Patrícia I. Vieira is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She is finishing a Ph.D. dissertation on political fiction and art in Latin America and Portugal. Her areas of specialization are Lusophone literature, culture, art, and film. Her current research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American and Portuguese fiction, contemporary Lusophone poetry, literary theory, and women's studies in the Portuguese-speaking world. Some of her recent publications include articles on authors Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Mia Couto, Lídia Jorge and António Lobo Antunes, as well as on film and propaganda. |
How to cite this article: Vieira, Patricia. "Torture and the Sublime. The Ethics of Physical Pain in Garaje Olimpo". Dissidences. Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism. On line. Internet: 15/09/06 (http://www.dissidences/ GarajeOlimpo.html) |
| " It seems as though spectators were being metaphorically invited to assume the role of gods, looking at the action from a higher level and judging what they see. The audience is being intimated to take a stance, to appraise not only the action but also the film itself and what it represents" |
| "Ethics is thus not only an intellectual but also a physical response of the beholders of torture scenes. In Garaje Olimpo sublimity cannot be dissociated from the bodies of the victims portrayed in the screen and from those of the spectators watching in horror" |
| D |
n
Physical pain is often described as an experience that eludes representation. In The Body in
Pain Elaine Scarry emphasizes the unsharability of bodily suffering and identifies resistance
to language as one of its essential attributes. A central consequence of the difficulty to
verbally express pain is its invisibility. This characteristic becomes particularly unsettling in
a situation of violence purposefully inflicted on others, since its insubstantiality allows for its
dismissal as a side effect of a particular policy or government. A case in point is the
ubiquitous use of torture by the dictatorial regimes of America’s Southern Cone during the
1970s and 80s, when thousands were submitted to the practice, justified by abstract notions
such as “internal enemy” or “security of the state”. Scarry points to the potentially benign
effect of expressing the pain imposed on oneself or on another, as a first step in unmasking
its reality and in giving the tortured social and political representation.
There are many perspectives from which to articulate discourses on torture. Testimonies of
victims and their families, reports by human rights agencies, social scientific research and
documents produced during legal procedures are perhaps some of the more common texts
on the subject. All these accounts share what Idelber Avelar describes as “authority to
speak” (254). Their legitimacy arises either from being the result of personal experience or
from their reference to juridical, political or scientific objectives. In the case of imaginary
creations about physical pain the definition of authority is more complex. The fictionalization
of the horror of violence leads to a questioning of the aesthetics and ethics of creative
representations on this subject. In this essay I will analyze the fiction film Garaje Olimpo
(1999), directed by Marco Bechis, which depicts the practice of torture during the Argentine
dictatorship. I will argue that traditional concepts such as beauty are inapt to explicate the
artistic language of the movie and make the case for the use of the notion of the sublime to
interpret the aesthetic of horror it presents. In the first part of the essay I will go back to
Immanuel Kant’s definition of sublimity and attempt to explain how this notion establishes a
bridge between aesthetics and ethics in the movie. In the second section of the text I will
focus on the representation of the suffering body. Following Edmund Burke’s reflections on
the sublime I will try to show that the ethics of sublimity in Bechis’ film is rooted on the
viewers’ physical response to the depiction of corporeal pain.
A crucial sequence in Garaje Olimpo occurs towards the end of the film. María (Antonella
Costa) is on the first floor cleaning one of the cars when Texas (Pablo Razuk) leaves the
building. In an extreme long shot that corresponds to an eyeline match from the perspective
of the prisoners we realize that the door at the end of the garage has been left open. The
intense light that enters through the small gap produces a strong contrast with the low-key
illumination in the interior. María realizes that this is an opportunity to escape. She begins to
run towards the door to the increasingly louder sound of a cello. The movement is
emphasized by a series of jump cuts while the camera pans to follow her. She is filmed from
the inside while she goes out and the shot continues frontally focusing on the open door. The
music stops and for several seconds the strong light coming from outside fills the screen.
Shortly after, Texas enters the scene dragging María with him. He forces her to kneel down,
points a gun at the back of her head and starts to count to ten. A high angle shot shows the
situation from above and is followed by a cut to an extreme close-up of the girl’s terrified face.
Texas fires and María screams and falls forward; the representation of her drop to the floor is
prolonged in time by three match of action shots that depict her fall from different angles.
Only then does the viewer realize that Texas fired to the side and that María, lying on the
floor, has not been killed.
This scene condenses many key elements of Garaje Olimpo. First, it emphasizes the
dehumanizing treatment of prisoners. Texas grabs María by her hair and arm, as though
she were an animal, and compares her to a bird who whishes to fly. It equally stresses the
close relationship between torture and power, a connection that had already been pointed
out by Michel Foucault: “power relations have an immediate hold upon it [the body]; they
invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit
signs” (25). Texas is invested not only with institutional authority but also with a weapon that
helps him enforce it. This situation of absolute power of the torturers, who are able to dispose
of their prisoners’ lives, is a leimotiv throughout the film. As one of the jailers puts it: “Acá
somos Dios”. In addition, this sequence thematizes the conflation between the purposeful
infliction of pain and sexual control, which will be further discussed later. [1] All torturers are
men and both Texas and Félix try to use their position to obtain María’s sexual favors. The
gun in Texas’ hand could be interpreted as a phallic symbol, an extension of his physical but
possibly also sexual dominance.
In this sequence, the division between the inside of the improvised concentration camp and
the outside of the city of Buenos Aires is sharply presented. The contrast between both
spaces is constant throughout the movie and is established by the use of lighting, among
other technical devices. The interior of the garage is always dimly lit, with long shadows and
an abundance of somber tones juxtaposed to ochre, dark blue and dark red. The city, on the
other hand, is presented as bright and colorful, as exemplified by the strong luminosity
coming from the outside through the open door. The sun almost always shines and at night
the intensity of the lights is emphasized. The significance of these differences goes beyond
the obvious distinction between the gloom of prison and the pleasures of freedom, as director
Marco Bechis points out:
Nelle scene sotteranee la camera era sempre in spalla, la luce era semplicemente la lampadina che si
vede nell’inquadratura, non c’è stata alcuna luce aggiunta. […] Fuori, alla superficie, la città è statta
invece raccontata come fiction, con luce artificiale, carrelli, che in questo dispositivo funzionavano
come finzione: quella in cui vivevano gli abitanti. Soto c’era la realtà” (25).
