Human Rights Cinema

A few days after 9/11, US Vice-President Dick Cheney invoked the need for the USA to work ‘the dark side’ in its global ‘War on Terror’. Cinema of the Dark Side explores how contemporary cinema treats state-sponsored atrocity, evoking multiple landscapes of state terror. Investigating the ethical potential of cinematic atrocity images, it argues that while films help to create and confirm normative perceptions about atrocities, they can also disrupt those perceptions and build different ones. Asserting a crucial distinction between morality and ethics, a new conceptualisation of human rights cinema is proposed, one that repositions human rights morality within an ethical framework that reflects upon the causes and contexts of violence. It builds upon theories of embodied spectatorship to offer a new perspective on the ethics of spectatorship, providing readers with fresh insights into how we respond to atrocity images and the ethical issues at stake.

Reviews:
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/cinema-of-the-dark-side-atrocity-and-the-ethics-of-film-spectatorship-by-shohini-chaudhuri/2017388.article

  http://www.cinemahumain.com/cinema-of-the-dark-side/

This course is designed to introduce students to the ways in which motion pictures have sparked significant social changes at home and abroad. Focusing on narrative fiction films as well as documentary features and shorts, students will be asked to consider the relationship between artistic expression, cultural diffusion, societal impact, and political efficacy in an age of contested meanings and ideological entrenchment. S p e c i f i c F o c u s o f t h e C o u r s e a n d S t u d e n t L e a n i n g O b j e c t i v e s Human rights, as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on December 10, 1948), are the " rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled. " Any cultural production purporting to be rooted in human rights issues or discourses subscribes to this underlying principle that everyone — regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation — is endowed with certain entitlements by reason of being human. Although such works have been produced for decades, only in recent years have there been a significant number of films that pivot on the struggles or challenges faced by individuals whose fundamental rights as human beings have been either threatened or trampled upon by forces beyond their control. Over the course of the semester, students will be introduced to a series of contemporary motion pictures dealing with human rights issues, from documentaries about the Holocaust of World War II to short films about military slavery and wartime rape to feature-length works about political refugees and asylum seekers. We will frame human rights cinema as a discursive category of filmmaking, one whose roots stretch back to " social problem films " of the 1920s-1930s and which increasingly relies on organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for financing and distribution. By the end of the semester, students will grasp the historical contexts that not only gave rise to human rights violations but also made possible the production of independent and studio-backed films that seek to remedy social problems of the past and present. In addition to examining the political backdrops against which several historically important films emerged, students will gain proficiency in analyzing those films' aesthetic and formal traits while becoming more sensitively aligned with the struggles and sufferings of people beyond U.S. borders.