Increasingly sophisticated technology for recording and reproducing sound and images is altering the traditional theatrical and literary element of the courtroom, writes video installation artist Judy Radul. Considering artwork and theory exploring connections between the image, power, and law, Radul asks whether "it is possible to imagine a court, guided by justice and law, taking into account the new 'politics of representation'"?
"In the playhouse, as in the courtroom, an event already completed is re-enacted in a sequence which allows its meaning to be searched out," writes Milner S. Ball, Caldwell Professor of Constitutional Law. Artists over the last 50 years have dealt with the same questions around representation now being considered by the new, increasingly technologized court of law.
Filmmaker Eyal Sivan, writing on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, points out that although the Nuremberg trials were the first to be significantly recorded, Eichmann's was the first fully videotaped trial. However, the 500 hours of tape held by the Spielberg Archive have remained largely unwatched; Sivan found much of it "stored haphazardly [...] in the only place the archive could find that was cool enough for purposes of conservation: an unused washroom." This is representative, he argues, of a tendency to ignore the original recordings in favour of dramatizing the events of the Holocaust. Sivan posits that the original footage humanizes Eichmann in ways that the dominant narrative resists.
As Sivan points out, the recording of trials of "crimes against humanity" has become synonymous with the juridical act itself: "After the Eichmann case, it became part of the juridical show to film the trials of those who had perpetrated crimes against humanity [...] with the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, in The Hague, and for Rwanda, in Arusha. The latter two courts are actually television studios."
Radul explores how glass, live video, and camera stasis together produce the court's mediated performance, drawing on artist Dan Graham's work on reflective materials: "What was behind me faces me; it appears and disappears," writes critic Birgit Pelzer of Graham's video installations — a phrase that also describes a witness's relation to past events, a version of the past standing before you, concretized as testimony. In Eichmann's trial, it was he who was placed in a glass box for security, like a contained object on display.
As we see the court supplement its traditionally literary and theatrical form with new technologies, Radul asks whether it is possible to imagine a court that takes into account the "politics of representation" as artists have done — connecting the present-time medium of video with the rapprochement of montage and the case-by-case invention of jurisprudence that Godard and Deleuze both, in their own ways, called for.
Source : Judy Radul — Eurozine, 02.05.2007