Visibility and torture: on the appropriation of surveillance footage in YOU DON’T LIKE THE TRUTH

Abstract

Even though visibilization is legitimized as a technology of surveillance, where security is gained through knowledge, its decisive function is not epistemological, but as a mode of torture. How can visibility be violent? If this violence consists in making human beings excessively visible, and if critical filmic research usually involves enhancing visibility, how can it avoid reproducing violence? Are there modes of filmic counterhistoriography that do produce visibility differently, appropriating and reframing ambiguous source materials?