Here is an image that will amaze us, especially in these days of violence: several members of Daesh are preparing to record a propaganda video to recruit new activists, and beware: they are behaving like any teenager with a camera not controlling them. They are of course not professionals at expression, and the fearsome terrorist with a visible dagger, a vest full of military equipment and other criminal props keeps getting stuck, breaking and going blank.
– Where am I?
—You start with Salam Alaikum.
– Can this bird keep its mouth shut?
– Place the chop forward.
The dialogue between director, cameraman and terrorist is full of laughter, nonsense and advice designed to get him to concentrate once and for all. The children laughed heartily, but when they were finished the rest of us weren't laughing anymore. Your video will stream across the global network with all the inflamed menace, video game aesthetics and victory that attracts lone wolves to its ranks. It's not a comedy.
The documentary Fantastic Machine by Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertyck, available to watch on Filmin, collects these and other astonishing scenes that, in short, show how cameras and broadcasting can change us, condition us and do something about making us worse than we are are. Here's another impressive one:
We put ourselves in a situation. The prestigious BBC reports on a ruling affecting the rights of the Beatles and Apple when a young Congolese man named Guy Goma shows up at the building for a job interview. On set, they are ready to interview a copyright expert named Guy Kewney, but someone confuses the accountant and introduces him directly to the journalist. His gesture when she introduces him as a specialist is unforgettable. We'll quickly see that he doesn't know whether he's facing a strange test he has to overcome to get the job or whether he's in an impossible quagmire:
—Were you surprised by the verdict?
“What surprised me is that the verdict fell on me,” he says uncertainly as he tries to recover. “It was a big surprise.”
The journalist doesn't know anything and continues with the questions until she casually brushes him off. He got away with some platitudes about internet cafes and music downloads. And with bombproof responsiveness. I hope they discontinued it, although I later read on Wikipedia that they didn't.
That was in 2006, and since then the capacity for risk, change and evolution in our relationship with cameras has multiplied ad infinitum through the avenues opened up by YouTube, TikTok and networks in general. The documentary shows us young people on the edge of cliffs or skyscrapers that they would never see if they weren't being filmed; another who drops into the hole of a frozen lake to record instructions on how to get out; Terrorists teach how to make bombs; a woman who experienced a painful and ridiculous fall that went viral; a child whose parents remove a tooth with a thread; a Putin or a Kim Jong-un on horseback to demonstrate his masculinity… Any excuse is good to be seen, even if we make a fool of ourselves. And we have all become actors in a great global spectacle.
In reality, the broadcasters have expanded a visual productivity that had already begun with television, which was born as a hope for information and culture and soon became a business for soft souls. All of this is in the documentation.
“Let’s be realistic. My job is to help CocaCola sell its products,” says the general director of France’s first private television channel. “For an ad to be remembered, the brain needs to be entertained. “Our product is the brain available to the public.”
And does anyone wonder about the algorithms that tech giants are now creating from our data to sell us new and more products? Companies like Nielsen have been studying the responses of the public brain for decades. We'll see it there. Producers buy the data and use it to design their programs.
In one of the most memorable scenes, an anthropologist shows Papua New Guineans photos of themselves. It's 1969 and it's the first time they've seen each other. And then we witness the transformation of these warriors in their paintings and demonstrations of power into indecisive beings who are also smiling and perplexed. After a while, one of them decides to take off the sagging and painful hat shown in the photo. His certainties are shattered and he is a victim of the great companion of our visual time, uncertainty.
“Fantastic Machine” takes us again and again from the present to the past and from here to there, in a brutal mirror of what the camera changes in us, and that leaves us with a big question: Who are we really? Are we what we are or what we see? Are we the candidate for a job at the BBC or the specialist worth interviewing? Because the camera changes us at any time, disturbs us, confuses us. And it's always a good idea to stay ahead.
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