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Foreign Encounters: The Political and Visual Aesthetics of Humanitarianism in Contemporary Canadian Film Culture
- University of Toronto Quarterly
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 82, Number 2, Spring 2013
- pp. 331-352
- Article
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This essay examines the visual politics of Patrick Reed’s documentary Triage: Dr. James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma (2008) and Larysa Kondracki’s feature film The Whistleblower (2010). Both of these films investigate the relationship between aesthetics and politics, the encounter with the other, and what Jacques Rancière calls ‘the distribution of the sensible.’ In contrast to Rancière, this essay explores how the redistribution of the sensible operates through the highly racialized, gendered, and spectacular technologies of humanitarian film productions. It examines what it means to encounter the other not as a human being but as a visual image, and explores the relationship between the economics of the image (the abject as coded in the trafficked foreign female body) and the consumers and agents of visual abjection in the context of humanitarian interventionism. It rereads Rancière’s notion of dissensus in gendered terms, and thus seeks to unsettle given modes of the humanitarian spectacle.