Millennium - Journal of

International Studies
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Slow Looking: The Ethics and Politics of Aesthetics: Jill Bennett, Empathic
Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2005) Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne,
Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2007) Gillo Pontecorvo, director, The Battle of
Algiers (Criterion: Special Three-Disc Edition, 2004)
Michael J. Shapiro
Millennium - Journal of International Studies 2008 37: 181
DOI: 10.1177/0305829808093770

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© 2008 The Author(s)
Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol.37 No.1, pp. 181–197
ISSN 0305-8298; DOI: 10.1177/0305829808093770
http://mil.sagepub.com

Slow Looking: The Ethics and

Politics of Aesthetics
Michael J. Shapiro

Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005)

Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne, Beautiful Suf-

fering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2007)

Gillo Pontecorvo, director, The Battle of Algiers (Criterion: Special Three-

Disc Edition, 2004)

This review essay treats three texts: Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect,
Trauma, and Contemporary Art; Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and
Erina Duganne, Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain;
and The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo.
Keywords: aesthetics, ethics, pain

Introduction: ‘Slow Looking’

In his novel Slowness, Milan Kundera displays a keen awareness that

images of suffering in daily media are both partial and brief. At one
point his narrator, who is traveling with his wife, notes that their stay
in a chateau ‘coincides with the period when, everyday for two weeks
[the television news media] showed the children of an African nation,
whose name is already forgotten, ravaged by war.’ The children appear
‘thin, exhausted, without strength to wave away the flies walking
across their faces.’1 Later in the novel, when the images are no longer
being carried by the television networks, the narrator remarks that
‘the situations history stages are floodlit only for the few minutes’ and
continues:
No event remains news over its whole duration, merely for a quite
brief span of time, at the very beginning. The dying children of
Somalia whom millions of spectators used to watch avidly, aren’t
they dying any more? What has become of them? Have they grown

1. Milan Kundera, Slowness (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 12.

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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37 (1)

fatter or thinner? Does Somalia still exist? And in fact did it ever exist?
Could it be only the name of a mirage?2
As Kundera’s narrator points out, the impressions left by stark images
of suffering carried in news media have too brief an exposure to have a
lasting effect on people’s sympathies. In contrast, while the momentarily
timely images carried by news media may be ephemeral, the genre of
the exhibition, which yields an accompanying and enduring catalogue/
text, is one in which what becomes effaced as a news event is restored,
reflected on, and made publicly available for extended ethical and political
negotiation. Museum exhibitions have sufficient exposure over time to
‘frame’ and often ‘reframe’ a society’s conversations.3 Like some other
artistic genres, they make available for extended public witnessing and
discussion what daily media has forgotten. Mieke Bal’s contribution to
a remarkable and timely volume, Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the
Traffic in Pain, which was issued as a companion volume to an exhibition
by that name at Williams College (28 January–30 April 2006), points to
the more enduring effects of photographic exhibitions. Just as Kundera’s
novel is an ode to slowness, to the savoring of life’s vivid presence, Bal
recommends ‘slow looking’ as an approach to the images and curatorial
organization that comprised the Beautiful Suffering exhibit and endures in
the accompanying text. Bal’s recommendation sets up the genre-reception-
empathy issues I am exploring as I treat the way recent texts in diverse
genres encourage thinking about the ethics and politics of aesthetics.
Specifically, in this review essay I examine Beautiful Suffering: Photography
and the Traffic in Pain along with two other texts: Jill Bennett’s Empathic
Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art and the recent DVD version
of Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers, reissued with new and past
commentaries and interviews that are contained in two supplementary
DVDs. The three texts have strong contemporary resonance because pain and
suffering, which are the central focus in all three, are objects of current policy
and contentious public reaction and debate, which intensified after images
of the abuse of ‘detainees’ at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq achieved public
notoriety. While as Kundera points out through his fictional characters, pain
and suffering have a brief public life as images in daily news media, other
media genres summon a more analytic reaction, not only because of their
subject matter but also because of both their ‘ideology of form’4 and their
availability for ‘slow looking’ and thus extended reflection. They endure to
provoke both sensation and criticism, resonating with embodied memories

2. Ibid., 79.
3. The museum exhibition’s effects of framing and reframing society’s conver-
sations is developed in Richard Sandell, Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of
Difference (New York: Routledge, 2007).
4. The concept of the ‘ideology of form’ is by Fred Jameson, in his early work.
See for example his The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).

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 Shapiro: Slow Looking

and encouraging public reflection and negotiation over the meanings and
significance of what they reveal. For example, when close-up views of the
victims of war policy become available for more than fleeting instances, ‘the
aesthetic finds itself in extreme proximity to the ethico-political,’5 a proximity
I explore in my encounter with the texts under review.

