<underfire> Brother's photo, checkpoint borders 3

[francois bucher]

—René Gabri's post opens up a question that is far reaching. To put  
it metaphorically: now it’s not the image of an event that counts,  
it’s the event of an image.  Or, it’s not what happens in the image,  
it’s what happens to the image.
— Onto a sequence of stills of the concentration camps, taken from a  
television network, Godard once wrote his notes: "Was it really  
indispensable for a national network to print its copyright logo on  
these poor images of the night?" The last still from the sequence is  
a close-up of the number stamped on the striped shirt of a  
prisoner... nothing needs to be added. There is an easy definition  
here for the technical eye of television: the technical eye is the  
eye that doesn’t see that logo. It is also the eye that can’t see the  
cut to commercials.

—Serge Daney's phrase (that Brian Holmes will recognize since he  
translated it some 14 years ago) is to me the most precise way of  
describing the issue at stake with the "copyright prisoner brother's  
photo" :  “The movement is no longer in the images, in their  
metaphorical force or in our capacity to edit them together, it’s in  
the enigma of the force that has programmed them (and here the  
reference to television—the triumph of programming over production—is  
unavoidable).”

—I would also like to bring up Claire Pentecost's section on  
"Ownership Society" in her article "Reflections on the Case by the  
U.S. Justice Department against Steven Kurtz and Robert Ferrell".   
She opens up the spectrum of the problem of copyright in a very  
interesting way. In the last paragraph of that article, Claire writes  
"Of course it's about the art. It's about representation. The  
individual cases, the kinds of cases, the facts of the cases, the  
arguments of the cases, the numbers of cases and the distortions of  
those numbers, these too are very much matters of representation. The  
case against the Palestinians, the case against Islam, the case  
against pacifists, the case against independent science, the case  
against rural people who don't conceive of their knowledge as  
property, the case against all people who are in the way of the  
cannibalistic machine of global capital cannot only be won by force.  
It has to be fought in the field of representation..."

François

On Dec 5, 2006, at 11:09 PM, Rene Gabri wrote:

> Who should have copyright on this image? Bracha L. Ettinger, his  
> brother (who is bracha’s brother?), or the (presumed) unidentified  
> Palestinian male who is subjected to this violence? Who owns this  
> violence? Who owns up to this violence? Where is the intersection  
> between our relations of property and this occupation? Even the  
> violence bestowed upon Palestinians is not their own property?  
> Where is the violence taking place here, in this scene? What is the  
> role of this image in a discussion like this? What deliberations  
> were made in allowing it to remain, to post to the list?
>
> I have to say that this session of underfire has for me been the  
> most staged and symptomatic of “orchestration” as opposed to  
> moderation.
> I wonder just how many posts have been refused? And what are the  
> categories and economies of decision making which determine what  
> stays and what goes?
>
> Why did these images remain? What do they communicate? To whom are  
> they intended? And just what is being represented (because maybe we  
> should stop speaking of communication for a minute) here?
>
> sincerely, with a little less compassion, rene
>
> On 12/5/06 11:45 AM, "Bracha L. Ettinger" <brachale at zahav.net.il>  
> wrote:
>
>> my emphasis ---> Brother's photo, n.3, 2006 © Bracha L. Ettinger
>
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> 16 October - 10 December 2006
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Local moblile while in NY
until 30th November:
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François Bucher
francoisbucher at gmail.com
Mohrenstrasse 17
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