- Steyerl talks about how the “unbroken belief” of the documentary form is challenged. What does Steyerl mean by this? Certain movies and films are based on a true story. How does truth inform the fiction? How might fiction inform the truth?
According to Steyerl, the sense of trust gradually disappear from the documentary, because of the lack of focus. Nowadays, documentaries tend to approach certain goals and purposes, for example, revealing the emotion, rather than striving to record the objective world. Deleting partial images or changing the focus subtly will cause the audiences to perceive totally different meanings from the documentary.
From my perspective, the truth will be the foundation of fiction. Specifically, most creations of fiction are actually based on the objective world, fully or spatial. To some extent, fiction is a certain extended view of truth, and at the same time, reminds people to ponder over the truth. Even though fiction cannot be regarded as the prediction of the future, it provides us with a way, maybe an extreme way, to think about the result of the current issues.
- What is the significance of the authenticity and representation of the truth in the media that you consume on a daily basis? What is the role of a live broadcast?
Alongside the development of daily media, we cannot deny that the speed of spreading messages increases sharply, at the same time, breaking the geographic boundary– a piece of event news happening in China will be heard by one American in hours or seconds. Also, immersing in a large number of messages, the public actually cannot tell the reliability in a short time, so that their mind and behavior actually are controlled by these messages, whatever they are true or not. In this case, the authenticity and representation of the truth gain lots of importance and should be guaranteed.
The invention of live broadcast, on the one hand, ensures the quick transportation of messages; on the other hand, provide a relatively objective view of the truth. Whenever the video has been edited, the authenticity will disappear correspondingly.