Here, in reference to a stupid question about The Thin Blue Line:
It never occurred to me that someone might think that the re-enactments were not re-enactments at all, but honest-to-God vérité footage shot while the crime was happening. It’s crazy for someone to think I had just happened to be out on that roadway, that night, with a 35-millimeter film crew and many, many cameras – cameras taking multiple angles, high angles from overhead, low angles at tire-level looking under the car, even angles inside the suspect vehicle. How could anyone think that? How could anyone believe that? Of course, people believe some pretty amazing things, and it made me think: is it a legitimate question? How do we know what is real and what is re-enacted in a photograph? What is real and what is a simulacrum? It’s a question about images. How do we know what is happening for the first time and what is a re-enactment of an event? In a photograph or in a movie? How do we know it hasn’t been doctored or altered to deceive us about the “reality” we imagine we are observing?
5 comments:
You know Morris went deep on Abu Ghraib photos in the New Yorker recently? Movie and book pending too. Here's video of an interview between him and his coauthor.
No . . . I missed that. Cool.
It is not a matter of deception, society prefers the image to the reality.
Maybe we like images because they present visions that already have a sense to them, or that present a matter already framed, as we like to say also metaphorically. But what is the "real" alternative? It would be unfair to blame somebody for preferring war photos to being actually in the fray. Or is it about preferring an iconic photo to a documentary photo album or video? I think this is just about a preference for simplistic/black&white/no-nuance explanation and story telling, and not strictly photographic. And maybe that's a reasonable preference for any large democratic society in which there's too much for anyone to keep abreast of. That's why I watch the news and want Frontline and not Fox selecting my video footage.
Given my primary activity during the week I just spent in Guatemala -- documenting with still photography the making of a video documentary, I think MT is right. Still, though I was there to record simply, I couldn't help making aesthetic (the success of these is another question entirely) and political decisions that, however subtle, play some role . . .
Maybe it's about degree of nuance.
I always thought that the milkshake reenactment in Thin Blue Line signaled itself as a dramatic reenactment in so many ways -- its use of sound and light and slow motion, to name a few. That the reporter asking Morris the question didn't pick up on those things suggests that, rhetorically, they are no longer the stuff, solely, of the visually fictive; maybe the visual rhetoric of the fictional (or just the dramatically non-fictional) has been appropriated for long enough by, say, both Fox News and Michael Moore, that a current generation of 'documentary' viewers expects other kinds of cues (Morris touches on this in that article).
I wish I could post a picture in this comment . . .
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