Hotel Cinema and other notions

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second. - JLG

It is interesting to consider Godard's assertion here in light of the new documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, by Errol Morris. I have yet to see the film though I have (being here in NYC and all) either heard or read all about the flick in various interviews. I admit, that I found his counter-intuitive idea that the events of Abu Ghraib actually facilitated the re-election of Herr Mission Accomplished so counter-intuitive that I was forced to consider it for a bit. In short, it goes something like this: the appearance of the infamous photos (google them - I'm not going to put any up here) actually allowed Bush (and his administration) to say that it was not his/the policy but just a few "bad apples" that were gumming-up the works. Beyond that, the whole basis of Morris's film is an implicit challenge to photography that within the frame there is always truth for it leaves out what is outside of it. Not least it extracts the photographer him/herself as a god's eye view is posited - an authority that is impossible to question and barely able to categorize as it is so often taken to simply "be." But in the context of a prison there is also the frame that resides outside the frame to consider - who is free to act with honesty, free to act towards truth in the context of the panopticon where all is monitored but so little is actually watched? But let us return to that other notion of Godard's, that the tracking shot is a moral act.

I might as well do it now, I am a fan, a lover, a devotee of the celluloid - but I do not believe that I can be counted as a cine-phile. Not least because I simply do not avail myself of or to enough film nowadays to be considered such. But it is the tracking shot that first brought me to the side of Jean Luc, and it is the tracking shot that Morris has used in the brutal revelation of arrogance if not the truth. Call me pedestrian, but I can do nothing but swim in the opening shot of JLG's "Contempt" - a languid tracking of Bridget Bardot's physical beauty with assurances to an insecure star by an insecure husband that she is perfection itself and is loved beyond measure - loved tragically - added to the film only because Godard argued with his producers about the lack of B.B.'s skin - then at the height of her powers. Though it is one of the most written about scenes in all of film that, for all the ink that has been spilled over it, still to me offers the most telling description of a what the flattened post-War life has to offer - the 10 minute tracking shot of the unrelenting traffic jam in "Weekend" details and offers more in its torturous length - its lack of anything else and in that nothing else, everything. Morris has achieved something of the same with his lingering camera, unremitting in its gaze daring, damning a man like Robert McNamara to a geometric brilliance lacking in all imagination or understanding. I would like to do more but the "Magnificent Seven" is on.
-fp