HUMANISM XL

In the introduction, I briefly presented Sartre's ideas about how literature and art can help to realise the Hegelian ideal of mutual recognition. Sartre argued that when reading a book (or looking at a painting), the minds of the reader and author collaborate on the creation of the work in such a way that both use their imagination (their freedom), and both find their imagination stimulated by that of the other. The result of Sartre's analysis was an understanding of art as an ‘exercise in generosity’ and the propagation of freedom. This activity, Sartre furthermore suggested, also has political repercussions.

The different films discussed in this book all seem to challenge the Hegelian set-up. They do not engage the imagination of the spectator in such a way that we feel compelled to talk about the artistic exchange as an act of collaboration, a harmonious dialogue and a joyful ‘spinning top’. The films in the first chapter instead come across as assaultive. Dogville, Daisy Diamond, Funny Games and Redacted lock the spectators into a very unpleasant position. The experience of watching such films is not one of freedom and recognition, but rather one of being humiliated and harassed. The directors achieve this by asking us to produce the images while at the same cheating us (hiding the true identity of Grace), confusing us via an aggressive play between fiction and (intra-diegetic) reality (Daisy Diamond), addressing the spectator in a direct and sadistic way (Funny Games), throwing us between various image-sources, shaking our epistemological apparatus (Redacted), and, more generally, by addressing the spectator in a manner that postulates that they know more about us than we do about ourselves – and that what ‘extra’ they know about us is unpleasant. It is not surprising that many spectators have responded to these films with strong negative emotions.

The films studied in Chapter 2 were very different, but they could still be understood as challenges to the Hegelian dialectic of recognition. In these films the spectator was no longer forced into the position of the ‘slave’, but she remained in an unpleasant position that can be associated with inferiority. Now, it was as if the dialectic framework was crumbling away.