Real Pictures Sell
Centuries ago, storytellers would regale villagers with tales of adventure, the glories of victory, and the horrors of defeat. The imagination of the listener was a partner in creating the depth of the emotional impact of the stories.
But motion pictures focussed on fantasy, not delivering human reality to the masses. This kind of John Wayne-make-believe in tinsel-town lasted until the Vietnam War, when we were introduced to real-time TV coverage, albeit censored by the networks.
To expect to --or try to -- depict real emotions on film in the past was the job of artful movie directors and career actors. But now comes along a new medium of motion pictures, the video format.
The producers of the box-office hit,“The Blair Witch Project,” asked, “What if we allowed real people to video tape themselves during their own experience in a potentially near-hysteria situation?” The producers gave three pick-up actors (I’ll call them participants) a professional video camera and ample film. They pointed the participants, a female and two males in their 20’s, into the woods and gave them an assignment to look into a folktale about a witch that legend says once frequented the distant hills.
The box office proved (the movie has made millions) that viewers were ready to pay for a motion picture that was void of professional actors, computer visuals, and million-dollar backdrops. Yes, Internet hype drove many to the film out of curiosity. But word-of-mouth drove the box office receipts off the charts. Viewers were given a peeping-tom license into a storyline that strung together raw footage that laid out the three participants’ internal selves as if their emotions were beef cattle parts being prepared for supermarket meat counter packaging. (Sorry, I didn’t know any other way to say it.)
Did the film propose some message? Since the outcome of the film wasn’t predetermined, the traumatized actors were at the mercy of each sequential 3x5-file card with instructions that the producers had given them on the first day of their four-day trek. The message of the film became as cryptic and as intriguing as a rumor –real, yet maybe unreal. Whatever.
Do we have a new genre of film? Is it some kind of faux snuff experience in disguise? Will we see new stalls at the video stores: “B-W-P-Type Films”? Probably not, because everything that follows The Blair Witch Project will be tinted with the temptation to do it one better. When you pull a mask from a face at the Halloween Ball, the black cat is out of the bag. Therein lies the unique voyeurism of this film. Like the wonder of having your first child, it’s impossible to repeat the primordial experience.
This film is more than the raw reality of a videotaped cop chase on a Los Angeles freeway or a Sally Jesse Raphael interview. The lighting and sound were excellent because of the professional video equipment used, much like the Star Wars weaponry that’s issued to youthful U.S. Army reserves in Kuwait or Kosovo. The results can be awesome.
The film tinkers with the thought processes of the zombie followers of two-dimensional Stephen
A funny thing happened on the way to producing, filming and editing it; no one knew just how it would come out. Art sometimes appears by accident.
Editorial photographers, by virtue of their raison d’ętre of photographing single pictures, have been capturing emotional subjects like those explored in The Blair Witch Project ever since the invention of the 35mm camera. That’s something American motion pictures could not do –up until it stumbled on the approach used in this film. We, as editorial photographers, have the same license as the producers of The Blair Witch Project. We can photograph slices of life without the crutch of Hollywood props, stand-ins, and stunt men. Our editorial photographs project reality and truth.
We may not see any more Blair Witch Project movies, but the success of the film is another proof to the stock photo industry that “real pictures” sell.
Rohn Engh is director of PhotoSource International and publisher of PhotoStockNotes. Pine Lake Farm, Osceola, WI 54020 USA Email: info@photosource.com Fax: 1 715 248 7394. Web site: http://www.photosource.com
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