We are a camera
We are a camera
by David Hajdu, the author of “Lush Life” and “Positively Fourth Street,” is the music critic for The New Republic.
In the 1980’s, the early days of home video, I happened to hear a monologue on video’s technical weirdness by the director Martin Scorsese, who said the medium made him nervous. While a great deal has always made Mr. Scorsese nervous, he appeared to find video acutely wracking. The preservationist in him found the fragile images of video unbearable, and the workhorse in him found the technology’s ease of use unacceptable. With video, he said, the making of moving images was too easy.
With digital cameras, camera phones and the Web to disseminate everything now, moving images seem nearly as commonplace as written language. The world has become an inversion of Orwell’s long-dated vision of a future ruled by video; instead of being the objects of observation by a great totalitarian eye, we are all running about pointing digital video cameras, watching each other.
We have become so accustomed to cameras everywhere that we know how to behave on video as well as we know how to order a burger. And we all know what such familiarity breeds. It is no wonder that, for the generation raised on video, the au courant way to address the camera is to exude contempt for it, degrading it. This is the YouTube aesthetic; and with it, Martin Scorsese’s fears are realized.