Genre Effects

My focus in coming to terms with the issues raised in the three texts is on
the ethico-political effects of forms of visual culture that display pain and
suffering in media that afford more space for contemplation and reflection
than does the rapid dissemination and displacement of images of suffer-
ing typical of broadcast media. The bookends of the analysis – the Beautiful
Suffering Exhibition and Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers – provide a con-
trast of still and moving images, while Bennett’s philosophical treatment
of the connections between vision and empathy (in which her illustrations
include both photography and film) provides a frame for theorizing the
reception of images in general. An analysis of the critical impact of the
three texts involves thinking through connections among the temporal
context of visual genres, the special contributions of the way different
artistic genres derive ethico-political implications from the way they dis-
play images of pain and suffering, and, more generally, the way aesthetic
modes of comprehension articulate with ethico-political ones.
The temporal context of the reception of photographs is crucial to
an analysis of Beautiful Suffering’s contribution. As Lynne Kirby points
out in her treatment of the difference between the temporal contexts of
televised events and continuously available photographic images:
Photography traffics in fixed stable images; electronics in highly unstable
ones. Photography gives the viewer a material trace to scrutinize at length,
rip out of the newspaper, pause to examine and return to. Video, as television
image, is ephemeral, unlasting, and inscrutable.6
Moreover, as Susan Sontag has noted in her reaction to the dissemi-
nation of the photos of abused at Abu Ghraib, ‘For a long time – at least
six decades – photographs have laid down the tracks of how important
conflicts are judged and remembered.’7 Of course what all visual media

5. The quoted expression belongs to Thomas Keenan, who employs it in an analy-

sis of the effects of visual media coverage of human rights abuses and episodes
of humanitarian intervention in such places as Somalia and Kosovo: ‘Mobilizing
Shame,’ South Atlantic Quarterly 103, nos 2/3 (Spring/Summer, 2004): 447.
6. Lynne Kirby, ‘Death and the Photographic Body,’ in Fugitive Images, ed.
Petrice Petro (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 73.
7. Susan Sontag, ‘What Have We Done?,’ CommonDreams.org, Saturday 19
May 2009; on the web at: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/05-09.htm,
obtained 22 May 2007.

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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37 (1)

may reveal about pain and suffering is epistemologically ambiguous.

Elaine Scarry has famously pointed out that pain resists unambiguous
representation because it has no object. As a result, diverse vocational
practitioners addressing pain and suffering – lawyers, Amnesty workers
and artists, among others – who have had to search for effective weapons,
have tended to enlist ‘the language of agency.’8 Yet at the same time that
some seek to alleviate or compensate pain and suffering by attempting to
render it intelligible as a form of adversity that warrants the allocation of
responsibility, others seek to conjure it away. As Scarry puts it, language
can ‘coax pain into visibility’ on the one hand or ‘push it into further
invisibility’ on the other.9
These two alternatives are currently being played out in the charges
brought on behalf of mistreated detainees at the Guantánamo prison
and elsewhere and in the denials made by officials authorizing and/or
administering what they euphemistically refer to as interrogation and
appropriate ‘discipline.’ However, inasmuch as images of suffering have
been made increasingly available for ‘slow looking,’ those seeking to
push them into further invisibility have been unable to prevail. As Scarry
points out, pain creates certainty for the sufferer but invokes doubt
when brought into language. Thus, for example, while the wrongly
accused and imprisoned detainee, Laith al-Ani, ‘tells’ about the pain
inflicted during his detention (when electric prods made his ‘whole
body … shake and hurt’), the official reaction by the prison commander,
Colonel Curry, invokes the language of appropriate discipline: ‘it was
standard to discipline detainees when they did not follow procedure’
he states.10 In contrast with verbal and written reports, stark images of
suffering are more difficult to conjure away with abstractions, and those
in Beautiful Suffering are a case in point. They challenge discursive denials
with what Andre Bazin famously referred to as ‘image facts,’ which are
‘fragments of concrete reality.’11 However the commentaries in this text
are concerned less with the epistemological issue of whether the suffering
is believable (the images manage this issue well) than with the ethics of
representation, an issue which is evoked in all the texts with which this
review is concerned.
The disjuncture in Beautiful Suffering’s title evokes the tension between
aesthetic and ethico-political modes of apprehension with which I am
concerned. I follow my engagement with that text with a critical review

8. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New
York: Oxford University Press, New Edition, 1987), 13.
9. Ibid.
10. See Michael Moss and Soaud Mekhennet, ‘Jailed 2 Years, Iraqi Tells of
Abuse by Americans,’ The New York Times on the web: http://www.nytimes.
com/2007/02/18/world/middleeast/18bucca.html, obtained 18 February 2007.
11. Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema Vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1971), 37.

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 Shapiro: Slow Looking

of Bennett’s Empathic Vision because Bennett’s investigation deepens the

philosophical issues evoked in the tension that constitutes the framing of
Beautiful Suffering. I conclude with an analysis of Pontecorvo’s The Battle
of Algiers because, while both Empathic Vision and The Battle of Algiers
extend the ethical and political implications provided in Beautiful Suffering
– with theoretical discussions and mostly fixed images in the former and
moving images in the latter – a focus on cinema at the end of this review
provides an opportunity to explore the ways in which film surpasses
photography’s ability to enact ethico-political critique because of its form-
related capacity to transcend the limits of perception.

