After the ever onward march of the cinematic form to bigger, brighter, better image clarity and quality and precision and colour stauration it seems we have taken a very interesting turn. It would seem from the surface that the better the quality of the image, the more closely it can be linked with the naked eye and the more accurate the representation of the 'natural'; the more 'truthul' an image can present to the audience...
But in a slightly closer examination it seems the century of cinema has deliver a quite inverse consttuction of truth. The more pixelated, the more artifact ridden, the more hazy, out of focus, shaky and distorted an image the closer it gest to an in-built visual association with 'truth'.
Its an aesthetic driven by handycams and mobile phone cameras, secuirty cameras and hidden cameras and more over now in the internet age re-inforced ten-fold by the compression artifacts of compressed video formas delivery. The Truth of YouTube.!
It also struck me as not entirely a contemporary construct evolution - one need only look at the Kennedy asassination film, shot from the crowd on 8mm, to see this viewer associatio between truth and low-quality at work.
The Rodney King beating.
The collapse of the WTC.
Even more interesting becomes the news services themselves now activly seeking out this footage as broadcast staple. Cheaper than a news crew, the ubiquitous nature of phone cameras and handycams almost garuntees someone is in the right place at the right time to capture the moment. And moreover byt the very nature of the equipment on which it is captured it is rendered more truthful, more effecting, more profound than any news crew could gather.
French media theorist Baudrillaid places this concept into the most ellusively poetic but none the less profound context with his book Fatal Strategies.
?imagine a thing
of beauty that as absorbed all the energy of the ugly: that?s fashion?
Imagine the true that has absorbed all the energy of the false: there
you have simulation.? p9 ?Fatal Strategies?
This idea might well be considered in the light of
the visual artifacts of contemporary media distribution ? pixilation,
compression, chromatic noise. Those artifacts that are part and parcel
of a diffused notion of ?broadcast quality? ? a term rendered
irrelevant by desire for these flawed aesthetics (webcams, mobile phone
cameras, satellite phone reporting, internet delivery, home DV
production). Pixilation and compression artifacts in video media have
all the hallmarks of the falsity of the image and yet, because of these
flaws present to viewer sensibilities as more ?truthful? than a true
image ? if we can take that as being one you would see with your own
naked eye.
?In the movement of seduction it is as if the false were resplendent in all the power of truth.? p 52 ?Fatal Strategies?
