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14 Moving Pictures and the Rhetoric of Nonfiction: Two Approaches Carl Plantinga History provides many examples of suspicion of visual images, but none so celebrated as that ofPlato. In the famous "Plato's Cave" analogy, unsuspecting cave dwellers see only the ephemeral shadows cast by a reality outside the cave. From their vantage point, to which they are shackled, they see only the cave walls, and not outside. Having never left the cave, and having no experience of that larger, extra-cavern universe, the cave dwellers naiVely experience shadows on the wall as actuality, appearances as the real thing, these mere semblances as the "really real." Could this be our condition in today's world of media images? Have the misleading images on the cave wall been replaced by the relentless flickering lights oftelevision and movie screens? And ifthis is so, what ofnonfiction films and videos and their claim to reveal aspects ofthe actual world, and to give us knowledge about a wider reality, at least in part through photographic images? Current postmodernist theorists, chief among them Jean Baudrillard, revise Plato radically. They accept his claims about images as deceptive appearances that reveal nothing and produce no knowledge. But they take an enormous and fateful step beyond Plato, by denying the existence ofany actuality or reality that may be revealed. Postmodernist epistemologists, and neopragmatists such as Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, reject Enlightenment notions of truth, reality, objectivity, and so on, arguing that there exist no protocols that enable us to distinguish between appearance and reality, truth and lies, rhetoric and information.l Baudrillard's thought is an inverted Platonism, which by rejecting "the real," attempts to dissolve all distinctions between appearances and reality. For Baudrillard, we are mired in postmodern "hyperreality ," where truth is simply the latest media consensus. Images, photographic and otherwise, have become a major component of this hyperreality, a means not of informing and revealing-for they refer to nothing beyond themselves-but ofparticipating in the creation ofthe manufactured consensus which passes as truth and knowledge in the postmodern world. Note the sizable gap between what might be called a "critical realist" position and that 307 308 Part Two: Film Theory and Aesthetics of the postmodernist. While the critical realist finds means to distinguish appearance from reality in some cases, the postmodernist denies such a distinction , in any case. In film studies, Post-Structuralism, sometimes allied with postmodernism, has produced similar suspicions ofnonfiction films, and in particular, oftheir use of photographic images. Though I believe Post-Structuralist/postmodernist accounts of the image (and ofepistemology generally) fail both as phi10sophy and as a ground for political analysis and action,2 I cannot make that argument here. Instead, let me contrast such accounts with what I call an instrumentalist approach-"instrumentalist" because it assumes that both images and nonfiction films in general have no universal ideological effect, but are relatively neutral tools that can be used for a multitude ofdiverse purposes. Ideological effect may be determined in relation to specific contexts and uses, but not a priori. What I hope to show is that the Post-Structuralist, from the lofty perspective of abstract Theory, views the nonfiction landscape only from afar. The alternative I propose-the instrumentalist approach-is better able to account for the complexity and specificity of nonfiction films and their uses of photographic images. The Nature of Nonfiction Film Many Post-Structuralists3 poison the well from the outset by characterizing nonfiction film in a misleading way. They define the type according to a particular use of motion picture or video photography-the recording of profilmic scenes-which along with other film techniques "ensures," or better, "pretends to," a privileged relationship with actuality. This privileged relationship is alternately described as an assumed transparency, an unmediated recording, or a misleading claim to unfiltered truth. In other words, nonfiction films are inherently duplicitous because they pretend to be something they are not-unmediated records. For example, Michael Renov writes that nonfiction film "has most often been motivated by the wish to exploit the camera's revelatory powers, an impulse only rarely coupled with an acknowledgment of the processes through which the real is transfigured." 4 This assumes that when a film does not explicitly acknowledge its constructedness, it then poses as a transparent, unmediated record. Another theorist notes that claims to "heightened epistemic authority" anchor the nonfiction film, and that various strategies ofauthentication, in bolstering these claims, signify the "spontaneous, the anticonventional, the refusal of[the] mediating process...

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