Beautiful Suffering

This image, which was part of the exhibition, was selected as the text’s
cover (Figure 1). Taken together with its caption, ‘One of four Iraqis who
surrendered to the marines, saying they were students trying to escape the
fighting,’ it conveys both an image of abject suffering and an experience
of ‘injustice’ (to the extent that the viewer is encouraged to translate an
image of suffering as ‘adversity,’ i.e. as unwarranted suffering).12

© Williams College Museum of Art.

Figure 1: ‘One of four Iraqis who surrendered to the marines,
saying they were students trying to escape the fighting’

12. For an edifying discussion of the complex differences in perspective on

trauma versus adversity, see Lauren Berlant, ‘The Subject of True Feeling: Pain,
Privacy, and Politics,’ in Cultural Studies and Political Theory, ed. Jodi Dean (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 42–62.

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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37 (1)

Certainly the presentation of such images raises ethical questions. As

one writer appropriately puts it:
The ‘ethical’ use of the imagery of torture and other atrocities is always in a
state of tension; the bodies in the photographs are still exposed to the gaze
in ways that render them abject, nameless and humiliated – even when our
goal in the use of that imagery is to oppose their condition.13
Attentive to this tension, the text’s editors and commentators state at
the outset, ‘we wished not only to avoid the dangers of anaesthetized
viewing and exploitive voyeurism but also to thematize them; to this
end we crafted our rhetorical stance carefully for “Beautiful suffering,”
admitting from the outset our curatorial culpability in the traffic in pain.’
In the exhibition and accompanying text the images presented include not
only the contemporary pain and suffering that are products of the current
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but also ‘earlier antecedents’ – a variety of
images of suffering produced since the mid-1980s. There are images from
advertising, photojournalism, art photography, and conceptual art, with
subject matter such as AIDS sufferers (from the famous Benetton ads),
Abu Ghraib prisoners, and various refugees and war casualties.
Taken as a whole, the commentaries provide a critical pedagogy on
the various ways that photography has been theorized in general and
how more specifically one can bring analytic perspectives to bear on the
images in Beautiful Suffering. However, rather than surveying the critical
insights offered by the five excellent essays in the volume – on ‘pictur-
ing violence’ by Mark Reinhardt, a ‘genealogy of documentary’ by John
Stomberg, on ‘photography after the fact’ by Erina Duganne, on ‘the life
cycle of an image in contemporary visual culture’ by Holly Edwards, and
on ‘the pain of images’ by Mieke Bal – I want to extend philosophically
the problematic that the commentators self-reflectively express about the
juxtaposition of suffering and the beautiful in order to prepare the way
for a consideration of how an aesthetic apprehension can migrate into an
ethico-political one.14
Jacques Ranciere’s treatment of the politics of aesthetics provides
an effective basis for an intervention into these concerns. In Ranciere’s
perspective, the problem of the aesthetic is compatible with ethical and
political judgment, even when it is focused on ‘beautiful objects’ because

13. The quotation is from Elizabeth Dauphinee, ‘The Politics of the Body
in Pain,’ forthcoming in a monograph issue of Security Dialogue 10, no. 2
(2007), ‘The Visual Culture of Security,’ eds. David Campbell and Michael
J. Shapiro, 7.
14. The issue is expressed variously. For Reinhardt it is an unease about aestheti-
cizing suffering; for Stomberg it is the morality of the exploitation of sentiment;
for Duganne it is the problem of distinguishing artistic from ethical questions in
photojournalism; for Edwards it is the problem of truth versus the desiring con-
sumption of beauty; and for Bal it is the (potential) opposition between empathy,
sympathy, or identity and disinterested aesthetics.

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 Shapiro: Slow Looking

the politics of aesthetics involves reconfiguring the way the sensible

is partitioned, ‘bringing on stage new objects and subjects … making
visible that which was not visible,’ and so on.15 To appreciate Ranciere’s
articulation of the ethical and aesthetic, we have to heed the political and
ethical implications of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which are
reinflected in the thinking of Ranciere.
In his Third Critique, Kant pursues the problem of subjective necessity
by focusing on judgments with respect to aesthetic objects, both the beau-
tiful and the sublime. Space does not permit a thorough engagement with
this complex text. The most important aspect for purposes here is Kant’s
recognition that the beautiful object is neither an object of cognition nor
of desire. Such objects do not fall under the rule of understanding and
do not subject reason to the vagaries of sensation. Since such objects are
not susceptible to determinative judgments, the subject experiences what
Kant calls the ‘free play’ of the faculties.16 The effect of this free play is
the subject’s reflection on the form-giving capacity of the interplay of the
faculties and thence critical reflection on the conditions of possibility for
reconciling different modes of judgment. In particular, for purposes of
making sense of the juxtaposition of ‘beautiful’ and ‘suffering,’ Kant pro-
ceeds to connect the judgment on the beautiful with that on ‘the morally
good.’ In his ‘general remarks,’ in his Critique of Judgment, in which he
treats the implications of both his analytic of the beautiful and his ana-
lytic of the sublime, Kant concludes that the reflective judgments they
engender create a space for a relationship with moral apprehension.17 In
Kant’s terms, they ‘prepare the subject for moral feeling.’18
As I have noted elsewhere, Kant achieves the aesthetic–moral articula-
tion by falling back on a narrow conception of culture. Desiring to show
‘subjective necessity,’ a universal basis for judgments of taste (in his words,
‘the harmony of everyone’s judgment with our own’), Kant resorts to his

