Dallas VideoFest
Greetings,
I hope you are staying warm as we emulate being up north for a change.
Commentary
Watching the video from both sides of the impeachment trial made me think about video as evidence. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I’m considering writing about it if I can find an appropriate venue. So, I will just give you a tease about my thinking here.
While any testimony is fraught with the inaccuracy of memory, video evidence is fraught with image manipulation. When editing two shots together, we imply meaning that is not in the original material.
The early Russian filmmakers understood the idea that montage (putting two shots together) can have either geographical meaning (exterior of building cut to inside implies that that is the building we are in), intellectual significance (shot of policeman cut to the image of a pig), or more subtle emotional meaning from the Kuleshov Effect. I have always thought that video depositions were not fair in that, it’s easy to m