Wet movies The topic of snuff has long been exhausted, ceased to be a taboo, the subject of shock and awe, the subject of total inhumanity on the other side of pornography in particular and cinema in general. This is especially true in the context of Snuff: A 2008 documentary about the murders on camera by American director Paul von Stetzel is a frankly raw and inexpressive exploration of snuff as an integral part of modern reality, although this picture is perhaps the most meaningful attempt to understand what snuff is without resorting to the over-the-top cinematic language of shockumentari, blackwash and exploitation. The dampness and grayness of the picture, however, are due to the fact that von Stetzel has not really decided on his author’s goal, with the main message conveyed to the audience of the picture: whether this is a confirmation of all conceivable and unthinkable urban legends about wet films, or this is a complete and comprehensive debunking of these very myths, despite the fact that from the point of view of directing, the film has hardly gone far from the great many television documentary detectives.
Von Stetsel interviews on the topic of both law enforcement officers - FBI representatives, criminologists - and film producers, along the way interspersing their stories with videos of allegedly snuff, while appealing so obvious to everyone and every argument (except for a few), that it fits to talk about author's craftiness and / or incompetence, because as the main examples of the evolution of snuff in a big movie, the director takes as a relatively unknown and vulgar "Snuff" 1970 Michael Feindlay (this tape became the main point of Jonahon's murder), which is clearly related to the "Shuff" picture of the "Luff" Demuff" as the main character of the film from the "Shannimuff" of the "Amuff" s" raft" , which is the "Amuffer's" , which is the main example of the "Duffer's" (" , the film) , which is clearly referring to the "Amuffer's , the "Snuffer's , as a pseudo-s Considering the snuff as part of popular cinema, von Stetzel therefore avoids all mention of both Michael Powell’s Peeping and Roger Michael Watkins’ Last House on a Deadlock Street, dispensing with sucking the most vivid manifestations of wet video, but not really bothering to analyze the prerequisites for the appearance of this topic in American and world cinema in general; that same philosophical or psychoanalytic context is simply put out of the brackets of the simple text of the tape, as if it does not exist at all. For the director, the snuff in the cinema is interesting only as part of some exoticism, as the most taboo attribute of the grindhouse, and no more than, but not as a conscious author’s exit beyond the limits of sophisticated fiction. What is a snuff or pretends to be such in cinematography is not there a great desire of directors to beat reality so much as to eventually replace it with cinema as such, to remove from the vital space of cinematographic reality the very concept and perception of cinema?! However, von Stetzel, instead of a greater immersion in the essence of snuff and pseudo-snuff, prefers to state the immutability of the very banal fact that in so-called free and independent cinema, everything is possible; it is worthwhile to reconcile and only follow the progressive integration of snuff into a large cinematic process to the extent that soon there will be nothing reprehensible in the deliberately dirty relishing of hyperrealistic mortido and libido. Although to talk about the impossibility of the existence of such an industry is more than imprudent. In any case, the body of the picture is soldered monologue of the famous Hollywood producer Mark Rosen, who said that in the seventies of the last century he was lucky to see a real snuff, the owner of which was a certain citizen of the Philippines, concurrently a pornmaker, who came to the producer with a proposal of extremely exotic and “real” material.
However, if the theme of the relationship between snuff and big cinema von Stetzel was put to a head, and nothing new was said, then in the context of the development of the theme of snuff and modern wars, the director went along a fine line, although trying to be extremely careful, because we will mainly talk about the US military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. The objective reality of modern wars with purely geopolitical, geo-economic and geo-strategic nutritious stuffing from Yugoslavia to Iraq and Syria is not only torture for the sake of torture and murder for the sake of murder (Srebrenica, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, etc.), but also the appearance of the same snuff for the purpose of its sale or as the main element of intimidation of the enemy. The element of sexual humiliation is sometimes simply implied or, on the contrary, protruding, as American servicemen in those very secret prisons proved, mocking that there is nonsense on terrorist suspects. Their ideological opponents, in cases of captivity of any member of the coalition, preferred to film their murder and torture on film; the enemy, deprived of his head and limbs, whom they do not think to save, is no longer the enemy, but the disseminated video with his sacrifice becomes the main element of counter-propaganda. Snuff merges with ideology. This is all the more obvious now that ISIS is filming what can be called snuff on an industrial scale and not in an amateur format.
But to a greater extent von Stetzel reveals the snuff in the context of the private stories of maniacs. From the international gang of pedophiles, covered in 2000, to the story of American sadists Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, who set up a torture film studio on their North California farm (the tape will provide a few minutes of their video exhibits, plus photos) in the 70s, to the notorious Charles Manson Family. But Lake and Ng receive the greatest author’s concentration; their bloody adventures most accurately focus on the objectivity of snuff as a kind of anti-kino shot not for commerce, but for sadistic satisfaction. The same Anatoly Slivko, Nevinomysk "teacher of the year", the pride of the Komsomol and the head of Chergid, hung and dismembered pioneers in his films not for the sake of fame, but for the satisfaction of his own libido, full of ammunition from heterogeneous sexual deviations. Lake and Ng, in turn, their actions are close to Saenko-Suprunyuk, Luka Magnotta, Kondratenko and Volkovich. The process of filming torture and murder for them was of exceptional narcissism, even a thirst for fame, for nothing that it smells of rotten flesh and dried blood, but glory, damn it, even at the cost of human lives. Snuff as a kind of variant to be aki Herostratus, but in fact it is just a manifestation of their excessive audacity and impunity, creating essentially complete proof of their guilt, without understanding it in any place and in any way. Painfully delays this process, it is too difficult to wean ourselves from both violence and its fixation; voyeurism brought to fetishism, shrouded in the haze of a total logocentric nightmare. For individuals like Lake and Ng, living is killing, and the tougher, the better, the better. In fact, for all its unevenness, 'Snuff: A documentary about the murders on camera claims only one thing: for all its semi-mythical snuff, being able to find for a long time, you can find, but Paul von Stetzel somehow completely forgot to clarify: is it necessary?!