The locus of torture is filmed with natural lights while artificial illumination is added to the
city scenes. This contributes to the feeling of unreality attached to the images of the world
outside the garage. The physical and psychological pain of the tortured is presented as more
genuine than the rest of Buenos Aires.
In The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry defines torture as an act that unmakes the foundations of
the world. The purposeful infliction of physical pain destroys our most basic assumptions
and deconstructs reality. Idelber Avelar, however, criticizes this clear division between
barbarity and social order as an illusion. [2] He argues that atrocity and civilization are
closely bound since practices such as torture can only exist with the implicit connivance of
the society (260). In this scene of Garaje Olimpo, the open door functions as a threshold
between two worlds and symbolizes their interrelation. The street seen through the door,
with its quiet harmony, is oblivious to the suffering of the prisoners. The dreamlike quality of
the images of Buenos Aires points to the fact that its serenity is an illusion. The whole city,
the film seems to imply, is responsible for the acts of torture happening in its midst.
If the film addresses the inactivity of Argentineans in the face of torture, it equally questions
the comfortable passivity of viewers. When Texas is about to fire on María, there is a shot
filmed directly from above, a technique often employed throughout the movie. Panoramic
views of the city, certain streets or the interior of prison cells are frequently presented from a
higher angle. It seems as though spectators were being metaphorically invited to assume the
role of gods, looking at the action from a higher level and judging what they see. The
audience is being intimated to take a stance, to appraise not only the action but also the film
itself and what it represents. However, the challenge to assess Garaje Olimpo proves to be a
difficult one to meet. Veracity, a central category in narrative accounts on torture such as
testimonies, is not a relevant tool to comment on fictional and artistic productions. Also, as
we shall see, traditional aesthetic categories such as harmony or beauty do not seem to be
appropriate to the analysis of the film. The concept of the sublime might be employed here
as an alternative to the concept of beauty in dealing with the fictional representation of
violence and pain.
In On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry argues that beautiful objects, beings or artistic
creations incite replication. We tend to wish to recreate beauty or, as Scarry puts it: “Beauty
brings copies of itself into being” (3). A brief reflection on the use of this category applied to
a movie such as Garaje Olimpo is enough to realize its inadequacy. The horrific, painful
moments portrayed in the film probably do not elicit in most viewers the desire to duplicate
them, be it in reality or in art. In fact, our aesthetic response to the film is much closer to the
notion of the sublime, as it was established by philosophy in the 18th century.
In his Critique of Judgment (1790) Immanuel Kant defines some of the differences between
the idea of beauty and that of the sublime:
[Beauty] carries with it the feeling of life being furthered, and hence is compatible with charms and an
imagination at play. But the other liking (the feeling of the sublime) is a pleasure that arises only
indirectly […].Hence, too, this liking [the sublime] is incompatible with charms, and, since the mind is
not just attracted by the object but is alternately always repelled as well, the liking for the sublime
contains not so much a positive pleasure as rather admiration and respect, and so should be called a
negative pleasure. (98)
Unlike beauty, the sublime is not compatible with play and charms. It is “violent to our
imagination” and arises from chaos, violence and devastation in nature (99-100).
Agreeableness is the feeling elicited by beauty, while the sublime produces a strong outpour
of emotion (72). Its attraction is closely bound with repulse and the pleasure that results from
it is a negative one in that it relates to pain. Kant depicts a person contemplating the sublime
as someone “seized by an amazement bordering on terror, by horror and a sacred thrill”
(129). Even though Kant associates the sublime primarily with the contemplation of nature,
he does not exclude its pertinence to the realm of artistic endeavor. In fact, throughout the
18th century, the term had been commonly used to describe art, especially literature. The
notion was particularly relevant in the discussion of what Samuel Monk designates as the
“graveyard school” (54). In his seminal work on the sublime, this critic documents the
increasing popularity in the 18th century of texts in which fear and terror played a central
role. He points out that there was a connection between graveyard poetry and a desire to
attain the sublime (87). [3] Later, this aesthetics was extended to prose writing, chiefly with
the gothic novel, and, in the 20th century, in film, with the emergence of horror movies. The
sublime became a common concept in the study of both genres (see Mishra, 1994).
Marco Bechis’ movie can be seen as an example of an aesthetic of horror. The somber
atmosphere of the indoor shots, the uncertainty that runs through the movie and the scenes
of torture and other physical and psychological abuse resulting in the constant terror felt by
the prisoners combine to create a mood of fright that permeates the work. [4] The category
of the sublime, with its emphasis on strong emotion, fear and even terror is thus particularly
apt to describe the film. However, this concept is equally useful in the analysis of this motion
picture from another point of view, namely from an ethical perspective.
Unlike what usually happens in gothic novels, horror films and many other artworks
associated with an aesthetic of horror, a patent moral stance underlies Bechis’ movie. Garaje
Olimpo is not only a film about torture but also a film against torture. It is clearly a
denunciation of the physical and psychological violence inflicted on political prisoners. [5]
The ethical responsibility of both the filmmaker and the spectators is heightened by the fact
that, although the events narrated are fictional, they are based on the reality of Argentina
during the 1970s and 80s. [6] This is emphasized in the end of the film by a short note shown
before the credits and stating that, during the dictatorship in the country, thousands of
citizens were thrown alive into the sea. The military responsible for these crimes, the text
points out, still have not been brought to justice. The movie openly intends to arouse not only
an aesthetical but also an ethical response in viewers and to encourage them to assume a
critical position regarding the actions it narrates.
The sublimity of horror has a long tradition of being associated with the liminal situation
between aesthetics and ethics we find at Garaje Olimpo. Samuel Monk states that the feeling
of terror was originally derived from religion. The terror produced by nature or artworks was
related to the idea of an angry God (52). Literature that exploited the sensation of fear often
had a moralizing intention, since the terrible elements described helped to show the
greatness of the Creator and the inscrutability of His ways. The sensation of the sublime
provoked by horror was consequently a way to appreciate God’s greatness. In Kant’s
Critique of Judgment the relationship between the sublimity of horror and morality is
secularized since ethics, not theology, lies at the core of the philosopher’s system of thought.
