Film, Video, Truth, and History

In which film and video, the latest and greatest media of historical evidence and the latest
and greatest media of historiography, are scrutinised in the hope of revealing what their
logical character might be.

To history has been assigned the office of judging the past and of instructing
the present for the benefit of the future. To such high offices the present
work does not presume: it seeks only to tell how it actually was.
— Leopold von Ranke, History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from
1494 to 1514

A fine position we are in to keep chronicles of past events! I was recently

letting my mind range wildly (as I often do) over our human reason and what
a rambling and roving instrument it is. I realize that if you ask people to
account for “facts”, they usually spend more time finding reasons for them
than finding out whether they are true. They ignore the whats and expatiate
on the whys.
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays, “On the Lame”, Book 3, Ch. 11

1. Film: Ranke’s Crazy Dream Fulfilled.

The invention of writing merely made history possible; the invention of

cinema made it possible to imagine its perfectibility. The observation of
historical events became repeatable. The past could be watched again, maybe
not live, but the replay. Film was a bit like the fulfilment of a famous historical
longing: that crazy dream of Leopold von Ranke’s about telling the past as it
actually was.

1
To common sense Ranke’s saying can roll off the tongue and sound like the
model of what history should be, a high hope maybe, but sort of the point of
the historian’s discipline. But it had its critics. After all, what kind of adverb is
“actually”, with all its self-satisfying matter-of-factness, used only to give
authority to a claim that ought not need it. And “was”. What a verb. Under
the great cloud of its abstraction, any and every seething can of worms can
neatly be considered, profoundly, necessarily and modestly to just be. Such
naïveté. Ranke’s line became the preoccupation of a kind of train-spotters’
historicism and ended up distracting its devotees from images of the past that
defied present complacency or self-righteousness 1. Even so, the times have
since seen this criticism become a refuge for its own complacency.

Whether it was loose talk, high hope or naive ambition, Ranke advertised his
proposal as a modest one — maybe falsely modest. It was his rebuff to what
he considered history’s immodest ambitions. Historians can resist anything
but the temptation to explain or judge the past, or to instruct the present for
the benefit of future ages. Ranke’s proposal notwithstanding, they have never
stopped assuming the high offices. Everyone’s a historian said Montaigne but
people are always readier to interpret events than to establish what actually
happened. This is not just because in a world of actions and intentions
interpretations are actions and interpretation matters. It’s also because it’s
easier to do, you can do it from your armchair, and it’s easier to get away with
it if you are wrong. Historical explanation and interpretation are always
arguable.

Anyway, to the offices — high or low — of judgement and instruction, not to

mention interpretation and explanation, cinema need hardly aspire: not when
film and video can record and actually show what actually happened.

Despite this though, or because of it, the contemporary academic discipline of

history hardly behaves as if either film or video were its medium of choice for
telling the past. Screen is not — not yet — for proper or serious
historiography. When footage is available it is mostly too recent to be called
history. Or it’s footage of what no historian is interested in. If its not news —
the political and sports history of the last 24 hours — its home or amateur
video or just CCTV. There are television documentaries on historical subject
matter, and the odd movie; occasionally a celebrity historian is invited to
preside; but when historical material is edited and screened it’s thought of as

2
Documentary rather than History. The historians can take their lead from the
cinephiles on this.

For themselves, historians mostly treat film and video as media of record,
patchy suppliers of images of relatively recent events. Serious history has to be
something else. It has to be about the past and that means mostly not just
yesterday. It wants the high offices, judgement, instruction, explanation and
interpretation for which it helps if the medium is logically richer than film, and
can be used to explicitly identify actions by their intentions. Historians still
mostly prefer a medium that’s easier for them to edit than film, and easier for
the reader to navigate around in than film, something with footnotes and
academic clout, and something that can account as easily for unfilmed as
filmed events, especially since most events of interest to most historians
remain unfilmed. It’s easier therefore if history is written, and then it can be
literary too and maybe some kind of cherished refuge from the possible
artlessness of science.

The result of all this is that, even if film has made history almost perfectible, it
might be a posthumous perfection: the academic discipline of history risks
relegating itself to the prehistory of some kind of as yet unrealised “video-
history”, some kind of documentation by kinds of documentaries. Or maybe it
can’t help it. History finds itself at the mercy of history.

And so does the theory of history, especially of film and video history.

On the one hand film was too modern for history. It was modernity’s
miraculous fulfilment of Ranke’s desire. A child sees this: the past is almost
actually there again, up on the screen. And therefore film seemed childish. If
historians and philosophers of history still like to shake their heads at Ranke’s
naiveté, maybe we should be wary that they are not just employing a half-
smart scepticism to defend themselves from the problem of cinema. The
wonderful problem.

On the other hand film was too primitive. Unlike photography, film could not
readily become a canonical device of everyday human memory, not until the
technology got better and cheaper and handier. With video — film in its

3
modern consumer incarnation — the consumer buys the technology to be a
producer; and only now that video has become everyday can it join
photography as an iconic medium of personal memory, recollection and
record. Or surpass it. For unlike still photography, which is a serviceable
medium of record but a plodding narrative medium, video is a glorious
narrative medium. And although video does not yet rival print as the academic
historian’s narrative medium, everyone’s a historian, and video on the cameras
and discs and mobiles and web pages of all us everyday historians is now a
familiar medium not only of everyday record but also of ordinary
communication.2

Film can always be used like this in two ways at once: as both a medium of
record and a medium of communication. These two features of film, are
embodied in the camera as the recording technology and the screen as the
showing technology.3 Film can be an instrument of observation and of
depiction; it is material evidence of the event it records, and the bearer of
truth claims. Compared to writing, film looks like it was made for history; it
makes history looks like it was just a late by-product of writing. A written
history is used as a bearer of truth claims about events, but the only historical
event of which it is direct and reliable material evidence is itself as an act of
written “utterance”. Even if it is all lies, it can at least reliably record its own
act of expression. A video record, however, is not only evidence of itself as an
act, it is enduring material evidence and an enduring observation of the events
it is about. No attempt to describe the event recorded can take precedence over
what a viewer sees or, for that matter, any other detail in the shot, for the
shot, albeit indeterminately4, shows whatever is to be seen. The prevalence of
the term documentary probably registers something of the sensed difference of
film history from written history. In film nearly all non-fiction, all
documentary, has a sensible quality of historical record; while history on
screen, so far as it is not shown and watched as a document of actual footage,
falls short of history’s uncompromisable demand for truth.

Before I can go any further I have to say, caveat lector. The ways we talk about
writing and print don’t work with film and video. For film and video we have
developed quite a different set of terms answering to different needs. For
example, we would say a sentence is true but it is a bit odd to say a shot is true

4
— or false. And when we are talking about film or video we don’t usually talk
about fiction or non-fiction. We say “documentary” for non-fiction film but
“documentary” doesn’t really cover all the non-fiction video that we see —
the home videos, the CCTV etc. If we want to distinguish a film or a video as
fiction we can say it’s fiction but if we just start talking about fiction many
people will think we mean literary fiction. “Fiction” sounds so literary. And
even the terms we use of video differ from those we use of film. Video
technology and its uses are evolving too fast to have a settled set of terms.
What someone says one week is obsolete the next. “Film” itself sounds like a
superseded term. Even “video” doesn’t sound digital enough, and “digital”
sounds like a default we needn’t mention. And what is “footage” in gigabytes?
Theory is chronically anachronistic, even everyday theory. It labours to coin
general terms. We don’t even have a good term for all moving image media,
and we keep on inventing new media anyway. The everyday talk meets
immediate needs that are quite localised in time and to the particular medium,
and the terms are usually quite different from those theory needs. They
certainly don’t meet the needs of anyone who wants to find general terms that
apply to both video and literary history, or even video and film history.
Meanwhile theorists borrow glossaries of terms from foreign languages for
idiosyncratic concepts. Or worse, for indispensable concepts, mise-en-scène and
montage, English has needlessly got stuck with terms designed to estrange the
matter-of-fact. Rather than manufacture another brutally sophisticated arsenal
of terminology, I’ll persist with a few of the better known-known mouthfuls
and otherwise risk a loose deployment of everyday terms. As an example, if I
say “film” I will often also mean video too, and vice versa. If I mean one or
the other in particular I hope it will be clear from the context. And while most
of what I say is about cinema in its fullest (and its most impure, some might
say) sense as an audio-visual medium, if I only mean vision and not sound I
hope that will be clear from the context too. Meanwhile, where I want to
designate something cinematic that corresponds to linguistic concepts such as
utterance, reference, meaning, use, mention, etc, I will just have to muddle though.

5
2. So Like Actual; And How Video Makes Events Historical

In recording and exploring physical reality, film exposes to view a

world never seen before, a world as elusive as Poe’s purloined letter,
which cannot be found because it is within everybody’s reach.
— Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: the redemption of physical reality,
299.

So like actual is actual footage, so evidently evidence, that film’s truth-

value and any need to assert it scarcely occurs to most us most of the time.
Even sincere personal testimony doesn’t count for as much. 5 The evidentiary
character of film makes it seem as if the notion of truth is somehow
inappropriate to film. Film used as evidence — that is as actual footage —
differs in function from film used as communication. Film records before it
asserts. It is in the second use that the question of film’s truth arises. But let’s
first consider actual footage used as a record, before considering its use as
communicated truth claim.

What does it mean to say “So that’s what Caesar’s assassination

actually looked like! That’s what happened”? We rightly have a deep faith in
the verisimilitude of film. It seems that it can be more than similar, more than
just the semblance of reality. We reflect our faith in the verisimilitude of film
in our way of speaking.

We say “I saw the plane crashing into the tower over and over again”, when
what we have actually seen again and again is the screening of the video of the
plane crashing into the tower. What is going on when we refer to an image of
an event as if we were referring to the event itself? What is going on when we
use a film as not only evidence but as evidence that works by being a likeness
that is so alike that we can use it to repeat the observation of the original
event? Film’s value as evidence and record is that the likeness it produces is
caused both by the event it is a likeness of and by the recording machinery,
which captures almost the same spatial and temporal information that the eye
does. A shot is not just a likeness, a record or an effect. It is all three. It is a
recording. So we can interpret the evidence the shot supplies not by deliberate
or painstaking inference, as we do in many cases of observation, but by the
more familiar, direct and intuitive means of our visual perception, common

6
properties of geometrical optics being shared in the design and function of
both the camera and the eye. The peculiar usage which refers to the video of
an event and the event itself in the same way is explained by the use we make
of video: we use the video of the event to observe the event itself.

We can video someone robbing a teller machine and afterwards show the
video in court and the jury can recognize the same person standing trial in the
court. It is strong evidence. And although we will never see the video of the
crime before the event, we can use the video to identify details of the crime,
or details of other events that an eyewitness might have missed happening at
the same time and place: the accomplice lurking in the shadow, a possible
witness passing by, avoiding the trouble. Video shows us a kind of total
onscreen event, a compound of all these events as well as other events that we
just don’t bother to designate or recognise as relevant. Video can cause us to
reinterpret an event, even to identify it as a different kind of event from what
we thought is was at first. We use video to actually observe the actual event,
the past as it actually was.

A weird thing about the camera is that, not only is it a machine for observing
and identifying events, it gives a kind of enduring substance to events. Helen
Garner reckons it is from a “terror of forgetting” or it is “as if direct
experience were unbearable” that people “raise a camera between themselves
and everything they encounter”6. But trying to make out that recording our
actions on video is some kind of phobia or a failure of existential courage is
just well-worn rhetoric. And it’s not an insight. There is no doubt though: we
so want to record our actions that we interrupt them — the holiday, the
special occasion, the children playing, the whatever — and we video them to
objectify them or to make something of them, even if what we end up
videoing are the new events that take place now the camera is on, since the
presence of the camera more or less affects the events it records. So much for
the new age existentialism of “being in the moment”; we go to the trouble of
stepping apart from ourselves and our world in order to objectify ourselves
and our world, and thereby place our new selves in a new world. This
proclivity to change viewpoint and objectify ourselves, here aided by the
camera, is typical of human consciousness. It is often the subject of censure
— as with Helen — or regret: that in the eagerness to savour the moment we
spoil the moment, our happiness passes at the moment we record it. The
regret is a kind of nostalgia though, almost a pathological response to a much

7
more happy go lucky self-objectification that is the condition of modern self-
consciousness. Videoing experience is a self-justifying act of productive labour
and of acute historical consciousness. We use video as a machine for giving
events their historical actuality. As Jean-Luc Godard put it in L’Histoire(s) du
cinema, cinema le re dites. The image is the shadow that confirms the substance
of the event, as if events only exist by being repeated. It is the empirical as
eternal recurrence.

A sceptical film theorist has to work hard to disrupt faith in film, and can
certainly cite the problems encountered by optical illusions or editing, but
these breaches only honour the general rule of verisimilitude.

