On the Void: The Fascinating Object of Evil in Human Remains

On Ethics and Documentary: A Real and Actual Truth

“…Because there must be a void in the field of images—a gap that separates the real from reality and, in doing so, causes all signifying processes—the practice of holding this void open demonstrates how narrative can never be complete, how no cinematic chain can ever fully symbolize what it claims to see. In the case of Human Remains , a film about Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Franco, and Mussolini, the void in the visual field is held open through repeated cuts to black, an editing technique through which the truth of the visual apparatus is brought to form, its absence “symbolized” in the form of a blank screen (Butchart, in press). As a technique of redoubling the visual apparatus, repeatedly cutting to black interrupts the narrative in Human Remains in order to indicate the fact that, despite the endless, technological capacity to reproduce a plethora of images, there can be no complete picture, no consensual image of evil that could once and for all resolve the mystery of human malice and thus provide a sense of social harmony.…”