Unlike beauty, the sublime is, according to Kant, a completely subjective experience. It is
not a quality of a particular object or landscape but the effect that these provoke in men:
“For the beautiful in nature we must seek a basis outside ourselves, but for the sublime a
basis merely within ourselves and in the way of thinking that introduces sublimity into our
presentation of nature” (Kant 100). When human beings are faced with certain stimuli they
experience the sublime and are led to realize that there is a supersensible world beyond the
natural phenomena that surround them. They understand that although they are immersed
in physical realities their cognitive powers are superior to sensibility. They enter the realm of
reason, which is the source of the moral law that governs them and their true calling. [7]
The Kantian sublime constitutes a transition between theoretical and practical reason, i.e.
between physical realities and morality. It is through the feeling of fear and horror that the
individual experiences sublimity and is able to associate aesthetics with ethics. [8] The
emphasis in Kant’s Critique on the interrelation between these two notions is pertinent for
the understanding of Garaje Olimpo. The aesthetic of horror developed in the film and its
portrait of cruelty produce in viewers a response very close to what Kant described as the
sublime. It is due to the spectators’ strong emotional reaction to the scenes of violence in the
screen, to their “amazement bordering on terror” (Kant 129), that their ethical conscience is
aroused. Their moral condemnation of purposefully induced physical pain is likely to have
gained renewed force after watching this artistic depiction of torture.
Kant’s aesthetic philosophy can be deployed in the interpretation of numerous contemporary
art forms dealing with violence, such as Bechis’ film. Yet the contrast established in the
philosopher’s writings between the physical world and the rational realm seems very
reductive, in that human beings are presented as divided into two distinct compartments
mediated through aesthetics. Furthermore, he defines a rigid hierarchy of human faculties,
where the sensorial ability constitutes the lowest form of knowledge and is opposed to moral
consciousness, which is the domain of reason. Consequently, the body is seen as completely
separated from ethics and even as impairing its activity. In the next section I will attempt to
recuperate the body as a site both of aesthetic and ethical experience. In the case of artistic
representations of physical pain the sublime can only be understood through its
hypostasization in the human body.
The Body Sublime
One of the first scenes of Garaje Olimpo after María’s imprisonment focuses on the effect of
pain upon the body. During her initial ten-hour torture session through electric shocks she
gets dangerously hurt and her torturer Víbora (Marcos Montes) hastens to call his
supervisor Tigre (Enrique Piñeyro). He reanimates María with the use of a defibrillator and
scolds Víbora for using too high a voltage. Their conversation shows the complete
instrumentalization of the prisoners and the jailers’ bureaucratic approach to their métier:
T: ¿Qué dice la tabla para 40 kilos?
V: Quince mil.
T: Quince mil. ¿Cuánto le diste?
V: No, estaba dándole bien… Yo… Bueno, si no hablaba…
T: La tabla está por algo allí. Bueno, ya está regular. Puedes seguir. No le des agua.
The callousness of this dialogue is emphasized by the background sound of light pop music
playing in the radio outside the prison cell, supposedly to conceal the cries of the tortured.
The sequence is filmed in one shot and the camera concentrates on María’s body. She is
filmed naked from her waist up, lying on her back on top of the torture table in the center of
the frame from a slightly high angle. She has her arms tied above her head to the top of the
bench and her position evokes Christ in the cross. Víbora is at her left and Tigre occupies
her right side but their faces are almost always outside the frame, since the camera rarely
moves from the girl’s body. She has obviously been under intense physical pain and her skin
shines with sweat. Her appearance is of utter defenselessness.
As it is mentioned in the dialogue between Víbora and Tigre, the immediate justification for
inflicting pain is the desire to get information from the prisoners. Thus the torturer increased
the voltage of the electric current applied to the girl’s body because she would not speak.
However, as Page DuBois points out, the practice of torture is not a reliable source of
knowledge. The suffering of prisoners is rather seen as a punishment for certain actions
(148) and the abuse of the body becomes an end in itself and not simply a means to gather
data. [9] DuBois sees in the purposeful infliction of pain the wish to extract from the body of
the other a truth that it conceals and which cannot be reduced to relevant information on
political activities. For the torturer, the victim represents a difference that needs to be
eradicated:
But a hidden truth, one that eludes the subject, must be discovered, uncovered, unveiled, and can
always be located in the dark, in the irrational, in the unknown, in the other. And that truth will continue
to beckon the torturer, the sexual abuser, who will find in the other – slave, woman, revolutionary –
silent or not, secret or not, the receding phantasm of a truth that must be hunted down, extracted, torn
out in torture. (147)
DuBois delineates a correlation between torture and sexual abuse, since the body of women
has traditional been regarded by a phallocentric society as the locus of absolute otherness.
The domination of the other through torture evokes the power relations resulting from sexual
difference. We can find this association in the scene of Garaje Olimpo described above,
where María’s naked helpless body is surround by the two men. The film enacts women’s
subjection and seems to ascribe María the traditional female role of a victim in a masculine
universe. However, we can also interpret this scene as a subtle critique of the victimization of
women and of the exploitation of their bodies.
Throughout Garaje Olimpo there is an emphasis on the representation of torture, of which
the scene described above is only an example. The suffering body plays a significant role in
the creation of an aesthetic of horror in the film. The viewers’ reaction to this artistic
representation of pain is, to a certain extent, a physical one. Nervousness, tension and even
the irresistible wish to cover one’s eyes in order to escape the most brutal moments are likely
to be some of the most common effects of the scenes of violence. The Kantian division
between body and reason proves unable to explain the spectators’ physical response to the
movie. In this case, the feeling of sublimity cannot be conceived solely as an intellectual
answer to outside stimuli.
In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Edmund Burke attempts to elucidate the physiological origins of the feeling of the sublime.
For the philosopher, the foundation of sublimity was pain, while pleasure was the basis of
beauty. His definition of the sensation is as follows:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any
sort terrible, […] is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the
mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much
more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we
may be made to suffer, are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures […].
