Page 196 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

VISUAL CULTURE

when German prisoners-of-war in the Second World War dismissed filmed
documentation of Nazi concentration camps (Fincher 1995). Consequently,
rather than assuming that people are taken in by photography because they
don’t know better, it may be more accurate to say that people buy into
photographic truth when it accords with what they want to believe.

Movie fantasies and personal realities
Although the photographic process is the basis of most pictorial mass media, it
was not until the advent of moving pictures that visual images began to
occupy the central role that they currently play in so many people’s leisure
time. One of the distinctive qualities of life in the twentieth century has been
the increasing amount of time that people spend in the imaginary visual
worlds of movies and fictional television programs. In both qualitative and
quantitative terms, this experience is sharply removed from that which charac-
terized the movies’ two most obvious predecessors, namely, the theater and
written fiction. The theater may be closer to reality in certain respects, and
fictional reading may be as consuming an activity – at least for some segments of
the population – but it is only movies and television that combine the true-
to-life appearance of photographic media with the ubiquity that most media
have acquired thanks to late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century techniques of
mass production.
What does it mean to be immersed, day in and day out, in the parallel visual
universe provided by television, video, and film? A crucial feature of this
experience is the compelling imitative realism of the motion-picture image.
This realism goes beyond the true-to-life quality of all photographs. Rather, as
many film theorists have noted, it is a realism that stems just as much from the
way in which movies manipulate space and time as from the photographic basis
of the movie image (Ray 1985). In film theory, this topic is usually discussed
under the heading of ‘illusionism’, namely, movies’ ability to create a fictional
world which sucks the viewer in and suppresses his/her awareness of the
essential artificiality of what he/she is watching. The most frequently cited
ingredient of movie illusionism is ‘invisible editing’, a set of principles for
creating image sequences that seem to flow naturally, deflecting the viewer’s
attention away from the fact that, each time there is an edit, there is also a
radical, ‘impossible’ shift in a movie’s point-of-view.
In the Hollywood style of film-making that dominated the world’s theaters
and television screens for much of the twentieth century, this illusionism has
been combined with another important attribute, the idealization of the
people, places, and events represented on the screen. To sit through most
Hollywood movies is to enter a world that can seem engagingly lifelike and
yet also better, more desirable than everyday life in many ways. Typically,
people in movies are more glamorous than people in real life, the physical
environment of movies is more opulent than people’s real-life surroundings,

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