[25 years ago this coming weekend, The Blair Witch Project was released in theaters. Blair is one of the most prominent and successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footage story, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such examples, leading up to a weekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]
On the
longstanding appeal, and the limits, of faux-realism.
In Monday’s
post on Washington Irving’s History of New York (1809), I noted how interestingly
Irving’s book foreshadows (in form, although clearly not in genre or tone)
early 21st century found footage texts such as tomorrow’s focus, The
Blair Witch Project (1999),
and Wednesday’s text, Mark
Danielewksi’s House of Leaves (2000).
There are obviously just universal and longstanding appeals of such works,
among which I would include the possibility that we are encountering something
genuine (always a challenge to find anywhere, including in creative art), the
blurring of boundaries
between fact and fiction (and the resulting discomfort, in the most
provocative sense of the term, that such blurring produces), and the undeniable
thrill of following along in the processes of making and finding such texts
(ie, of putting ourselves in the shoes of both those who filmed and those who
“found” Blair Witch’s footage, of
both House’s creators and its initial
readers, and so on).
If found
footage has been an artistic element for centuries, though, it has nonetheless
reached new levels
of popularity and ubiquity in recent years. In film alone we have seen
found footage monster
movies, found footage superhero films, found
footage alien invasion
dramas, and, most consistently and most relevantly for a series inspired
by Blair Witch, the exploding genre of found footage horror films. The
latter category includes, to name only a fraction of the entrants (and only
some of those that have thus far spawned sequels), the Paranormal Activity series,
the [Rec] series, the Grave
Encounters series, and the Last Exorcism series.
Each of those series fits into a different sub-genre or niche within the horror
genre, but all rely on the same found footage trope, and thus all to my mind
tap into some of those same aforementioned appeals. (With, perhaps, the added
bonus of being able to yell at
stupid horror movie characters whom we can imagine are actual
people.)
When it’s
done well, as I would argue it most definitely was in Blair Witch, found footage undoubtedly and potently taps into all
those appealing qualities. But I think it has a significant limitation, and not
just that it’s become far too frequently used (and certainly not the blurring
of fact and fiction, for which
I’m entirely on board). To me, the central problem with found
footage works of art is that they too often tend, by design, to eschew artistic
choices and complexity—after all, their amateur filmmaker characters likely
weren’t concerned with such artistic elements (especially not once the crap
starting hitting the fan), and so their actual filmmakers often seem not to be
either. But while we might well look to works of art for the kinds of appealing
elements that found footage features, we also look to them to be artistic, to
be carefully and effectively designed as something more than—or at least
something other than—the reality with which we’re surrounded. Great found
footage works, that is, help us escape into their artistic alternate
reality—they don’t simply remind us of our own.
Special
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment