Screening Suffering

We have been talking a lot about the portrayal of suffering in art over the last few weeks, focusing often on films. The weird thing is I am having trouble relating to the conversation, despite the fact that I write about films a lot in my work, and consider them to be a very important part of visual culture.

The genesis of my trouble is that I go out of my way to avoid seeing anything explicit in films, which means that I often cannot bring to mind film examples of trauma or suffering. The one film I have been able to talk about is Schindler's List , but even this is hazy and I can only recall the end (I think - its an image of people walking in a long line. It is possible that there has been an amalgamation of the tonal qualities of Schindler's List and the Sound of Music in my head.)

I have avoided explicit films since I was about 12, when I found that the images of 12-certificate horror films would implant themselves into my head and then reappear in my dreams or situations when my fears needed faces. It is a weird appropriation of 'art' (using the term exceptionally loosely here) as memory, and as I don't believe that this is an experience to me I wonder how it affects the world.

An excerpt from Marina Warner's Reith lecture in 1994 has popped back into my head at this point which sums up my concern. One of the results she notes about the portrayal of masculinity in film and gaming culture she states that the:

Fear of men has grown alongside belief that aggression - including sexual violence -
inevitably defines the character of the young male. Another myth shadows the
contemporary concept of male nature: that intruder could be a rapist. Alongside the
warrior, the figure of the sex criminal has dug deep roots in the cultural formation of
masculinity.(Warner, 1994)

While I agree with the sentiments of Adorno and Benjamin, and the idea of an ethics of memory, at the same time I wonder what the effect of our striving to acknowledge suffering in art are on the audience we create for.

And as usual I find my self broaching a question for which I have no answers.