Timothy Havens writes
> I agree strongly with your assertion that verite' techniques like those
> used in FOX's _COPS_ aren't politicially inert; in fact, they seem very
> volatile and potentially dangerous to me as hegemonic recuperation of
> "nomadic" video like Holliday's/Rodney King by using similar cameras/
> techniques to validate police violence instead of critiquing it.
I don't understand how the technique per se is "hegemonic" and
"validatesŁ police violence."  Woody Allen's *Husbands and Wives*
uses the same technique--and even, ex post facto--seems to be catching
one of its subjects in the act, so to speak, yet seems not to
"validate" marital delusions and infidelities but to criticize them.
Surely if COPS *is* validating "police violence," that must be
done in part by the *way* the technique is used, mustn't it?  I
think the analysis required of COPS (and other "reality based"
programming) requires more subtle discussion than it has
so far gotten here.  Surely if the "technique" were used with
an animated feature it would have a different effect.  If it
were edited as Wiseman does, it would have a different effect.
Subject matter, editing, the relation of the subject to the
daily newspaper (and the "newscasts" on tv), etc. all must
enter into the semiology of this supposedly hegemonic, and
I therefore infer monolithic, technique, the same one, btw,
used by lots of amateur photographers to capture their babies'
first steps.  When done by mommy or daddy, we assume ignorance
of film technique and lack of funds for multiple cameras; when
done by Fox, we assume an aesthetic (and perhaps political)
choice.  Surely, then, the technique is not neutral, yes, but
is also not monolithic: it "means" according to a complex mix
of factors only some of which I've just tried to indicate.
And this "meaning" may be hegemonic or critical or ironic etc.
Or so it seems to me.
 
Eric
 
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