(39) [my emphasis]
Burke attempts to give a physical explanation of how ideas of pain affect both the body and
the mind and produce the feeling of the sublime. The philosopher emphasizes here the
interrelation between physical and psychological processes when dealing with aesthetic
concepts. For Burke, pain and fear — the idea of pain — affect the body in similar ways.
Both the sensation and the emotion lead to a contraction of the muscles and cause tension in
the nerves. Thus the effect that pain operates in the mind through the body is similar to the
results of the idea of pain in the body (see Monk 97). The feeling of the sublime, resulting
from terror, is therefore a tension of the subject. The philosopher goes on to explain how
human beings can transform terror in an aesthetic experience. Just as labor is essential for
the constitution, the contraction of the body through the feeling of the sublime is also
beneficial: “As common labor, which is a mode of pain, is the exercise of the grosser, a mode
of terror is the exercise of the finer parts of the system” (Burke 136). Humans can appreciate
the idea of pain and fear, provided that it does not endanger them. The sensation of the
sublime resulting from an aesthetic of horror is thus highly dependent on physical processes.
Although Burke’s physiological description of the sublime seems nowadays irretrievably
archaic, his efforts in bringing the whole organism into the artistic experience are still
pertinent. His lessons are particularly relevant in the analysis of artworks that depict violence
and torture, such as Bechis’ film. The origin of the tension we experience when watching the
movie is perhaps not so far removed from the “idea of pain” described by Burke (39). The
repulse viewers feel in beholding the infliction of physical pain is probably due to their
imagining that suffering in their own bodies. Kant’s notion that the sublime resulting from
the horrible may elicit a moral reaction explains the film only partially. It is the beholding of
the physical suffering and the refraction of that pain in the audience that conditions our
aesthetical appreciation of the film and allows for a possible ethical reaction. Ethics is thus
not only an intellectual but also a physical response of the beholders of torture scenes. In
Garaje Olimpo sublimity cannot be dissociated from the bodies of the victims portrayed in
the screen and from those of the spectators watching in horror.
Notes
[1] In the film El caso Pinochet (2001) directed by Patricio Guzmán there is a similar
association between the practice of torture and women. The movie presents the testimony of
Chileans who suffered torture while narrating the legal process against former dictator
Augusto Pinochet. Of the several people interviewed only one is a man. Women are thus
ascribed to their traditional role of passive victims.
[2] In Torture and Truth Page DuBois makes a similar argument by showing how the values
of civilization are bound with violence. She emphasizes the interrelation between torture and
truth in Ancient Greece and describes the fact that in the Greek legal system, the torture of
slaves was seen as a guarantor of the truthfulness of their testimony. She equally points out
that, during a certain period, torture was used as a way to define social status. Thus the
Greek citizen was, by definition, someone who could not be submitted to the practice.
Therefore, the social order was constituted through the infliction of pain.
[3] Monk points out that the concept of the sublime grew increasingly estranged from that of
neo-classical beauty. In fact, it came to represent a set of qualities that neo-classical
aesthetics had rejected: “Terror is the first of several qualities that, finding no very happy
home in the well-planned, orderly, and carefully trimmed domain of neo-classicism, sought
and found refuge in the sublime, which constantly gathered to itself ideas and emotions that
were to be prominent in the poetry and prose of the romantic era” (52).
[4] Marco Bechis states that the actors did not have access to the whole script before the end
of the film. They received new instructions while the shooting progressed. This may have
contributed to the mood of uncertainty in the film since the performers did not know what
would become of the character they were interpreting (100).
[5] The views of the filmmaker became clear in the way the main characters are portrayed.
The torturers are not only unnecessarily brutal but they are also petty thieves, like Félix, or
crooks and murders, like Texas. The victims, on the other hand, are brave and noble, like
Nene or María, who worked in a destitute neighborhood alphabetizing the poor.
[6] The filmmaker interviewed several former prisoners and victims of torture in preparation
for the film. Also, he had himself been arrested and imprisoned in a concentration camp
called “Club Atlético” while he was visiting Argentina in 1977. Due to the influence of his
family, the military transferred him to a civilian prison, where he met a man who had spent a
year in “Garaje Olimpo” (Bechis 204-7).
[7] Kant’s own words are the following: “Hence the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect
for our own vocation. [...] this respect is accorded an object of nature that, as it were, makes
intuitable for us the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers over the
greatest power of sensibility. […] For it is a law (of reason) for us, and part of our vocation, to
estimate any sense object in nature that is too large for us as being small when compared
with ideas of reason; and whatever arouses in us the feeling of this supersensible vocation is
in harmony with that law” (114-5).
[8] Significantly, there are pre-requisites for experiencing the sublime. While beauty is
universally accessible to all human beings, one needs to be prepared to feel sublimity: “In
fact, what is called sublime by us, having been prepared through culture, comes across as
merely repellent to a person who is uncultured and lacking in the development of moral
ideas. In all the evidence of nature’s destructive force, and in the large scale of its might, in
contrast to which his own is nonexistent, he will see only the hardship, danger and misery
that would confront anyone forced to live in such a place” (Kant 124). The transition from
aesthetics to ethics can consequently only be undertaken by those who are already
predisposed for it.
[9] Michel Foucault had already made a similar argument in Discipline and Punish. The
work documents the transition from corporeal punishment to other forms of criminal justice
in the last 200 years. Foucault mentions that in the Early Modern Age torture was commonly
inflicted not so much to find out the truth about a certain crime but as a legal form of
chastisement (16). The change to more humane sentences marks a transformation of
paradigm in western legal systems. The decline of what Foucault names the “hold on the
body” goes hand in hand with the end of punishment as a spectacle: “At the beginning of
the nineteenth century, then, the great spectacle of physical punishment disappeared; […]
the theatrical representation of pain was excluded from punishment” (14). The use of torture
in contemporary societies is thus often perceived as an anachronism, a barbaric practice
from another age and is hidden from public view. This can be observed in Garaje Olimpo.
The scene described above happened underground, in a dark, closed space below the
streets of Buenos Aires.
Works Cited
Avelar, Idelber. “Five Thesis on Torture.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 10.3
(2001): 253-71.
Bechis, Marco. Argentina 1976-2001. Filmare la Violenza Sotterranea. Milan: Ubulibri, 2001.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958 (1st ed. 1756).
