Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 American Film Comedy and Cultural Critique: Glitches in the Smooth Running of the Social Machine
- 2 The Feeding Machine and Feeding the Machine: Silence, Sound and the Technologies of Cinema
- 3 The Constitution of the Real: Documentary, Mockumentary and the Status of the Image
- 4 Parody: Targeting Cinema's Narrative Technics
- 5 The Unspeakable and Political Satire: Performance, Perception and Technology
- 6 Conclusion: Between the Machine and the Event: Film Comedy
- Index
3 - The Constitution of the Real: Documentary, Mockumentary and the Status of the Image
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 American Film Comedy and Cultural Critique: Glitches in the Smooth Running of the Social Machine
- 2 The Feeding Machine and Feeding the Machine: Silence, Sound and the Technologies of Cinema
- 3 The Constitution of the Real: Documentary, Mockumentary and the Status of the Image
- 4 Parody: Targeting Cinema's Narrative Technics
- 5 The Unspeakable and Political Satire: Performance, Perception and Technology
- 6 Conclusion: Between the Machine and the Event: Film Comedy
- Index
Summary
There's something about the nature of the tape, the grain of the image, the sputter black-and-white tones, the starkness – you think this is more real, truer-to-life than anything around you. The things around you have a rehearsed and layered and cosmetic look. The tape is superreal, or maybe underreal is the way you want to put it. It is what lies at the scraped bottom of all the layers you have added … The tape has searing realness.
Don DeLillo, Underworld (157)The ‘eyes’ made available by modern technological sciences shatter the possibility of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems building in specific translations and ways of seeing, that is, ways of life. There is no unmediated photograph or passive camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies and machines; there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds.
Donna Haraway, ‘The Persistence of Vision’ (679)In its present endeavors cinema increasingly approaches, with ever increasing perfection, absolute reality: in its banality, in its veracity, in its starkness, in its tedium, and at the same time its pretentiousness, in its pretention to be the real, the immediate, the unsignified, which is the maddest of enterprises …
Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images (30–1)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film , pp. 58 - 92Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013