The Death in their Eyes: What Perpetrator Images Perpetrate

By Vicente Sánchez-Biosca.

Translated by Martin Boyd.

Images that embody the point of view of the perpetrators of violent crimes, or their accomplices, force us to look at the pain of victims through the eyes of those who caused it. Accompanied by over sixty visuals of historically infamous violence, The Death in their Eyes goes beyond the visible aspects of images to reveal what has been left outside of the frame. Covering human abuse and humiliation at Abu Ghraib, the Auschwitz Album, religious desecration during the Spanish Civil War, an unfinished Nazi propaganda film made at the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1942, and detainees at the S-21 torture center in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, this volume proposes a rigorous new methodology for analyzing perpetrator images, in photography and film, that continue to be used and re-appropriated in today’s media.

Vicente Sánchez-Biosca is Professor of Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Valencia (Spain) and was Chairholder of Spanish Civilization at the KJC Center (New York University) in 2013. Visiting professor and research fellow at numerous universities (NYU, Montreal, Paris-Sorbonne, Sao Paulo, Technische Universität Berlin), he leads the REPERCRI research project on perpetrators of mass murder. His latest publications include Cine y guerra civil española: del mito a la memoria (Alianza Editorial, 2006), and Miradas criminales, ojos de víctima. Imágenes de la aflicción en Camboya (Prometeo, 2017).

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