DuBois, Page. Torture and Truth. New York and London: Routledge, 1991.
El Caso Pinochet. Dir. Patricio Guzmán. 2001.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New
York: Vintage Books, 1977.
Garaje Olimpo. Dir. Marco Bechis. Perf. Antonella Costa and Carlos Echeverria. Ocean
Films, 1999.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis and
Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987 (1st ed. 1790).
Mishra, Vijay. The Gothic Sublime. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1994.
Monk, Samuel H. The Sublime. A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the Modern World. New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
---. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Pain Elaine Scarry emphasizes the unsharability of bodily suffering and identifies resistance
to language as one of its essential attributes. A central consequence of the difficulty to
verbally express pain is its invisibility. This characteristic becomes particularly unsettling in
a situation of violence purposefully inflicted on others, since its insubstantiality allows for its
dismissal as a side effect of a particular policy or government. A case in point is the
ubiquitous use of torture by the dictatorial regimes of America’s Southern Cone during the
1970s and 80s, when thousands were submitted to the practice, justified by abstract notions
such as “internal enemy” or “security of the state”. Scarry points to the potentially benign
effect of expressing the pain imposed on oneself or on another, as a first step in unmasking
its reality and in giving the tortured social and political representation.
There are many perspectives from which to articulate discourses on torture. Testimonies of
victims and their families, reports by human rights agencies, social scientific research and
documents produced during legal procedures are perhaps some of the more common texts
on the subject. All these accounts share what Idelber Avelar describes as “authority to
speak” (254). Their legitimacy arises either from being the result of personal experience or
from their reference to juridical, political or scientific objectives. In the case of imaginary
creations about physical pain the definition of authority is more complex. The fictionalization
of the horror of violence leads to a questioning of the aesthetics and ethics of creative
representations on this subject. In this essay I will analyze the fiction film Garaje Olimpo
(1999), directed by Marco Bechis, which depicts the practice of torture during the Argentine
dictatorship. I will argue that traditional concepts such as beauty are inapt to explicate the
artistic language of the movie and make the case for the use of the notion of the sublime to
interpret the aesthetic of horror it presents. In the first part of the essay I will go back to
Immanuel Kant’s definition of sublimity and attempt to explain how this notion establishes a
bridge between aesthetics and ethics in the movie. In the second section of the text I will
focus on the representation of the suffering body. Following Edmund Burke’s reflections on
the sublime I will try to show that the ethics of sublimity in Bechis’ film is rooted on the
viewers’ physical response to the depiction of corporeal pain.
A crucial sequence in Garaje Olimpo occurs towards the end of the film. María (Antonella
Costa) is on the first floor cleaning one of the cars when Texas (Pablo Razuk) leaves the
building. In an extreme long shot that corresponds to an eyeline match from the perspective
of the prisoners we realize that the door at the end of the garage has been left open. The
intense light that enters through the small gap produces a strong contrast with the low-key
illumination in the interior. María realizes that this is an opportunity to escape. She begins to
run towards the door to the increasingly louder sound of a cello. The movement is
emphasized by a series of jump cuts while the camera pans to follow her. She is filmed from
the inside while she goes out and the shot continues frontally focusing on the open door. The
music stops and for several seconds the strong light coming from outside fills the screen.
Shortly after, Texas enters the scene dragging María with him. He forces her to kneel down,
points a gun at the back of her head and starts to count to ten. A high angle shot shows the
situation from above and is followed by a cut to an extreme close-up of the girl’s terrified face.
Texas fires and María screams and falls forward; the representation of her drop to the floor is
prolonged in time by three match of action shots that depict her fall from different angles.
Only then does the viewer realize that Texas fired to the side and that María, lying on the
floor, has not been killed.
This scene condenses many key elements of Garaje Olimpo. First, it emphasizes the
dehumanizing treatment of prisoners. Texas grabs María by her hair and arm, as though
she were an animal, and compares her to a bird who whishes to fly. It equally stresses the
close relationship between torture and power, a connection that had already been pointed
out by Michel Foucault: “power relations have an immediate hold upon it [the body]; they
invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit
signs” (25). Texas is invested not only with institutional authority but also with a weapon that
helps him enforce it. This situation of absolute power of the torturers, who are able to dispose
of their prisoners’ lives, is a leimotiv throughout the film. As one of the jailers puts it: “Acá
somos Dios”. In addition, this sequence thematizes the conflation between the purposeful
infliction of pain and sexual control, which will be further discussed later. [1] All torturers are
men and both Texas and Félix try to use their position to obtain María’s sexual favors. The
gun in Texas’ hand could be interpreted as a phallic symbol, an extension of his physical but
possibly also sexual dominance.
In this sequence, the division between the inside of the improvised concentration camp and
the outside of the city of Buenos Aires is sharply presented. The contrast between both
spaces is constant throughout the movie and is established by the use of lighting, among
other technical devices. The interior of the garage is always dimly lit, with long shadows and
an abundance of somber tones juxtaposed to ochre, dark blue and dark red. The city, on the
other hand, is presented as bright and colorful, as exemplified by the strong luminosity
coming from the outside through the open door. The sun almost always shines and at night
the intensity of the lights is emphasized. The significance of these differences goes beyond
the obvious distinction between the gloom of prison and the pleasures of freedom, as director
Marco Bechis points out:
Nelle scene sotteranee la camera era sempre in spalla, la luce era semplicemente la lampadina che si
vede nell’inquadratura, non c’è stata alcuna luce aggiunta. […] Fuori, alla superficie, la città è statta
invece raccontata come fiction, con luce artificiale, carrelli, che in questo dispositivo funzionavano
come finzione: quella in cui vivevano gli abitanti. Soto c’era la realtà” (25).
The locus of torture is filmed with natural lights while artificial illumination is added to the
city scenes. This contributes to the feeling of unreality attached to the images of the world
outside the garage. The physical and psychological pain of the tortured is presented as more
genuine than the rest of Buenos Aires.
