In an era when gratuitous violence, extreme, incredible violence, is coated malignantly with the pill of aesthetics, Geert Wilders’ Fitna has struck the right chord.
Recently, a slew of movies such as There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, The Departed and In Bruges have won accolades of praise while filling our screens with slaughtered bodies. Both There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men were nominated for the supreme aesthetic recognition of best cinematography at the 2008 Oscars, with There Will Be Blood taking the prize. Much of the blood and gore in these films is, as I wrote in my opening sentence, gratuitous. Promiscuously gratuitous. There is no dramatic necessity to the violent endings in The Departed and There Will Be Blood, and In Bruges manages to tie together a clever puzzle to justify its gory ending. The beginning scenes of No Country For Old Men are so absurdly awful that I didn’t stop munching on my movie house popcorn when I realized that this was going to go on for a while.
I’m sure it was the slow-moving, often still camera which is especially good at defusing anxiety in the midst of the story’s mayhem that abetted me into watching scenes from No Country For Old Men. Imagine if the shots had been done in fast motion, with guns rattling away, bullets flying, and bodies falling and writhing. The director chose just the right kind of filmic device – an after the fact survey of the chaos - to seduce his viewers to keep on looking. I was even reminded of that great film aesthete, Robert Bresson, who constructed his austere scenes of pathos and nihilism with long, still tableaux, as though beauty would excuse what we saw. And the In Bruges crew have certainly digested their elementary modern art by adding surrealism’s exquisite corpse (no, there is no irony here) method of free association with the dwarf meandering throughout the beautiful Belgian city until the grand finale. Yet, we looked, and we were not rewarded.
Current documentary films have been winning the same kinds of accolades for combining beauty with horror. These are mostly films reacting to the war in the Middle East, and their directors’ indignation at its length and devastation. There were a total of five films nominated for Best Documentary at the 2007 and 2008 that dealt with the war. Taxi to the Dark Side and Iraq in Fragments have both been described as “gorgeous”; My Country, My Country’s “cinema verité” approach certainly uses this as an aesthetic device; Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, made from a National Endowment for the Arts fund is mostly a dramatization of letters by soldiers; and one critic calls No End In Sight “a movie classic”, a description often reserved for fiction films rather than documentary. Those who found fault with these films primarily reproached them for their lack of reporting, yielding instead to opinion, dramatization and even falsifications, and aggressively using beautiful imagery. Their aestheticizing of atrocity is the biggest critique, and not unexpectedly, the biggest praise at least two of these films - Taxi to the Dark Side and Iraq in Fragments – have received.
So, we have fiction and documentary filmmakers who use aesthetic means to make horror more palatable. The common objective for both is to keep us looking at their shocking images with impunity. Whatever dearth their stories and reporting may have is thus conveniently covered up.
Then there’s Fitna, Geert Wilders’ film on the Koran. More precisely, Wilders’ film on the violence prescribed by the Koran, as followed by Muslims. Juxtaposing footage from newspaper, television and photographic sources with Koranic verses, Fitna documents the destruction of the World Trade Center, beheadings, train and subway bombings, child suicide bombers, female genital mutilations, gun-executions of women, hangings of gays, and much more, to show how Muslims are mandated to act in violence. And with a license to kill and destroy.
And Wilders makes a bold and correct decision with his film. He decides to go for the aesthetic effect. He places the translations of the Koranic verses on sepia toned pages of the Koran itself with its beautiful script and gilded borders. His images of newspaper, film and photographic footage are placed within diffused frames in soft-focus, once again on the sepia-toned background. Even the terrible scenes of the Nick Berg’s beheading, whose final moment of terror Wilders spares us by substituting the images with the muffled, bone-chilling, sounds of his gagged screams, are presented within these blurred frames on this softened background. The music is two classical pieces by Tchaikovsky and Grieg.
I expected Wilders to present his film as a series of raw footage, without embellishments, and certainly without the classical background music. I didn’t expect him to present Koranic texts in the striking gold script. I imagined the film to be a harsh, unrelenting documentation of the grimy realities of what Islam is doing around the world. But, Wilders’ method is much more powerful. And here’s why.
Aesthetics in art is a very important, if it is used with confidence for the good. Our current fetish for intricately aesthetic films uses beauty in entirely the wrong way: to coat nihilistic, destructive and factually suspect films so that we can be seduced into watching them.
Western art has always relied on aesthetics. Terrible scenes have been painted in glorious colors and compositions. Jesus’ many crucifixions come to mind. Scenes of decadence and degeneracy from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights are more of a warning than a seduction. Secular paintings such as Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, where the surging Marianne is trampling over dead bodies, give us the assurance that there really is a new dawn. In fact, without aesthetics, these paintings would have warped into despair and hopelessness. Old time aesthetics propped up hope and optimism. Our newer crop has turned the tables around and used it to contemplate destruction and nihilism.
Wilders decided to follow his older mentors when making his film. He uses aesthetics not to make the horror more acceptable, not to camouflage an empty message, not to prop up crippled ideas, but as a way to say that there is hope. He uses aesthetics to script stubbornly his own story . Succumbing to the griminess of Islam’s destruction would have been to say that he’s given up on a new dawn; that he has accepted the end that the Islamic Jihad is prescribing for him and the rest of the world. Wilders applies aesthetics as an armour to deflect the onslaught of horror, and to protect himself, and by extension all of us as well, from annihilation. Wilders has recovered aesthetics as a portrayer of confidence. The confidence of good winning in the midst of destruction. What is more life-affirming that that.