Oh Look, A Riot...
Jun. 14th, 2020 08:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloIn artistic representations of conflict- paintings, movies, TV shows- everything is purposeful. Even the extras know what they're supposed to be doing. The attackers attack, the defenders defend, meaningful gestures are made, sinews are stretched. If an important historical figure is present he has a space cleared round him so we can better admire whatever it is he is doing. No-one just wanders through the scene, no-one stand idle, no-one has their hands in their pockets.
Reality is otherwise.
Yesterday I was watching unedited drone footage of the action in central London. In one sector a bunch of protesters had been kettled by the police. We were at a height from which people look like ants so it was impossible to be sure which faction they were from. They had formed into a sort of clump- and swirled and drifted amorphously, like industrial pollution on a pond. They pushed at the thin yellow line (the cops were wearing high vis jackets) seeking advantage, but when the line parted as it sometimes did, no-one broke through because they were leaderless and had no idea where they wanted to be. People who were just going about their business crossed the camera's eye. Some ran to be sooner clear of the unpleasantness, but others strolled, sauntered, took their time about it. "Oh look, a riot, how interesting..."
Reality is otherwise.
Yesterday I was watching unedited drone footage of the action in central London. In one sector a bunch of protesters had been kettled by the police. We were at a height from which people look like ants so it was impossible to be sure which faction they were from. They had formed into a sort of clump- and swirled and drifted amorphously, like industrial pollution on a pond. They pushed at the thin yellow line (the cops were wearing high vis jackets) seeking advantage, but when the line parted as it sometimes did, no-one broke through because they were leaderless and had no idea where they wanted to be. People who were just going about their business crossed the camera's eye. Some ran to be sooner clear of the unpleasantness, but others strolled, sauntered, took their time about it. "Oh look, a riot, how interesting..."
no subject
Date: 2020-06-14 06:51 pm (UTC)I wish I could find again the piece I once read or saw about the Nuremberg Rallies which were most famously filmed by Leni Riefenstahl, but for a period of time were also broadcast live from the scene by TV crews, Nazi Germany being such a TV pioneer. Riefenstahl's cinematography was heroizing: everything looked precision-tooled, flawlessly synchronized, a superhuman gestalt. The TV broadcasts looked like most on-the-ground footage of a march or a rally: a mess of people trying to get a good view while not being totally trampled by their neighbors. It was abandoned because it didn't present the proper, desirable grandeur of the Third Reich. Photography was controlled just as carefully, which is why some of our most valuable images of the rallies are not the staged, official photo-ops but contraband souvenir selfies or distant, sneaky, blurry snapshots of the stadium. Reality is a stick in the wheel of propaganda. My mother, traveling through Europe in the spring and summer of 1968, was suddenly surrounded by a group of students in Paris who begged her to come with them because she had a camera, and that's how she wound up photographing history, also being tear-gassed.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 07:53 am (UTC)