For the Sake of Art

For the Sake of Art

  • Submitted By: jhkimfilms
  • Date Submitted: 11/02/2011 9:04 PM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 1770
  • Page: 8
  • Views: 264

For the Sake of Art
A beautiful woman walks down an underground passageway in Paris. She sees a man beating a transsexual prostitute and starts to turn in the opposite direction. The prostitute escapes as the man’s attention is turned towards the woman walking away. He grabs her and she, terrified, attempts to flee. He slams her against the corridor wall and then proceeds to beat her. She’s now unable to fight back and her screams are not heard, the passageway is empty. He whispers sick and twisted things into her ear and it becomes clear to the audience what is about to happen next. He then begins to brutally rape her, vaginally and anally. This is the nine-minute scene in the film Irreversible by Gaspar Noe that has caused so much controversy and labeled it one of the most disturbing movies of 2002. During its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, many audience members walked out during this scene, outraged. The said the film was an expose of rape and violence and that Noe was seeking nothing more than shock value. However, in order to attempt to understand why Noe used such subject matter in his movie, we have to look past the initial shock of the violent rape of a woman and see the purpose of it all. Beneath the violence and sexual abuse, Noe has created a film about revenge and the depths of human despair. He’s created a story about a man who is out to kill the person who beat and raped the love of his life. However, in order to portray this, everything is fair game to Noe and that is something atypical of filmmakers and even artists. And then we have to answer the questions that are; at what point does art become exploitation and do we have the right, as artists, to depict the aspects of the world that we would rather not see?
In his essay “The Documentary Debate: Aesthetic or Anaesthetic?”, David Levi Strauss provides an in depth analysis of the arguments surrounding documentary photography, particularly the negative side of it. Strauss discusses the...

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