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Persuasive Visions: Film And Memory, Jessica M. Silbey
Persuasive Visions: Film And Memory, Jessica M. Silbey
Jessica Silbey
This commentary takes a new look at law and film studies through the lens of film as memory. Instead of describing film as evidence and foreordaining its role in truth-seeking processes, it thinks instead of film as individual, institutional and cultural memory, placing it squarely within the realm of contestability. Paralleling film genres, the commentary imagines four forms of memory that film could embody: memorabilia (cinema verite), memoirs (autobiographical and biographical film), ceremonial memorials (narrative film monuments of a life, person or institution), and mythic memory (dramatic fictional film). Imagining film as memory resituates film’s role in law (procedural, substantive …
Images In/Of Law, Jessica M. Silbey
Images In/Of Law, Jessica M. Silbey
Jessica Silbey
The proliferation of images in and of law lends itself to surprisingly complex problems of epistemology and power. Understanding through images is innate; most of us easily understand images without thinking. But arriving at mutually agreeable understandings of images is also difficult. Translating images into shared words leads to multiple problems inherent in translation and that pose problems for justice. Despite our saturated imagistic culture, we have not established methods to pursue that translation process with confidence. This article explains how images are intuitively understood and yet collectively inscrutable, posing unique problems for resolving legal conflicts that demand common and …
Evidence Verite And The Law Of Film, Jessica M. Silbey
Evidence Verite And The Law Of Film, Jessica M. Silbey
Jessica Silbey
This paper explores a puzzle concerning the authority of certain images that increasingly find themselves at the center of legal disputes: surveillance or “real time” film images that purport to capture an event about which there is a dispute. Increasingly, this kind of “evidence verité” is used in United States courts of law as the best evidence of what happened. Film footage of arrests, criminal confessions, photographs of crime scenes (during and after) is routinely admitted into court as evidence. It tends to overwhelm all other evidence (e.g., testimonial or documentary) and be immune to critical analysis. Why would this …
Cross-Examining Film, Jessica M. Silbey
Cross-Examining Film, Jessica M. Silbey
Jessica Silbey
The Supreme Court decision in Scott v. Harris holds that a Georgia police officer did not violate a fleeing suspect's Fourth Amendment rights when he caused the suspect's car to crash. The court's decision relies almost entirely on the filmed version of the high-speed police chase taken from a “dash-cam,” a video camera mounted on the dashboard of the pursuing police cruiser. The Supreme Court said that in light of the contrary stories told by the opposing parties to the lawsuit, the only story to be believed was that told by the video. In Scott v. Harris, the court fell …
Criminal Performances: Film, Autobiography, And Confession, Jessica M. Silbey
Criminal Performances: Film, Autobiography, And Confession, Jessica M. Silbey
Jessica Silbey
This article questions the criminal justice emphasis on filmed confession as the superlative evidentiary proffer that promotes accuracy and minimizes unconstitutional coercion by comparing filmed confessions to autobiographical film. It suggests that analyzing filmed confessions as a kind of autobiographical film exposes helpful tensions between the law’s reliance on confession as revealing the inner self and the literary and filmic conception of confession as constituting one self among many. Through a close examination of several filmed confessions along side an examination of the history of autobiographical writing and film, this article shows how filmed confessions do not reveal the truthfulness …
Videotaped Confessions And The Genre Of Documentary, Jessica M. Silbey
Videotaped Confessions And The Genre Of Documentary, Jessica M. Silbey
Jessica Silbey
No abstract provided.
Filmmaking In The Precinct House And The Genre Of Documentary Film, Jessica M. Silbey
Filmmaking In The Precinct House And The Genre Of Documentary Film, Jessica M. Silbey
Jessica Silbey
This Article explores side-by-side two contemporary and related film trends: the recent popular enthusiasm over the previously arty documentary film and the mandatory filming of custodial interrogations and confessions. The history and criticism of documentary film, indeed contemporary movie-going, understands the documentary genre as political and social advocacy (recent examples are Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11 and Errol Morris’s Fog of War). Judges, advocates, and legislatures, however, view films of custodial interrogations and confessions those that reveals a truth and lacks a distorting point of view. As this Article will explain, the trend at law, although aimed at furthering venerable criminal …
Judges As Film Critics: New Approaches To Filmic Evidence, Jessica M. Silbey
Judges As Film Critics: New Approaches To Filmic Evidence, Jessica M. Silbey
Jessica Silbey
This Article exposes internal contradictions in case law concerning the use and admissibility of film as evidence. Based on a review of more than ninety state and federal cases dating from 1923 to the present, the Article explains how the source of these contradictions is the frequent miscategorization of film as "demonstrative evidence" that purports to illustrate other evidence, rather than to be directly probative of some fact at issue. The Article further demonstrates how these contradictions are based on two venerable jurisprudential anxieties. One is the concern about the growing trend toward replacing the traditional testimony of live witnesses …