In The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry defines torture as an act that unmakes the foundations of
the world. The purposeful infliction of physical pain destroys our most basic assumptions
and deconstructs reality. Idelber Avelar, however, criticizes this clear division between
barbarity and social order as an illusion. [2] He argues that atrocity and civilization are
closely bound since practices such as torture can only exist with the implicit connivance of
the society (260). In this scene of Garaje Olimpo, the open door functions as a threshold
between two worlds and symbolizes their interrelation. The street seen through the door,
with its quiet harmony, is oblivious to the suffering of the prisoners. The dreamlike quality of
the images of Buenos Aires points to the fact that its serenity is an illusion. The whole city,
the film seems to imply, is responsible for the acts of torture happening in its midst.
If the film addresses the inactivity of Argentineans in the face of torture, it equally questions
the comfortable passivity of viewers. When Texas is about to fire on María, there is a shot
filmed directly from above, a technique often employed throughout the movie. Panoramic
views of the city, certain streets or the interior of prison cells are frequently presented from a
higher angle. It seems as though spectators were being metaphorically invited to assume the
role of gods, looking at the action from a higher level and judging what they see. The
audience is being intimated to take a stance, to appraise not only the action but also the film
itself and what it represents. However, the challenge to assess Garaje Olimpo proves to be a
difficult one to meet. Veracity, a central category in narrative accounts on torture such as
testimonies, is not a relevant tool to comment on fictional and artistic productions. Also, as
we shall see, traditional aesthetic categories such as harmony or beauty do not seem to be
appropriate to the analysis of the film. The concept of the sublime might be employed here
as an alternative to the concept of beauty in dealing with the fictional representation of
violence and pain.
In On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry argues that beautiful objects, beings or artistic
creations incite replication. We tend to wish to recreate beauty or, as Scarry puts it: “Beauty
brings copies of itself into being” (3). A brief reflection on the use of this category applied to
a movie such as Garaje Olimpo is enough to realize its inadequacy. The horrific, painful
moments portrayed in the film probably do not elicit in most viewers the desire to duplicate
them, be it in reality or in art. In fact, our aesthetic response to the film is much closer to the
notion of the sublime, as it was established by philosophy in the 18th century.
In his Critique of Judgment (1790) Immanuel Kant defines some of the differences between
the idea of beauty and that of the sublime:
[Beauty] carries with it the feeling of life being furthered, and hence is compatible with charms and an
imagination at play. But the other liking (the feeling of the sublime) is a pleasure that arises only
indirectly […].Hence, too, this liking [the sublime] is incompatible with charms, and, since the mind is
not just attracted by the object but is alternately always repelled as well, the liking for the sublime
contains not so much a positive pleasure as rather admiration and respect, and so should be called a
negative pleasure. (98)
Unlike beauty, the sublime is not compatible with play and charms. It is “violent to our
imagination” and arises from chaos, violence and devastation in nature (99-100).
Agreeableness is the feeling elicited by beauty, while the sublime produces a strong outpour
of emotion (72). Its attraction is closely bound with repulse and the pleasure that results from
it is a negative one in that it relates to pain. Kant depicts a person contemplating the sublime
as someone “seized by an amazement bordering on terror, by horror and a sacred thrill”
(129). Even though Kant associates the sublime primarily with the contemplation of nature,
he does not exclude its pertinence to the realm of artistic endeavor. In fact, throughout the
18th century, the term had been commonly used to describe art, especially literature. The
notion was particularly relevant in the discussion of what Samuel Monk designates as the
“graveyard school” (54). In his seminal work on the sublime, this critic documents the
increasing popularity in the 18th century of texts in which fear and terror played a central
role. He points out that there was a connection between graveyard poetry and a desire to
attain the sublime (87). [3] Later, this aesthetics was extended to prose writing, chiefly with
the gothic novel, and, in the 20th century, in film, with the emergence of horror movies. The
sublime became a common concept in the study of both genres (see Mishra, 1994).
Marco Bechis’ movie can be seen as an example of an aesthetic of horror. The somber
atmosphere of the indoor shots, the uncertainty that runs through the movie and the scenes
of torture and other physical and psychological abuse resulting in the constant terror felt by
the prisoners combine to create a mood of fright that permeates the work. [4] The category
of the sublime, with its emphasis on strong emotion, fear and even terror is thus particularly
apt to describe the film. However, this concept is equally useful in the analysis of this motion
picture from another point of view, namely from an ethical perspective.
Unlike what usually happens in gothic novels, horror films and many other artworks
associated with an aesthetic of horror, a patent moral stance underlies Bechis’ movie. Garaje
Olimpo is not only a film about torture but also a film against torture. It is clearly a
denunciation of the physical and psychological violence inflicted on political prisoners. [5]
The ethical responsibility of both the filmmaker and the spectators is heightened by the fact
that, although the events narrated are fictional, they are based on the reality of Argentina
during the 1970s and 80s. [6] This is emphasized in the end of the film by a short note shown
before the credits and stating that, during the dictatorship in the country, thousands of
citizens were thrown alive into the sea. The military responsible for these crimes, the text
points out, still have not been brought to justice. The movie openly intends to arouse not only
an aesthetical but also an ethical response in viewers and to encourage them to assume a
critical position regarding the actions it narrates.
The sublimity of horror has a long tradition of being associated with the liminal situation
between aesthetics and ethics we find at Garaje Olimpo. Samuel Monk states that the feeling
of terror was originally derived from religion. The terror produced by nature or artworks was
related to the idea of an angry God (52). Literature that exploited the sensation of fear often
had a moralizing intention, since the terrible elements described helped to show the
greatness of the Creator and the inscrutability of His ways. The sensation of the sublime
provoked by horror was consequently a way to appreciate God’s greatness. In Kant’s
Critique of Judgment the relationship between the sublimity of horror and morality is
secularized since ethics, not theology, lies at the core of the philosopher’s system of thought.
