Page - 90 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

90 | Alyda Faber www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 As in other Wiseman films, there is a complex layering of sound and image, the cacophony of tools for processing the animals, workers reduced to very little sound, while images of the killed animals parody life-like movements: the shud- der of a leg when a carcass is first hung, a swinging tail when the hide is torn off, twitching muscles on decapitated heads. Repeated images show the cattle as if at rest when they are bled just after slaughter, and later the heads on metal stakes look like stabled cattle in stanchions with feeding buckets nearby. The camera records every part of the disarticulated animals, the masses of inter- nal organs, the parts salvaged on an assembly line, others disposed of down massive chutes, the blood pooled on the floor. In more leisurely cuts than the sardine sequence in Belfast, Maine (1999), the camera brings together the life- like movements of the dead with the death-like movements of the living – a reciprocity of inattention – with attention that neither can give the other. The space of parable happens in this gaping silence of reciprocal inattention that addresses us (and we do not look away). Inattention is a powerful theme revisited in many Wiseman films, and highlight- ed with a discussion of Giovanni Bellini’s The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr in National Gallery (2014). A man asks a group of gallery visitors why this rep- resentation of the story includes woodcutters going about their work, taking up more space in the picture than the assassin and martyr. He suggests that a tragic event is intensified if there are people who “don’t really notice these things happening … they just keep going on and on and on” (NG 33–34). He also refers to the Fall of Icarus: “Fantastic painting where almost all of the paint- ing is people not noticing what’s going on, people out plowing the fields and do- ing lots of other things, while in the background [Icarus] plunks into the ocean and dies” (NG 33). Many sequences in Wiseman’s films notice what people are not noticing, a paradox that intensifies the address of the films to the viewer to be aware of seeing and hearing, and enter into a possibility, both realised and unrealised by film subjects, of more-than-reciprocity. I consider Juvenile Court (1973) as a final example of such an invitation. Wiseman has a number of films that explore court cases (Domestic Violence I and Domestic Violence II, US 2001/2002), but none with such an extreme power differential as Juvenile Court (1973), shot in the court of Memphis and Shelby County in Tennessee where children come face to face with representa- tives of the powers of the state. The children become “cases” and numbers, are deliberated upon, and judged with a variety of techniques: case history, assessments of drawings, Rorschach inkblot tests, a polygraph test, etc. The judge in Juvenile Court (1973) exercises the power to retain jurisdiction over a juvenile or to waive it, sending the defendant to adult court, and to send chil- dren home or to foster homes or training school. These are all critical decisions, but such measures seem paltry in the face of the overwhelming need of the