The Pain of Others, Amplified: Agon and Sonic Spectatorship
Giulio Bertelli’s Agon forms a compelling conclusion to this series of reflections on mediation, spectatorship, and the ethics of encountering the pain of others. The previous texts explored the moral complexity of witnessing trauma in Narrative and the politics of restricted access in the Strehlow Collection, drawing on Susan Sontag’s writings on photography and interpretation. Agon shifts this discussion from questions of looking towards questions of hearing. Rather than focusing on absent images or inaccessible archives, Bertelli’s film presents a world of total sensory exposure, where violence, effort, and bodily vulnerability are amplified through sound technologies. The result is a film that interrogates not only the spectacle of sport, but also the contemporary desire for immersion itself.
Set during the fictional 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Ludoj, the film follows three Italian female athletes, a fencer, a judoka, and a rifle shooter, through training sessions, medical examinations, and moments of physical collapse. The title immediately establishes the film’s conceptual framework. In ancient Greek thought, “agon” referred to a regulated form of conflict, distinct from “polemos,” the unrestricted violence of war. Agon described competition governed by rules: athletic contests, debates, and forms of struggle considered necessary for civic life. Bertelli mobilizes this concept to examine how contemporary sport aestheticizes violence while presenting it as disciplined and socially acceptable.
The opening quotation from Pierre de Coubertin frames sport as inseparable from militarism: “Now, for this energy to be maintained, gymnasts must perpetually be under a warlike influence. The idea of war must never cease to inspire them.” Throughout the film, sport appears as both simulation and continuation of warfare. Rifle shooting evokes combat training, fencing reproduces ritualized attack and defence, and judo stages forms of bodily domination governed by strict rules. This connection recalls Sontag’s observation in Regarding the Pain of Others that international sports function as “that invaluable substitute for war.” (39)
Yet Bertelli is less interested in competition itself than in the systems that record and aestheticize it. Athletes are constantly mediated through cameras, microphones, sensors, and digital reconstructions. The shooter explains how microphones and lasers determine where bullets land, emphasizing the precision with which athletic movement is measured. The body becomes data, translated into images, sounds, and statistics. Throughout the film, motion-design dots replace actual fencing footage, digital avatars appear in video-game sequences, and 3D medical imaging reconstructs internal injuries. Agon suggests that contemporary sport exists increasingly as captured information.
This concern with mediation extends particularly to sound. The film constructs what might be called a “sound-stage sport,” where acoustics become proof of effort, pain, and violence. Environmental ambience is largely absent. Instead, isolated noises are amplified with obsessive precision: the clashing of fencing swords, breathing trapped inside masks, shoes scraping across the piste, bodies hitting tatami mats, or the mechanical thumping of an electrotherapy device attached to an injured knee.
These sounds create an intensely immersive sensory environment. During a running test, the athlete’s breathing reverberates unnaturally inside a respiratory mask. In fencing scenes, the surrounding silence allows every metallic impact and frustrated exhalation to become audible. The hum of air-conditioning systems and recording devices remains perceptible in the background, emphasizing the technological environment surrounding the athletes. The camera circles competitors on rails, its cables trailing behind like a big black snake circling its prey, transforming sports cinematography into a form of surveillance.
This sensory intensification recalls Sontag’s arguments in Against Interpretation, where she writes that “we must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”(10) Bertelli’s film appears to pursue exactly this heightened sensory experience. Tiny details usually ignored in sports broadcasting become central: the swishing of feet before impact, the clicking of machinery in a weapons factory, or the shrill alarms of scoring systems. Yet the film also reveals the unsettling consequences of this sensory obsession. The amplified sounds become fetishistic, resembling forms of ASMR or audiophile listening culture in which pleasure emerges from hyper-clarity and intimate sonic textures.
The film repeatedly foregrounds forms of bodily exposure that feel invasive. A close-up of the judoka binge eating chips and burgers emphasizes chewing and swallowing sounds with uncomfortable intimacy. Drug testing scenes force the athlete into humiliating surveillance. Medical procedures transform the body into an object of technical examination. Knee injuries are visualized through 3D imaging and endoscopic surgery footage, creating moments of body horror that recall Sontag’s reflections on spectators’ fascination with suffering. In Regarding the Pain of Others, she notes the contradictory pleasure involved in confronting painful images: “There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.” In Agon, this dynamic becomes acoustic as much as visual.
The film also challenges assumptions about authenticity in sports performance. Athletes are expected to conceal pain from spectators and opponents, particularly in elite competition where visible weakness can become strategic disadvantage. Sound repeatedly betrays what the body attempts to hide. Groans, strained breathing, and bodily impacts expose exhaustion beneath the controlled surface of competition. Even when scenes are clearly reconstructed or staged for the camera, sound continues to function as evidence. The spectator trusts what they hear despite knowing that the cinematic environment has been carefully manipulated.
This tension culminates in the film’s most disturbing sequence: the reconstruction of a fatal fencing accident in which a sword pierces through a competitor’s mask. The event is recreated through digital simulations before cutting to the morgue containing the victim’s body. A formal hearing analyses audiovisual recordings to determine responsibility. Here, the technologies surrounding sport are revealed not as systems of protection but as systems of documentation. Cameras, microphones, and sensors cannot prevent tragedy, they merely capture it in ever greater detail.
The recurring video-game aesthetics reinforce the connection between sport, warfare, and simulation. Floating digital avatars, target systems, and virtual environments suggest that athletic competition increasingly resembles gamified combat. Military institutions have long used video-game technologies to train soldiers for real combat situations, just as sports technologies simulate precision and tactical behaviour. Bertelli collapses these distinctions, presenting sport, gaming, and warfare as interconnected systems of mediated violence.
One of the film’s most striking aspects is the absence of spectators. Competitions occur in near silence, without cheering crowds or collective excitement. The athletes seem to perform not for audiences but for cameras, microphones, and recording systems. Human spectatorship is replaced by technological observation. Even when an official insists to the suspended shooter that “there is no violence here,” the statement becomes absurd against the backdrop of bodily damage and constant surveillance structuring the entire film.As the final reflection in this series, Agon returns to many of the ethical concerns raised by the previous essays while moving them into a more extreme sensory register. If the discussion of Narrative explored the moral difficulty of looking at traumatic memory, and the Strehlow Collection foregrounded the importance of refusing visibility altogether, Bertelli’s film imagines the opposite condition: a world in which access is total and every sensation can be recorded, amplified, and replayed. The spectator no longer simply observes violence from a distance but inhabits it acoustically through technologies designed to intensify immersion. We hear too much, see too much, and yet remain unable to look away.