The London School of Economics and Political Science
12-13 September 2016
This workshop is supported by the CIS, Department of International Relations and Department of Law.
Aims and scope
Our starting point is that film — in the broadest sense of fiction, documentary, media reportage, and audiovisual court transmissions — is key to the scholarship and practice of international criminal justice.
The workshop is a creative effort to analyse and make sense of disparate ways in which film and international criminal justice relate to each other with different logics, such as in aesthetic, truth, political and legal relations. Potential themes or directions of analysis may include, for example:
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Genres of film on international criminal justice: Fiction, documentary, mixtures of the two? Activism, propaganda, therapy, tragedy, melodrama, parody? How and why do fiction films use ‘real’ images and documentaries? How do different genres of film stand the charge of commodification?
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Film and histories: The workshop aims to consider the way histories of international crimes, criminals and their trials and punishments are written through film. What are the dominant images in these films and the codes that the narratives rely upon? What are the tropes of picturing the past?
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Functions of films and the questions on their ‘veracity’: is a picture really worth a thousand words? How to deal with the dilemma of the ‘eyewitness’ and ‘truth’, whether it be historical or judicial truth? Are films ‘illustrating’ real crimes and real criminals, in order to confirm their veracity? What role do ‘reenactments’ and new representations (as for example in films by Rithy Panh and Joshua Oppenheimer) play?
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Agendas and ideologies in films on international criminal justice: what kind of patterns can be identified between humanitarianism, empathy, caring for ‘suffering strangers’, educative tales of universal justice, and fear, entertainment, up to the ‘pornography of pain’? Does international criminal justice provide a particularly fertile ground for visual means of communication? Why is violence pictured so spectacularly—or is the aim simply to represent it ‘realistically’? Are films gendered and how? Who are the good guys?
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Dominant images versus absent or obscure images: some national or regional histories, trials, individual actors have entered the current international criminal justice canon and beyond, featuring in the often-explored archives of reference, up to a point to becoming a ‘clichéography’. Other regions or entire continents have ‘their’ fragments of international criminal justice unknown or filed under a uniform label of ‘show trials’. Why? Can this be ‘corrected’ and how? What are the hierarchies of violence, suffering, ‘crime’ engendered by dominant images and narratives?
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Teaching international criminal justice with film: How can films be used in teaching international criminal justice? What kind of films, to teach what?
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Filmmakers and the political economy of filming ‘atrocity’ and ‘justice’: we are seeing a new breed of filmmaker—victims, perpetrators and bystanders who film events, on light material, today on their mobile phones. Famous examples include the Serbian paramilitary group Scorpions, Abu Ghraib, or ISIS. What are the effects of the identity of the filmmaker on the perceived veracity of the film? Is the act of filmmaking—and the economy of filmmaking, given that clips can command high prices on the news market—changing the behavior of those engaged in conflict or in international criminal justice?
Workshop organisers
Further information
If you have any queries, or would like to learn more about this workshop, please e-mail s.wise3@lse.ac.uk, or one of the workshop organisers listed above.
Suggested hashtag for this event: #LSECIS