License for aesthetics
In an era when gratuitous violence, extreme, incredible violence, is coated malignantly with the pill of aesthetics, Geert Wilders’ Fitna has struck the right chord.
Wilders decides to go for the aesthetic effect. He places the translations of the Koranic verses on sepia toned pages of the Koran itself with its beautiful script and gilded borders. His images of newspaper, film and photographic footage are placed within diffused frames in soft-focus, once again on the sepia-colored background. Even the harsh scenes of the soldier’s beheading, whose final horror Wilders spares us by substituting the images with the muffled, still bone-chilling, sounds of the gagged soldier’s last screams, are presented within blurred frames on a softened background. The music is two classical pieces by Tchaikovsky and Grieg.
[More to come]
