Indy Media: The Camcorder's Impact

Every time you point your camcorder and push the record button, you're recording history.

Seriously. Even though you may think it's just another birthday video full of screaming children, there's more to it than that. You are (perhaps unwittingly) helping to document the age in which we live. In just a few decades, if those tiny magnetic particles on the tape manage to hold their charge, the stuff that's on that birthday video could make a social historian search through a dozen archives just for the chance to take a look.

If you don't believe me, watch some home movies shot a mere twenty or thirty years ago. Look at the hair styles, the clothing, the knick-knacks on the coffee table; notice the books on the shelves, the car in the driveway, the style of the curtains. That's history, every bit as much as the building of the pyramids in Egypt or the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Of course, there's always the chance that you'll find yourself in the right place at the right time and capture one of these greater historical events on tape. It happened to a guy named Zapruder (though he was using film, not videotape); chances are, with the growing number of camcorders in the world, it'll continue to happen in the future.

In this article, we'll take a look at the camcorder and its role in the course of human history. But before we do this, we'll take a little philosophical journey and attempt to shed some light on the power of the moving image (something we tend to take for granted in this day and age). We'll also try to look into the future and see what effect the camcorder will have upon the course of human events.

So whether you're out shooting a presidential motorcade on some grassy knoll, or you're just at home taping the kids, be sure to keep it steady and in focus--you could be making more than video. You could be making history.

The Power of the Image--Moving or Still

Images have power. No, I don't mean the mumbo-jumbo, mystical kind of power that the local palmist or tarot reader sells; I mean something more like the power that makes you buy a certain brand of soft drink or shampoo after you've seen their ads a few times.

History is full of examples of the power of the image. In ancient times, rival factions fought and died over the power of painted religious images, or "icons." Some felt that paintings of saints and religious figures held mystical power; they called themselves "iconodules" or image-lovers. Their enemies, who stood behind the commandment forbidding the making of graven images, were "iconoclasts," or image-smashers. And that's precisely what the iconoclasts did: they broke into the monasteries where monks diligently painted icons, and smashed everything in sight, monks included.

If the simple, static image of a painted religious figure held so much power, how much more so the moving image of film and video? You might think that those days of mystery and superstition are in the past, and that we "modern" people are beyond such things. But are we really? Think of the amount of money and time we spend watching movies and television. (For that matter, think of how much we spend on popcorn, candy and soda at the movie theater. Now that's what I call power.)

The newness of this power has worn off a bit. When one early filmmaker showed footage of a train approaching the camera, the audience ran from the theater in fright. We no longer respond in this way; we've seen so many movies and television shows, we've become de-sensitized. That doesn't mean the power is gone. It's still there, but we've become accustomed to it.

The essence of that power is the ability to capture a memory. Your camcorder does what our minds do every day: it grabs a slice of time and records it with light and sound. In some ways, it does a better job at this than our own minds. Will you remember what color shirt you wore at your son's tenth birthday? A videotape will. It will also tell you things you may not want to know, like how much weight you've gained since then, how much grey has appeared in your hair, how much your son has grown. A sobering device, no doubt; one that not only shows us the past, but makes us reflect on our own growth, and ultimately, our own mortality.

On second thought, maybe the power of video is the same as tarot and palmistry.

A Place Where Memory Resides

Most people buy camcorders for the same reason they buy cameras: to remember. They want a device that will help them mark their passage in time. (See this month's "Viewfinder" for more on this.)

Sure, many people do more with their camcorders than just tape family members and holiday events; they make artistic or dramatic statements, or even produce videos that illustrate a process or train someone in a skill or craft. Even so, the main function of the camcorder in all of its applications is memory, whether it be a memory of your family, a memory of an artistic vision or a memory of how to perform a certain task.

Again, video cameras aren't the first devices ever invented that allow us to do this--nor are they necessarily the best. Writing (which developed from tiny pictographic images) has long been the best way to pass along memories from person to person and generation to generation. Sculpture, painting, architecture, music--every one of the fine arts has the power to transmit memory in some form or another.

But videotaped images have some qualities that other works of art lack. To begin with, these images are very concrete, like photographs. When you videotape something, you have less control over the interpretation of the final product than with other art forms; what you see is usually what was there. Sure, you can decide how to frame the shot, adjust the depth of field, add special effects and filters and such. But unless you tweak the image in post production (as the special effects wizards did in Forrest Gump), you can't edit reality with the same wild abandon that Picasso or James Joyce could.

Videotaped images don't (usually) make mistakes or lie. Consider this example: a woman is taping her children with the family camcorder. Suddenly, someone shouts, "stop, thief!" and a hurried-looking man runs across her camcorder's field of view, stolen merchandise in hand. When it's time for the police to take a report, which do you think they'll be most interested in--her written and spoken testimony, or the images on her videotape?