Show Me the Money

Each society has its regime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth: that is, the types of discourses it harbours and causes to function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true from false statements, the way in which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures which are valorised for obtaining truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

(Foucault, 'The political function of the intellectual', Radical Philosophy, Summer 1977, p. 13)

Cheating

In 1898 Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton, proprietors of the 'American Vitagraph Company' set out to deliberately 'fake' a piece of actuality film. Having just shot footage of the Spanish American War in Cuba the two young former vaudeville entertainers returned to New York to discover that they had missed the crucial event, the Battle of Santiago Bay. In an interesting comment on the construction of a news agenda, even in 1898, Smith recalled:

'Did you get the other shots?' a reporter asked.

'What do you mean?'

'The sea battle – the American fleet pasting Admiral Cervera.'

At this moment, flushed with triumph, I think we would have taken credit for any phase of the Cuban campaign.

'Certainly, certainly,' I said and Blackton nodded solemnly as if I had spoken a simple irrefutable truth ...

Once in our office I knew we were in trouble. Word had spread through New York that Vitagraph had taken pictures of the Battle of Santiago Bay! To caller after caller we said we had not developed the film, that we were not sure what we had, that it would be some time yet inasmuch as the film has to be processed in order. We sat down and looked at each other. How to get out of this one? Vitagraph, not too well off as things were, could ill afford to reverse itself.

Blackton said we could fake a sea battle and I said he was insane ...

Nevertheless this is precisely what they managed to do, with a delightful arrangement of cardboard cut-out boats floating on an inch-deep ocean, with tiny gunpowder charges and an office boy blowing cigar smoke over the tabletop set. Despite this unpromising mise-en-scène the results surpassed the producer's expectations,

It would be less than truth to say we were not wildly excited at what we saw on screen ... Pastor's and both Proctor houses [theatres] played to capacity audiences for several weeks. Jim and I felt less and less remorse of conscience when we saw how much excitement and enthusiasm were aroused by The Battle of Santiago Bay ...

This is an eloqent episode. It speaks to me as a producer about the often absurd lengths we go to in order to make the film that we see in our mind's eye. One of the most commonly used terms on any film set is 'cheating' – directors and camera operators constantly speak of 'cheating' a shot, as in 'We can cheat it to the left a little', or 'Could you just cheat it forward a bit'; meaning can you move the camera or the action a little to fit into the frame's mise-en-scène in a way that will feel uncomfortable or 'unreal' to the participants but will 'read' as physically acceptable to the camera lens. There is a spectrum of manipulation involved at every stage of film or TV production.

However, Smith's story also speaks to me as a critic for the way in which it short circuits, from the maker's point of view, the long-running debate about documentary's referential status, that is to say the precise relationship of the documentary image to reality. For Smith and Blackton any remorse they may have felt (they knew what they were doing was 'faking') was erased by the reception the piece received. If it plays then it is real enough. In the words of Brian Winston, 'It is audiences who can tell the difference between a fictional narrative and a documentary argument. In other words it is a question of reception. The difference is to be found in the mind of the audience.'

We can never know if audiences for The Battle of Santiago Bay found their pleasure in the apparent referential truth of the piece or whether in fact the desktop battle represented a narrativisation of knowledge, 'a structure of feeling', that they already possessed. The point is not whether the film was 'real' or not; it is that a particular form of realist representation emerged from a particular production context. Production occurred within a febrile market in which rapidly growing numbers of film-makers chased a rapidly developing exhibition circuit. The economic relationship between audience and producer was direct in cinema's first years – prints were sold to the theatre owners for cents per foot or rented out at a negotiated rate per week. Production was subject not only to the economics of the early cinema market-place but also a political framework of imperialist ambition, a context of developing mass media intertextuality of newspapers, photography, engravings and early cinema, and also a context of exhibition as part of vaudeville entertainment. What audiences took to be true was generated through this matrix. Writing about the start of the Spanish-American War, Smith says, 'With nationalistic feeling at fever pitch we set out to photograph what the people wanted to see.'

Although some contemporary commentators on early cinema stressed its extraordinary reproductive relation to the real world there are just as many who, like Smith and Blackton, acknowledge that production of cinematic 'truth' in this period was likely to involve fakery, manipulation and distortion. The worthy intention to celebrate 'truth telling' in cinema was undertaken by the purveyors of popular street entertainment, the showmen and the lanternists, the very experts in the arts of illusion. This is a tradition of practice that has been written out of documentary history in its insistence on revisiting the precise textual relations between 'the creative' and 'the actual' in Grierson's by now exhausted formula of documentary as 'the creative treatment of actuality'.

My argument is that we have come full circle: the 'regime of truth' at the end of the century has some qualities surprisingly in common with the vaudeville, fairground and peepshow context of a hundred years ago. Modernist debates about documentary moving image media which have centred on the form's indexical relationship to the real now need to be displaced by a clear-eyed consideration of the position that they occupy within a postmodern cultural ecology. Pleasure, and therefore desire, is a major characteristic of such an ecology. Desire finds its satisfactions in illusion. Tidal waves of entertainment have flooded into discursive zones previously reserved for education, information and enlightenment. This collision between historical tradition and contemporary culture has produced in factual moving image media a crisis of epistemology that, in Europe at least, has centred on the issue of 'faking'. As...