Visual Culture, Spectatorship and Humanitarian Disaster

Abstract

This article examines the dialogic encounter between the spectator and the spectacle in the context of war crimes and humanitarian disasters (in this context, the Sri Lankan civil war) in Vanni Eli, a short film by a Sri Lankan Tamizh diasporic filmmaker Tamiliam Subhas. The narrative introduces us not only to the military disaster that is war but also to the humanitarian disasters effected through war. The article studies the role of the spectator who ‘witnesses’ the torture, and thus complicates the ethics of both the act of torture and the viewing of it. By looking closely at the ingenious ways of narrating torture the article argues that the creative representation of war and disaster implicates within its discourse not merely the participants and the victims of the war alone but also the ‘peripheral’ subjects like the mice (the film’s lead ‘actors’), and by extension, the spectators participating in the discursive construction of the victimized. Despite the symbolic disembodiment and effacement of the tortured, their suffering is recognized as a humanitarian disaster with the shared grammar of suffering common to all.1