The Aesthetic of Testimony and Translation in Producing Subjethat is not English

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• University of Auckland
• Saturday 19 September 2015, 16:15-18:30
• Venue to be confirmed.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Professor Lawrence Simmons.

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This talk explores how a range of modalities of testimony can emerge from the narrative and aesthetic qualities of documentary and is shaped by the production process. Drawing on my experience of making Brother Number One (2011), this film challenges the generalized understanding that testimony is primarily transmitted through ‘talking heads’.

The documentary follows Kiwi Rob Hamill to Cambodia where he attends the war crimes tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), which is currently underway in Phnom Penh trying former Khmer Rouge leaders for their genocidal policies of the mid- to late-1970s. Rob is a ‘civil party’ at the tribunal, where he describes the suffering his family underwent after his oldest brother, sailor Kerry Hamill was tortured and murdered by the regime, one of the few Westerners killed. I distinguish a range of modalities of testimony within the film: ‘formal’, ‘informal’, ‘interactive’, ‘spontaneous’, and ‘emotion as testimony’. Rob Hamill not only testifies himself through multiple modalities but also, through his presence, testimony from the Cambodian survivors he meets. Moreover, when Rob interacts with survivors on-screen, the empathetic flow between the two parties engages Western viewers, bringing them into greater proximity to the Cambodian subjects from whom they otherwise would feel more distant.

This talk is part of the Literary Theory and Criticism Research Seminar Series series.

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