Abstract
In Creating the Witness (2012), Leshu Torchin investigates and discusses the communicative effectiveness, documentary power and socioethical usefulness of various operative tools, practices and visual media technologies (e.g. pictures, posters, reports, film, video, Internet) in producing virtual witnesses of human rights violations and crimes against civilization, humanity and peace over the past 100 years – including the atrocities of the Armenian genocide, the monstrosities of Nazi concentration camps and the horrific events in Bosnia and Rwanda. Torchin presents a wide-ranging set of examples of rapes, abuses and brutal acts against human beings and various cases of mass violence in the last century, and tries to outline and better understand how screen media can offer visible evidence of human rights transgressions and produce witnesses at great distance, in order to mobilize audiences and promote popular awareness, social responses and global respect for human rights.
Using the conceptual categories of testimony and witnessing, and adopting a historical and comparative approach, Torchin’s study explores the production of witnessing publics through a series of different means of communication (e.g. text, photographs, illustrations, vivid pictures, moving images, sketches) and analyses how the encounter with this testimony hails audiences, encouraging them to take both responsibility and action. It is obvious that the starting point is a subject position that implies empathy, ability to perceive pains, overcome compassion fatigue, and, above all, assume responsibility for the pains of others. Bearing witness is an ethical and transformative process, and each testimony of trauma and injustice has a great political value. To testify is therefore not merely to narrate, but to commit oneself to others, to take responsibility for the truth of a tragic occurrence. Testimony may be considered a speech act. Exposing victim and survivor testimonies of tortures, persecutions, oppressions, pains and so on transforms personal stories of abuses into powerful tools of justice. Furthermore, narrating painful events and the testimony of a direct experience of violence promotes the development of feelings of international solidarity, facilitates the construction of popular memory and collective identity, and supports campaigns against inhuman cruelty.
The traumatic effects and devastating impacts of the terrible experiences that each eyewitness can describe contributes to the creation of a common moral bond in shared humanity, a social feeling of horror, a robust cultural imaginary of indignation, and a sense of a collective obligation for international action against civil extermination. In particular, photographic media play a crucial role in extending witnessing, because images have the power of immediacy.
Media witnessing works in different ways: in essence, witnessing brutal acts on the screen, media can bear witness to traumatic events and audiences can become witnesses of crimes against humanity. In terms of media, media technologies can extend the reach of the original enunciation of violence and pain in both space and time (i.e. dissemination). But the mere spectacle of horrors and atrocities (i.e. the sound and image tracks of tragic events) is insufficient to catalyse the chain reaction of exposure and reflexive critique, revelation and sense of justice; rather, a complex visuality of suffering, based on a combination of aesthetic factors, functional properties and emotional elements, generates ethical claims and produces witnessing publics ready to act. Thus, simple exposure is not enough, and what matters is the manner in which the suffering is treated, the identity of the audience and the strategies for placing images or videos within a promotional movement that can develop the impetus to act due to conviction, shame, empathy, or moral imperative.
The focus on genocide concerns catastrophic events such as the Armenian crisis, a series of tragic events starting with the Hamidian Massacres of 1894–1896, the genocide in 1915, and the expulsions, deportations and extreme privation that continued until 1923 (an estimated 1.5 million Armenians died between 1915 and 1923) and the Holocaust. The Hamidian Massacres included systematic murders, executions and deportations, rapes of women, decapitations of children and the burying of men alive, and culminated in the forced exile of 4 million subjects. In this case, in order to understand the relationship among visual media, global witnessing, the formation of a public moral sensibility, the production of a public response and the mobilization of audiences, the author focuses on the activity of Near East Relief (NER). This was one of the largest of the American missionary and charity organizations that specialized in reporting and responding to the Armenian crisis. The author analyses the emotional resonance and public sentiment produced by the film Ravished Armenia (1919), a cinematic adaptation of survivor testimony of the genocide. The film was based on the autobiographical book, Ravished Armenia, and the lead role was played by Aurora Mardiganian, who offered an evocative and personal story that represents multiple others’ traumatic experiences.
In his book, Torchin also explores the role of cinematic technologies in the performance of international justice and, specifically, the role of three films in the first set of International Military Tribunals in Europe, also known as the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. These documentary films, which made the world aware of the evidence of the mass slaughter of children and families, the extermination through gas chambers and the hideous industrialization of murder, contributed to the creation of a visual understanding of ‘crimes against humanity’, an unprecedented indictment and an antecedent to the UN Convention on Genocide and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The documentary films inspired a range of emotions, including horror, disgust and outrage, and helped establish the horrific events, not simply as misfortune, but as a distinct crime, and therefore contributed to legitimizing the system of managing the crimes, not only morally, but also legally and politically; on a philosophical level, the films also pointed out the limits of law. Presenting unbelievable atrocities, these documents bore witness to the truth of human cruelties in order to create a sense of responsibility on the part of the listener as well as the possibility of a political intervention to transform the world.
In terms of the witnessing function in a context of abuses and human rights violations, another important concept linked to new media technologies and the Internet’s power for advocacy concerns the cosmopedia, which may be considered the testimony cyberspace, a source of information, a place of collective intelligence, or a virtual agora where members of a thinking community may search, inscribe, connect, consult, explore, or discover using the knowledge space as a site of public discussion, negotiation and development. The interactive technology of similar platforms (e.g. MoveOn.org) spreads cultural activism and allows people to organize civic interests and social movements around the defence of human rights and to apply pressure on decision makers to define a social, political and legal imaginary of global respect for human rights.