In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • And Now Our Watch Begins
  • Aurore Spiers (bio)
Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen, eds. Unwatchable. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019. 412 pages. $99.95 cloth. $29.95 paperback.

“What do you find unwatchable and why?” is the question Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen asked the fifty-six contributors to their edited collection Unwatchable. Their answers had to be personal, short (up to 1,500 words), and quick (within three months) if they were to respond to and engage with the topic’s urgency.1 The “act of covering one’s eyes,” Unwatchable argues, “has become a representative gesture in our contemporary media culture of proliferating scenes and virally circulating images where potentially traumatic content is never more than a click, scroll, or swipe away” (1–2). In Unwatchable, the scholars, critics, visual artists, curators, and archivists who responded to the invitation above find unwatchable images in a wide range of media texts, which allow them to investigate the historical and theoretical ramifications of the unwatchable across media today. As Marc Francis said in Film Quarterly, Unwatchable is “chillingly relevant” and will help readers from many humanistic disciplines understand common affective responses to unwatchable images.2 Unwatchable will also provide readers with strategies not to look away but instead to watch—or witness—harder, longer, and more effectively. After all, most of the contributors have watched the unwatchable themselves [End Page 113] before setting out to share their intimate encounters with what can’t, shouldn’t, or ought not to be seen.

The term “unwatchable,” which the editors define as something “unsuitable for viewing” and “disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible” (3), first appeared in the nineteenth century when it described “territories outside surveyable view” (7). The term then became common in the 1960s in discourses about television news network where images from the Vietnam War shocked the American public. In Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, Siegfried Kracauer writes that “the film screen is Athena’s polished shield” against the horrors of reality mirrored in documentary images, which he compares to Medusa’s deadly face.3 As this edited collection shows, more images than those considered by Kracauer in 1960 belong to the unwatchable, including those found in contemporary Hollywood cinema, horror cinema, pornography, photojournalism, advertising, silent film archives, and the avant-garde. The editors explain that “with its extensive range of meanings and resonances in our time, the unwatchable might threaten to become a buzzword or catchall category, losing its critical purchase or heuristic value” (19–20). Indeed, since Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016, the term “unwatchable” has been given new currency that puts it at risk of overuse. But Unwatchable succeeds in creating a “cognitive mapping” of this concept along three main axes—violence and testimony, histories and genres, and spectators and objects—each of which includes thoughtful essays that closely examine specific iterations of the unwatchable (20).

Several essays focus on the unwatchable as an aesthetic principle meant to “produce critical awareness and ethical insight” (154) through forms of visual transgression and the elimination of spectatorial pleasure. Asbjørn Grønstad claims that in staging scenes of unwatchable (sexual) violence, Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, and filmmakers associated with the “New French Extremity” carry on the modernist project against aesthetic pleasure. In the avant-garde too, Kenneth Berger argues that Guy Debord’s film Howls for Sade (1952) mobilizes the unwatchable against the “society of the spectacle,” thereby urging spectators to look without consuming. Noël Carroll shows how Andy Warhol’s eight-hour-long film Empire (1964) is so “inhospitable to human viewing” that it reveals how “machine ‘vision’ is not human vision” (191). Even if few have ever watched Empire from start to finish, Carroll is able to write about its unwatchability, proving that “appreciation without acquaintance is possible” and that “interpretation can be a form of aesthetic experience” (192). [End Page 114]

Other essays discuss images of unwatchable realities that reveal the limitations of human vision, which are then supplemented by the camera or “kino-eye.” Unwatchable is especially interested in the many “spectacles of destruction” that would...

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