15. The quotations are from one of Ranciere’s most concise treatments of the
politics of aesthetics: ‘The Politics of Aesthetics’ on the web at: http://theater.kein.
org/node/99, obtained 5 May 2007. For a more extended treatment, see Jacques
Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum,
2004).
16. See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (Amherst,
NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 120–5.
17. Ibid., 132–45.
18. In his analytic of the sublime, Kant becomes less optimistic about the sub-
ject’s achievement of a ‘subjective necessity.’ I treat the nuances of the difference
between the two analytics for Kant’s project of finding a basis for a universal
common sense in Michael J. Shapiro, ‘The Sublime Today: Re-Partitioning the
Global Sensible,’ Millennium 34, no. 3 (2006): 657–81. I am indebted to Rudolph
Gasche’s discussion of the connection between Kant’s reflections on his ana-
lytics of the beautiful and the sublime and moral sensibility. See his The Idea
of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2002), 155–78.

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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37 (1)

Second Critique (of ‘practical reason’) and renders ‘culture’ as a universal

moral sense.19 Ultimately, then, it is through his pursuit of the warranting
of the faculty of judgment that Kant sees aesthetic judgments articulating
with moral ones because they alert the subject to her/his participation
in a sensus communis. Without pursuing the many post-Kantian ways in
which Kant’s Critique of Judgment is critically elaborated and reinflected
(for example in Ranciere’s above-noted politics of aesthetics), I want to
suggest that if we follow the implications of Kant’s insights, the tension
to which the commentators in Beautiful Suffering self-reflectively address
themselves can be read auspiciously rather than pessimistically or with
moral inhibition.20 By juxtaposing terms that evince both aesthetic and
ethical sensibilities, the collection encourages reflection on the relation-
ship between the two. However, in order to appreciate the relevance of
the second text, Bennett’s Empathic Vision, to the aesthetic–ethical rela-
tionship, we have to resist Kant’s narrow account of the subject, for his
approach emphasizes abstract mental dynamics to the neglect of other
aspects of embodiment. To treat the way images of pain and suffering
can evoke ethical reflection, it is necessary to consider the ways in which
the viewer’s bodily or sense memory can contribute to their reception. Jill
Bennett’s Empathic Vision is framed by such a consideration.

Empathic Vision

Jill Bennett’s Empathic Vision provides both philosophical depth and

rich case studies to analyze the relationship between aesthetic and
ethical reactions to pain and suffering. To situate her contribution we
must recognize that for most viewers, the images in Beautiful Suffering
feature persons and places that are unfamiliar and are thus less likely to
provoke an empathic response than are images that summon exchanges
of sympathy in more familiar situations. This is the case because, as I have
noted elsewhere, feelings of moral solicitude tend to be correlated with
a geopolitical cartography.21 David Hume, who saw the social bond as a
function of sympathy rather than contract, helps us to locate the geography
of empathy. He insists that while the social bond is based on sympathy, it

19. See Shapiro, ‘The Sublime Today’.

20. For a different defense of Beautiful Suffering’s aesthetic approach to images
of pain and suffering, see David Levi Stauss, ‘Nikons and Icons: Is the aestheti-
cization-of-suffering critique valid?’, bookforum.com on the web at: http://www.
bookforum.com/imprint/200703/258, obtained 14 June 2007. Stauss argues that
‘one needs first to feel the pain of others by seeing it.’ Bennett’s theorizing of
the sensation–thinking relationship provides a more complex rendering of the
seeing–feeling connection by noting the critical mediation of sense memory.
21. See Michael J. Shapiro, ‘The Ethics of Encounter: Unreading, Unmapping
the Imperium,’ in Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics, eds. David
Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999), 57–91.

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 Shapiro: Slow Looking

is the case nevertheless that people’s sympathy is partial, for ‘the qualities
of the mind are selfishness and limited generosity.’22 Accordingly, the
primary social problem for Hume is not one of maintaining a contractual
order, which raises the issue of how to translate egotism into sociality,
but of how to stretch the passions, how ‘to pass from “limited sympathy”
to an “extended generosity”.’23 Significantly for purposes here, Hume
recognized that extending sympathy across national boundaries is even
more problematic: ‘We sympathize more with persons contiguous to us,
than with persons remote from us. … With our countrymen, than with
strangers … ’24 Of course our world differs from Hume’s because of the
reach of contemporary media. There has been ‘a steady intensification of
interconnection and intercommunication between peoples over the last
several centuries.’25 As a result, contiguity is less a matter of geographic
distance than of access to the dissemination of images and discourses.
Nevertheless, ‘extended generosity’ remains an issue for which Ben-
nett supplies a compelling set of conceptualizations. She cites with
approval Kaja Silverman’s concept of ‘heteropathic identification,’ which
she reads as ‘a form of encounter predicated on an openness to a mode of
existence or experience beyond what is known by the self.’ Her focus, like
that in the Beautiful Suffering exhibit and text, is on images connected with
events that have been affectually remote for most viewers. Her analy-
sis, aimed primarily at illuminating both the experience of trauma and
the exercise of traumatic memory, is based on three case studies – the
contrasting images of South Africa’s reconciliation process, Australia’s
‘stolen generation,’ and New York’s 9/11 catastrophe. Many readers are
therefore confronted with unfamiliar images and juxtapositions.
As is the case with Beautiful Suffering, Bennett’s investigation began as
an exhibition (in Ulster Belfast). The book, a philosophical investigation
of ‘Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art’ (the book’s subtitle), aims to
show how ‘art makes a particular contribution to thought, and to politics
specifically: how certain conjunctions of affective and critical operations
might constitute the basis for something we can call empathic vision.’
Although Bennett illustrates her perspective in numerous historical
venues, the philosophical contribution she makes is more important

22. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1978), 494. I should note that Bennett distinguishes empathy from
sympathy, conceiving the former as attuned to affective memory and the latter as
more of an intellectual attitude. Here I am using them interchangeably and retain-
ing the dimension of affective embodiment for both.
23. The quoted formulation is Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Hume’s social
problematic: Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence, trans. Anne Bowman (New York:
Zone Books, 2005), 46.
24. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 581.
25. The quotation is from Abe Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global
Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 5.

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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37 (1)

than the breadth of geographic coverage she supplies. Relying in part on

Gilles Deleuze’s concept of ‘the encountered sign,’ Bennett offers a theory
of image reception that attenuates the opposition between sensation and
thought. ‘Sense memory’ registers the lived process of recollection. It is
the basis for creating the way in which an image becomes intelligible
according to Bennett. Her emphasis is therefore not on what images
represent but on how they activate sensation; it is on what art does rather
than on what it is about.
Without going into the philosophical nuances of Bennett’s richly
illustrated treatment of trauma and suffering, it is especially important
to recognize the significant shift in emphasis of her approach. She turns
our attention away from pain as a private phenomenon that erupts from
within and, in varying degrees, shows itself on a suffering body, to pain
as a public phenomenon evoking the widespread sense memories that
inhabit a culture. Treating the complicated relays between sensuous signs
and thought, Bennett’s analysis induces us to consider art’s activation of
affect in terms of how it shapes thinking in general and thence the cul-
tural negotiation of the meaning of trauma, pain, and suffering. Telling
examples abound in her survey of the artistic documentation of trauma,
pain, and suffering. One is her treatment of Sandra Johnson’s slide foot-
age in To Kill an Impulse, a set of images that witnesses the after-effects
of political violence in Belfast. Bennett points out that Johnson’s ‘perfor-
mative response’ to grief juxtaposes her own body images with funeral
images. She suggests that Johnson’s affective mode of documentation dis-
turbs familiar funeral imagery, short-circuits the process through which
people watch but familiarize what is troubling, and activates thinking
about the overall cultural frame within which the legacy of violence can
be thought.
Another significant illustration is drawn from Doris Salcedo’s sculp-
tural assemblages related to the violence in Columbia’s interior. Rather
than making direct images of people who are suffering, Salcedo creates
images associated with their disappearance. For example her Widowed
House is ‘displayed as partially dismantled furnishings … dispersed
around the gallery space.’ The effect, as one of Bennett’s cited commen-
tators puts it, is to evoke ‘a home grieving for lost occupants.’ Bennett
suggests that such displays solicit a different response than, for example,
the direct violence of a knife attack. She suggests that the sensation of
grief is a diffuse, extended process that is made palpable for the viewer
by reorienting the significance of familiar objects – for example pieces of
furniture – and connecting them with an intense experience of loss.
A critical ethos emerges from the theorized examples with which
Bennett defamiliarizes the traditional reception of images of trauma,
pain, and suffering. By reworking the relationship between sensation
and thought, she opens a space for rethinking the ethics and politics of
trauma and its after-effects. Her analyses move from the still images of

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 Shapiro: Slow Looking

photography, through sculptural arrangements, to the moving images

of film. For example, in the case of film, she offers a gloss on a treatment
of a US-made documentary, Long Night’s Journey into Day, which has
vignettes of the 1997 hearings about the 1986 killings of young men
in Cape Town (the so-called ‘Guguleto Seven’).26 However, to mark
the critical advantages of the moving images of cinema, I turn to the
recent DVD release of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, which is
an especially apt vehicle for stimulating reflection on the singular effects
on thinking about the ethico-politics of aesthetics of cinema deployed on
the cultural registers of pain and suffering.

Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers

There is a compelling hinge for turning from Bennett’s book to Pontecorvo’s

film because both treat the issues of colonialism/postcolonialism. Bennett
refers explicitly to her ‘exploration of perception’ as something akin to a
‘postcolonial method’ (inasmuch as it explores aspects of ‘inter-cultural space’
that is structured by a colonial legacy), and Pontecorvo’s film, which explores
the ‘colonial spacing: of the city of Algiers in the 1950s,’27 had a profound
impact on postcolonially oriented ‘Third Cinema.’ As Peter Matthews puts it
(in the booklet of accompanying text, supplied with the DVDs):
The true heirs of Algiers have been the numberless filmmakers from Brazil,
Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Senegal, Mali, Tunisia, Morocco, Palestine and
Algeria itself-inspired by Pontecorvo’s supreme empathy to tell their own
stories of nationalist striving.28
While the film has been an inspiration to filmmakers, as well as theorists
of political struggles, operating in other genres since the mid-1960s, it
is especially relevant now when the use of torture and ‘the dividing
line between the ‘resistance fighter’ and the ‘terrorist’ have become
contentious political issues.29
The historical reference of The Battle of Algiers is well known – the
mid-1950s’ Algerian struggle for independence. Among the film’s con-
tributions is its depiction of the details of the resistance, not only from

26. Deborah Hoffman and Francis Reid’s documentary shows segments in

which the mothers of the victims, who are attending the hearings, are viewing
the police-made videotapes of the dead children, after they have been shot.
27. The treatment of The Battle of Algiers in terms of how it enacts a ‘colonial
spacing’ is well developed in Ben Highmore, ‘Colonial Spacing – Control and
Conflict in the Colonial and Neocolonial City,’ in his Cityscapes (New York:
Palgrave, 2005), 70–91.
28. Peter Matthews, The Battle of Algiers: Bombs and Boomerangs (Criterion,
2004), 11.
29. Michael Chanan, ‘Outsiders: The Battle of Algiers and Political Cinema,’
Sight & Sound 17, no. 6 (June, 2007): 38.

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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37 (1)

the points of view of both the political leadership of the FLN (Front
de Libération Nationale – National Liberation Front) and the Algerian
people but also from the points of view of the French settler community
and the French military, which ultimately suppresses the armed strug-
gle. Rather than dwell on the film’s obvious political content, I want to
point to how the film’s political impetus is conveyed through its form
and to note the special conditions of its contemporary consumption. With
respect to the latter, the availability of the film in its new DVD version
makes possible the events of slow looking that thematize all the texts
under consideration. The recent history of film viewing has radically
changed. Rather than what characterized film viewing throughout most
of the 20th century (a single trip to the movie house), thanks to new view-
ing technologies – the video cassette recorder, digital editing capacities
on computers, etc. – control over film viewing is in individual hands, and
multiple repetitions of scenes are possible for both individuals and for
audiences assembled for purposes of instruction. As Victor Burgin puts
it, whereas ‘the experience of a film was once localized in time and space,
in the finite unreeling of a narrative in a particular theater on a particular
day,’ film can now be continually revisited and repartitioned to summon
a variety of ways to make it mean.30
Certainly Algiers is a political film, but Pontecorvo endeavors to rep-
resent faithfully the experiences of the encounter on both sides of the
struggle. As he notes in a long interview (in a DVD that accompanies
the remastered film), he was not creating a black and white ideologi-
cal film but rather seeking to get inside the minds of both the Algerian
resistance and the French attempt to hold onto their colonial possession.
Nevertheless, Algiers, which is filmed in an Italian neo-realist style, using
non-actors (with only one exception) in a vernacular setting and in a Ros-
sellini-inspired newsreel style – in black and white with documentary-
type editing – is politically inflected. It offers close-up looks at Algerian
insurgents, while the French colonialists are seen, with few exceptions, as
remote and unsympathetic. Given the cuts and juxtapositions that mark
the film’s statements-through-editing, what is shown is a people seek-
ing to control their political destiny in the midst of a self-indulgent and
privileged settler community. The crowded and segregated Casbah, sur-
rounded by the wide boulevards characteristic of French urbanism, sup-
ply the physical side of the colonial mise en scène, while a bio-political mise
en scène is created with a montage of shots that juxtapose the surveilled
and impoverished Algerian inhabitants, compressed in crowded quar-
ters, with the leisurely life of bourgeois French settlers, relaxing in bars
and cafes and entertaining in large, well-appointed estates.
While the alternation between close-up and distant shots and the mise
en scène convey much of the film’s political impetus, the working of the
soundtrack provides much of the film’s political sense. Pontecorvo notes

30. Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004).

