The Doubling of Death
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deaths, no death at all, really, of which to speak. Animal actors will never find
their deaths singled out, let alone doubled by art.
It is perhaps not an accident, historical or otherwise, that one of the very
first films ever made was of the death of an animal. In 1903, Thomas Edison,
showing off both his filmmaking advancements and his mastery over electricity,
famously electrocuted an elephant named Topsy, filming the slaughter in order
to play the short movie for audiences across the country. The one-minute film,
Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), was meant to help persuade the public of the
dangers of Nikola Tesla’s AC electricity, the type of electricity competing with
Edison’s own proposed DC plan for the nation. Throughout the late 1800s all
across New Jersey, Edison had electrocuted countless dogs and cats—hundreds
of animals, in fact—using AC electricity, hoping to sabotage the Westinghouse
Company which stood as AC’s most outspoken proponent and Edison’s biggest
competitor. In the short film showcasing Topsy-the-elephant’s death, we see—in
long shot for the most part, though there are moments of excruciating closeup—the animal actually being executed. Haneke, in many respects, lets his
camera work in such a documentarian fashion. One must wonder about the
politics here as well.
Indeed, what precisely marks animal death as special on film is the animal’s
assumed inability to die. From Descartes on, animals have been taken to be
machines, and so what better way to present animality to us than through the
technological gauze of the camera? As Akira Lippit has argued, the disclaimer
that ‘“No animal was harmed in the making of this film’ serves as a form of
erasure that brings the death of the animal back into the ethical folds of the
human world. But the disclaimer—a disavowal of animal death—never resolves
the crisis, only defers it.” It is filmmaking itself that provides anima, animation,
animality to that which was a lifeless picture and mere static representation. The
still camera makes of things dead objects; the filmmaker’s camera puts them
into action, allows them movement, and animates. Is the animal thus reanimated
on film or animated truly for the first time by film? If an image points toward
the way in which anything can be made to die, to be still, and not merely to
perish, we might say that there is a necessary “animalation” that takes place in
cinema. Haneke’s work is thus ontologically as well as ethically disturbing,
doubling the stakes even as it doubles the possibility of death.
What, then, of the death of humans—what of the same sort of confusion and
unresolved questions about life and what moves us, what animalates us? Before
it is possible to respond to the question of a violent human death, we must first
ask about Haneke’s relationship to human violence in general.
For the film Code Unknown (2000), Juliette Binoche was asked to slap a
child. Haneke demanded that the slap be real for fear that it otherwise might
look fake and thus pull the viewer out of the fictional moment on film. The
nonfictional, that is, is put in service of the fictional. Binoche—the actress, not
the character (whatever that means)—recalls not only how difficult it was for
her to enact this real violence on a real child, but how impossible it was for