From Marie-José Mondzain's forthcoming essay "Can Images Kill?":
If spectators of a crime become criminals, it is because they are no longer spectators. What makes one stupid also makes one malicious. Under the identificatory and fusional regime, even the spectacle of virtue can make one a criminal, just as the spectacle of beauty can give rise to the worst hideousness. This is the real violence; it is the murder of thought by tyrannical images. Holy images have not prevented some from becoming murderous inquisitors.
But I would like to evoke an exemplary case: a film produced through the criminal violence of its sponsor, the Third Reich, and made by a disciplined filmmaker submissive to Hitler. To the filmmaker’s great misfortune, Joseph Goebbels did not like the film and it was censored. But it so happens that this film was saved by Henri Langlois. The film has escaped its director’s apologetic intentions, and it deserves close analysis. During those times of horrifying dictatorship where bodies and gazes were completely enslaved, where filmmakers were the minstrels of unifying incorporation and edifying personification, Willy Zielke produced, against all expectations, a free and contradictory object at the service of a free incarnation of fiction. An unacceptable object whose images did violence to totalitarianism, it triggered the wrath of the Nazi propaganda minister who wasn’t mistaken. The strength of Das Stahltier came from its appeal to spectators who were free to construct their place in a narrative space where dreams, hopes, and failures mingled. The questions that interest me are the following: How is it that a work of art is always and inevitably unsatisfying for a dictator? How does a work provoke violence insofar as it implements the violent power of a liberty?
PLAY CLIP FROM DAS STAHLTIER