The Hirshhorn Museum's recent gallery titled Cinema: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image featured many interesting pieces of film. One piece that particularly interested me for many reasons was Artur Zmijewski's Repetition. Repetition explores the reconstruction of Philip Zimbardo's 1971 "Stanford Prison Experement".
Zmijewski's film was interesting because it demonstrated the power that a camera has to influence events and decisions of actual people. The fact that the experiment was filmed and that the subjects were aware that they were being filmed gave off an eerie feeling of some sort of twisted reality television show.
At one point in the film someone, who i presumed to be the director of the experiment, was speaking to the guards and was encouraging them to use harsher measures with the inmates. By having this interaction caught on camera, it was very suggestive that the director was not conducting a true experiment but actually trying to manipulate the guards to create the ends that he desired. With this in mind, I was reminded of Anne Ellegood's essay Character Driven: Subjectivity and the Cinematic where she comments that "Reality television is not real [and] [d]ocumentary film is not purely truthful." Is it possible to portray something completely true and honest through the cinema? before answering that question we should first try to define truth and honesty. is it even possible to define truth and honesty? how can we determine what is truth and what is real? truth seems like it should probably be relative to reality. is reality the same to every person? probably not. if reality is subjective then maybe truth is also subjective. In the case of Zmijewski's film, it is obviously not an honest attempt to portray truth when the director tried to manipulate the guard by trying to plant insecurities about the warden's ability to control the inmates.
zeppelin rocks number 1.
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