ART AND PAIN

I talked about this a little bit on Twitter recently, but I am going to reiterate and expand upon the topic a bit, as I think it's something worthwhile to discuss.

Serge Daney, the great French film critic, wrote an essay entitled THE TRACKING SHOT IN KAPO, in which he described Jacques Rivette's review (which he had read in his youth) of the Gillo Pontecorvo film KAPO - and, more specifically, one particular shot, that in which Emanuelle Riva throws herself into a barbed-wire fence, and then the camera slowly tracks toward her and watches her die "beautifully." Rivette took great offense to said shot, as he found it exploitative and wrong. The review hit Daney hard, and it informed the entire basis of his film criticism from then on. One should not create beauty from the horrors of human suffering, as it goes against that for which good art stands.

This notion is something that I think about a lot, and especially right now, as I am drawing a comic written by Michelle Perez about the crisis in Chechnya in which gay men are abducted from their homes and thrown into concentration camps. The script itself features little in the way of violence, save one small string of panels (told in silhouette), but the idea is there: this is a very bad situation in which a government is doing what it can to destroy its people.

Now, when I received the script, I noticed it was written very loosely; Michelle said she doesn't write panel layouts, as she likes to leave it to the artist. I think she only intended the comic to be three or four pages, but I have expanded it, since it was my choice, to seven, as I feel that number allows me to create the most with regard to feeling and fear within the art of the comic.

I do worry, though, about what I discussed above. I am trying to maximize the page number so it allows me to draw MORE - essentially, as a way to create interesting page layouts to showcase my own art. It's not fully this, as, again, I did think it was the best manner in which to tell it, but I did keep wondering to myself: Should I just tell this comic in the most straightforward way, as it is a serious issue?

But...it IS a comic, and the art exists in a manner that can draw someone in; and so, if I am to do that, shouldn't my art be interesting to look at?

Rereading certain SIN CITY books (and Frank Miller books, in general), I am often pretty horrified by the gratuitous violence, even torture, that many characters face. Their faces are bloody pulps as someone continues to punch down, until bullets speed through the night, creating a quick carcass of the body. And the method with which Miller portrays this violence is one of extreme artfulness. The pages scream at you with both their inherent disgusting nature, as well as with the intricacy and thought put into them.

But where this differs, though, is that SIN CITY pulls from hard-boiled pulp/noir - stories in which, while they do expose the dark underbellies of the human spirit, these kinds of devious plots are routine, and which are not meant to be believed as true depictions of suffering, per se.

A big issue, too, is the difference between a drawing (in this instance, a comic book), versus moving, recorded images (in this instance, a movie); while a comic book like MAUS can portray the holocaust with an intimate portrait, there is still something to be said for real people (even if they are actors) experiencing human suffering. I think one definitely can connect with a drawn image well - many comic books have made me cry with depictions of things both happy and sad - but watching it happen in a way that it is meant to be seen as a visceral truth happening in reality is a little different. Our ability to empathize with another human, therefore, is typically greater than our ability to empathize with a REPRESENTATION of another human.

And so what does this mean? That one should be able to approach a comic book story of suffering through more visually emphatic means? What about stories unlike SIN CITY, where they pull from harsh realities instead of pulp narrative tropes? Like MAUS, Jamie Hernandez's THE LOVE BUNGLERS handles a very disturbing sequence (here, an older child sexually assaulting a younger one) of events with little panache. Instead of creating something that intends to exude incredible drama, Hernandez allows our knowledge of events like that to create the drama for us; it is shown to us, but we understand why it's bad already, and why we should be worried.

I don't really have an answer to how I feel about this topic. I know that this is something I try to keep in the forefront of my brain when approaching sensitive material - because the last thing I want is to show how "cool" I am by producing artful pages while the situation is actually quite dire for those represented in the narrative. Being aware of this does not solve everything, but hopefully, in considering it, I don't fall into the trap of the Apathetic Artist.