Output details

Powers of the False

Supported by a £250 MeCCSa grant, this feature article in Moving Image Review and Art Journal (MIRAJ) addresses the complex ethics of the manipulation of real people and events in fiction, documentary film and artists’ moving image. Through close readings of specific films that deliberately falsify their encounter with actuality, the article asks ‘can there be an ethic of falsification in the encounter between filmmaker and subject, and how can we document something whose truth has many sides or may be inscrutable?’ Referencing Gilles Deleuze’s theories of minor cinema and his term ‘the powers of the false', the article draws upon Levinas’ philosophy of alterity. It proposes that the documentary encounters the limits of its own spurious modes of articulation when the natural environment in question comprises of images and concepts that cannot be objectively recorded, rhetorically or otherwise – in other words when they are historical, when they are recollected, or when they are imagined. Consequently, film productions inexorably produce alteration and change. Following Deleuze, this argument recognises that in certain films and for some filmmakers the propensity for inventing the past and fictionalising the present is a tactic for resisting the power exerted by grand narratives. Within this mode of enquiry, staged events, re-enactments, symbolism and fiction demonstrate that the act of documenting is always inevitably performative . To support its claims, the article analyses the films Etre et Avoir (Phillibert), Grey Gardens (Maysles Bros) and Sherman’s March (Mckelwee) before providing close readings of Close-Up (Kiarostami) and Daddy’s Girl (Coulthard) and Whose Been Framed? (Ord).

MIRAJ is the first peer reviewed scholarly publication dedicated to artist's film and moving image. See: http://newsevents.arts.ac.uk/32150/moving-image-review-art-journal/ http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Contributor,a=E/view-Contact-Page,id=29873/

The article was developed from a symposium convened by Eastwood in May 2012, Powers of the False, held at Institut Francais, see: http://www.cinemaintothereal.com/steveneastwood/Powers_of_the_False.html