Amnesty with a Movie Camera

Abstract

Witness often structures discourses of law, memory and history. As a process of looking, witness binds the relationship between vision and truth in testimony, and also in the narration of history. The camera has similar evidentiary roles and provides valuable source material for the historian’s work. The Soviet filmmaker, Dziga Vertov, links the camera’s function to the discovery of truth. Moreover, Vertov’s statement in the epigraph on cinema’s potential posits that the medium remakes the present through a consideration of its place in the future. Its function becomes narrative and political. Yet we know that the potential for error in the courtroom, like the process of ‘editing’, demonstrates that the histories these two discourses construct are sites of narrativity that run counter to the pure objectivity they frequently purport to have. Subsequently the relationship between truth and witness does not appear as stable as often presented.

Our eye sees very poorly and very little — and so men conceived of the microscope in order to see invisible phenomena; and they discovered the telescope in order to see and explore distant, unknown worlds. The movie camera was invented in order to penetrate deeper into the visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena, so that we do not forget what happens and what the future must take into account.

—Dziga Vertov¹