An optical illusion in a shot is not the result of a mistaken inference on the

viewer’s part or of misleading editing on the filmmaker’s. Film as a technology
has its limitations, under certain physical circumstances. When recording
certain events it can fail to make a verisimilar image, the image misleads our
perception. Our perception of the image of an event is at odds with the
identity of the event itself. Propellers on flying helicopters can look like they
are not moving. Wheels on cars or coaches can look as though they are
rotating backwards —illusions created by the whole similarity generating
machinery of the camera and its twenty four or twenty five frames per second
— but we call them illusions because they takes place at the sensory level of
perception, and not because of mistaken inference from evidence. Indeed we
see the film and because it contradicts what we know from perceiving rotating
propellers or wheels, we explain away the apparent illusion by inferring that it
is an illusion. Just where sensory perception finishes and inference takes over
doesn’t concern me here, except that it is implicit in the way we use the word
illusion. I’ll leave the rest to psychologists. Some like to say that cinematic
movement itself is an illusion. This doesn’t bother me much: if it’s an illusion
it is not very misleading. No one much is deluded by it. Nor is anyone deluded
by the screen’s two dimensions, by black and white, graininess, low resolution
and various other limitations of film or video images. I don’t think much of
ontological significance hangs on any of these things. Shots are images of
events and for all my emotional response to them I am not about to take the
images for the events themselves. But I am going to use them to make
observations of and about the events themselves.7

8
Do we need to remind ourselves of the miracle of cinema? Imagine that we
discovered news footage of Caesar’s assassination, that Herodotus had actually
taken his video camera with him, that Thucydides had CCTV recordings of
the defacing of the Hermae, that Baneelon had used his mobile to record the
spearing of Governor Phillip. What myths would be dispelled, what details
revealed, what accounts corrected, confirmed or trashed? Who stabbed Caesar
when, where and how? who damaged the Athenian Hermae? and why was
Phillip speared? might not be questions beyond our capacity to answer. All
that useless, trivial, curious detail might be revealed.

There are those who become blasé about film, through the course of a life.
Perhaps the culture becomes blasé too. Reports of the wonder of film have
become past history. We did something similar long ago with writing, but we
have now mostly lost the sense that Socrates still had that writing was a
dangerous and fascinating technology. Those who are blasé seem given to
falling back on sceptical critique of film either for their stimulation or self-
promotion. But by using critique or dialectic as a stimulant it becomes what
Adorno called a “formal technique of apologetics unconcerned with content”.
Scepticism is such an easy way of looking at things we forget to pay proper
attention to them. In the child’s wonder there is more attention to cinema and
history than in the naïve jadedness of the graduate.

Making, as the Sophist’s said, “the lesser word the stronger”, sceptics say it is
naïve to assume that the camera does not lie, and they remind us of optical
illusions, misleading uses, the limits of framing, the devices of editing. With
that they content themselves that they have turned the tables. Sure. But (dare I
be so naïve) the camera doesn’t lie. It is just an amazing machine. Only people
lie — or else make mistakes. The fact that the camera can be used to lie
follows from its mechanical lack of mendacious intention, dare I say, from its
truthfulness, that is, from the fact that it is nearly always useful as a machine
for showing what actually happened. It is so useful for lying just because it is
so disarmingly useful for showing the truth. And history is nothing if not true.
For that it is a science. Cartesian scepticism of the senses followed almost
immediately after Galileo’s telescope extended the senses farther into space, as
if to rescue speculative thought from the threatening sensuality of perception.
Now history has its Galilean instrument and again the reaction is scepticism as

9
if there were a need to rescue historical speculation and imagination from the
deception and artlessness of the seeing.

3. The Truth Of A Shot

So what does it mean to speak of the truth of a film? I know I should

be careful trying to investigate the truth of film by using the means supplied
by the philosophy of language and logic, but that is what I intend to do. To
fellow cinephiles who expect film theory to shed the baggage of the
philosophy of language it might just seem like a backward step. To
philosophers of language and logic, those sticklers for the rigours of analysis,
it will probably seem hair-brained. To historians, a yawn: the answers to
philosophical questions can seem to so little challenge or enlighten the
understanding, that people wonder why we would bother to ask questions like
“what is truth” in the first place. And as far as others are concerned, truth
might be irrelevant to history, let alone film.8

So: If film is different from language, I only want to show how film is
different. If I can’t use tools of language philosophy with rigour, I will test
their unsuitability. Meanwhile, for my purposes they are as good as any I can
find. If questions about truth are pointless or trivial, I will be trivial. If truth is
irrelevant to either history or film, maybe I will find myself writing about
things other than history or film, or about “mere” fictions or nothing at all.
Unfortunately, one thing I will have to write about is language, because I don’t
want to use the tools language philosophy supplies without making sure that
readers know how they were designed to work originally, that is, on language.
I am scared this essay might end up with more re-hashed philosophy of
language than fresh philosophy of film or history. Sorry in advance.

Language philosophy has supplied a few well-known theories of truth. Among

them there is the correspondence theory: that truth is correspondence
between a linguistic statement and a bit of reality, or a fact. There is the
coherence theory: that a statement or a belief is true if it is consistent with a

10
system of true statements or a system of beliefs. And there is Alfred Tarski’s
sublimely simple, so-called semantic theory, which has to be framed in terms
of a given sentence: If the sentence “Snow is white” is true then snow is
white; and if snow is white then the sentence “Snow is white” is true. So
obvious, it seems to tell us nothing. 9

3.1 Truth And The Correspondence Machine

Correspondence theories of linguistic truth have had to face a lot of

powerful criticism, not simply from all those wicked relativists and
postmodernists who were supposed to be corrupting the young, but from the
most straight-laced philosophers of language and logic. Most of these
arguments are beyond the scope of this essay,10 but a couple are worth
considering.

One concerns a little problem that arose when Gottlob Frege

undertook his foundational work in modern logic. When considering what it is
in the world that a sentence corresponds to and that makes the sentence true,
the common answer is that a true sentence corresponds to a fact. Just what is
a fact though? Facts just seem to be all sorts of odd things picked out from
everything else in the world by the light that true sentences project upon the
world. They are entities for true sentences to correspond to. Fair enough: they
are begotten by the notion of correspondence, rather than being the begetters
of true sentences. If facts make sentences true it is only after sentences have
made the facts to do that job11. Let us say then that what sentences do is
designate facts. Now as Frege understood it, a sentence is a singular term, like
a name, which names an entity. But Frege could not avoid concluding that all
true sentences must name, refer to, or correspond to, the same thing — to
what he called the True. Indeed, true sentences name the True and false
sentences the False. This is to put it as plainly as Frege himself did.12 His
argument though has been developed, formalised, complicated and challenged
by many since but I don’t think anyone has ever succeeded in dispelling it.
While it is not exactly a refutation of correspondence theories of truth, it does
seem to be a trivialisation. It tells us that the best we can say is that a true
sentence corresponds to the facts, or to the world, but that is not much
different from saying a true sentence is true. This is the situation of linguistic
propositions — sentences used to make truth claims — but perhaps it is also

11
the situation of shots used as propositions, that is of shots used to make truth
claims.

Given the optical technology of the camera, film truth looks like a model case
of correspondence truth — indeed a correspondence that words can never
hope to rival: whatever is on the screen corresponds to something that was in
front of the camera. A shot doesn’t just pick out a fact by shining its light on
that particular bit of the world, it records the whole totality of facts in front of
the camera. Wittgenstein said the world is a totality of facts. Well, if that’s the
case, a shot shows a world. Were it not for the limitations of lenses, we might
fancy that a shot shows or designates Frege’s True in all its detail.

However consider now another problem that had arisen in the examination of
correspondence theories of linguistic truth. Wittgenstein in the Tractatus was
frank enough to say “the proposition is a picture of reality” — doing everyone
the service of spelling it out. Yet advocates and critics of correspondence
truth have mostly dismissed the notion that the relation of statements to facts
is like the relation of a picture to the thing pictured.

J.L. Austin — himself inclined to a correspondence theory — was curious

about the ordinary ways we speak about truth. He noticed that in English we
say a picture is true to rather than true of whatever it represents, and he added
that to credit truth to a picture is not appropriate because the relation between
words and things is a matter of convention while that between a picture and
the thing pictured is not. Austin’s rival in a celebrated mid-twentieth century
debate about the theory of truth, P.F. Strawson, doubted that “convention”,
had much to do with it. Yet in citing the old semiotic concept of convention,
Austin was at least onto something. He was concentrating however on how
we use language and his mind wasn’t really on how we use pictures. He tries
to rationalize his understanding of language with a misunderstanding about
pictures, especially moving pictures, which were probably not on his mind at
all.

Although we might think it odd sometimes to even speak about the truth of a
picture or film, once we consider its use as communication, the truth of a film
shown does become an issue. We do use shots as propositions; we make assertions
with them. We can use a shot to lie or to tell the truth. I can use a video to
show that an accused robber was casing a bank the day before a robbery. If I

12
record it the day after the robbery and I use it to show the accused casing the
bank before the robbery, I use it to mislead, to lie. If I record the accused
casing the bank the day before the robbery I am using it to show the truth. If I
record the accused looking innocently at the bank the day before the robbery
(perhaps the accused is examining the architecture) and I mistakenly believe
the accused to be casing the bank and I use the video to show the accused
casing the bank, I am using it to make a truth claim, but a false one.

The camera as a recorder of what happens where and when it shoots is a

correspondence machine. It makes an image of an event by the projection of
light onto a sensor and then we can show the image record as a projection
onto a screen. We reflect our confidence in the correspondence of the image
to whatever happens in front of the camera by saying the shot is true to the
events it records. We even say we are looking at the event when in fact we are
looking at the video of the event. When a shot is used as a proposition and to
make an assertion that is true or false, something different is happening. We
can even use a shot of a re-enactment of an event rather than actual footage
of the event to show what is true of the event.13 Austin thought English
prepositions registered an insight into the difference between film and
language. In fact they register something deeper, a logical insight into the
difference between film-as-record using the camera as an instrument of
observation of an event, and film-as-communication using the screen to show
a truth claim about an event. There is more to this than just the distinction
modern philosophical habit makes between objectivity and subjectivity: on the
one hand the objective correspondence of a recording to what it records; on
the other the subjective intent of a proposition to be true of what it is about.
What Austin and semiotic tradition called convention was a way of denoting
the social or intersubjective collusion without which human communication
would get nowhere. Intersubjectivity is intrinsic not only to any
communication of a truth claim, but to the constitution of what we call
subjectivity and intention. We are social animals, born to make truth claims
with language, and ready and able to coopt film to make truth claims too. So a
shot can be either a recording of what it shows or a proposition about what it
shows or, as in the case of actual footage used as a truth claim, both.

But there is more to it than that.

13
3.2. Truth And The Coherence Of Images

3.2.1 A Shot’s Intention

Filmmakers using a shot to make a truth claim hold a shot to be true on the
basis of two considerations: what event they take the shot to show and what
event they believe to have happened. This is the filmic counterpart of Donald
Davidson’s idea that speakers hold a sentence to be true on the basis of two
considerations: what they take the sentence to mean and what they believe to
be the case. The difference in the terms here is that film “shows” and
language “means”. But as long as a shot is used with the intention of showing a
particular event it is being used to mean something: what a film is intended to
show is what it means. And as long it is OK to speak of a shot being true, it
seems OK to at least borrow this much from language philosophy.

So consider a news video of the plane hitting the south tower of the
World Trade Centre. The news staff put the shot to air because they take it to
be true that a plane has crashed into the south tower, and they take it to be
true on the basis of two considerations. Firstly they take it to show a particular
event: a plane crashing into the south tower of the WTC. And secondly they
believe that this particular event has happened, i.e. that a plane has crashed
into the south tower of the WTC. Is this all? The film is evidence of the event,
but we would not necessarily believe the event took place without
corroboration. On its own, and on first encounter, anyone might expect the
shot of such an unexpected event to be a hoax. So what the news staff take to
be the truth of a shot relies on other evidence: corroborating eyewitness
reports, another video showing the same event, knowledge that another plane
has already crashed into the north tower and the north tower is burning and
that the shot of the south tower being hit shows, incidentally, the north tower
burning.

