Real Pictures Sell
Advance Notes: Reality shows on TV can trace their heritage back to 1999 and the movie, "The Blair Witch Project." Many knockoffs and parodies have been tried - but without the initial shock of seeing, for the first time how
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.
When motion pictures came along, the depiction of adventure, strife, and war was laid out in visual detail with the magic of cinema. Imagination no longer figured in. Hollywood directed whether we shivered with delight or closed our eyes in fright.
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 high-end video camera and ample tape. 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 (as you know, 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 story line 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.
Did this experience engender a new genre of film? Was 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 an Oprah 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 Iraq. The results can be awesome.
The film tinkers with the thought processes of the zombie followers of two-dimensional Stephen King novels, and
A funny thing happened on the way to producing, filming and editing this film; no one knew just how it would come out. Art sometimes appears by accident.
Editorial photographers, by virtue of their raison d'être 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. Editorial photographers have the same license as the producers of The Blair Witch Project. They can photograph slices of life without the crutch of Hollywood props, stand-ins, and stunt men. Editorial photographs often project reality, and sometimes truth.
The success of the film is another proof to those of us in the stock photo industry that "real pictures" sell.
Rohn Engh, veteran stock photographer and publisher of "PhotoRESEARCHER Newsletter," has provided on-line targeted information for photobuyers, photo researchers and editors for two decades. No other newsletter brings photobuyers such up-to-the minute, practical information from an experienced picture professional intimately familiar with both sides of the stock photo desk. For more info: http://www.photosource.com/photobuyer/.
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