called ‘pornographic’ images. The chapters tackle comparable questions from differing perspectives. Where looking at representations of suffering can be seen to charge the viewer with responsibility, especially where the suffering on screen is ‘real’, i.e. footage of war, genocide or murder, sometimes intercut with fictional scenes in a narrative film (as in the case study of Persona discussed in Chapter 4), ethical debates turn on the question of the spectator’s implication in the suffering watched, and ask what the limits of spectatorial responsibility are. The discussion of the category of images labelled pornography in Chapter 5, on the other hand, addresses the complex question of rights when it comes to viewing spectacles that are interpreted as pleasurable by some; distasteful or ethically repugnant by others. The debate engages both legal questions concerning the production, circulation and possession of pornography, on the one hand, as well as a more philosophical set of concerns, on the other, regarding the troubled status of ‘reality’ in pornography. Also at stake is porn’s capacity – in its filmed forms – to alter and play with its meanings through the kinds of cinematic manipulation of genre and point of view that we have discussed with regard to narrative and documentary films. The fact that Saxton’s chapter addresses an ethics of responsibility, while Downing’s problematizes discourses that would seek to render reprehensible the pleasure of looking – to rest...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section 1 Introduction to Section 1
• Section 2 Introduction to Section 2
• Bibliography
• Index