Video evidence and shots used as truth claims are always in a context, just as
linguistic truth claims are. A shot’s truth-value is always a matter of
consistency with other truths. Some of these other truths are filmic, others

14
linguistic. Some are articulated or shown within the film itself, others, beyond
the occasion of the film itself, are mutually assumed. 14 Such shared
assumptions are variously referred to in philosophical tradition by terms such
as “mutually manifest assumptions” (Sperber and Wilson), “forms of life”
(Wittgenstein) and “lifeworld” (Husserl, Habermas). Historically, all cinematic
truth claims are made in the context of and are preceded by linguistic life. A
language somewhat logically richer than cinema has always been available for
cinema as we know it.15

Of immediate importance among these claims are those that index the
recording of the event to the time and place of the event recorded and thus
identify the event shown with the event recorded. The truth claim of actual
footage — its claim to truth by correspondence — is conditional upon its
being consistent with truth claims about the place and time index of the shot.
While the correspondence theory may work both ways, so that we can make
predictions about the world’s events based on a shot that we have seen, and
predictions about the shot based on what we know about the world’s events,
without coherence we cannot know what shot and what events we are relating
to one another. We cannot know whether we are watching truth claims of
fiction or history.16 The executive partner of correspondence, the coherence
theory of a shot’s truth is an epistemological one. It is concerned with how we
may know a shot is true or with the reasons to believe it. However a shot’s
consistency with a total system of truth claims or beliefs is not a necessary
condition of a true shot, nor is it a sufficient one. The assumption of the
coherence of a shot with other shots and with linguistic truths is also a
normative arrangement, an intersubjective condition of successful
communication.17

3.2.2 Identification of Actions

A coherence theory of truth is especially important when the event

being shown is an action. An action is only an action if there is some
description under which it is intentional or done for a reason or can be made
intelligible in terms of an agent’s motives or compulsions. Casing a bank is an
action that can be described in terms of specific unlawful intentions. Loitering
near a bank is an action described in terms of indeterminate unlawful
intentions. We would say that a filmmaker uses a shot to be true of an event if

15
the event the filmmaker uses the shot to show and the event the filmmaker
believes to have happened are one and the same. What matters here is that
because an action involves intention and intention is not explicitly recorded by
video, the filmmaker and the viewer can be mistaken about the intention of
the accused and therefore about the identity of the event.

The identity of the action that the filmmaker believes to have happened may
be signalled by the filmmaker’s description of the action, if for instance it is
described verbally on the soundtrack, but such a description depends on
interpretation. The filmmaker’s truth claim may be false if the filmmaker is
mistaken about the action’s intention and therefore its identity. In a world of
intentions, interpretation matters because acts are identified by intentions, and
intentions are identified by interpretations. But a shot on its own does not
name an action. Just what action a filmmaker intends a shot to show is not
made explicit by the shot alone. The filmmaker can place the shot amongst
other shots, from which the viewer, assuming the consistency of the shots,
can infer what more precise truth claim the shot might be making. In other
words, we use the coherence theory of truth not to explain why a shot is true
but to infer what truth the shot claims. Even a series of shots though, which
places the action in a narrative sequence of actions, though it indicates the
identity and restricts the range of possible identities, does not determine the
precise identity of the action. And the interpretation of the intention of the
action shown in the shot, and therefore of the identity of the action, is as
much the viewer’s as the filmmaker’s.

In language, we can avoid identifying an act by what might be, in the context,
a contentious description such as “casing”. We resort to other descriptions
that are less contentious, such as “loitering near” or “standing outside and
looking at”. However if we want to strictly avoid all action terms then we
must even avoid “standing” and “looking at” too. Actions fancifully conceived
as free of any of the implications of action terms, are sometimes referred to as
“behaviour”. Descriptions of such abstractions, strictly avoiding all action
terms, are likely to be long-winded, alien, awkward, trivial or irrelevant, and
psychology strictly limited to behaviour, Behaviourism, was a strange, self-
defeating undertaking. Because it is designed to be intersubjective, explicit and
determinate, language is inarticulate in such indeterminate matters as
behaviour. Language is articulate by being determinate.

16
Film is articulate by being indeterminate. It cannot and need not to show an
act under any description at all. It can only show acts indeterminately. So it
can show such actions as “standing outside the bank” and “looking at the
bank” and “taking photographs of the bank” or even “casing the bank”
without claiming it is showing any of them. We can perceive these actions and
identify them by no more than seeing the event or watching the film of the
event. We need neither be blessed nor burdened by the filmmaker’s or anyone
else’s interpretation of the identity of an action. This is a great boon of
cinema, if only because all actions are more or less indeterminate in their
outcomes, and initiate processes that more or less exceed the intentions of the
doer. As they exceed such intentions, they may be designated by new
descriptions and take on new identities. Even if it were it possible
unambiguously to identify the intentions of the doer (such identification
probably exceeds even the capacity of the doers themselves) acts would still be
indeterminate in their propensity to initiate or be absorbed into processes.
Nevertheless, as human animals we are made to perceive these events right
from the start as actions and not as abstract spatiotemporal events that lack any
intention. Our perception is not abstractly spatiotemporal; abstract description
is the result of analytical effort. Our propensity as social animals is to nearly
always describe the intentional events of the human body using action terms
that imply some determinate description in terms of intention.

For a shot to make a truth claim about an identified action, it must be shown
in the context of other truth claims that imply the identity of the action. Such
truth claims include the accompanying shots and voiceover of a film and the
shared assumptions of the filmmaker and viewer. When watching a film we
observe the actions shown as we observe the actions themselves, and our
observation can become more explicit as we interpret the action observed and
make inferences about it in a context of other evidence. A filmmaker who
shows a film as evidence of casing is using the film as true of an act described
as “casing” and for the film to be taken this way it has to be shown in a
context where the description of the event as casing is consistent with the
film’s and other truth claims (i.e. other evidence). In a forensic setting, use of
a shot to show an accused casing a bank may well be begging the question.
Filmmakers often use shots to show actions where the relevant intentions of
the actions and thus the precise identity of the action and the precise truth
claim of the shot is only demonstrated, if ever, retrospectively.

17
3.2.3 General and Singular Terms

Film does not just supply documents for historical inquiry, as a medi-
um of truth claims it is a medium of historiography. There are several ways
historical events are shown on screen. Besides actual footage (e.g. The Battle of
Chile, Patricio Guzman, 1975) filmmakers use still photographic images with
voiceover narration and contemporary quotations and music (The Civil War,
Ken Burns, 1990). They also use voiceover recollections of people who parti-
cipated in events, and expert historical commentary about events, even though
the events in question are not shown but told. Sometimes a film might tell one
story in the voiceover (a former soldier recalls his experience in a battle) while
showing footage of the same battle but not of the same soldier (The War, Ken
Burns & Lynn Novick, 2007, The Howard Years, ABC, 2008). To compensate
for the lack of vision, there is also the device of staged recreation, when actors
on a set are filmed re-enacting historical events. Whole films have been done
like this (The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966). At some point we can
find we have passed over from historical narrative into historical fiction. In
staged recreation, even if we are using actual transcript of dialogue, we have
already passed into the realm of fiction.

A shot used as actual footage performs something like the designating func-
tion that singular terms do in language. Perhaps it designates just one thing, an
event, and admittedly a very complex total event that takes place everywhere
on the screen and lasts as long as the shot lasts. We might call this manifold
totality the shot event. But a shot is also used, and indeed usually is used, to des-
ignate a particular salient, or we might even say “meaningful”, event that oc-
curs on the screen only as part of the complex total event. Thus the shot of
the plane’s crashing into the tower is used to designate that event rather than
some incidental event that might also be on the screen like the shadow of a
bird passing. The shot is used to be weakly determinate.

Sentences are general terms. As a universal, a sentence may be repeated in dif-

ferent contexts and of different events. Sentences as such do not designate.
Only when uttered by someone in particular at a particular time and place and
about a particular event or state may a sentence be said to function like a sin-
gular term. Then it is true or false, and we might even say, like Frege, that it
refers to the True or the False. Philosophers have been given to saying that a
sentence in such circumstances is expressing a truth-value and designates a

18
proposition. I’ll ignore the disagreement about just what a proposition is; vehicle
for a truth-value will do here.

Like Pontecorvo, we can film actors re-enacting an incident in the Battle of

Algiers. In a strict evidentiary use (i.e. as actual footage) such a shot is like a
singular term designating actors re-enacting an incident in the Battle of Algi-
ers. That’s all it is. We could not use it in court as evidence of anything but
what happened on the film set. But when we use this shot in a cinema to des-
ignate an incident in the Battle of Algiers, then we have taken advantage of the
shot’s capacity to function as a universal: a shot is available to represent any
event that looks like what the shot shows. In such a case its truth, say in mak-
ing a truth claim about the history of the Algerian War, becomes very prob-
lematic, much more so than a linguistic truth claim, because of all the ex-
traneous detail in the shot. The shot’s indeterminacy becomes a burden. Com-
pared to the sentence, which natural language has bestowed upon us as a pro-
positional instrument that can cunningly limit its designation to what is se-
mantically salient, a shot from a film that re-enacts historical events can never
avoid showing false detail. No matter how historical events are represented on
screen — whether actual footage or re-enactment — we need some way of
identifying what events are being shown. In the case of actual footage, the
truth claim made by a description of the time and place of the video recording
has to be consistent with and confirm the truth claim of the shot. In the case
of other film histories, such as staged re-enactments, the truth-value depends
on consistency with a more complicated and possibly ambiguous set of claims.
We have to know which details in the shot are extraneous and not seriously to
be entertained as truth claims. To work as a felicitous truth claim the film-
maker must somehow let the viewer understand what is true and false in the
shot. Calling a film historical fiction only circumvents this problem if it is a fe-
licitous work of art.

A fiction film uses a shot of actors too — for example George Sanders and
Ingrid Bergman kissing each other in Voyage In Italy (Roberto Rosselini, 1954)
— but not to make an historical truth claim about George Sanders and Ingrid
Bergman. It shows a scene from a story about a married couple on a trip in
Italy. Fiction restores to film the full advantage of its indeterminacy:
everything in the shot is true. In fiction the use of a shot’s potential as a uni-
versal recalls a profound insight into the nature of narrative art: a shot — his-
torically a singular term recording actors at work on a film set — must take on

19
its character as a universal in order to be used to make the truth claims of fic-
tion. This should illuminate Aristotle’s observation in the Poetics that history
deals with particulars while poetry is universal. Gushing about the universality
of fiction is a reliable sign of failure to appreciate the simplicity of Aristotle’s
insight. The shot, as a universal may be used or shown in a particular context
in either of two distinct ways — as actual footage, or as a truth claim about a
fictional world. If it is truly a universal it should be possible to use it as a sin-
gular term in any number of different contexts, to make any number of truth
claims. And surely this can be done. It can be true in any number of possible
worlds.

3.3
The Empirical Machine

3.3.1
New Kinds of Propositions
When film was invented, one of the amazing things about it was that we
humans, the animals that communicate in propositions, had in our hands the
most astonishing propositional objects since the invention of sentences. And
one thing that was so dazzling about film was that it was not mired in the
opaque, symbolic forms of language that human evolution had eventually
managed to cobble up out of living flesh seemingly as a device for winkling
thoughts out of brains and into the shareable sounds of speech. At last the
linguistic animal could take full social advantage of the fact that it was also the
visual animal; film was so out there in the shared world of objects, and its
truth claims looked like whatever they were about. Further, in a world of light,
vision had become the sense, which, above all others, humans dedicated to
objectivity, a sense that need not sense the sensing body, that senses at a
distance, that shares the object of its sensation with others, and that senses the
world as an immense miscellany of detail.

However the evolution of speech had not begun with thoughts in minds and
then come up with a way of winkling them out into the social world at all.
Evolution couldn’t work that way. More likely, in the evolutionary process of
creating the talking animal, it would have created social minds, communicable
propositions, and the shared social world of objects — subjectivity,

20
intersubjectivity and objectivity — as one inter-animating, mutually
dependent, co-evolving trio. It is only retrospective analysis that divides the
trio up and projects ontological and historical priority onto one or another.
After this evolution of language, the incredible visual animal just had to look
on and wait for thousands of years before film gave it the articulate visual
propositions for which human vision and propositional communication had
pre-adapted it. Until the invention of moving pictures, the talking animal
would scarcely have dared to imagine non-linguistic visual propositions
beyond the mimetic gestures of drama and the images of painting, and,
although the mimetic theory of art intimated otherwise, these seemed scarcely
propositional at all.

Even when film was invented it was so dazzlingly objective that we were not
very aware of or familiar with its subjective and intersubjective or social
character. Words might have been mired in their symbolic opacity and their
working obscured by the objective complexity of the our fleshy, brainy,
talking bodies, but subjectively words were our intimate and familiar second
nature, indeed, our first and defining nature. A child could recognise a belief
and denote it with the word “belief”, although how it could do so was
unfathomable, and what a belief actually was seemed very strange to anyone
who got philosophical about it and tried to spell it out in any detail. Linguistic
intersubjectivity, the body’s ancient and familiar designator and communicator
of everyday subjective experience hardly gave film, the mechanical recorder of
the objective world, a look in. Film’s objectivity notwithstanding, there would
be no concept of objectivity unless subjective observers had been able to be
aware of the fact that they, like other subjects, experience subjective thoughts
and a shared world of objects, both of which can only be described by means
of a shared, intersubjective, propositional language. Because we never just
abstractly gawked at films, but right from the start showed them to one
another — that is, in some incipient sense, started to communicate with them,
and started to believe or not believe what we saw — we made film
propositional right from the start. Someone who has a belief about something
must grasp the concept of objective truth, of what is the case independently of
what they think. And in making shots things that we could believe or not
believe we used shots as propositions that could be true or false. Even though
its objectivity was so dazzling, from its earliest use film has had objective,
intersubjective and subjective uses.

