Operation Atropos

At Free Speech TV, we started having monthly Doc Fridays. I get to pick a couple programs from our collection and show them to the staff. This past Friday, I showed Howard Scott Warshaw's Vice and Consent, which I've blogged about before, and Coco Fusco's Operation Atropos. The latter video is available through the Video Databank and will be playing on Free Speech TV. The first of the two films is an educational documentary about San Francisco's BDSM community. The second, Operation Atropos, is Fusco's exploration of women's roles in military interrogation after the photos from Abu Ghraib were released. Fusco takes a group of young women to an interrogation training course put on by ex-military interrogators. The bulk of the film shows her and the group of women experiencing interrogation and learning about it from the position of victims. The film addresses all sorts of issues about representation, the real, the performative, victimization, power, race, gender, etc...The conversation afterwards was quite interesting. One staff member was highly effected by the simulation of interrogation and found the documentary to be quite painful. Another, who had seen films from the School of the Americas in the late 80s, felt the film diminished the reality of torture. I really hope you get a chance to check it out when it plays on Free Speech TV. I'd love to hear your thoughts.