"unreliability is not a character lying, but the film itself lying to the spectator."
I am not sure what exactly this means, Henry. My bad, but I am having
trouble with the concept of the film's agency here. Ultimately is it not a
question of the spectator lying to her/himself? Surely the suspension of
disbelief has to come into play somewhere in an assesment of narrative
veracity. There is an implicit responsibility somehow in your thinking and I am
wondering where you might choose to locate that responsibility - with the
characters, the film, the filmmaker or the spectator or perhaps somewhere
else?
"That unreliability in the cinema has been so dramatically on the rise
since the 90s, would suggest that in the age of CGI, society in general has
become more suspicious of images, due in part also to our being inundated
with pictures. The 'iconic turn' in effect has devalued the image."
I wouldn't blame CGI, that seems too simple to me. I don't know that it's really
a post 90's thing either. In fact I can think of a very relevant quote from
Kirekegaard from 1843 to suggest otherwise.
"My destiny is to discourse on truth as far as I can discover it but I do so in
such a way that as at the same time I demolish all possible authority on my
own part. Since I then become to the highest degree unreliable in men's eyes,
I speak the truth and thus place them in the contradiction from which they
can be rescued only by appropriating the truth themselves. It is only the
personality that can absorb truth and make it his own"
Perhaps cinema as a 'recent' dominant narrative mode is catching up with
something older, something much more than innovations in image manipulation
technology?
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