We are familiar with ways this fact of cinema has had an impact on history: for example, film footage of war crimes was used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials.

Since the films of the Lumière brothers, however, many have been recorded cinematically. Humans and events before 1895 cannot be seen living and happening. In a Bazinian and Cavellian mode of writing, this introductory essay to the phenomena of nonfiction film fragments aims as much to be evocative of our experience of film as public memory, as critical of it.įilm, fragment, history, memory, nonfiction 1. That is, the fragmentary status of some film is what paradoxically restores 'wholeness' to the person or place of which it is a glimpse. The essay goes even further in its claims on behalf of a realist cinematic memory, suggesting that nonfiction fragments constitute a mode of perception that affords trustworthy historical witnessing.

The essay sees 'nonfiction film fragments' as a form of witnessing, and tries to articulate our experience of such film in terms of memorializing the people and events it bears witness to. While cognizant of the problematic status of 'realist' representation-of photography being somehow purely or naively representative-this essay nevertheless deliberately recuperates a realist discourse with which to value some forms of nonfiction film. Film theory and philosophy have in recent decades rightly critiqued earlier theorists' claims for the fundamentally realist nature of the cinema, and of photography generally.

Fragments movie 2005