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08 Nov 2008 07:34 pm
He Saw It Coming
Michael Hirschorn on the under-appreciated work of meta-genius Peter Watkins:
Like a Centre Pompidou of cinema, Watkins is forever laying bare the
artifice. Fiction and nonfiction merge: non-actors improvise roles in
fictional accounts of factual events (the effect is very reality-TV);
and the contrivance inherent in any media narrative is exposed as
Watkins shows the cameras, the sets, his directorial technique. His
endlessly recursive gambits serve as a metatextual critique of how fact
and fiction are just different ways to impose narrative—and yet they
never seem like academic posing; indeed, they carry an amazing
emotional wallop.
And yet, I find this election campaign to have been an impressive testament to post-modernism's limits. The post-modern candidate was Palin: a hologram of cultural resentments, crafted to win votes through image, propaganda and untruth. And yet we saw right through it. Fact mattered in the end, didn't it? And truthiness finally lost.
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