Video and Resistance

Critical Art Ensemble, the authors of "Video and Resistance: Against Documentaries", attempt to make readers question the authority of documentaries. The passage begins by describing how photography clarified vague memories and spurred a “Realism and literary Naturalism” movement that emphasized facts. According Critical Art Ensemble, the first documentaries were not factual because the Lumiére brothere's Workers Leaving the Lumiére Factory served merely as an advertisement for industrialization and Elephant Processions at Phnom Penh displayed a culture that never existed. In addition, Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North and D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation both had no factual integrity, especially since Flaherty completely conceptualized a walrus hunt in his documentary. The passage ends with a step-by-step procedure of how a documentary maker will obscure truths in order to convince viewers to sympathize with a guerrilla faction.

As "Video and Resistance: Against Documentaries" addresses documentary films, Susan Sontag's "The Image-World" addresses the influences of photography. Sontag writes, “Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete.” Sontag writes about how some things in photographed form disturb us more than a real experience. She also addresses how in eastern culture it is encouraged to take photographs with the least amount of artistic expression, obscurity and grotesqueness. Both Critical Art Ensemble and Susan Sontag mention how sometimes an image or film can obscure reality, but Sontag seems to be more accepting of how images can also appropriate reality and coexist cohesively with society. Critical Art Ensemble only seems to focus on filmmakers' mistakes of omitting full truths. Both pieces make readers aware of the relationship between reality and images.


Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North
(http://uashome.alaska.edu/~jndfg20/website/nanook.gif)