Steve F. Anderson is a filmmaker, media artist, curator and writer working at the intersection of media, history and technology. A former documentary film and sound editor for National Geographic and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Steve founded the public media archive Critical Commons in 2008 to support the transformative use of media by artists and educators. He has written or edited books on media historiography, technologies of vision and popular documentary. An award-winning media artist, his work has been exhibited in the US and abroad, most recently at the 2021 Beijing Film Festival and the 2024 Madrid International Film Festival. He received an MFA from CalArts and a PhD from the University of Southern California. He currently teaches documentary and digital media arts in the Film School at UCLA and serves as an Associate Dean in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.
We talked about his latest film, Reality Frictions, by Zoom on October 15, 2024. Below is an edited transcript.
#####
John Hawkins: What is the thesis of Reality Frictions?
Steve Anderson: My thesis is that we've been navigating the boundaries between truth and fiction for a very long time, and this has given us pretty good skills so that when a technology like generative AI comes along, creating realistic-looking images, we're actually not as mindless and incapable of dealing with that as it might seem. In fact, I feel that anyone who's been watching TV or movies for their entire life has been developing skills at recognizing things that are true and deciding what's believable. So, we're not as naive and gullible as the current anxiety over generative AI might have us believe.
Hawkins: We all sort of understand the genre of consciousness, as it were, and watching these films we know there's a lot of self-reflexivity and a certain amount of phenomenological truth as well. So, inside the film itself, we come to realize we're sort of propositions ourselves, not finished. Adam Curtis came to mind. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011).
Anderson: First, I'm greatly honored to be mentioned in the same sentence with Adam Curtis. He's one of my heroes. I didn't actually think of him in relation to Reality Frictions, but now that you bring it up, I see similarities, especially in terms of his willingness to follow tangents and to pull together ideas that might seem unrelated. His series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is actually much closer to the project that I'm working on now titled, Technologies of Cinema, which is about the representation of technology in Hollywood. That project was directly inspired by Curtis, but for Reality Frictions, the person I'm most influenced by is Thom Anderson and the film that he made about 20 years ago called Los Angeles Plays Itself. Thom was a mentor of mine at CalArts, and his work does an amazing job of interweaving his personal narratives and opinions with an invitation to rethink the ways we view films. He talks about strategies of counter-viewing in terms of the tension between voluntary and involuntary attention.
There's a mode that we easily slip into when we watch movies of just allowing images to wash over us, and we involuntarily accept the messages that are being given to us. But if we cultivate a voluntary awareness, it allows us to ask, "What are we doing when we're watching a movie?" Are we just simply following narratives and characters in a state of suspended disbelief? Or is it possible to maintain a kind of duality of consciousness where we're doing both things at once? Los Angeles Plays Itself invites us to decode the ontological status of images as evidence at the same time that we experience the pleasures of narrative.
Hawkins: Reality Frictions comes out at a time when there's been a buzz from the U.S. government, through the MSM, that we're experiencing deepfakes. We need to be aware of that as we enter the election season, et cetera. They could potentially play into the results of the election. Is there any truth to that? But it's also possibly something that could be played out by the mass media, who are really good at Deepfaking themselves?
Anderson: Agreed. My film makes the argument that we've had lots of ways to create fake images with previous generations of technology. Photoshop is the most obvious example, but before that we had photo compositing that was done in the camera or in the darkroom. We've had disruptions of the indexical, referential quality of photography for a long time. So deepfakes, to me, are part of that legacy. The danger that feels more clear and present in our current moment is the willingness of otherwise reasonable people to let go of their ability to distinguish real from fake. We're surrounded by people who declare anything they don't agree with ideologically or politically to be fake. It's become too easy to disavow things that should be convincing to the electorate.
Hawkins: There's also a political angle or satirical angle that could make it justified as well. For instance, you use a clip of Obama and Jordan Peele's, deepfake, in which Obama appears to call Trump a dipshit, and to then ponder aloud about the danger of deepfakes and how they might signal a coming dystopia.
Anderson: I agree that there's a kind of pedagogical function to that Jordan Peele video. It's presenting a warning about the way we process information in the digital age. And it begins to move toward one of the sections of the film that's about self-performance. We have been negotiating postmodern reflexivity for many decades now. Nobody thinks for one minute that those scenes in films or TV shows where actors play themselves, are capturing any real insight into them as human beings. Those are scripted, or if not entirely scripted, they're improvised, but it's performance. We have this desire to derive something real from performance.
For me, the most provocative instance of this is the scene in Reality Frictions from Eyes Wide Shut, with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who of course were married in real life when the film was made. They're kissing, but he's doing it all wrong, and she's clearly not enjoying it. And you think, There! I see it! Their marriage was always a sham! But these are actors acting in a movie. We want to think we're seeing something real, but are we? Are we supposed to believe Kubrick wasn't directing the action in that scene? Or when Woody Allen in Husbands and Wives is basically confessing his real world affair with Soon-Yi Previn through his fictional character in the film. We want to think, there it is -- visible evidence on screen! But Allen was the writer and director of that film and he clearly knew what he was doing. So those are the moments when we need that duality of consciousness the most. We have to be aware of all the layers of performance, of artifice, of storytelling, that are part of the way we understand not just movies but also the world.
