4 - Collaborative Film as Terminal Care

Summary

Filmmaker Jon Jost's response to Nick's Film/Lightning over Water by German director Wim Wenders, filmed in April and May 1979 in the last few weeks before Nicholas Ray died of lung cancer, is indicative of reactions to artwork that deals with sensitive issues such as terminal illness and death. In his review of the film, ‘Wrong Move’, Jost writes:

The film business has long been noted for cruelty and harshness. In his last months Nick Ray needed something for himself, though perhaps he didn't know what that was. It certainly wasn't this movie, which clearly he did know. What Ray needed, simply, was love. Instead he got a crew who seem to perceive life only through the mechanical devices of film. They rolled over him with a movie-making machine, and now they even choose to display the carnage. (1981: 96)

Comments such as this about the legitimacy of using illness as the basis of art are familiar to many illness narrative and cultural critics. One of the best-documented controversies on this topic is, as mentioned in the Introduction, Croce's ‘non-review’ of Bill T. Jones's performance Still/Here in the New Yorker in 1994. Another muchdebated case that provoked disagreement among viewers, readers and reviewers over the tensions between voyeurism and empathy is Annie Leibovitz's photographs of her life with Susan Sontag in A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005 (2006). This book includes pictures of Sontag hospitalised and hooked up to machines, receiving chemotherapy at home, recovering from bone marrow transplant, dying and finally dead, elegantly dressed for burial. As death functions indexically rather than symbolically in photography and non-fiction film, and is thus experienced as real by viewers, the violation of such a visual taboo in our culture is often accompanied by the need to justify it. This is especially pressing in the case of the representation of another person's experience where consent may be an issue, as well as in collaborative narratives where one person (the healthy party) often finishes the joint work.