Mechanical Witness: A History of Motion Picture Evidence in U.S. Courts

by Louis-Georges Schwartz

Overview

Mechanical Witness is the first cultural and legal history charting the changing role and theoretical implications of film and video use as courtroom evidence. Schwartz moves from the earliest employment of film in the courts of the 1920s to the notious 1991 Rodney Kind video, revealing how the courts have developed a reliance on film and video technologies and contributed to the growing influence of visual media as a dominant mode of knowledge formation. At the same time, film and video in juridical contexts has developed a distinct theoretical legacy. The particular qualities of film as evidence both resonate with and contradict existing scholarship-focusing on economic, social, or aesthetic factors-which hitherto has defined film's status and cultural contribution. In the context of a trial, the possible meanings of a film change from its meanings when shown in a movie theater or broadcast on television, yet the public (and cinema scholars) tend to assume that the two are the same. Mechanical Witness demonstrates that we must understand evidentiary film and video's institutional specificity if we are to understand the full effects of motion picture technologies on our culture. This study sets the terms for a long overdue assessment of how the entertainment industry has shaped our film viewing practices, the place of moving picture evidence in the courtroom, and the social and cultural consequences of these intertwined histories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195315059
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/24/2009
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Louis-Georges Schwartz is Assistant Professor at the School of Film at Ohio University.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Introducing Films into the Courts: The 1920s
3. The Development of Case Law Governing the Use of Motion Picture Evidence in the 1940s and 1950s
4. Framing Videotape: The Electronic Para-Sight, Juridical Infrastructure, and Testimonial Images In and Out of Court
5. The Rodney King Case, Or Moving Testimony
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This pathbreaking study of case law rescues film studies from the cloisters by tracing the use of cinema in the U.S. courts. Valuable for its research and a model of exposition, this is a marvelous book."-Toby Miller, author of Makeover Nation

"Mechanical Witness is an important piece of film history and it is well situated in ongoing dialogs in film history and theory. It is well written and informed by outstanding research."-Lisa Cartwright, coauthor of Practices of Looking

From the Publisher