“Violence, Torture and Cinema: From the Middle East to Latin
America and Back.”
Dr. Riccardo Bocco
April 23rd, 2014
Summary by Adrian Rios
In recent years, there has been an upsurge of research on the relationship between
transitional justice and contemporary approaches to rewriting national histories and
reconstructing collective memories. The “memory boom” has become almost an obsession,
noted Dr. Riccardo Bocco at a lecture hosted by AUB on April 23rd, 2014 in the Issam Fares
Institute Auditorium.
Organized by the Refugee Research and Policy in the Arab World Program at the Issam
Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs (IFI) in collaboration with the
Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies, Dr. Riccardo Bocco gave a
lecture entitled, “Violence, Torture and Cinema: From the Middle East to Latin America and
Back.” Dr. Bocco has a wide-range of expertise in development, humanitarian and
reconstruction polices, as well as nationalism, state and nation-building processes in
conflict and post-conflict contexts.
Dr. Bocco introduced his most recent work on the “dynamics of dealing with the past” that
examines the role of Latin American and Middle Eastern fictional films and documentaries
in the process of reconstructing collective identities in the wake of armed conflicts and
political transition.
To better examine the dynamics at work in the two continents, Dr. Bocco adopted four
case studies: Argentina, Chile, Lebanon, and Palestine. The reasons behind Dr. Bocco’s
choice of film as units of analysis are many fold. Most importantly, artists may play several
roles in legitimizing, glorifying and subverting certain accounts of history. Additionally, he
sees film directors as active social actors in the reconstruction of collective memory. To
fully grasp the importance of film, Dr. Bocco quoted Patricio Guzmán, a Chilean filmmaker:
“a country without documentary films is like a family without a photo album.”
Dr. Bocco highlights five overarching topics within the films he analyzed. The first topic
pertaining to the (1) issue of victims and perpetrators in film, putting into question how
brutal violence is represented and, in this case, what particularly is represented. Other
topics he details are (2) the representation of the military and soldiers both as perpetrators
and victims, (3) the issue of passive and active collaboration with dictatorial state
apparatuses, (4) missing and forced disappearances, and (5) exiles, refugees, and internally
displaced persons.
Additionally, Dr. Bocco emphasizes three crosscutting themes that affect the process of
filmmaking. First, censorship, in its multiple forms (i.e. state-censorship, self-censorship,
and indirect-censorship), greatly impacts a film’s narrative. Second, Dr. Bocco sees the
competition over narratives as a quest for discussing official histories especially during
civil or revolutionary wars. Lastly, he studies how national academies of cinema train
generations of film directors and the discourses they produce and reproduce of ‘dealing
with the past.’
Seeing as Dr. Bocco’s research is still at its earliest stages, the focus of his lecture was on
the question of torture and the possibility of writing a trans-national lexicon on it. He listed
several movies that focused on torture since the United States’ invasion of Iraq and
Afghanistan, primarily The Torture Question produced by Michael Kirk (2005), Ghosts of
Abu Ghraib directed by Rory Kennedy (2007), Taxi to the Dark Side directed by Alex Gibney
(2007), and Standard Operating Procedure directed by Errol Morris (2008). Dr. Bocco noted
that violence transposed from its local setting and now articulates its practices beyond
borders; for instance, torture has become legitimized, as a means to extract information
deemed necessary to protect “millions of lives”- the greater good. Most notably, he rejects
the myth of torture for obtaining information, suggesting that other mechanisms are
proven to be more successful, especially reward through collaboration. In this sense,
torture becomes a means for collective punishment – hurting society at large- instead of
individual punishment. Dr. Bocco traces such circulation of the knowledge of torture
through the transmogrified forms of documentary films. For instance, he studies the
circulation of the renowned film, The Battle of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo (1966), from the
Middle East to Latin America and back. The film addresses the French counter-insurgency
strategies and the torture techniques adopted during the Algeria’s war for independence.
Dr. Bocco highlights that it was screened in the Argentinian military academies during the
dictatorship and then again to the American marines after 9/11 and before the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq.
In conclusion, he explains that this transnational lexicon of torture does not merely study
the epistemology of torture but its ontology and sees how people manage torture and
dissociate it from its social role.