Mediated immediacy: constructing authentic testimony in audio-visual media

Abstract

The article argues that the power of witnessing is intimately linked to concepts of authenticity – it is the eyewitness who, it is believed, can truly give an account of ‘what it was really like’. However, in order to ensure an impact on memory cultures, witness testimony must be recorded and fixed in a way that allows wider distribution. Such mediation can result in a perceived reduction in the authenticity of the narrative, as the person-to-person contact is lost. The recipient of the testimony is necessarily at a greater distance from the witness spatially and temporally than he or she would be in ‘live’ conversation. The article explores the methods deployed in audio-visual media (video testimony, memorial museums and documentary film) to lend authority and authenticity to the testimonies they record. In the process, it elaborates two theoretical terms: complementary authenticities and mediated remembering communities, which have broad significance for our understanding of how first-person testimony can have an impact on collective engagement with the past. The article concludes that such stagings of witness testimony in public and popular history are a powerful method of lending a strong emotive element to representations of past conflicts. This emotive element can connect individuals more closely to the victims of state and inter-communal violence, but may also prevent a deeper understanding of the societal causes and consequences of that violence, which is essential for processes of post-conflict reconciliation. In this way, the article makes a significant contribution to understanding the role of testimony and mediated authenticity in what might be termed the ‘era of the postwitness’.

Keywords:

• Authenticity
• secondary witnessing
• mediated memory
• audio-visual testimony
• memorial museums
• documentary film

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Joanne Sayner of the University of Birmingham for her critical reading of an early draught of this article.

Notes

1. See also Stier’s (2003, 104–109) discussion of the framing of eyewitness testimony in documentaries produced by the Shoah Foundation.

2. One exception is Jones (2014), in which I examine eyewitness testimony in memorial museums relating to the Stasi. See also the chapter on ‘Testimonial Video Installation’ in Arnold-de Simine (2013, 97–105). Shenker (2015) considers the collection and use of testimonies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

3. Indeed, Rowland (2010) indicates that the examination of perpetrator accounts is in fact one future direction in the study of testimony.

4. All translations from German are my own.

5. See http://web.library.yale.edu/testimonies/about.

6. See https://sfi.usc.edu/vha/about.

7. See http://web.library.yale.edu/testimonies/testimony-excerpts-thematic-programs.

8. See https://sfi.usc.edu/video-topics.

9. For criticism of Landsberg’s approach see Berger (2007).

10. This is not to say that ‘authenticity of affect’ cannot be engendered by fiction, as seen in Evans’s (2010) analysis of Das Leben der Anderen. However, I would argue that here the authenticity relates, at least to a large extent, to the knowledge that the fiction is a representation of events that did happen to real people in the past.