While an audience does feel, in a sense ‘inverted’ into the “American Shot” movie-clips, there is an enormous buffer – technology. The characters are not entirely human. As Belgian painter, René Magritte would say, “ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“this is not a pipe,” meaning it is but a picture of a pipe). What is seen on screen in “American Shot” is only a picture of a person. Technology provides society with ways to make the fictional seem more real. Gadgets such as the Christie Digital screens used in “American Shot” capture footage, while the programs used to edit the material create scope, so that viewers see only what they are told to see. This movie-slip demonstrates mimesis, an imitation of reality that is becoming more and more ‘real’ as technology advances.
A viewer’s encounter with “American Shot” is interactive but it is also highly mediated by technology. One cannot reach out and feel the warmth of another body, nor the cinematic sun on one’s skin; the experience of the characters in the film is, thus, drastically different from that of the viewer. Instead, the viewer imagines himelf or herself in the story. While not playing a film, the screen appears like a mirror. Initially passers by might take a peak at themselves, touch up a hairdo, or tuck in a shirt, but then a film plays and, caught off guard, one wonders who noticed them, who saw that imperfection? Stefanescu writes that, “mirrors have a way of underlying the idea of [the] present, of ‘now.’”
Film is an incredible art form in that it has the ability to convey such an array of ideas and images, and to conjure up a variety of emotions in viewers without any kind of physical interaction with those viewers. Digital rendering allows the creators of film to take the physicality out of rendering. The videographer, Klaus Engel, is not in the scene, he is behind the camera lens. However, used subversively in the case of “American Shot,” the digital rendering of film allows participants to explore the physicality inherent in interactions between the real world and the digital (as exemplified in virtual reality systems). The clean digital realm becomes capable of relating to the fleshiness of existence. As an audience, we accept the production submitted for our viewing as real; we know it is ‘fake’ because it is acting, but it is real because at some point in time the actions occurred.