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 Shapiro: Slow Looking

(in the second DVD with interviews) that he was aiming at creating a
counterpoint between the sound images and visual images. And cru-
cially, he adds that often the sound image trumps the visual image. Tell-
ingly, Pontecorvo’s figures his main protagonist musically. He describes
the Algerian people as a whole in his film as a ‘chorus.’ Ennio Morricone’s
soundtrack, which contrasts French martial music with a percussive
representation of the emotions of the Algerian people (a musical idiom
close to an Algerian baba saleem), more than any other aspect of the film,
delivers the affective register of the political struggle. At one point, the
Algerian women produce a collective chant, ‘an eerie wall of sound that
creates a strangely menacing form of passive resistance.’31
From an academic point of view, Algiers is a historical film with a
strong realist dimension. Among other things, Saadi Yacef – a leader of
the FLN and now a member of the Algerian Parliament – collaborates
in the production of the film and plays himself (under a different name,
El-Hadi Jaffar). Moreover, the historical aspects of the film are under-
scored in a third accompanying DVD, which contains interviews with
both FLN leaders, some of whom are now parliamentarians and public
officials, and the French military officers who directed the assault on the
Casbah and the subsequent suppression of the insurrection in the coun-
tryside. However, there are other points of view that are shaping the film’s
ongoing reception as contemporary rather than merely historical. In 2003
it was reported in The New York Times that there was a screening of the
film for a group of officers and civilian ‘experts’ employed by the Penta-
gon. The flier used to invite the viewers read, ‘How to win a battle against
terrorism and the war of ideas.’32 Of special interest to those viewers was
the effectiveness of the French ‘interrogation’ techniques (the euphemism
used by the commanding Lieutenant Colonel for torture).
While for those who would side with struggles against colonial and
neo-colonial hegemony, the film is received as a chronicle of a people seek-
ing to control its own political destiny (as one writer notes, ‘Pontecorvo
has penetrated our Western self-absorption and let in the harsh light of
reality’), for those seeking to suppress a contemporary insurgency, it is
a manual for effective interrogation techniques. In contrast with viewers
who are sympathetic to the Algerian and subsequent struggles for inde-
pendence, the Pentagon’s viewers were encouraged to watch the film to
explore ‘the advantages and costs of resorting to torture and intimidation
in seeking human intelligence about enemy plans.’33 What they could
witness are tortures that include electric shock, near drowning, upside

31. The quotation is from Chanan, ‘Outsiders,’ 40.

32. Quoted in Michael T. Kaufman, ‘Film Studies,’ on the web at: http://
rialtopictures.com/eyes-xtras/battle-times.html, obtained 3 November 2006.
33. Quotation from Louis Proyect, ‘Looking Back at The Battle of Algiers,’ MR
Zine on the web at: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/proyect.html, obtained 8
December 2006.

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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37 (1)

down hanging, and flesh burned with blow torches. Could this provide
lessons for ‘operation Iraqi freedom?’ Certainly the film testifies to how
the information obtained through torture led to the capture and killing of
key insurgent leaders. But what else might the Pentagon’s viewers have
seen if they were able to place the scenes in the context of the anti-colonial
struggle that the film foregrounds – a situation of curtailed freedom in
which (in Jean Paul Sartre’s words during the actual rebellion) ‘the riches
of the one are built on the poverty of the other?’34
Without dwelling on the merits of the different points of view or modes
of reception, I want to note some aspects of the ways in which film form
confronts the partialities of perception. No thinker was more attuned to
the partialities involved in perception than Henri Bergson, who saw the
body as a centre of perception. However, crucially, the Bergsonian body
is a centre of indetermination in that its perceptions are always partial.
To perceive is to subtract in order to come up with a sense of the world,
selected from all possible senses.35 Although Bergson failed to recognize
the ways in which cinema overcomes some of the partialities of percep-
tion, Gilles Deleuze, influenced by Bergsonian philosophy (among oth-
ers), developed a philosophy of film that registers how cinema thinks in
a way that restores what perception evacuates. He insists that ‘cinema
does not have natural subjective perception as its model … because the
mobility of its centres and the variability of its framings always lead it
to restore vast acentered and deframed zones.’36 Thus for example, quite
apart from the individual dramas in which the fates of various charac-
ters in Algiers are determined, is what is provided in Pontecorvo’s mise
en scène. The framing of the action in a colonially divided city, provided
through zooming and panning shots of the cityscape, yields possibilities
for perception that exceed the self-understandings of the film’s charac-
ters. Clearly, as I have noted, Algiers shows that the use of ‘interroga-
tion’ (torture) was instrumental in the French para’s decimation of the
FLN leadership and, accordingly, the French military victory. However,
whatever may be one’s perspective on the ethics of resorting to torture
to curtail a violent insurgency, the film provides a series of cuts, juxtapo-
sitions, and depth of focus spatial shots that reveal a more general and
historically institutionalized form of suffering.
Ben Highmore summarizes this aspect of the film well:
While the Algerian people are the collective protagonists of the film (figured
most insistently in the various crowd scenes), it is the physical mise en scene

34. Quoted in Sheila Johnson, ‘The Battle of Algiers and Its Lessons,’ Com-
monDreams.org News Center on the web at: http://www.commondreams.org/
views03/0907-07.htm, obtained 2 November 2006.
35. See for example, Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books,
1990).
36. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. High Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 64.

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 Shapiro: Slow Looking

of the film, the city of Algiers, that articulates and supplies the rhythmic
orchestration of the film. Continually moving between the Casbah (the
Algerian enclave of the city) and the European quarters, the film highlights
a colonial city that is a physical, social and architectural embodiment of
French-Algerian colonialism.37
Ultimately, while from a narrative point of view Pontecorvo’s Algiers
is about the suppression of an insurgency, its moving images, taken as
a whole, think well beyond the historical narrative they re-enact. Such
cinema, in Deleuze’s terms, ‘does not simply present images, it surrounds
them with a world,’ in this case a world shaped by colonial encounter.38
That world is now available for slow and careful inspection given its
realization as a DVD, accompanied by additional commentary from those
who operated on both sides of the independence struggle.

