As I Mentioned in Class I Think a Lot of the Theoretical Premise Here Rests on the Form

December 11, 2008

Gairo Cuevas:

As I mentioned in class – I think a lot of the theoretical premise here rests on the form of your proposed film. Irrespective of content – whether it’s a sci-fi thriller, a documentary, a horror film – it’s the form not the content per se that says to the viewer “this is real.” Those Roland Barthes essays are going to be instrumental in working this theoretical issue out. The discourse of reality itself, insofar as it is presented in these conventional modes – masks the editorial process, presenting a narrative that has the look and feel of a “natural” linear trajectory – which signify “reality” itself; this is Roland Barthes’s “reality effect.”1 As he says “the realist speech act,” for example in history (or even in the genre of the horror film), engenders the verisimilitude of an event, where “details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they do – without saying so – is signify it.”2

The reality effect is also engendered in the evacuation of the subject from the documented event (this is what makes Blair Witch so scary – it seems like a direct unmediated document of the events); typically in documentaries there is no “I,” but rather an invisible, but omnipotent present hand that governs the trajectory. Paradoxically then, the filmmaker is everywhere – in his/her omnipotent presence governing the narrative trajectory – and nowhere at all; rarely, if ever does the (documentary) filmmaker appear in the narrative in the form of the “first person,” or revealing themselves and laying bare the constitutive process, the very assembly of the documentary itself. What is so fascinating about Blair Witch is that the disclosure/presentation of the filmmaking craft (the filmmakers document their investigation into the Blair Witch), but this moment of cinematic “honesty” encourages a “fetishistic disavowal,” “I know, but…” And this fetishistic disavowal is doubled, because we are intended to say here: “I realize that the Blair Witch narrative is a construct, and so too then is the presentation of filmmaking within the narrative, but I nevertheless believe (i.e., fetishistic disavowal) that the ‘real’ Blair Witch investigation is being revealed here.” Despite what the narrativized filmmaking shows, the evacuation of the filmmaker’s subjective presence in Blair Witch connotes “objectivity,” “reality,” and denies the filmmaker’s editorial hand. Again as Barthes notes, “On the level of discourse, objectivity – or lack of signs of the ‘speaker’ – thus appears as a special form of image-repertoire, the product of what we might call the referential illusion, since here the historian claims to let the referent speak for itself.”3 The Blair Witch film is supposed to be a transparent window onto the events – and leads us to believe that the “referent speaks for itself.” Traditionally, the (documentary) filmmaker has been viewed as a humble conduit, through which unmediated facts are conveyed, the connotations being that it is not the filmmaker who speaks per se, but the event itself speaks through the film. What makes Blair Witch so frightening is that its form gives the impression that we are a witness to the events as they ‘really’ were.

1 See Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 141 - 148. 2 Barthes, The Rustle of Language, 148. 3 Barthes, The Rustle of Language, 132. Your discussion of “authentic” was productive. In the future though – for definitions it’s best to cite the Oxford English Dictionary – and not your tiny pocket one, but the complete 20 (plus?) volume set. It’s available online along with our electronic databases and journals.

Also I’m glad that you brought up War of the Worlds. This is also a good reference point. There was a nice little piece on the NPR program Radio Lab about mass hysteria, which features among other things a discussion of War of the Worlds. See this link: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/03/07

I thought your trailer was great.