On April 27, 2007 WWE Films will release a movie called The Condemned. The movie's story goes like this:
"An adrenalin-charged action thriller, "The Condemned" tells the story of Jack Conrad, who is awaiting the death penalty in a corrupt Central American prison. He is "purchased" by a wealthy television producer and taken to a desolate island where he must fight to the death against nine other condemned killers from all corners of the world, with freedom going to the sole survivor"
The hook?
These 10 people are all on death row in prisons around the world, and instead of the state killing them, they sell them to a television producer that puts them on an isolated island to kill one another. The island is full of cameras and all the action is televised online.
An interesting concept. DSM would like to see how the audience for the show within the movie is portrayed. Generally, the audience will flock toward the show and it will be popular, although I know the movie's focus will mainly be on the prisoners and especially the main character, Conrad, played by WWE Superstar Stone Cold Steve Austin.
Promoters of make-believe violence, the WWE is always popular with young males and with their new movie studios have extended the violence into their movies.
These videos found on Revver and on the movie's official home page (WatchThemDieLive.com) show clips of people getting killed. They are teasers for the movie and represent the mindless curiosity in death Internet audiences might have.
Today, Toronto film critic and film programmer of the Toronto International Film Festival, Cameron Bailey visited Humber College to speak in a lecture series.
His lecture was entitled "YouTube Apocalypse: Watching Death on Demand".
Bailey commented on much of what Dead Sea Media has been discussing the past few weeks. However, with a focus on the popular YouTube online video sharing service, Bailey demonstrates how death is available to us with a click of a mouse. He used video clip examples during his speech and DSM will choose and discuss these videos.
Bailey began his discussions on the Saddam Hussein hanging video as captured by an official with his cell phone.
The video raised questions about public executions and how they have been pushed back into culture through a website as public displays of the spectacle of death. Public hangings were the most popular method for European and North American executions well into the mid 1960's. However, some countries had to stop public displays because they were inciting blood lust. Saddam's execution was popular because it was not what mainstream media forced us to watch, a choreographed, staged execution. People showed favour toward a video that was outside the public norm and ripped in social fabrics created by the mainstream media.
Saddam's hanging was compared to this hanging by American troops in WWII. This video shows fixed camera positions and even the final drop. Unlike the Saddam video, this was professionally and probably government filmed. Brings up questions of how things are changing, how almost any moment in time can be documented and put on display for the world to see.
This video was the last execution by guillotine in the public, and came at a time when executioners toyed with filming their actions. But public executions did not last. People had become desensitized to the display.
The Vietnam War brought visuals to the tube of Americans as reporters joined soldiers on the front lines. Along with visuals protests against the violence and cries to remove soldiers spread. This television video captures the same 1968 moment Eddie Adams' Pulitzer Prize winning photograph captures. You can see the flash go off before the man is shot in the head.
Question of Authenticity
When looking at death videos on YouTube one may question authenticity. This staged film of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots from 1895 was horrific in nature, almost too real to be true at the time.
Now, when a video is posted, debates rise over the authenticity of the footage. People argue as if they are disappointed, angry even, that they did not witness an actual death caught on film. Why would people stage these events anyway? Mocking the beheading of journalists and soldiers, people (mainly male youth) comment on death through humour, but not respectable humour. They are mindless and ignorant displays.
Compilation Videos
Two videos discussed were edited products and not just raw clips. The video below shows dramatic footage by soldiers in Iraq as a suicide car bomber blows up on an Iraqi street. However, most interesting is the build-up to the event and the how well documented it was. For it to be available online seems to show favour of these type of events and how they can be visually captivating. A music track is put behind the images, making commentary on the events through song.
[The footage could not be embedded please click here to watch]
Bailey brought this compilation of car crashes and cars striking pedestrians to the forefront.
Comments about the music, Radiohead'sKiller Cars, suggested someone decided to make a music video using car crashes as the focus. Why not? Right? What strikes me most, is the fact they used the live version of the song, so you can hear fans cheering them on as they perform or cheering on the drivers as they weave in and out traffic before coming face-to-face with their bitter end.
The Humber College presentation was very suitable for our subject here at Dead Sea Media and I would like to thank Cameron Bailey for taking his time to speak with me personally.
Watch out for another video compilation video soon by DSM. The video will compare images of death through history and how art and reality clash in modern times.
Talks between South Korea and the United States about a possible free trade agreement sparked a flurry of protests outside the hotel where delegates met.
One man set himself on fire and shouted "Stop the Korea-U.S. FTA" according to the New York Times. The man suffered third-degree burns all over his body. Below is a video of the man being extinguished and carried out by ambulance.
Burning Against War
This event invokes the memory of a photo that emerged from the American support of South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm. Buddhist monks were heavily involved in protesting the suppression. But in the early morning of June 11, 1963, two monks got out of a car, poured gasoline on Thích Quảng Đứcand set him ablaze. Quảng Đứcburned to death at a busy intersection in downtown Saigon, Vietnam.
I was to see that sight again, but once was enough. Flames were coming from a human being;his body was slowly withering and shriveling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning human flesh; human beings burn surprisingly quickly. Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think.... As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.
I've been asked a couple times whether I could have prevented the suicide. I could not. There was a phalanx of perhaps two hundred monks and nuns who were ready to block me if I tried to move. A couple of them chucked themselves under the wheels of a fire truck that arrived. But in the years since, I've had this searing feeling of perhaps having in some way contributed to the death of a kind old man who probably would not have done what he did — nor would the monks in general have done what they did — if they had not been assured of the presence of a newsman who could convey the images and experience to the outer world.
That same day the photo was shown to John F. Kennedy, soon after the American involvement with the Ngô Đình Diệm regime ended.