Conclusion: Visualizing Pain and Suffering

The authors/curators of Beautiful Suffering made a wise, philosophically

informed decision when they selected a title that generates a productive
tension between aesthetic and ethical modes of apprehension. As a result,
their project, like their subject matter, constitutes a critically reflective
‘trafficking in pain.’ As I have suggested, the tension can be read less as
a worrisome inhibition than as a creative choice. Effectively, it enacts a
Kant-inspired inter-articulation between an aesthetic apprehension and
moral sensibility. However, to the extent that one inhabits a traditional
approach to aesthetics, an adherence to what Ranciere calls an ‘ethical
regime of images’ (within which one becomes primarily concerned with
the proprieties of allowing certain types of images public exposure),
one’s reception is likely to be moralistic.39 Accordingly, one response
to a blog-initiated discussion of Beautiful Suffering found the cover and
title ‘absolutely disgusting … abhorable’ and interpreted it as an ‘artistic
celebration within the context of torture.’40
In her analysis of ‘empathic vision’ Jill Bennett suggests a way to
resist the moralizing encouraged within the traditional ethical regime of
aesthetics. Stating that ‘it is always easy for art and for audiences of art
to take the moral line,’ she credits the artists, Doris Salcedo and Willie
Doherty (who develop oblique still and moving images respectively
of violence) with encouraging an ‘ethical imperative’ to think beyond

37. Highmore, Citycapes, 72.

38. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989), 2.
39. Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, 21.
40. The quotation is from a response to Jim Johnson’s blog, ‘(Notes on) Politics,
Theory & Photography,’ http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot/2007/02/
beautiful-suffering.html 9 February 2007, obtained 24 May 2007.

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Millennium: Journal of International Studies 37 (1)

morally fixed roles. To pursue Bennett’s distinction: morality as

traditionally understood is about deriving imperatives from fixed moral
codes, while ethical imperatives are invitations to negotiate meaning
and value, given situations of either competing and incommensurate
value commitments and/or alternative perspectives on what is the case.
Film, in particular, often has the effect of encouraging reflection and
negotiation of alternative perspectives because it functions without a
dominant centre. Here Gilles Deleuze’s Bergson-inspired contribution
to the analysis of cinema’s critical capacity is relevant. On his view,
because cinema deprivileges the directionality of centered commanding
perception, it allows the disorganized multiplicity that is the world to
emerge. In his words: ‘Instead of going from the acentered state of things
to centered perception, [we] could go back up towards the acentered state
of things and get closer to it.’41
Accordingly, the ethical effect in Pontecorvo’s Algiers consists not in
a promotion of a polemical position but in the ways it overcomes vari-
ous forms of perceptual partiality. Providing a framing and rhythmic
montage that exceeds the interest-mediated gazes of political and mili-
tary partisans, it puts in place what perception tends to evacuate. For
example, one can imagine that the viewers at the Pentagon’s recent
screening of the film had difficulty managing a cinematic technology
that gave them much more to think about than the instrumentalities of
interrogation. Although their charge demanded a very narrow, interest-
based mode of reception, perhaps Pontecorvo’s mise en scène caught their
attention. Perhaps like Pontecorvo’s composite Colonel Mathieu, who
expressed admiration for the FLN leadership he was crushing, they saw
a basis for empathy with the courage and persistence of the insurgents
and the overall public will they represented. As I have noted, in the case
of film, slow looking is now more available than it was during the period
in which one had to attend showings in theaters. The ‘decentering of the
theatrical film experience’ has changed the phenomenology of film recep-
tion. While playing DVDs, individuals and assemblages can slow down
the viewing process by stopping and repeating scenes, creating a recep-
tive editing that provides for extended reflection and negotiation of the
meaning and significance of scenes.42 More generally, perhaps the ongo-
ing insistence of images of pain and suffering can generate movement
from sensation to reflective thinking. Given its availability for slow look-
ing, critically oriented cinema, such as Pontecorvo’s Algiers, along with
other approaches to critical image production and reception developed in
Beautiful Suffering and Empathic Vision, can encourage political apprehen-
sion and ethical negotiation in ways that address Hume’s above-noted
problem – how to make limited sympathy become extended generosity.

41. See Deleuze, Cinema 1, 58 and 86.

42. The quoted expression is from D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 27.

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That ‘political apprehension’ pertains not to the macropolitics of the per-

son–state relationship but to the micropolitics of interpersonal exchanges
of recognition and sympathy. Importantly however, Bennett’s construc-
tion of an embodied rather than merely a seeing observer provides a
theoretical complement to the way the Humean problem can be applied
to an ethics and politics. Heteropathic identification with the suffering of
an other is enhanced by the observer’s sense memory, which enables a
mode of reception predicated on what images (when they have extended
availability) do rather than what they represent.

Michael J. Shapiro is a Professor of Political Science at the

University of Hawai’i.

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