> -----Original Message-----
> From: Film-Philosophy Salon [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
> Behalf Of Geoff King
> Sent: Monday, April 07, 2003 2:55 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: war images/authenticity
>
> I wouldn't say low-quality images question ontological status, but
quite
> the
> opposite: by the sheer fact of their low quality, they scream
> 'authenticity', because reasons of authenticity (ie, they're the only
> images
> available from the front, with a status of real presence) are what
allow
> such low quality on our screens. There's a dialectic, in which I'm
very
> interested, between full, rich imagery as 'authentic' and precisely
the
> opposite as 'authentic', which just underlines the extent to which
> authenticity is always a rhetorical construct in these cases.
I too am interested in, what we might call, the "Kon Tiki Effect."
Imperfections can lend an interesting source of credibility to
photographs, and this has been used effectively in horror. For
instance, in "Prince of Darkness" the dream transmission has the look of
scratchy tv footage. The birthday party video in "Signs," where an
alien is briefly caught on tape, is the scariest part of the film. At
these moments of discovery, the monster's existence seems
incontrovertible because of the mode of presentation. (This is
especially important for horror, if you think of the genre as constantly
having to work to keep the viewer from rejecting the fictional situation
as ridiculous or implausible.)
The phenomena of the "Kon Tiki Effect" deserves further analysis to
explain why it works and what kinds of rhetorical effects it can have.
However, I'm not sure what you mean by saying that it "underlines the
extent to which
authenticity is always a rhetorical construct in these cases."
Are you questioning the notion of "authenticity" by saying that the "Kon
Tiki Effect" shows that there can be no authenticity?
I'm not sure what your argument is or what you mean by "authenticity."
Cheers,
Aaron Smuts
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