21
3.3.2 The Social Set-up or Mise-en-scène of Empirical Observation
We know about our own minds, about the minds of others and about the
objective world that exists independently of what me might think about it.
And our knowledge of each of these is dependant upon our knowledge of all
of them.18 Each might know about his or her experience in its most abstract
occurrence independently of others, but experience is concrete and what each
knows about his or her experience is known only in the terms shared with
others. We can understand the relation of objectivity to subjectivity and
intersubjectivity as follows: observers as subjects observe an object and
intersubjectively communicate their observations and coordinate them, and
thus provide the foundation for formulating true statements about the shared
world of objects. Without subjects coordinating their observations
intersubjectively their would be no objectivity. The mistake of assuming the
priority of objectivity, while based on a valid conclusion about the
preponderance of objects — after all, a subject is pathetically subject to the
objective forces of nature — is loosely referred to as positivism, or empiricism
in a narrow sense, but where such a narrow abstraction preoccupied
philosophical doctrine it was seldom far removed from the abstractions it
repudiates: each is the shadow of the other. The preponderance of objects
notwithstanding, objectivity is the historical consequence of the
interdependent evolution of subjects, intersubjectivity and objectivity.

This set up — I could call it the mise-en-scène — of subjectivity, intersubjectivity

and objectivity has been formalised one way or another in the various norms
of empirical scientific observation. 19 I don’t think we can quite understand
actual footage without understanding empirical observation. So I need to look
more closely at empirical observation before giving an account of the
significance of actual footage in empirical historical inquiry.

Since the relation of subjectivity, intersubjectivity and objectivity does not

assume the priority of any one of the three, neither need nor should the
norms of empirical observation. An empirical observation must be an
observable observation; that is, a subject’s observation and the object of that
observation must be observable by a second subject. We can, and often do,
limit empirical observation to the observation of the shared world of objects
or events —external objects so called. This set up however can also include
observations of subjective objects as well— beliefs, intentions, attitudes —
regardless of whether they are our own subjective objects or others’. This

22
creates epistemological problems: the means of observation differ for
different subjects, the truth claims of different subjects about the observed
phenomena are more likely to be contradictory; and the intersubjective
coordination of our actions towards those phenomena is less likely. But these
need not preclude such observations from the empirical in its full sense.
Subjective self-observation is usually differentiated from empirical observation
and called, among other terms, phenomenological observation. Observation
of others is called variously heterophenomenological, or social or
intersubjective observation. It is inherent in observation of another’s actions,
so it lies at the heart of communication, which is utterly dependent on
observing others intentions, explicit and implicit. It is most explicit in
observations of others descriptions (in language) or depictions (in images) of
their own beliefs and intentions.

Although truth claims about actions are problematic, it is still the case that
actions are observable in the shared world and included among the objects of
empirical observation. The unreliability of the truth-value of such
observations does not, of itself, preclude them from the realm of empirical
observation. The reason for limiting empirical observation to objects in the
shared world is that it increases the likelihood of a true description of what is
observed. The same reasoning motivates the adoption of a norm of empirical
observation — an observation observed is more reliable than a private or
secret one. Positivism, so-called, was the hypostatisation of this principle, a
doctrine that mistook a useful pragmatic device for the nature of things.
Certain sciences — the physical sciences let’s call them — limit their norm of
empiricism, or rather, they limit the objects of their study. However many
sciences need to observe subjective and social phenomena and they must use
a full rather than a restricted empiricism.

To sum up: For the norm of empirical observation we formalise the social set
up of observation: we introduce a second observer who observes the first
observer observing an event. Likewise, the first observer as well as observing
the event, also observes the second observer observing the event, with the
result that the observers can correlate their subjective observations. While
empirical observation is common human social behaviour and presumably
developed during the evolution of human communication, its formalisation is
a convention of scientific society that deals with the riskiness of trust between
subjects. The openness of such observation obviates some of the

23
epistemological limitations of subjective observation such as mistakes,
mendacity and self-deception. The consistency of the truth claims of different
observation statements is tested in the context of the other beliefs of the
subjects. The observations of two observers may be inconsistent not only
because one is wrong, but because other beliefs of the observers are not
consistent. A coherence theory of truth is implicated in such a model of
empirical observation. Practising scientists have long used the principle of
coherence — e.g. it is crucial to scientific hypothesis testing — and
philosophers of science, notably the Logical Positivists, long recognised its
importance.

3.3.3 Empirical History and Actual Footage

Since events are absolutely unique and only happen once, there are obvious
limitations on strict empirical observation of historical events. Some scientific
observation gets around this, virtually not actually, by the technique of making
experimental events and their observation repeatable. Repetition of any event
is strictly impossible, but because general theories are about kinds of events,
scientific observation can get away with the device of repeating events of a
kind. Of course a lot of important scientific events are unrepeatable, and to
that extent it might be said most of the sciences are to some extent historical.
To put it this way implies that the historical sciences are sciences of
unrepeatable observations. Some sciences like cosmology, geology, and
evolutionary biology — and therefore all biology — have a lot of historical
content. The science we call “history” is so determinedly concerned with
unique historical events and processes that many people forget or don’t
consider that it is a science at all. On the other hand those who, mainly in the
past, searched for laws of history, did not want to consider that there could be
a science with scarcely any laws it could call its own. Limiting empirical
observation by the criterion of repeatability, like limiting it to a particular class
of objects observed, is a powerful device appropriate to certain sciences; but it
exceeds the requirements of strictly empirical observation.

Where it can’t repeat events of a kind, empirical observation has to rely on the
corroboration of a second observer of the same event, or even just on
observations that provide additional evidence for the likelihood of the event
in question. The validity of these procedures can be formalised in protocols of
evidence. Many historians have formulated such protocols, and students of

24
history routinely learn about them. In its rules of evidence, the law has
formalised protocols of historical evidence for its own forensic ends, although
these ends are not necessarily the same as those of historical inquiry. Each of
academic history, news, local history, film documentary history, and so on has
different ends, and in turn, historical inquiry in each of these areas has
disputed ends, disputed sets of protocols and different requirements.

The invention of writing made history possible because it made empirical

observation of certain historical acts, namely written acts possible. 20 What we
call history is, at least in the first stage of inquiry, empirical history. As is the
case with non-linguistic objects from the past, the observation of past written
acts could be observed and confirmed, because the observation of written acts
was repeatable in the same way that science’s events were repeatable — at
least as kinds. In this context, performative written acts have a special status.
Performative actions are repeatable, indeed, ongoing actions. Written edicts,
laws, acts of parliament, contracts, promises and declarations are just some of
the acts that work as actions at each instance of reading, or rather, they take
place and obtain until they are revoked as ongoing actions. Any reading of the
written document, that is, any observation of a repetition of the written act, is
also an observation of the ongoing action itself. Such is the peculiar character
of written performatives, and their special status in historical inquiry follows
from this. Some historians, such as John Burrow, reserve the term “primary
document” exclusively for them. Otherwise, if we retain the term “primary
document” in its more widespread sense — that is as a description of a direct,
usually eyewitness account from the time under investigation — then written
performatives are, as it were, the most primary of primary documents.

Actual footage also has a special place in empirical historical inquiry.

A shot has an objective, intersubjective and subjective function: it can record

something that happens in the shared world independently of what anyone
might think has happened; it can communicate to another and show another
its record of what has happened and it can make a truth claim to another
about what has happened; and it can be believed as true or false. Thus film,
like language, has its place in this set up of observers, objects and
intersubjectivity. It is an intersubjective bearer of subjective intention, the
propositional vehicle of a truth claim. But it also has its place as a scientific
instrument, with a special relation to the objective world, unmediated by either

25
the subjectivity of human observation and belief or by the symbolic
intersubjectivity of linguistic assertion.

In the set up of empirical observation the camera records the event. As an

instrument of observation, the image the camera produces makes the
observation observable for a second or other observers. In doing so it also
gives the original observer the advantage of a second observer, making it
possible to increase the information observed, exposing to view Kracauer’s
“world never seen before”. When used as a truth claim, actual footage has the
ontological and epistemological credentials of both correspondence and
coherence truth. The claim of the filmmaker or observer of the event is
consistent with the claim of a second observer. Film as an instrument of
empirical observation allows a new kind of repeatability, not the same as the
repeatability of a kind of event that is typical of pre-cinematic, empirical
science, but the repeatability of the visual observation of the objective,
verisimilar record of that event. Again, given the uniqueness of events, then
strictly each viewing of a film is a different event, but each viewing is an event
of the same kind, i.e. of the kind we can call “looking at the film of the
original event”. With film the original empirical observation of the event is
done with the instrument of the camera. It is a sort of second observer itself,
an empirical machine that produces a repeatable observable record of the
event, the function of which enables accurate and repeated observation of the
event.

The repeatability of the observation of the film record, as well as being an

instrument for detailed scrutiny, makes another kind of act possible too, not
only can we describe a series of repeated observations of the film of the event,
we can describe a single ongoing act of observation that is a compound of
repeated viewings of the film, by one or several viewers. This follows from the
grammar of events,21 which allows two or more events to be combined into a
single compound events.

Although quite different from written performative documents, film

documents have their own kind of empirical veracity, which makes them just
as much primary documents for the purposes of historical inquiry. Our sense
of this special empirical function, which rivals or perhaps exceeds that of
linguistic performatives, is indicated by our hesitation to call shots true, just as
we hesitate to call linguistic performatives true.

26
Any proposition, whether in written, videoed or recorded form, comes, as
Michael Oakeshott has rightly insisted, under the scrutiny of historical inquiry
primarily as an object surviving from the past.22 It is an enduring, material
component of a communicative action performed in the past, which
communicates its truth claim as long as the writing or video or audio has or
will have an audience. As such it is not primarily evidence of or a truth claim
about other acts and events; it is an act itself, and evident as such. Only
secondarily is it evidence of other events, and it is evidence of other events by
being true by correspondence to, and by coherence with reports about the
past.

Because those past events are unique and never to be repeated, the truth of a
written claim about the past (unlike that of a film or video) can only be
evaluated by its consistency with others’ claims about those past events.

Methodologically, written performatives may be the primary written

documents of historical inquiry, and all written documents are in the first
place to be considered as performances, that is linguistic actions, before their
truth claims are believed or not; but historical inquiry has always and above all
been fascinated by the events reports report.

I am tempted to claim that the most important event of the Peloponnesian

War was the one described in the first sentence of Thucydides’ history:
“Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the
Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out,
…”. It is the act of communication that is still going on, still producing
effects. However, such is the fascination with all the other events described by
Thucydides after that first sentence that my claim could well be taken as
perverse. What really matters to most are the events “themselves” — the
fortunes of Greece and Athens and the political, artistic and philosophical
culture around the end of the 5th century BC — rather than just the event of
recording of them. Even the term “primary document” is ordinarily used to
refer to a report by a direct witness of the events reported rather than being
confined, as Barrow suggests it should be, to performative documents. Yet for
all our desire to know what actually happened, historical inquiry based on
written documentation of events is limited by the subjectivity of all written
documents that are not performatives. Film and video, however, can show the
non-performative acts of the past. All events on film are as empirically

27
compelling as that meagre but important class of actions that language has
recourse to in its written performatives. Historical inquiry into film and video
records is not limited by the murky subjectivity of language. It does not have
this problem. It shows what happened almost as it happened.

It has other problems though.

3.3.4 Documentary Set up

The observation of an event on video is one way to empirically observe the
event itself, although the act of filming can change the character of the event
filmed, particularly if it is an action. This follows from the social set up of
empirical observation. Set-up or mise-en-scène works at the artistic crux of
cinema and the concept is much used in the theory of film art and film style.
It’s a field where terminology is freely coined, borrowed or recast, and many
definitions of mise-en-scène have been proposed, each serving the interests of
one or another theorist and each fraught with the conceptual prejudices of
their theoretical contexts. It’s in my interest here to try to adopt a fairly
conventional definition of mise-en-scène as a triangular set up: the relation of
the camera, the actors and the world. In the case of empirical observation: the
position of the actors corresponds to the observed and the observing subjects,
the world to the shared world of objects, and the camera to the
intersubjectively observed observer producing its record of the observation.
In actual footage what I have been describing as a relation between the camera
and the events that it records, conceals a three way relation because the term
“events” includes both the people who act or experience the events, and their
shared world of which the events are part.