Hawkins: Reality Frictions had interesting snippets. Richard Nixon on a comedy show, turning to the camera and saying, almost deadpan, "Sock it to me?" Not many people of the millennial generation would really understand what that reference is to. But it's packed for those who grew up in that generation and recall the politics of that time. We know what a bad guy he was. He had secret plans to nuke North Vietnam. He and Kissinger helped arrange the coup in Chile in 1973. He had an Enemies List. Daniel Ellsberg thought Nixon would have him snuffed. Powerful stuff. And then Nixon comes on the Rowan and Martin Show laughing about having it socked to him. Almost funny.
It was kind of surprising. A lot of humor has a surprise element. You're not expecting a certain situation to develop, and no one would have thought Nixon would show up on a comedy show and crack any kind of joke, let alone that one. Because we really did want to sock it to him, and we knew he wanted to sock it to some of us, too.
Anderson: Well, let me say one thing about Nixon, because I grew up in a Republican household. All through Watergate, my mom, who's now 95 years old, never said the word "Republican" without saying "good, honest" before it. So, I think that was also an experience of duality of consciousness -- I'm seeing and hearing what's happening on TV, but within my household it was being interpreted in a different way.
Hawkins: It all ties into the idea of reality and representation.
Anderson: History is telling stories, right? There are some versions of the past that are indigestible that can't be reconciled with our core historical narratives, so they have to be discarded. We hold onto the stories we need to tell ourselves, and align our understanding of historical facts to stay consistent with them.
Hawkins: We're big on self-reflexivity today, but it goes back a way to at least the 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera. That film was famous for its multiplicity of angles and techniques, and produces, for the viewer, a kind of parallax view of reality. The machine itself -- the camera -- was like a person. It could divide up space in the frame in ways that no one had ever seen before.
Anderson: I love that film, and I show it to my students who think that the idea of reflexivity was invented in the '80s, to say no, this has been part of our cinematic vocabulary almost since the beginning of the medium. But what's interesting to me about that is when we see the on-screen cameraperson in Man with a Movie Camera, it's still easy to erase the fact that there's another person we don't see who is operating another camera. So, there's this weird revealing, but also a concealing of the apparatus of production. It's complicated. We need to think and distance ourselves a little bit from what we're seeing on screen -- to recognize that those two things are happening at the same time. That's where Vivienne Sobchack's idea of documentary consciousness comes in.
Hawkins: Reader response theory comes to mind. All of these things that are produced for us, whether it's a book, a newspaper, a movie, we bring ourselves into the production, and what we're going to get out of it might be limited or enhanced by our vocabulary and our experiences in life. All kinds of facets come in. There's not just one generic reader or movie watcher out there; we're all looking at the same film on the screen, but from different perspectives and bringing different things to it. With text we can pause and reflect; we can stop and think about what we've just read and process it. But it doesn't work that way with film. How do we pause the film while we're watching at the cinema? There is a difference in how we absorb these things.
Anderson: That's a great question and very close to the heart of the film. I'm interested in the different ways that readers, and viewers respond to the media in front of us, and the sensibilities we bring -- our history, cultural context, personal life experiences and identity -- all of those factors. Reality Frictions invites viewers to parse those differences across a multitude of viewing perspectives. My basic argument is that we're not so dumb. And we have been asking these questions and, and marking these distinctions for a long time. So, we should have well-developed skills at telling the difference between something that's believable and something that's not.
I do worry that, moving forward, this kind of work [video essays] will become more difficult to do. As we give in to viewing streaming media, where images just wash over us, we don't have easy access to the media if we want to pull a clip to analyze or include in a video essay. It is possible to rip and download streaming media, of course, but it doesn't have the same legal protections that we have with hard media. As an allegory for what we're doing as viewers, it's very disempowering to just have these images be something that we subscribe to rather than something that we can buy and own, which then allows us to excerpt, transform and critique them.
Hawkins: Postmodernism took away the canon, which was a great boon for democracy, but now the pendulum is swinging the other way, and we're wondering what the hell is going on, living in a post-truth world, and we're trying to figure out how to bring consciousness to machines. Kooky times. Film and making films, and how that's going to work out with machine learning and all that being incorporated into films?
Anderson: Right. That's mostly my area - I teach digital media. I do documentary too. So, this is the perfect point of intersection of those two. I was in my PhD program at USC in the 90s, when post-structuralism was the prevailing theoretical paradigm. I understood my role in the university to be challenging systems of knowledge and exposing the ways that we were indoctrinated to accept certain paradigms of knowledge while excluding others. Systems of authority and certainty, in particular, were the most suspect and subjected to the most withering critique. The idea that, 25 years later, I would be going on a march with my daughter, who was in high school during the pandemic, holding a sign saying, "I believe in science" -- that would have been unthinkable to me. Comical. But here we are. That's the world that we're in now. It's scary.
So, I think the stakes of all these questions are really high right now. I don't think there are any easy answers. I don't think generative AI is that different, in terms of the perceptions of reality that it brings to the table, compared to other past generations of digital technology. My basic position on all of this is that we've got to have technological literacy and not just throw up our hands and say, "Oh, no, that's too complicated." That's what the AI industries would like us to do so they can avoid being regulated in any meaningful way. If only experts and specialists -- only computer scientists -- can understand it, then only they can engage in the critical discourse about it. But we have to be involved in those discussions and bring our own priorities and perspectives to bear. We have critical paradigms from decades of visual culture and science and technology studies that are still relevant today. Reality Frictions talks about systems of power and knowledge in terms that were well established nearly half a century ago. A lot has changed, but a lot remains the same, and those factors are still operative in the way we understand images on screen, whether they're captured by lenses or generated by software.
######
More of Steve Anderson's work can be seen at his website, Reality Frictions.
Post Article Comment and Rate This Article