Unlike beauty, the sublime is, according to Kant, a completely subjective experience. It is
not a quality of a particular object or landscape but the effect that these provoke in men:
“For the beautiful in nature we must seek a basis outside ourselves, but for the sublime a
basis merely within ourselves and in the way of thinking that introduces sublimity into our
presentation of nature” (Kant 100). When human beings are faced with certain stimuli they
experience the sublime and are led to realize that there is a supersensible world beyond the
natural phenomena that surround them. They understand that although they are immersed
in physical realities their cognitive powers are superior to sensibility. They enter the realm of
reason, which is the source of the moral law that governs them and their true calling. [7]
The Kantian sublime constitutes a transition between theoretical and practical reason, i.e.
between physical realities and morality. It is through the feeling of fear and horror that the
individual experiences sublimity and is able to associate aesthetics with ethics. [8] The
emphasis in Kant’s Critique on the interrelation between these two notions is pertinent for
the understanding of Garaje Olimpo. The aesthetic of horror developed in the film and its
portrait of cruelty produce in viewers a response very close to what Kant described as the
sublime. It is due to the spectators’ strong emotional reaction to the scenes of violence in the
screen, to their “amazement bordering on terror” (Kant 129), that their ethical conscience is
aroused. Their moral condemnation of purposefully induced physical pain is likely to have
gained renewed force after watching this artistic depiction of torture.
Kant’s aesthetic philosophy can be deployed in the interpretation of numerous contemporary
art forms dealing with violence, such as Bechis’ film. Yet the contrast established in the
philosopher’s writings between the physical world and the rational realm seems very
reductive, in that human beings are presented as divided into two distinct compartments
mediated through aesthetics. Furthermore, he defines a rigid hierarchy of human faculties,
where the sensorial ability constitutes the lowest form of knowledge and is opposed to moral
consciousness, which is the domain of reason. Consequently, the body is seen as completely
separated from ethics and even as impairing its activity. In the next section I will attempt to
recuperate the body as a site both of aesthetic and ethical experience. In the case of artistic
representations of physical pain the sublime can only be understood through its
hypostasization in the human body.
The Body Sublime
One of the first scenes of Garaje Olimpo after María’s imprisonment focuses on the effect of
pain upon the body. During her initial ten-hour torture session through electric shocks she
gets dangerously hurt and her torturer Víbora (Marcos Montes) hastens to call his
supervisor Tigre (Enrique Piñeyro). He reanimates María with the use of a defibrillator and
scolds Víbora for using too high a voltage. Their conversation shows the complete
instrumentalization of the prisoners and the jailers’ bureaucratic approach to their métier:
T: ¿Qué dice la tabla para 40 kilos?
V: Quince mil.
T: Quince mil. ¿Cuánto le diste?
V: No, estaba dándole bien… Yo… Bueno, si no hablaba…
T: La tabla está por algo allí. Bueno, ya está regular. Puedes seguir. No le des agua.
The callousness of this dialogue is emphasized by the background sound of light pop music
playing in the radio outside the prison cell, supposedly to conceal the cries of the tortured.
The sequence is filmed in one shot and the camera concentrates on María’s body. She is
filmed naked from her waist up, lying on her back on top of the torture table in the center of
the frame from a slightly high angle. She has her arms tied above her head to the top of the
bench and her position evokes Christ in the cross. Víbora is at her left and Tigre occupies
her right side but their faces are almost always outside the frame, since the camera rarely
moves from the girl’s body. She has obviously been under intense physical pain and her skin
shines with sweat. Her appearance is of utter defenselessness.
As it is mentioned in the dialogue between Víbora and Tigre, the immediate justification for
inflicting pain is the desire to get information from the prisoners. Thus the torturer increased
the voltage of the electric current applied to the girl’s body because she would not speak.
However, as Page DuBois points out, the practice of torture is not a reliable source of
knowledge. The suffering of prisoners is rather seen as a punishment for certain actions
(148) and the abuse of the body becomes an end in itself and not simply a means to gather
data. [9] DuBois sees in the purposeful infliction of pain the wish to extract from the body of
the other a truth that it conceals and which cannot be reduced to relevant information on
political activities. For the torturer, the victim represents a difference that needs to be
eradicated:
But a hidden truth, one that eludes the subject, must be discovered, uncovered, unveiled, and can
always be located in the dark, in the irrational, in the unknown, in the other. And that truth will continue
to beckon the torturer, the sexual abuser, who will find in the other – slave, woman, revolutionary –
silent or not, secret or not, the receding phantasm of a truth that must be hunted down, extracted, torn
out in torture. (147)
DuBois delineates a correlation between torture and sexual abuse, since the body of women
has traditional been regarded by a phallocentric society as the locus of absolute otherness.
The domination of the other through torture evokes the power relations resulting from sexual
difference. We can find this association in the scene of Garaje Olimpo described above,
where María’s naked helpless body is surround by the two men. The film enacts women’s
subjection and seems to ascribe María the traditional female role of a victim in a masculine
universe. However, we can also interpret this scene as a subtle critique of the victimization of
women and of the exploitation of their bodies.
Throughout Garaje Olimpo there is an emphasis on the representation of torture, of which
the scene described above is only an example. The suffering body plays a significant role in
the creation of an aesthetic of horror in the film. The viewers’ reaction to this artistic
representation of pain is, to a certain extent, a physical one. Nervousness, tension and even
the irresistible wish to cover one’s eyes in order to escape the most brutal moments are likely
to be some of the most common effects of the scenes of violence. The Kantian division
between body and reason proves unable to explain the spectators’ physical response to the
movie. In this case, the feeling of sublimity cannot be conceived solely as an intellectual
answer to outside stimuli.
In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Edmund Burke attempts to elucidate the physiological origins of the feeling of the sublime.
For the philosopher, the foundation of sublimity was pain, while pleasure was the basis of
beauty. His definition of the sensation is as follows:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any
sort terrible, […] is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the
mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much
more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we
may be made to suffer, are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures […].
(39) [my emphasis]
Burke attempts to give a physical explanation of how ideas of pain affect both the body and
the mind and produce the feeling of the sublime. The philosopher emphasizes here the
interrelation between physical and psychological processes when dealing with aesthetic
concepts. For Burke, pain and fear — the idea of pain — affect the body in similar ways.
Both the sensation and the emotion lead to a contraction of the muscles and cause tension in
the nerves. Thus the effect that pain operates in the mind through the body is similar to the
results of the idea of pain in the body (see Monk 97). The feeling of the sublime, resulting
from terror, is therefore a tension of the subject. The philosopher goes on to explain how
human beings can transform terror in an aesthetic experience. Just as labor is essential for
the constitution, the contraction of the body through the feeling of the sublime is also
beneficial: “As common labor, which is a mode of pain, is the exercise of the grosser, a mode
of terror is the exercise of the finer parts of the system” (Burke 136). Humans can appreciate
the idea of pain and fear, provided that it does not endanger them. The sensation of the
sublime resulting from an aesthetic of horror is thus highly dependent on physical processes.