Every recording is a social act and, as is well known, people being recorded
act in the social context of the recording. People perform the social actions of
their everyday life without a camera, and they also perform them with a
camera, although not always in the same way. Notably, people perform
historic acts for the camera. Politicians staging a handshake for a camera is an
act of collaborative performative video, self-referential in the manner of
linguistic performatives. All actions performed before a camera for the camera
are performatives to a degree, although as truth claims made by the
performers before the camera they are at serious risk of proving unhappy.
When the politician performs before the cameras his or her performance may

28
be an unhappy one. The collaboration with the filmmaker or television
journalists is a risky one; they may use the shot for a different truth claim and
a different performance. The filmmaker, even though we are not talking about
the auteur of a fiction film here, has much more control over the use of the
shot. Consider how impossible it is (other than by destroying the recording)
for someone who does not want to be filmed to perform the action of not
being filmed. There is the pathos of covering one’s head with a coat, or
putting one’s hand over the lens. But then even the filmmaker’s subjective
intentions may be exceeded by the objectivity of the shot, as in cases where
scrutiny of a film reveals details that the filmmaker had not observed. So
where is the filmmaker in this triangle of the set up?

The events on the scene are those being recorded by the camera and, by
implication, the action of the camera recording them. The filmmaker acts by
being there on the scene with the camera or by setting up the unattended
camera. Whatever its effect on the events taking place before the camera and
being recorded by the camera, the action of recording cannot be thoroughly
abstracted from the social or historical set up. One way or another we must
recognise that the filmmaker is there, unseen, although not necessarily
unindicated, in the set up, whether as part of the social environment, as
unseen actor, or as the operator of the camera. Take your pick. A
documentary filmmaker or theorist can hardly avoid theorising about this. It
has been one of the great topics — theoretical, practical, ethical, and aesthetic
— of documentary set up. CCTV may try to solve it by secreting the camera,
although it would be a naïve criminal who robbed a bank or terrorised an
airport without performing for a camera. Even so, in the case of a lot of
actions the action of filming them gets lost in the background environment of
the actors being filmed: one way or another those acting before the camera
don’t notice the camera, or forget about it, or treat it as just one other
observer on the common stage of social performance. A lot of ceremonial life,
political life, and even everyday life is just mundane, videoed life. Those
acting, even though they may be performing, are not primarily performing for
the camera. On the other hand, even animals respond to a camera, especially if
they see the filmmaker. This affects the kind of animal behaviour that ends up
being recorded and thus affects the use of a camera in the scientific
observation of fauna. There are even events that do not involve actors at all
that are nevertheless sensitive to and can be affected by the action of the
filmmaker and recorder. Not earthquakes or bushfires let’s say, but a light

29
boat might sink with the weight of a camera, while without the camera it
would stay afloat.

When we read say Thucydides, we observe not just a report of the times, we
observe an act of the times — the record made at the time — and also an
experience of the times. All shots used as actual footage are like this. It might
be an observation of an event but it is also an act and an experience of the
times themselves. Whether the events are identified spatiotemporally or within
a causal network, the combination of action of recording and the event being
recorded makes a compound event. Together an event’s observation and its
recording produce a peculiarly significant (compounded) event of the times. A
filming of the assassination of Kennedy is a piece of the action that morning
in Dallas, inextricably compounded with the event it shows. It was just one
other event in Dallas that morning and therein lies something of its historical
pathos. The videoing of the plane’s crashing into the south tower was an
event in New York, then and there. It is an empirical record of the event, but
also of the witnessing of the event, and as such it has unique historical pathos.
Indeed for the terrorists the crash was probably performed to be witnessed
and to become a media event. Even more intimately and intentionally
connected to the event recorded is the video recording of the Latham –
Howard handshake in the 2004 Federal Election. 23 A trivial interaction
between politicians, a handshake performed collaboratively by the politicians
and for the journalists, it was an event which in its ambiguity attracted and
subsequently absorbed an awful lot of interpretation. As is the case with so
many events on an election “campaign trail”, the filming of the handshake
cannot be abstracted from the causal identity of the handshake event itself and
from the subsequent effects the event had. The film is an observation of the
event but at the same time an observation of the observation of that event,
and inextricably part of the event itself, for the event would not have existed if
it had not been recorded.

Thucydides cannot compete with this, because reading Thucydides is not an

empirical observation of the events reported. Indeed in most cases
Thucydides himself was quite remote from the events reported.

We cannot neatly separate the newsreel of the Viet Nam War from the war
itself and the way the war was played out. The news footage of this and

30
several subsequent wars took on something of a performative character. The
television coverage of a political campaign is to some extent an extended
performative in which the parties vie with one another and the media to
render the performance of their opponents unhappy while striving to ensure
that they themselves perform happily. The age of video, especially the age of
digital video, has provided much more than just video of wars and disasters
and assassinations, or even video of political actions and events. Events from
the entire gamut of artistic, legal, scientific, and social history can be and are
videoed. Socially they are primarily video-events or media events.

Thus news and documentary style is clearly political. More generally in all
documentary making style is an ethical matter, and the worst sins of
documentary are sins against the subjects in which their good will or courtesy
is abused. A fly-on-the-wall documentary or a cinema verite piece that abuses
its ethical obligation is an historical documentation of its own shamelessness
before anything else, although it is not always recognised as such. Often a
filmmaker's presence in voice over, in visual references to the camera, in poor
recording, or in conversation with the subjects is more honest. Disguising the
presence of the camera and filmmakers from the audience, especially when the
subjects are goaded into contrived performance — into mistakes, insincerity
and even lying — is so common as to be an accepted norm of documentary.
Occasionally it is used to expose a fraud, but it also can range from fairly
innocent things such as imposing on the subjects to re-enact a small event,
like greeting the filmmaker at the door, to hectoring them with false
accusations and editing complicated responses into untruths. It is justified in
the case of politicians or reality TV because the subjects are 'fair game', they
play as performers; or it is justified in the case of courteous, naïve or innocent
subjects because they 'should know better', or they are 'characters', or that's
just 'how things are', or it makes better or more professional television, or it
sells. Justification will always find its rationalisations.

Still in all these cases it is the empirical veracity of the video that makes the
invention of film, and its subsequent technological development, its economic
availability and the discovery or development of more and more uses, if not
already a major event in the history of history, then one waiting to happen. Its
scientific validity, its forensic legitimacy and authority, and its use as an
observation of observations is almost beyond my capacity to doubt, and

31
beyond my capacity to disprove. If this is naiveté on my part — or on that of
the empirical sciences or the law — I would appreciate being disabused of it.

4. Truth, Meaning, Logic and Narrative

How many facts or propositions are conveyed by a photograph? None, an

infinity, or one great fact? Bad question. A picture is not worth a thousand
words or any other number. Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a
picture.
—Donald Davidson24, “What Metaphors Mean”, 223

What is the right question? If words are the wrong currency, what is
the logical value of a shot? If a shot is true, what does it mean? So far I have
primarily considered truth in the context where actual footage is used as a
proposition to record an observation and to make a claim that is true of the
events observed. In this context “true” has ended up being used primarily as
an epistemological concept. The coherence conditions of truth are conditions
for epistemological verification and a correspondence between shot and
events, although it has an ontological sense so far it is about what events exist,
is only as good as it is coherent in the context of other reports.

The principle that a filmmaker or viewer holds a shot to be true on the basis
of two considerations — what event they take the shot to show and what
event they believe to have happened — is very like another formulation that
traces its origins back to Frege: We understand a sentence if we understand
what would be the case if it were true. This can be formulated for a shot too:
We understand a shot if we understand what would be the case if it were true.

If we are to understand the meaning of an historical film narrative in the usual

form as a sequence of shots, we need to understand the inferences made from
the sequence of shots. And to understand these inferences brings us to the
vexed problem of the logic of film. We need some explanation of the
entailment relations between shots or how we can use a shot, if it is true, to
infer true conclusions. What about Tarski? Is it possible that what might have
looked trivial when I first mentioned it above, may prove useful?

32
First, back to language. Tarski’s formulation applies to particular sentences. So
consider a particular sentence: “The plane crashed into the south tower”.
Tarski’s formulation of truth conditions goes something like this:

The sentence “The plane crashed into the south tower” is true if and only if the
plane crashed into the south tower.

The term “The plane crashed into the south tower” is really just a name for
the sentence. Putting the quotation marks around the sentence is just a way of
making a name for the sentence inside the quotation marks: it names the
sentence by showing it, or “mentioning” it, as some philosophers would say.
The sentence inside the quotation marks is in what Tarski called the object
language. It is for this language that we are defining the truth conditions.
However we are defining truth in the object language by using another
language to talk about the object language. Call it the metalanguage. Here for
convenience both languages look like ordinary English, but we could have
used English as our object language and Malayalam or Spanish or whatever as
our metalanguage; or the formal language of quantificational logic. Use of the
latter is a good way to reveal the logical structure of the object language, and
its ontological assumptions. Revealing the logical structure is the first step in
revealing the entailment relations of the sentence in question to other
sentences. Tarski’s formulation of the definition of truth conditions is also a
formulation for the translation of the sentence in the object language into a
sentence in the metalanguage, since the requirement of translation is
preservation of truth-values.

What if our object language is film? Tarski’s formulation placed special

conditions on the kind and structure of the object language described and on
the metalanguage used to describe it. His truth conditions are strictly confined
to formal logical language. Natural languages like ordinary English do not
satisfy the conditions; film hasn’t got a hope. Even calling film a language is
more like metaphor than satisfaction of some definition of “language”. It is
certainly not a language like English, nor is it a language in the mathematical
sense. Film seems scarcely to have any “logical part”; nothing in or between
shots looks like any of the logical constants, quantification, or even
disjunction or negation. Or even conjunction.25 If this is the case though, then
one of Tarski’s requirements — “that the metalanguage in its logical part is

33
‘essentially richer’ ” than the object language — is sort of satisfied if the object
language is film and the metalanguage is a formal logical language or even
ordinary English.26 So language or not, since we routinely use shots to make
truth claims and we make logical inferences from these claims to true
conclusions, I intend to try out Tarski’s approach to see how we make some
logical use of shots. This might not be proper logic or philosophy of history.
It’s more like taking a problem down to the shed and tinkering with it.

4. 1. Film as the Object Language, English as the Metalanguage

Taking film as the object language and, for convenience, ordinary English as
the metalanguage we might try something like:

The shot of the plane’s crashing into the south tower is true if and only if the plane
crashed into the south tower.27

Tarski’s original formulation might look trivial, but this one has too many
problems to be merely trivial. Remember that the first half of this formulation
names the well known actual video shot of United Airlines Flight 175 crashing
into the South Tower of the World Trade Centre in New York at 9:03am, 11
September 2001. If we try to use the formulation as the basis for translation,
the translation is not complete: the shot of the plane’s crashing into the south
tower shows much more than just the plane crashing into the south tower. It
is also a shot of, among other events, the north tower burning. A picture sort
of is worth a thousand words. The plane crashing into the south tower might
be a necessary but it is not a sufficient condition for the truth of a shot of the
plane crashing into the south tower. On the one hand if the plane did not
crash into the south tower then the shot of the plane crashing into the south
tower is not true. On the other, if a shot of the plane crashing into the tower
is not true then it does not follow that the plane did not crash into the south
tower. It may have crashed into the tower even though the shot is just a false
CGI mock up in which, for example, the north tower is not burning when the
plane is shown crashing into the south tower. Because a shot shows many
events and can be used to assert them all, such a shot is false if any of those
assertions is false. Such is the indeterminacy of a shot: if it is a proposition, it
is a very different kind of proposition from a sentence.

34
So at best we must restrict ourselves to the statement of a necessary condition
of the truth of the shot:

If the shot of the plane’s crashing into the south tower is true then the plane
crashed into the south tower.

This does not give us a full account of the conditions of the truth of shot. So
we might want to try to spell out every event the shot shows — to translate
the picture, as it were, with those thousand words — but that’s an impossible
task. Even with a million words it would never end. Even if we could exhaust
every event that might seem relevant to native human intuition, we could keep
on identifying all sorts odd events based on an infinite number of
spatiotemporal partitions of the material shown in the shot.

There is another more fatal problem with this formulation though which
becomes clearer if we work with a different shot:

If the shot of the man’s casing the bank is true then the man cased
the bank.

The left hand unambiguously identifies a shot by designating it as “the shot of

the man’s casing the bank” even if it is actually a shot of a man examining the
architecture of the bank and not casing the bank. We have designated the shot
with a name, even though that name uses a false description. The shot can be
true even if the supposed truth condition is false; therefore it need not be a
truth condition of the shot at all. In the case of the plane it is hard to doubt
that “the plane crashed into the tower” because we have smuggled in a whole
system of supporting evidence for that being the case. Having identified this
fatal flaw —the problem of describing just one event in the shot — let’s hold
it in abeyance and tinker a little longer with the problem of describing (or at
least designating) all the events in the shot.

