Jonathan Rommey draws a very interesting line between unreliable
narration and how digital film changed the ontology of film:
"The new Paranoia movies have less to do with political anxieties, more
to do with the feeling that there is little verifiable reality in the
screen image itself and, by extension, in the world we know through
visual media. It’s no longer a question /who/ is to be trusted, as in
the Seventies, but a question of whether /anything/, any image, any
evidence of the state of things, can be trusted. (Jonathan Rommey, The
New Paronoia, in Film Comment 1998)
He further refers to such films as Dark City or The Truman Show, in
which at the end everything turns out to be a narcissistic creation
which runs paralell to how images are created non-referentially - it
feels like the wrong reaction to the loss of a relatedness to reality.
I was always wondering why I hate so much such paranoia films as Dark
City or The Matrix and I think it has also something to do with their
foregrounding of the fact that the worlds are created by the filmmaker
or by creative forces of the digital postproduction department of the
film studios. Paranoia there is not so much a reaction to the growing
possibilities for manipulation but more are pretext for using digital
technology. So all the philosophy invested in these films is wasted to a
form of narration which is mainly induced by technology .
Herbert
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