Why Audiences Love to Laugh at History’s Monsters
Posted: Sun Mar 10, 2024 5:19 am
Why Audiences Love to Laugh at History’s Monsters
Read more here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/arc ... dy/677702/
What is the correct distance from which to film a dictator? You could give him a close-up, revealing his psychic wounds, in a biopic or drama. You could turn on a spotlight, make him sing and dance onstage. Perhaps it’s best not to put him on-screen at all, and to focus instead on those who suffered at his hands.
Pablo Larraín, the director of the Oscar-nominated black comedy El Conde, wrestled with this question carefully. He feared that using a dramatic lens to depict Augusto Pinochet, whose 17-year-long military dictatorship in Chile made torture and forced disappearance state policy, could risk generating “some sort of empathy” in viewers, as he noted in an interview with the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario. “It would be completely immoral and dangerous to do something like that,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. Instead, the director shot the film in black and white and invoked satire to “produce a distance necessary.” Oh, and he made Pinochet into a vampire.
Read more here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/arc ... dy/677702/
What is the correct distance from which to film a dictator? You could give him a close-up, revealing his psychic wounds, in a biopic or drama. You could turn on a spotlight, make him sing and dance onstage. Perhaps it’s best not to put him on-screen at all, and to focus instead on those who suffered at his hands.
Pablo Larraín, the director of the Oscar-nominated black comedy El Conde, wrestled with this question carefully. He feared that using a dramatic lens to depict Augusto Pinochet, whose 17-year-long military dictatorship in Chile made torture and forced disappearance state policy, could risk generating “some sort of empathy” in viewers, as he noted in an interview with the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario. “It would be completely immoral and dangerous to do something like that,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. Instead, the director shot the film in black and white and invoked satire to “produce a distance necessary.” Oh, and he made Pinochet into a vampire.