We identify most events, especially actions, in causal terms (e.g. in terms of

their intentions or their ends) rather than in spatiotemporal terms, but that
does not prevent us, if we wish, from using an infinite number of partitions of
the spatiotemporal “event space” to identify an infinite number of events. By
this means we could identify such events as the plane’s approaching the tower
from the moment it comes on screen up until the moment of impact, or up to

35
one second before impact, or 1.5 seconds before, and so on. And, although
uniquely identified by place and time, each of these events has its own unique
causal identity.28 We cannot give a full or exhaustive translation of the shot
into our metalanguage, whether into ordinary English or a formal logical
language, other than by some such designation as “the total shot-event”.

In this case why not try to formulate the truth conditions with a mouthful like
this:

The shot of the total shot event that includes, among other things, the plane’s
crashing into the south tower is true if and only if the total shot event that
includes, among other things, the plane’s crashing into the south tower happened.

Remember that the first half of this formulation still just names the well
known actual video shot of United Airlines Flight 175 crashing into the South
Tower of the World Trade Centre at 9:03am, 11/09/2001. Even if the
formulation manages to identify both a total shot event and a shot of that
total shot event, it does not translate the shot. It just does not preserve the
truth-value of what is translated, because it does not identify the truth relevant
elements that we observe in the shot. Thus, in attempting to preserve the
indeterminacy of the shot’s truth claim, it sacrifices the truth of the shot.
Lacking the semantic insight of Tarski’s formulation, it is not a translation of
the shot that yields truth claims for the purpose of logical inference.

Here I can try casting another light on the problem Frege recognized in the
insight that all true sentences name the True and all false sentences, the False.
All true shots designate “the facts”. That phrase “shot of the total shot-event”
rigs the formulation up as a version of correspondence truth, in much the
same way that the term “fact” used in linguistic formulations of
correspondence theories rig up a fact as whatever a sentence corresponds to.
Just as the coherence theory of truth insists that for a sentence to be true it
must be consistent with a totality of true beliefs about the world, the
coherence theory applied to shots insists that a true shot is consistent with a
totality of true beliefs about the world. Indeed a true shot shows that totality,
or at least a totality that is a fair attempt (given the constraints of lenses) at
showing everything. If we consider that a shot is a bit like an attempt to show
the True in all its detail, we get some understanding of the nature of a shot’s
indeterminacy. Frege’s insight suggests that language used its comparatively

36
rich logical form, especially its denotative alacrity, to solve the problem of
indeterminacy. There is a trade-off between our two propositional media:
shots correspond in their details but are indeterminate in their truth claims;
sentences are determinate in their truth claims but lack detail in their
correspondence. Even if a shot is true, that is, if it is an actual shot of what it
shows and thus true according to epistemological requirements, we cannot
identify with certainty what event it is true of or what event it intends or
means to be true of.

4.2 Silent Film as the Object Language, Sound Film as the

Metalanguage

There is another condition of Tarski’s convention that, in the interests of

seeing what some tinkering might reveal, I have not mentioned: the
metalanguage must contain the object language. If only for this reason, we
should not be surprised that the attempts to state film’s truth conditions in
language fail. Tinkering demonstrated some of the characteristics of film’s
indeterminacy and how radically untranslatable into language it is. We could
designate a shot but we could not quote it. So what if we try silent film as the
object language, and sound film as the metalanguage? That way our
metalanguage would be logically richer than the object language, and also
contains the object language.

Perhaps we can do this, if only in that loose, impure way of sound film. So
here we need a film but all I can do in a written essay is its storyboard.

Shot 1: Shot of a monitor showing the plane crashing into the tower.
(Voiceover: The shot of the plane crashing into the tower is true…)

Shot 2: Shot of an inter-title “…if and only if…” (Voiceover: …if and
only if…)

Shot 3: Shot of the plane crashing into the tower. (Voiceover: …the
plane crashed into the tower)

37
Shot 1 looks like a conjunction: the shot on the monitor and the voiceover
(“the shot of the plane crashing into the tower”. If it is a conjunction — and
charitably that is probably how film convention works — both the shot and
the voiceover designate the same thing: “the shot of the plane crashing into
the tower”. Use of the monitor is like the use of quotation marks in language.
It’s such a common device of film to quote other films or videos that it has
worked itself into convention.

Shot 2 is a logical connective, rendered in both audio recorded speech and

video recorded writing. We could have avoided this shot, used just two shots
and used the voiceover “..if and only if…” during the first or second shot.

Shot 3 also looks like a conjunction: the first term is the shot of the plane
crashing into the tower (It’s not on a monitor this time, which is in
accordance with the so-called disquotational procedure of Tarski’s
formulation) and the second is the voiceover sentence “the plane crashed into
the tower”. Now we already know that this sentence is a judgement like the
“the man cased the bank”, and possibly false. So the final shot and voiceover
does not work as a conjunction: the shot may be true but the linguistic claim
made in the voiceover false. Perhaps we could drop the voiceover in the third
shot. The logical formulation with that “if and only if” connective probably
doesn’t have to connect to a second term that includes a linguistic
formulation. In shot 2, after the voiceover of “if and only if” we could have a
little drum roll announcing shot 3 without any voiceover.

If this works — by the standards of shed tinkering, not formal logic — it only
confirms that we can’t translate film into language; the linguistic translation
can’t preserve the truth of the shot. If we want to derive truths from a shot
that we can then use in logical inference — that is truths with at least the
logical structure of ordinary language — we have to use something like the
storyboard above but with a voiceover that contents itself with stating only a
necessary condition, the truth of which will be only conditional:

Shot 1: Shot of a monitor showing the plane crashing into the tower.
(Voiceover: If the shot of the plane crashing into the tower is true…)

Shot 2: Shot of an inter-title “…then…” (Voiceover: …then…)

38
 Shot 3: Shot of the plane crashing into the tower. (Voiceover: … what
appears to be a plane appears to crash apparently into what is appears to be a
tower)

The plane might not be crashing or crashing into, or it might not be a plane or
the plane, or it might not be a tower or the tower. For our inferences then we
resort to conditional probability. Given everything else we know it is much
more likely that the plane crashed into the tower than that it didn’t. We can’t
make logical inferences from a true shot alone and whether or not the
sentence “The plane crashed into the tower” is true is a matter of probability,
dependent upon other truths — other observations, reports of other events.
So we are back in the domain of coherence truth and empirical observation:
the Bayesian predicament of the sciences. If history is a science, and a science
in which we want to make logical inferences, philosophy of history keeps
returning to epistemology. And even if history wants to be an art it can’t be
fiction and it can’t be false. Its art will reside in its argument, its narrative. The
semantic truth of a shot is inseparable from its indeterminacy, which is
scarcely less than the indeterminacy of any observation of events, so the art of
history on screen will consist in how its narrative uses film’s indeterminacy
and the infinite subtleties of conditional inference.

We quite normally talk of the meaning of a shot when we are referring to the
particular event — among many other events shown in the shot — that the
filmmaker intends or takes the shot to be true of. We sometimes call this the
point of the shot. This brings us back to the notion that we understand a shot
if we understand what would be the case if it were true. This idea is sometimes
discussed in terms of a psychological theory of attention — our attention
being automatically drawn to whatever event in the shot is relevant — and if it
turns out in a subsequent shot that something other than what we attended to
in the earlier shot was relevant then we rely on some faculty of working
memory to retrieve this other event. Here, though, I will confine myself to a
description of the logical processes rather than try to account for their
psychological embodiment.

In a shot of the plane crashing into the tower the crashing of the plane may be
the relevant event, that is, the event the shot means to be true of. If this is the
relevant truth claim of the shot then it is the claim whose truth is to be used in

39
logical inferences from the shot. However in the shot of the plane crashing
into the south tower the relevant event may be the burning of the north
tower. Indeed that was the event that was relevant when it came to deciding
whether the computer-generated mock-up shot was true. Mocked up shots are
true of their relevant events but may not be true of other events they show.

A mocked up shot may be anything from a sophisticated re-enactment or a

computer-generated image to a simple animated line drawing. Such images are
diagrams. They pick out the truth relevant elements and show only those as
their meaning.

A shot, even an animated shot, may be used as a truth claim but its lack of
logical form renders its truth claim somewhat indeterminate. Any semantic
specificity is only achieved by some degree of mutual understanding, that is by
some mutually understood assumptions about symbolic substitution, and by
some mutually understood assumptions about what is to be ignored as not
meant. This semantic determination of the shot’s relevant truth claims is
conferred by its entailment relation to other shots, to mutual assumptions
about the filmmaker’s and audience’s “forms of life” or social background
knowledge, and to explicit linguistic propositions that take place in the context
of the films exhibition — notably claims made on the soundtrack.
Diagrammatic films have the advantage of being able reliably to make
mutually manifest what is relevant and irrelevant in a shot. However no event
in actual footage or indeed in any shot that is a truth claim— whether
diagrammatic or not, or non-fiction or fiction — can be ignored entirely.
Subsequent shots may confer relevance on details previously disregarded, or
entirely unobserved.29 Yet it is not the case that all films affirm the truth of
every detail in a shot. It is one of the anomalies of non-fiction films that they
alone among films show shots that are not true — not by correspondence nor
semantically. They are untrue because they are untrue in what is intended to
be irrelevant detail. The problem is to signify unambiguously what is irrelevant
and what is relevant detail, and thus what is a truth claim and what is not. This
is a particular problem for films about the conventional subject matter of
history when there is no actual footage available. It is the case with all
“historical re-enactments”.

40
So far I have done nothing more than translate a shot into an abbreviated
description of what it shows, an abbreviation that is not unlike the
abbreviation of a diagram, and which is conditional on other information: “If
the shot of the plane’s crashing into the south tower is true then it is likely
that the plane crashed into the south tower.” Why give this as an account of
the truth conditions of a shot even when we can already specify the truth
conditions of a shot in terms of its being an actual shot of the actual events it
shows? Because it specifies the likely truth relevant elements of the shot and
along with relevant background assumptions there it is the truth-relevant
events of a shot that we use in order to infer what the shots entail. Although
we cannot necessarily identify them with certainty we can with a high degree
of probability. We can also observe quite a sophisticated hierarchy of events in
a shot; we observe the plane’s crashing into the south tower as part of larger
compound events that the shot shows — what happened and was happening
to the plane, the south tower, the north tower, in the sky above and in some
of cityscape below, right up to the “total shot-event”. We use this to
reinterpret what the relevant events of the shot are in the light of subsequent
shots shown in a narrative sequence of shots. We use a semantic version of
the truth conditions of a shot, not to determine if the shot is true, but to give
the shot some logical form by translating it into a language that has a logical
form and thereby to give some sense to the concept of the meaning of a shot.
As I said, we understand a shot if we know what would be the case if it were
true. Our knowledge is not certainty though.

To betray the cinematic truth of a shot and translate the shot into
language is to acknowledge that the shot has scarcely any more logical
structure than the events themselves, and events only have the logical
structure that our subjectivity describes in them in order to use that logical
form for making logical inferences. We are made as animals who parse the
information we get from the world into events and objects, and it takes some
philosophical insight to acknowledge that our ontology, the events and the
objects, were never quite just “out there” in themselves in the first place. Even
so these categories carve the world “at its joints”, that is at its causal and
spatiotemporal joints. Not having an ontology of causally identified things like
events and objects is a risky way for an organism to get by in the world and
pass on its genes. In everyday psychology we simply refer to what we are
doing when we do this parsing under the rubrics of “perception” and
“grammar”. 30 The grammar of objects and events has been conditioned by

41
our need to make valid inferences about the world — in particular to tell valid
narratives. Meanwhile we can leave the neurological and physiological nuts
and bolts of this parsing to as yet unavailable descriptions of an entirely
different order and complexity.

Ordinary language shows a certain quasi-logical structure in its grammatical

form — quite a rich one. Formal logical notation is a specially limited form of
ordinary language in which the functions of the language are pared down to
those of explicit logical form. Even so, as an awful lot of philosophical debate
over very ordinary linguistic usages has demonstrated, it is not always agreed
how ordinary language should be translated into a formal notation in such a
way as to preserve its relevant logical structure. The problems encountered in
translating a shot into a sentence share some features with those of translating
a sentence into explicit logical form. In both cases translation has to sacrifice
truth in order to achieve a more explicit logical structure. The logical structure
of a sentence used as a proposition is always determined by the inferential
uses we make of it in a context, that is in the context of our system of beliefs,
and among other sentences used in the same narrative or argument. We have
to test a translation in order to check that it identifies the elements that are
relevant to an account of the truth-value of the sentence being translated. In
practice the logical inferences used in an argument (that is in the ordinary use
beyond the confines of the sentence itself) retroactively suggest the logical
structure of any translation from ordinary language. The formal logical
structure, as Donald Davidson has said “need never feature in the transactions
of ordinary life. As long as we know how to redeem our paper we can enjoy
the benefits of credit.”31 That is, we need never articulate this logical structure
separately from the everyday grammatical structure of ordinary language, even
if or when we use this logical structure in our everyday inferences. Like wise
when we watch a film or observe actual events, the logical inferences are being
made but we need never “redeem our paper”.

