By Louis-Georges Schwartz
ISBN-10: 0195315065
ISBN-13: 9780195315066
Mechanical Witness is the 1st cultural and felony heritage charting the altering function and theoretical implications of movie and video use as court proof. Schwartz strikes from the earliest employment of movie within the courts of the Twenties to the notious 1991 Rodney type video, revealing how the courts have constructed a reliance on movie and video applied sciences and contributed to the turning out to be impression of visible media as a dominant mode of data formation. whilst, movie and video in juridical contexts has built a special theoretical legacy. the actual features of movie as facts either resonate with and contradict current scholarship-focusing on monetary, social, or aesthetic factors-which hitherto has outlined film's prestige and cultural contribution. within the context of a tribulation, the potential meanings of a movie swap from its meanings while proven in a film theater or broadcast on tv, but the general public (and cinema students) are inclined to think that the 2 are an identical. Mechanical Witness demonstrates that we needs to comprehend evidentiary movie and video's institutional specificity if we're to appreciate the entire results of movie applied sciences on our tradition. This examine units the phrases for an extended past due evaluation of the way the leisure has formed our movie viewing practices, where of relocating photograph facts within the court, and the social and cultural effects of those intertwined histories.
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Extra info for Mechanical Witness: A History of Motion Picture Evidence in U.S. Courts
Example text
Previously his projection of the film could have been construed as part of the evidence projected by the film insofar as his technique might alter the image, as the objection attempts to do. This decision established that the film itself was the evidence and the projection a mechanical convenience that allowed the evidence to reach the court. The passage of the projection of films into the infrastructure of the courts reflected a growing confidence in evidentiary film and increased familiarity with its technology.
In the cinema, a documentary’s accuracy receives an implicit guarantee from its position in that institution. The courts require an explicit guarantee that determines the relevant, visible, and audible components of the image and makes the image evidence of something in particular. Doxa gave judges a point in their discourse from which to begin writing about films and their relations to truth. They began with what was generally believed about film, sometimes presenting motion pictures as accurate and other times casting doubt on the medium.
The defendant claimed that the plaintiff was exaggerating his injuries. In order to prove this, Benhart entered into evidence movies of McGoorty performing certain activities that he had claimed were prevented by his injury. Benhart called to the stand the man who had made the film, Frederick A. Hurst, to authenticate the films, soliciting from him testimony to the effect that every phase of the filmmaking process had adhered to standard procedures for the production of an accurate image. To establish that he was competent in the use of the motion picture camera, Hurst testified that for fifteen years he had been a commercial cameraman who shot films for use in courts and other places and that his most recent employer was the Stein Detective Agency.