Cruelty, perpetual undertow

Drawing on the work of Wolfgang Sofski, who defines cruelty as “violence for the sake of violence”, without finality, “becoming a pure praxis”, this text analyses the presence of violence and cruelty in the films of Lav Diaz. The filmmaker is opposed to any excess of the visible: he relies on words to describe the violence suffered by bodies, and films the care given to hurt bodies. In Lav Diaz’s cinema, cruelty is expressed rather than exhibited through the voice of sound theatre. The filmmaker takes it upon himself to give free rein, in the sovereign space of the shot, to the excessiveness of this cruelty, the purpose of which is to ravage human life, destroy the Other, and devastate his difference.