So what we do with film we already do to some extent with the

disambiguation of linguistic propositions in the context of a linguistic
argument such as a narrative. And even sentences exhibit their own
indeterminacy. It is only after we read on in a narrative that we understand the
relevant implications and therefore the relevant meaning of a sentence.
Likewise, we keep on watching to understand the truth relevant meaning of a
shot.

42
An animation — a moving diagram — which pairs down the events of a shot
to the relevant gist, to that extent approaches the condition of a sentence,
although it still lacks the logical functions of language. We can still only
provide a conditional account in logical language of the necessary but not the
sufficient conditions of its truth-value. The diagrams of films are, as it were,
continuous, while those of language are discrete. A linguistic proposition
performs the function of a diagram with more or less discrete elements. A
proposition in a formal logical language performs the function of what might
be called a strictly logical diagram.32

Picking out actions from a shot in a film comes quite naturally in the process
of making the inferences necessary for understanding the argument  the
typical kind of argument in a film being what we call narrative. So wide is the
definition of narrative, so indeterminate the logical structure of film, and so
empirical the objects and events it is about, that narrative is probably the only
kind of film argument. When we see a shot our native event-perceiving nous
is apparently able to chime in to make an observation of many component
events in the total shot-event, component events that can be redeemed if
needed in due course. We typically individuate acts and events by their causal
relations. If they are acts then we usually think of those causes as intentions or
motives, which are often described in terms of their effects or, teleologically,
their ends. Even in language we find that subsequently described events and
their causal relations to earlier events lead us to new inferences about the
relevance of earlier sentences, and hence to re-assessments of their meanings.
In film subsequent shots become evidence for redefining events and their
relevance in earlier shots. The logical structure of the film, which is scarcely
discernable anyway, need never feature in these “transactions of ordinary life”.

As to the question about what event the filmmaker intends the shot to be
about, the filmmaker may intend the shot to mean the total shot-event, in
which case the shot is indeterminately about anything or everything it shows.
Even if certain events shown are likely to be more relevant and generate more
narrative consequences, relevance is a matter of degree. The most
inconspicuous, inferentially unexploited of background events is relevant if
only as background. This intended indeterminacy is always the case with actual
footage used as actual footage. The shot is used to signify whatever it records,
and, since it is held to be true by correspondence, it is used to make a truth

43
claim about everything in the shot. As an empirical observation, such a shot
can even be used, in Kracauer’s terms to expose “to view a world never seen
before”. However all this is also the case with shots in fiction films. Even
though occasional mistakes happen — the camera accidentally catches its
reflection in a window, a bus strays into the background of a film set in the
seventeenth century — the film is made with the intention that everything or
anything it shows is true within the possible world that the film is about. Even
an animated fiction film is like this. This is not the case though with many
non-fiction films — those in which it is intended that we disregard certain
details.

5. The Past As It Wasn’t, Actually.

Maybe all non-fiction films fall into the category of historiography. They are
almost unavoidably narrative because their shots show events, and no
arrangement of their shots can avoid the predicament that it is string of
propositions about events, and therefore, narrative and non-fiction, and thus
historical. The general term for such films is documentary.

However there is a class of documentaries that we would call history films in a

stricter, and more usual sense: films about the more or less remote past and
usually about a restricted range of subject matter, especially political and
military, and especially about powerful people involved in those fields. It
ventures beyond these topics but when it does we are still apt to distinguish it
as artistic, legal, religious, scientific or social history, or whatever. It then
usually concerns itself with what precedent has considered the major events in
these fields and is still fascinated by the powerful players involved in them. I
guess this is history in the most conventional sense. And it is a problem for
film.

Events that happen remote in time or place from a camera don’t leave a video
record. There is no footage of the First Fleet fetching up on the Cadigal
country in 1788, or of the death of Hitler, or any number of events of interest.
So how can film tell these events? Written history is characterised by a lot of
secondary reporting. Even Thucydides, who in one sense is a primary source
on the Peloponnesian War, and whose book was an event of that war, is only

44
a secondary source when it comes to most of the events he reports.
Nevertheless his truth claims about most of these events don’t strike the
problem that cinematic truth claims do. Verbal reports identify the relevant
events, selecting them from the indeterminate manifold of concurrent,
contiguous events that actual footage cannot avoid showing. They limit their
claims, so there is less that they can get wrong, and what they can get right is
determinate. Where Thucydides exceeded the capabilities of written
historiography was in his “transcripts” of speeches, because transcripts are
sufficiently like audio and video recordings, that is sufficiently mimetic (to use
the classic term of narrative theory), to be judged true or false by
correspondence.

In an irony of history it was Plato who first made the distinction between
narrative that tells its story by showing likenesses, and narrative that tells by
reporting.33 The former he called mimetic, the latter diegetic narrative. Having
made the distinction he was able to condemn the former. This condemnation
would apply to Thucydides’ recreated speeches. For that matter it would also
apply to all of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. Treating these dialogues as primary
sources for any history of Socrates and what he said, or treating Thucydides as
a primary source for a history of Pericles and what he said in his speeches is a
bit like treating a filmed recreation of a recent historical event as a primary
source or actual footage. If it is not too anachronistic to use modern
categories, Plato’s Socrates condemned mimesis in fiction, but it is in non-
fiction that it can be a problem. Film, the propositional use of which reveals
previously unappreciated features of propositions, makes this problem even
more critical.

History on film, when it uses videoed re-enactment of historical events, is not

true by correspondence, not the way actual footage is. As far as
correspondence goes videoed re-enactment gets anything and everything
wrong. As far as coherence goes it gets so much wrong that maybe it gets too
much wrong. Such footage is used with the intention of making a determinate
truth claim (about the actual world) that is mutually manifest and relevant to
the filmmaker and viewer. However, because of the indeterminacy of the shot,
it also makes an indeterminate manifold truth claim about a fictional (or
possible) world that is more or less like the actual world, but this truth claim is
not taken to be about the actual world. Such footage can only hope to work
by assuming that it is manifest to the viewer what the relevant truth claim

45
implied by the shot is. I think this is one way in which shots of re-enactments
seem to be used, so far as I can find words to describe it, but I would not say
it was the only way.

The filmmaker takes certain events shown in the shot of a re-enactment to be

relevant and it is only those events in the shot that are used to make truth
claims about events in the actual world. Thus the filmmaker also assumes that
the viewer will be able to infer what those relevant events are and what their
respective relevant descriptions are, thus making it possible for the viewer to
infer what the filmmaker’s truth claims about the actual world are. Because of
the indeterminacy of a video proposition, there will be other events shown in
the shot, and it is assumed that any descriptions of these events will be taken
to be of indeterminate truth value; apart from being like the actual events that
comprised the context of the relevant actual events, these events will be taken
to be more or less irrelevant. Of course this a messy process. A lot can go
wrong. At best we may be able to have some confidence that on the whole the
viewer has got the point or points of a shot, meaning that the viewer
understands its manifold truth claim (i.e. the compound of the relevant truth
claims) and, just as importantly, the viewer understands which particular
component claims of this compound claim are the ones which the filmmaker
means the viewer to take as most relevant and thus the most reliably true. The
filmmaker must play a balancing act: the degree of relevance of any depicted
event and the degree of confidence in its truth-value are proportional. Like
someone balancing the other end of a see-saw, the viewer has to be able to
play the same balancing game by inferring the same degrees of relevance and
truth from the shot and its context. Although we readily play with such
subtlety of meaning in art and in the everyday uses of irony, t
his poses serious but I suppose not insuperable problems: the returns, in
terms of truth claims about the actual world, might become so vanishingly
small that using words rather than film would often be not only more reliable
but more efficient.

This makes me wonder though about such a film as Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle
of Algiers. It does historiography by re-enactment, and I find myself watching it
as an historical record, a cinematic account of the battle. It seems as if the
shots can be strictly all untrue by the correspondence criterion but somehow
the narrative is valid and this can somehow render the shots true. Narrative
and the truth-value of the shots (or sentences) it uses inter-animate. An invalid

46
or misleading narrative can render shots false, which in another context would
be true by correspondence; while re-enacted shots — that is shots that are
untrue by the correspondence criterion — can work as truth claims in the
context of the right narrative.34 In the narrative context the truth claim of a
shot or sentence becomes a matter of its consistency with the other shots or
sentences, that is, it becomes true by the criterion of coherence. The Battle of
Algiers frankly asserts that is uses not one foot of actual footage, although that
might not entirely save it from a certain disingenuousness. It works as
historiography only so far as it works as art. It is historical fiction, where we
play the see-saw of its interpretation not bothering to disbelieve35 it. We do
the same with most works of fiction, as we likewise do with works of
historiography.

The Battle of Algiers also has its own historical pathos. And I don’t just mean its
beautiful use of black and white, which is art concealing art and to that extent
might actually be disingenuous. Rather, we watch it in Michael Oakeshott’s
terms as truly a survival from the times of its story. It is a work — a document
— of people who lived through the war, of the people of Algiers who played
roles “the people of Algiers” in the film, and of Saddi Yacef, a leader of the
FLN who played the role of a leader of the FLN In this it is like any primary
source, the truth-value of which is always a secondary consideration. And in
this it is also somewhat like Thucydides’ history. However, the truth of the
narrative of The Battle of Algiers is the loose kind that we associate with
narrative validity, and I would have to say that the truth-claim of any of its
shots remains that of historical fiction, not, as I believe is the case with
Thucydides’ prose, that of historiography.

The price we pay for generating the logical form of a verbal proposition from
the saturated but indeterminate truth claim of actual footage is loss of all the
other truth claims that the footage shows and the other verbal truth claims it
entails. Our descriptions of visually perceived events also sacrifice these truth
claims. Compared to the saturated universe of a single shot, whose manifold
truth claim, as it were, virtually shows the detail of the True of all true
sentences, what a single sentence describes seems infinitesimal. We make the
sacrifice for the power of logic; we would not survive otherwise. But we can’t
have our cake and eat it too. There is no way we can redeem what we have
lost, that is redeem empirical observation of the past, by using a shot of re-
enactment. It recovers effectively nothing and corrupts logical form and truth

47
in doing so. This places severe limitations on the use of re-enactment shots in
film historiography, a genre whose primary concern is truth and whose
greatest historical resource are those propositions that are recorded empirical
observations of the events they make truth claims about. The limitations of re-
enactment are certainly a stylistic challenge, and at best an opportunity for
historian filmmakers and the makers of historical fiction to make a virtue of
necessity. Re-enactment footage has its uses, although if it was not used as a
record of itself as re-enactment, by which means alone it is able to give itself
the truth value of recorded empirical observation, it would really be risking
historical infelicity. Of course film is an audio visual record, an impure art, and
using voiceover, filmed and recorded recollection of witnesses and still
photography, are the tried methods for relieving filmmaker historians from
the embarrassment of re-enactment and the dearth of actual footage. 36

Using an animation, which is a diagrammatic representation of the events and

a sort of re-enactment that is paired down to the most concise rendering of
the relevant events, is one way to make a virtue of these limitations, e.g. an
animated map that shows the geographical movement of, say, colonists or
refugees or an army, or the movements of Nazi staff at the attempted
assassination of Hitler, or the geography of an earthquake or tsunami. There
are two good reasons for this. First while incredible temporal detail is easily
encoded in tenses (as it is for that matter in the duration of a shot) and
retrieved without thinking, spatial detail quickly gets lost in a clutter of words
and is much better communicated with diagrams. Second, diagrams are almost
visual logical forms.

I wonder what I have done in this essay. Wondering about the truth of film
and video will seem superficial, banal, or trivial. Tinkering away at film using a
theory of truth — Tarski’s — that film seems to resist, idle. Finding out two
or three things about what a shot is and whether it is a kind of proposition,
and what it means to say a shot is indeterminate might seem poor rewards. I
suppose anyone who only wanted to read profound or provocative ideas
about truth, film and history would have little interest in this essay. For myself
I found that I could no longer skate along on the surface of film without
stopping and looking close. I didn’t want to just blissfully dream away with
everyone about depths beneath, even though felt intimations of depths makes
the glide more thrilling. But why waste more time imagining the structure of

48
unseen depths in a jargon that disenchants them when there is the unseen and
ignored surface of the Rankean miracle: actual footage. Truth is so everyday;
history is nothing if not true.