Although Burke’s physiological description of the sublime seems nowadays irretrievably
archaic, his efforts in bringing the whole organism into the artistic experience are still
pertinent. His lessons are particularly relevant in the analysis of artworks that depict violence
and torture, such as Bechis’ film. The origin of the tension we experience when watching the
movie is perhaps not so far removed from the “idea of pain” described by Burke (39). The
repulse viewers feel in beholding the infliction of physical pain is probably due to their
imagining that suffering in their own bodies. Kant’s notion that the sublime resulting from
the horrible may elicit a moral reaction explains the film only partially. It is the beholding of
the physical suffering and the refraction of that pain in the audience that conditions our
aesthetical appreciation of the film and allows for a possible ethical reaction. Ethics is thus
not only an intellectual but also a physical response of the beholders of torture scenes. In
Garaje Olimpo sublimity cannot be dissociated from the bodies of the victims portrayed in
the screen and from those of the spectators watching in horror.
Notes
[1] In the film El caso Pinochet (2001) directed by Patricio Guzmán there is a similar
association between the practice of torture and women. The movie presents the testimony of
Chileans who suffered torture while narrating the legal process against former dictator
Augusto Pinochet. Of the several people interviewed only one is a man. Women are thus
ascribed to their traditional role of passive victims.
[2] In Torture and Truth Page DuBois makes a similar argument by showing how the values
of civilization are bound with violence. She emphasizes the interrelation between torture and
truth in Ancient Greece and describes the fact that in the Greek legal system, the torture of
slaves was seen as a guarantor of the truthfulness of their testimony. She equally points out
that, during a certain period, torture was used as a way to define social status. Thus the
Greek citizen was, by definition, someone who could not be submitted to the practice.
Therefore, the social order was constituted through the infliction of pain.
[3] Monk points out that the concept of the sublime grew increasingly estranged from that of
neo-classical beauty. In fact, it came to represent a set of qualities that neo-classical
aesthetics had rejected: “Terror is the first of several qualities that, finding no very happy
home in the well-planned, orderly, and carefully trimmed domain of neo-classicism, sought
and found refuge in the sublime, which constantly gathered to itself ideas and emotions that
were to be prominent in the poetry and prose of the romantic era” (52).
[4] Marco Bechis states that the actors did not have access to the whole script before the end
of the film. They received new instructions while the shooting progressed. This may have
contributed to the mood of uncertainty in the film since the performers did not know what
would become of the character they were interpreting (100).
[5] The views of the filmmaker became clear in the way the main characters are portrayed.
The torturers are not only unnecessarily brutal but they are also petty thieves, like Félix, or
crooks and murders, like Texas. The victims, on the other hand, are brave and noble, like
Nene or María, who worked in a destitute neighborhood alphabetizing the poor.
[6] The filmmaker interviewed several former prisoners and victims of torture in preparation
for the film. Also, he had himself been arrested and imprisoned in a concentration camp
called “Club Atlético” while he was visiting Argentina in 1977. Due to the influence of his
family, the military transferred him to a civilian prison, where he met a man who had spent a
year in “Garaje Olimpo” (Bechis 204-7).
[7] Kant’s own words are the following: “Hence the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect
for our own vocation. [...] this respect is accorded an object of nature that, as it were, makes
intuitable for us the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers over the
greatest power of sensibility. […] For it is a law (of reason) for us, and part of our vocation, to
estimate any sense object in nature that is too large for us as being small when compared
with ideas of reason; and whatever arouses in us the feeling of this supersensible vocation is
in harmony with that law” (114-5).
[8] Significantly, there are pre-requisites for experiencing the sublime. While beauty is
universally accessible to all human beings, one needs to be prepared to feel sublimity: “In
fact, what is called sublime by us, having been prepared through culture, comes across as
merely repellent to a person who is uncultured and lacking in the development of moral
ideas. In all the evidence of nature’s destructive force, and in the large scale of its might, in
contrast to which his own is nonexistent, he will see only the hardship, danger and misery
that would confront anyone forced to live in such a place” (Kant 124). The transition from
aesthetics to ethics can consequently only be undertaken by those who are already
predisposed for it.
[9] Michel Foucault had already made a similar argument in Discipline and Punish. The
work documents the transition from corporeal punishment to other forms of criminal justice
in the last 200 years. Foucault mentions that in the Early Modern Age torture was commonly
inflicted not so much to find out the truth about a certain crime but as a legal form of
chastisement (16). The change to more humane sentences marks a transformation of
paradigm in western legal systems. The decline of what Foucault names the “hold on the
body” goes hand in hand with the end of punishment as a spectacle: “At the beginning of
the nineteenth century, then, the great spectacle of physical punishment disappeared; […]
the theatrical representation of pain was excluded from punishment” (14). The use of torture
in contemporary societies is thus often perceived as an anachronism, a barbaric practice
from another age and is hidden from public view. This can be observed in Garaje Olimpo.
The scene described above happened underground, in a dark, closed space below the
streets of Buenos Aires.
Works Cited
Avelar, Idelber. “Five Thesis on Torture.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 10.3
(2001): 253-71.
Bechis, Marco. Argentina 1976-2001. Filmare la Violenza Sotterranea. Milan: Ubulibri, 2001.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958 (1st ed. 1756).
DuBois, Page. Torture and Truth. New York and London: Routledge, 1991.
El Caso Pinochet. Dir. Patricio Guzmán. 2001.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New
York: Vintage Books, 1977.
Garaje Olimpo. Dir. Marco Bechis. Perf. Antonella Costa and Carlos Echeverria. Ocean
Films, 1999.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis and
Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987 (1st ed. 1790).
Mishra, Vijay. The Gothic Sublime. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1994.
Monk, Samuel H. The Sublime. A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the Modern World. New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
---. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1999.
| Patricia Vieira, Harvard University |
| n |
| Torture and the Sublime The Ethics of Physical Pain in Garaje Olimpo |