BloguesRichard Martineau

Faut-il TOUT montrer?

Courriel de Mélissa Bélanger

A controversial movie showing real-life suicides is to be screened at a London film festival, despite being met with disapproval across the world. THE BRIDGE, which shows six people jumping from San Francisco's famous Golden Gate Bridge, will be shown at the London Film Festival on Monday (23OCT06).

The Bridge was earlier rejected by film festivals at Cannes and Berlin, with one organiser describing it as "voyeuristic, nothing more". Director ERIC STEEL believes the movie forces the audience to rethink their position on mental illness and suicide, and allows them to "bear witness to something profoundly disturbing".

The movie has also attracted heavy criticism from suicide experts, who believe it could lead to an increase in similar behaviour as shown on-screen. Professor KEITH HAWTON of the Centre for Suicide Research at Oxford University in the UK says, "All research suggests that showing, in detail, methods of suicide does result in an increase of those methods immediately afterwards, so portrayal of methods of suicide is ill-advised."

Voici quelques liens pour le film

Un (une entrée dans Wikipédia)
Deux (la bande-annonce, très, très "creepy")
Trois (un article de journal)

Extrait d'un texte publié dans un journal de San Francisco

Golden Gate Bridge officials are seething that a moviemaker who told them he was working on a "day in the life" project about the landmark was, in fact, capturing people on film as they jumped to their deaths.

Eric Steel initially told officials he planned to spend a year filming the "powerful and spectacular interaction between the monument and nature" and that his work was to be the first in a series of documentaries about national monuments such as the St. Louis Arch and the Statue of Liberty. That's how he got the Golden Gate National Recreation Area's permission to set up cameras on parkland overlooking Fort Point.

Now, however, Steel has revealed in an e-mail to bridge officials that the cameras — which were operating almost continuously during daylight hours for all of 2004 — filmed most of the 19 jumpers who went off the bridge last year plus a number of attempted suicides.

Doit-on tout montrer, sous prétexte que c'est un documentaire?

Le documentaire Manon, réalisé par André Saint-Pierre et animé par Benoît Dutrizac, montrait une Québécoise atteinte d'une maladie incurable qui allait se "suicider" dans une maison spécialisée en Suisse. Mais ce document a été fait AVEC son consentement. Manon VOULAIT susciter un débat sur le suicide assisté…

Alors que les gens qui ont été surpris alors qu'ils sautaient en bas du Golden Gate Bridge n'étaient pas au courant qu'ils étaient filmés et que des milliers de personnes allaient voir les derniers instants de leur vie.

Il n'y a aucun message, dans ce documentaire. Aucune volonté de "partir" un débat.

C'est toute la différence…