Since my father’s diagnosis of lung cancer, my life has been haunted by something I cannot see. When the biopsy reported “airway dissemination positive,” I became consumed by questions: What is the shape and reach of this spread? Was the surgical margin[1] sufficient? Has the cancer already advanced beyond what was removed, lurking undetected, growing with each breath, shifting with every cough?
This essay film gathers a range of technologies that render lung tumors visible and legible to the human eye—high-resolution CT scans, PET imaging, paraffin embedding, and microscopic histology. These media frame the tumor as biological and physiological, something that emerges from within individual bodies.
The narration, quoting the words of Rob Nixon, resists[2] this framing. Overlaying the medical imaging with Nixon’s text invites reflection on the political and ethical stakes of a visual-driven epistemology that equates reality with the visible and the material.
Lung cancer is alarmingly prevalent in China, where several forces converge: the state’s heavy fiscal reliance on a tobacco industry that is itself state-monopolized, the widespread normalization of smoking that follows from it, and decades of rapid industrialization that have saturated the air with PM 2.5. My father is from Xuanwei in Yunnan, one of the nation’s most notorious lung cancer hotspots located in a mountainous border province, where 70% of government income relies on tobacco production. Tobacco money builds roads, supplies clean water, funds schools, and supports healthcare. Here, the economic and carcinogenic are one, each sustaining the other.
Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence is painfully apt here: a violence that is invisible, unevenly distributed, incremental, and internalized within the body. The tumor is as structural and political as it is material and biological.
In the film’s second half, we see the measurement and characterization of resected lung tissue, followed by the thoracoscopic removal of tumor-bearing lung segments, a procedure my father recently underwent. They show how slow violence ultimately materializes in a violence that is immediate, visceral, and intimate–when it takes form in flesh and blood.
It is the intention of these visuals to be straightforward and unflinching—not to sensationalize, but to insist on seeing violence as violence. Not obscured under sterile clinical language, nor hidden behind the closed doors of the operating room—a space of controlled disclosure that too often reproduces unawareness and inaction. My hope is that the affective intensity of this footage can help shape a horizon in which visibility can still be mobilized, but in a politically attentive and ethically responsible way.
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Notes
[1] Surgical margin refers to the boundary of healthy tissue removed along with a tumor; its adequacy helps determine whether cancerous cells may still remain.
[2] At the same time, the relationship between the image and narration need not be oppositional. The film is also conceived to allow for a synergy between the two, where the narration can be read as interpreting the visuals.
Source & Ethics Note
“The lung tumor we know exists yet that we cannot see” is a found footage essay film that assembles publicly available medical materials and original footage to explore how lung cancer is rendered visible—and remains invisible—through clinical regimes, and to reflect on how visibility operates as an epistemic practice that might be mobilized otherwise.
The opening and closing scenes were filmed by the author, depicting the author’s father’s experience. All other medical images used in the film are sourced from publicly accessible medical materials, with no identifiable patient information included. This work is non-commercial and academic; the use of found materials is transformative and recontextualized rather than redistributive.
This post was reviewed by Aaron Neiman.
Reference
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
