Michael
You wrote that:
what's the difference between the
>trust we accord to documentary and to the fiction film? How is it we
>recognise the difference? And so rapidly - if you zap through the tv
>channels you can tell the difference virtually instantaneously, no? Is
>it just that we are extremely adept at picking up the cues of genre? Am
>I barking up the wrong tree here?
In reply
I'm not to sure that you can however! What about the film hoax, where the
fictional 'performativity' of the film passes itself off as actuality (many
examples here, e.g. the 'forgotten silver' hoax in New Zealand in the
1990s). I guess the point here is that without the possibility of a hoax
there would be no way of discerning an authentic image from an inauthentic
one. There would just be images and nothing else. That is to say, without
the possibility of a 'performance' passing itself off as the 'real thing',
there could be no 'real thing'. This issue is different from the one you
mention of discerning one genre from another.
Here we are dealing with ontological issues (rather than semiotic ones)
related to image authenticity. This is where trust comes in. At some level,
our trust in the film images' capacity to lead us back to an actual event
is bound up in the modal orientation of the film technology as it situates
the viewer in space and time. This can be related to the camera and its
'deterritorialising' effects, together with its trace-technology, allowing
for the storage and recycling of 'traces' of an event to many others not
physically present at the event in its actual occurence. Camera based
technologies and those who operate them or are subject to them, thus have a
stake in breaching the gap between the event and the image. Modern forms of
trust in camera-based visual cultures such as ours, privilege 'authentic'
images which lead us directly back to the event. They seem only able to
tolerate inauthentic performances when they are placed in the genre box of
'fiction'. And even then, the desire for realism reduces performativity to
so-called 'authentic' experiences of fictional characters and events. In
more recent time the authenticity of experience in fictional film has
shifted away from psychological realist acting styles, to the image-event
itself in the form of hyper-effects of sensation experienced by the cinema
viewer as an 'assault on the senses' (not much different however from
nineteenth century stage melodrama which ended up doing the same thing).
All performativity is thus oriented towards its own self-effacement by the
technology trying to 'ground' or reterritorialise human subjectivity in
some 'real' or authentic experience. But this does not mean that
performativity itself is eliminated. The residue of performativity in
camera based visual cultures is the interesting bit!
Warwick
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Warwick Mules
Senior Lecturer
Film and Cultural Studies
Editor Transformations
http://www.cqu.edu.au/transformations
School of Humanities
Faculty of Arts, Health and Sciences
Central Queensland University
Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia 4702
email: [log in to unmask]
Phone: 0749 309217
Mobile: 04122 92541
Fax: 0749 306455
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