The doppelgänger of visible, spectacular horror – the mediated terrorist attacks and execution videos, designed for widespread dissemination – is the terror of the invisible. In the common imagination, terrorists threaten by ‘passing’, like Baudrillard's shadowy figures, sleepers of uncertain quantity or power, contagious, deceiving and multiplying like a virus. Torture, on the other hand, makes visible: it materialises or reifies a truth through the tortured body, and so serves as the symbolic antidote to terrorism.
And yet, the power of factual contemporary torture relies fundamentally on being half-known and half-invisible, an open secret. In such situations, where information is censored and facts are disputed or obscured by visual excess, there is immense political potential in striving for visibility and transparency. In both sets of cinematic texts explored here, the films seek to express the invisible of history, that which is forgotten, erased, obscured, but also to push categories of what counts as perceivable beyond the visible, from film as collective experience of emotional repercussions, creating a sense of shared social pain, to enlarging the frames of our perception, the relation between visual mediation and reality.
The Invisibilities of Torture in US and Chilean Cinema
The first part of this book investigated what kinds of images cinema has created within the situation of visual excess – if not in variety, then in quantity – that resulted from the circulation of the Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo images. The films discussed here focus centrally on the visibilities of torture, showing typical scenes, narratives and images of torture, and often operating with the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as reference point. Increased surveillance and the unequal access to and distribution of visual information express differentials in knowledge and power, and anxieties about the failures and potential manipulations of machines. Yet these films, too, explore invisibilities in the shape of epistemological vulnerabilities, emerging from the superimposition of clichéd representations which impede understanding, known but denied facts, verbal pirouettes which by now have become alternative facts and false statements.
In the second part of the book, the analytical focus shifted from the visible towards the invisible, towards other ways of accessing the past and of anchoring our cinematic experience.