the following passage, which i just stumbled upon, from a recent note from

peter latham, leads me to ask once again a question i raised a while back to

little avail

>

speaking of unreliable narration in film peter says:

>

> Unreliability is easily shown by a contrast between the spoken word and

> visual image. In HC, the narrator says: My New Year's Resolution is to be

> kinder to others.... while the film shows the speaker agressively expelling

> a young man from a party. The risk of demonstrating unreliability less

> directly is that it may beceome obscure, though The Usual Suspects did it

> admirably.

 

my question: why do we privilege the video over the audio so automatically,

or intuitively [not to say "naturally"] that most of us--like peter--can

simply take it as a given requiring no further comment that when the video

and audio clash, the video is telling the truth??

 

i know that this seems intuitively right, and i know that this is the

convention that hollywood has regularly used (cf. don lockwood's opening

autobiographical narrative in SITR) . . . but those are not answers, i think,

they are symptoms of the question . . . something more must be going on here,

and i'm eager to find new ways of thinking about the question

 

mike frank

 

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