"Video and Resistance: Against Documentary"

"Video and Resistance: Against Documentary" begins by refering to photography as an invention that could unquestionable capture an event as fact, opposed to relying on memory to recall the event. From the invention of photograph many artists began trying to replicate both nature and society. When film came around the idea of replication was presented in the form of documentaries. However, documentaries were and still are a complete disaster because the facts get distorted in order to tell a compelling story (like in Nanook of the North pictured to the right). To counteract this problem these films should announce that the image as shown in the documentary are only a "version" of the subject matter.

Just like Susan Sontag, "Video and Resistance: Against Documentary" speaks of photographs as "traces" of events that actually occurred. Sontag goes on to say that, "At one end of the spectum, photogrpahs are objective data; at the other end, they are items of psycological science fiction." This fits right in to the "Video and Resistance: Against Documentary" article because in it the discussion of taking images in the form of a documentary and distorting them as a sort of fiction in order to tell a story is quite prevalent. One such example is the Nanook of the North documentary in which the filmmaker had Nanook hunt a walrus using harpoons although he always used a gun. This was done becuase it was more appealing to the telling of the story.