49
1
Such as Walter Benjamin in his timely “Theses on the Philosophy of
History”.
2
See 3.3.1 New Kinds Of Propositions
3
Audio recording and video recording are the same in this regard, making it
possible to extend claims made here about the historiographic features of
video to audio as well. The general subject matter of this essay can be
extended beyond the visual medium of moving pictures to the audio-visual
medium of sound pictures. Concretely, what has long been familiar to human
experience is now familiar in the experience of audio-visual culture. Too
paraphrase a line in Finnegan’s Wake, recorded events can be seenheard again
and not forgotten.
4
That is, without, for instance, being able to explicitly identify filmed actions
by their intentions, More on this indeterminacy later.
5
Perhaps we can say: Epistemologically there is nothing we can be more
certain of, nothing more reliably known, than our own experience, but once
that experience is described in language, it’s truth for others is a question of
meaning, first person authority and honesty. Whereas semantically, beyond
our own experience, in the social, objective world, there is nothing more
reliably true than actual footage.
6
Helen Garner in “Regions of Thick-ribbed Ice” in The Feel of Steel, (Sydney,
Picador, 2001), 32-33
7
As far as editing being cited as a source of counter examples to the
verisimilitude of film, I will leave that till later. Editing — the cutting of one
shot after another — can lead to misunderstanding or can be used to mislead
because we watch two or more shots in a sequence and make inferences from
what we see and from what we assume is mutually manifest to the filmmaker
and the viewer. We can make the wrong assumptions or make the wrong
inferences, or the filmmaker can have mendacious intentions. The cutting of
one shot after another creates a film argument — typically a narrative
argument — where validity is the issue. Truth is the issue with a shot or with
series of shots understood as a compound truth claim. A closely related issue
with a series of shots is their coherence or consistency. Whether as a valid
argument or a compound truth claim, a series of shots must be coherent. In
order to understand a film we assume that its narrative is coherent and its
shots consistent. Only on pain of abandoning hope of understanding do we
conclude that the shots of a film are inconsistent and the meaning incoherent.
Logically, once we allow that the film contradicts itself, anything goes,
anything follows. Rather than infer that, a viewer will hold apparent
inconsistency in abeyance and wait to see if subsequent shots resolve the
apparent inconsistency. This is only what the language philosophers would
call the principle of charity. It is common in narrative to find such
unresolved inconsistencies, and, indeed, in some narratives, not to resolve
them. It might be the intention of a filmmaker to not be a slave to
consistency, but when the filmmaker intends to signify inconsistency and
the viewer works that out, then a conclusion of absolute inconsistency need
not follow. As an argument, a film that uses editing to tamper with the truth
of a shot and the consistency of the shots, is invalid, whether or not it is
specious, misleading, or plain mistaken. Otherwise we extend our charity
toward the film, continue to take it as valid, and hold any apparent
inconsistencies in abeyance.
8
Those who get all solemn about truth deserve to be teased. It’s mildly
entertaining to see them get offended. If there are really others who believe
that truth is irrelevant, that history is fiction, that is, who have actually come
to believe the taunts, I suppose they too might be amusing, in their own
credulity, although if they acted on such a belief, that would be desperate.
Even Nietzsche, who, as the archenemy of Truth, is regularly touted by the
credulous and disparaged by the offended, wrote about truth because he
thought it was something worth writing about. For while he exhilarated
readers as he smashed his way through the china shop of worn out concepts,
what many readers seemed not to notice was that he blissfully bestowed the
word “true” on what he found or made worthy of it: to what bad
philosophers weren’t; to what might be so injurious only a strong mind can
endure it; to what the wicked and unfortunate are often more likely to
discover. He wanted to make clear that people don’t truly know what a
philosopher is.
9
For the most thorough account of Taski’s concept see “The Concept of
Truth in Formalized Languages” in Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers from 1923
to 1938 by Alfred Tarski, Corcoran, J., ed. Hackett. 1st edition edited and
translated by J. H. Woodger, (Oxford Uni. Press.1983 (1956)). For a more
straightforward version see “The Semantic Conception Of Truth And The
Foundations Of Semantics” at http://www.ditext.com/tarski/tarski.html
(accessed 6 October 2010)
10
See for example many essays of Donald Davidson; Carl Hempel on the
disenchantment of Logical Positivism with notions of correspondence (“On
the Logical Positivists’ Theory of Truth”, in Selected Philosophical Essays,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)), the Austen/Strawson debate
( “Truth” & “Unfair to Facts” by J.L. Austin in Philosophical Papers, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, second edition, 1970) and P.F. Strawson’s “Truth”
in Truth edited by George Pitcher (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1964)) ; or
Quine’s short, sweet entry in Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987) .
11
The word “fact” has more than this one meaning in English. As well as
using it to refer to what a true sentence corresponds to, we sometimes use it
to refer to the true sentence itself. There is metonymical blurring of the thing
the sign signifies with the sign itself. Something similar happens with the word
“history”, which can be used to refer variously to the discipline of inquiry into
past events, the account of those events, and the events themselves. In both
cases the blurring can be used to create the pleasant profundity of ambiguity.
12
“On Sense and Reference”, trans. Max Black,
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Sense_and_Reference (accessed 6
October 2010)
13
Perhaps we might say — because our use of these prepositions is, after
all, loose — such a shot is true to the event, but it is only true up to a point.
In such a shot a lot of detail is extraneous and neither true to nor of the
event it is about. But more on this later.
14
Others that are assumed, but not mutually, and upon which filmmaker
and viewer would differ if they were articulated, provide the source of
disagreement over the meaning and truth of a shot.
15
This raises a question for later: Is language necessary for cinema?
16
Fiction claims truth just as much as history. Dishonesty damages both.
17
See note 5.
18
People get all confused about objectivity, whether they stand up for it or
whether they say there is no such thing. Fewer, however, seem to do the same
about subjectivity. I suppose that this is because people believe that an
observation, a subjective observation of the world we share with others, even
if it might be mistaken, retains the authority that we are ready to give to first
person reports of subjective experience. People might not know what they
saw but they know that they saw something and they know what they think
they saw. We are ready to acknowledge that our claims about the world we
share with others might not match the claims made by others, and — possibly
out of some kind of politeness or fear of being overbearing, or culturally
insensitive or even racist — many feel constrained to admit several truth
claims, several knowledges, even when they are inconsistent or misleading,
and I suspect that we justify this epistemologically dubious move by the
thought that people as we say “know their own minds”.
People routinely use the term subjective observation to suggest that they
hold the observation in low esteem; it seems to suggest at best that on
observation is casual and so might not be as trustworthy as it would if it were
done with the care, measurement apparatus and the staging we call scientific
rigour. But I think they are being loose about what they think good scientific
observation is as well as about what subjective means. Often people assume
objective and true mean the same thing. Indeed objective is often used that
way.
Let me just say here that I use the words objective and objectivity to
refer to that which is concerned with the object of a subject’s observation or
of a subject’s intentional attitude such as belief, thought, desire, etc. I take it
that the objects of the world that subjects share with others, what we
sometimes call physical objects, exist independently of what we might think of
them. I think that to not acknowledge this is somehow to deny the other. The
notion that all observations are subjective is quite correct. In saying so I am
really no more than a child of the times, that is of the whole history of science
and philosophy since Descartes. There is no observation without a subject
who does the deed. Formally, that is what objects and subjects are: two place
holders on opposite sides of an action of observation or thought. It might
seem that there is a correspondence between these formal concepts and the
ontological categories of the physical and the mental, but there are mental as
well as physical objects, and given the untenability of a dualistic ontology
subjects and objects are of the same ontological category. Except for in a
loose way of speaking, even an experimental scientist is making subjective
observations; it’s just that protocols of scientific observation recognize this
and require that observations are observable or repeatable or confirmable, that
is, the observation is communicated between subjects and thereby subjected
to confirmation or otherwise.
 However the notion that what I observe and what another observes
are not only different but incompatible, or rather that such incompatibility
might apply to the majority or even all observations, denies not only the
shared world of objects, but the other; for it is only by what is consistent in
our claims that, whatever our differences, we acknowledge the other in the
first place. There could be no communication otherwise. We don’t know the
other as some kind of abstract other, but as an other like us. Our own
subjectivity depends on this, as does our intersubjectivity, and as does our
notion of what is objective, that is, of what exists independently of what we or
others might think of it. To speak of something’s objectivity is to refer to our
belief that that thing exists independently of what we might think about it,
even if it is an object of our mental life, rather than the shared world. Whether
we are right in a particular belief about an object or about that object’s
objectivity is another matter — in the first case the truth of our belief about
the object, in the second the truth of our belief that it is an independent object
in the first place. To speak of the objectivity of our claim about the object,
however, is often just another way of speaking of its truth. Loose talk, which
is fair enough, but to avoid confusion, it is probably better to leave such an
abstract noun as objectivity to refer to the quality of being an object, and let
truth refer to the logical value of a proposition. We can then argue about
whether a claim is true, and abstract sceptics, if they exist, can entertain us
with truth claims that there is no such thing as truth, instead of that there is
no such thing as objectivity.
19
The terms in which this model is proposed and some of its features may
remind readers variously of Donald Davidson in Subjective, Intersubjective,
Objective. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001) Niklas Luhmann in Social
Systems, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) and Heinze von Förster in
Observing Systems (Seaside: Intersystems Publications, 1982).
20
To be more precise there is an initial act of writing, the written product of
which is only a stage in what at each reading is an ongoing process. Although
the initial act of writing is not strictly repeatable, repeated readings are. And
although each reading is a unique stage in the long and unique process that is
the unfolding of the whole written act, each reading is of the same document
or a copy of the document and so it is virtually the same. Thus observation of
the written document satisfies the condition of the repeatability of observation
that is demanded by the norms of empirical observation.
21
See Judith Jervis Thompson, Acts and Other Events (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1977)

See Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty

22

Fund, 1999), 51-53

23
See A Long Hard Look At An Event, The Latham-Howard Handshake,
http://www.scribd.com/doc/37700166/Essay-4-A-Long-Hard-Look-at-an-
Event-The-Latham-Howard-Handshake (accessed 6 October 2010) for a
discussion of this event.
24
“What Metaphors Mean” in The Essential Davidson (Oxford: Clarendon Press.
2006), 223
25
Here “film” refers to vision without a spoken soundtrack or even writing.
Film in its full, impure sense as audio-visual medium has the logical richness
of ordinary language, or even of formal logical language at its disposal. But if I
had to start on such a chimera, my first desperate move would be to separate
the parts, just to get to know how they worked separately. And that’s what I
am doing.
26
English has a rich if not entirely consistent logical structure and can, at a
pinch, be spruced up into a formal language, so for convenience we can use
it here temporarily as a handy translation of formal language. If, however,
English were the object language and film were the metalanguage then, for
want of logical richness in our metalanguage, we could not frame anything
like Tarski’s truth conditions.
27
I will ignore tense changes and just stick to the everyday tense usage of
English. I will also designate events using the form “the plain’s crashing”
(the gerund of the verb with a possessive pronoun) as in rather then “the
plain crashing”. The former form, although it has become somewhat
archaic, refers more explicitly to the event “the crashing”, whereas the latter
refers to one of the objects involved in the event, “the plane”. I will live with
sins of English grammar and leave scruples about tense and how we quantify
over events to the virtues of formal logic.
28
Because of the spatiotemporal integrity of so many of the objects relevant to
us, casual partitions of an event are in large part integrated spatiotemporal
partitions
29
There are some wonderful thoughts on this in Raul Ruiz’s little book Poetics
of Cinema (Paris, Editions Dis Voir, 1995) in the chapter entitled “The
Photographic Unconscious”.
30
We would usually restrict the use of the word grammar to linguistic animals
like us. We usually restrict ontological nous to ourselves too, but there is some
incipient even if unarticulated ontology implied in what we call perception.
31
“The Logical Form of Action Sentences” in The Essential Davidson, 63.
32
C.S. Peirce thought that logical form was a kind of diagram, and that
deduction was a kind of “ingenious manipulation” of such diagrams. See
Collected Papers (Vol. II). (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1931-
1958). Similar things are commonly said of mathematics in general. In a logical
diagram, so called, the relevant semantic elements are arranged in a well-
behaved logical structure, so that inferences may be made by permissible
operations on the diagram. Operations are permissible on structures that are
well-behaved, only if they preserve truth values.
33
Or was it Socrates? Who knows who’s who with these two?
34
Note how in English we use words such as misleading, right, or wrong in cases
where we are not talking strictly about truth, which strictly is a characteristic
of shots and sentence. Or we might say a shot does not work. We ordinarily
use these terms rather than the technical term “invalid” to designate
something like the truth value of a narrative or of a shot (or sentence) as used
within its narrative context.
35
Belief and whether or not it is exercised in the context of fiction is
commonly dealt with using Coleridge’s rubric about “suspension of disbelief”.
In fact fiction for the most part seems more to rely on the suspension of
belief. For just as in the immediacy of lived experience the issue of belief is
seldom raised — that is it is suspended — nor is it in fiction.
36
On the other hand, if there is a critical problem for video historiography it is
that whatever does not get videoed thereby lacks the most important
adaptation for survival in the historical record, a problem we already see in the
news media where what is reported tends to be the events of which the media
has “vision”.