Still

Director’s statement

Still was made for OUTRAGE & REBELLION a collective french film to protest against police violence in France, intiated and produced by Nicole Brenez, after the filmmaker Joachim Gatti lost his eye, when a policeman shot him with a flashball in July 2009. 

The idea of the project was for each filmmaker to make their contribution without a budget and within a few weeks. I worked with images of police brutality that I found on the internet, often taken by family and friends of the victims. I sampled the soundtrack from Santiago Alvarez’s NOW! My video made in memory of him

I wanted to draw attention to the “climate of impunity” within the French police force, described by Amnesty International. More and more, people who complained or spoke out about police violence were being charged with defamation or “outrage et rébellion.” This applied to some journalists documenting the violence too.

Notes about Still and police violence

… I wanted these passages of white, accompanied by the sound of machine guns, to represent the absence of images and information; the vacuum into which, I believe, decades of obscuring information has thrown French society and which to me is also a kind of blinding. What exists behind the white? How many deaths do we not know about? How many cases of mistreatment are not recorded because the victims were silenced or charged with “Outrage & Rebellion”?

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On my interest in images uploaded to the internet, at that time

“Does the arrival of a new technology— photography, small video cameras, the Internet, smart phones —completely transform a society? Or at moments in history, do events in the making, call out for and conjure into being the new tools needed to document them—the old forms no longer able to seize them, suddenly rendered redundant, until one day, no longer relied upon, they may be re-visited in a completely fresh way?” (WADDINGTON, Scattered Truth)

The question posed by Waddington regarding the use of new technologies directly interrogates the ways in which photography, mini video cameras, the internet and smartphones have transformed society; namely, a subversion of the relationship between image and event is taking place, to the point that the latter requires new forms and new techniques of documentation. This reflection arises from the artist’s need to replace her old TRV-900, camera with a new high-definition camera, an HDV 1080i; its “over-lit, perfect sheen”, however, preserves nothing of the contradictions and incompleteness, typical of low-definition shots. Thus, the new media of high definition, ends up being defined as a reinforcement of certain and deliberate narratives, leaving no room for doubt and expectation, fundamental elements in the process of the authentication of the image.

Cecilia Bima LOW DEFINITION AND TESTIMONIAL IMAGE:THE VISUAL GAPAS STRATEGY OF AUTHENTICATION