Camera as Sign

Berger puts forth the idea that, within the medium of television, the usage of a camera can function as a signifier for what the cameraman and producer wish to covey, in terms of point of view. The angle of view can imply specific intention, as can the focal distance of the camera. By focusing closely upon a person in an interview, the camera can imply a certain sense of intimacy, where a longer shot can offer relationships between people by showing how they are positioned with reference to each other. Holding a camera at a low point of view can imply the viewpoint of a child, giving the subject of the shot a power over the viewer. At the same time, positioning the camera above a subject puts the viewer in a position of power over the situation. These viewpoints and intentions are innate, in that the personal distances and points of view reflect our assumptions and experience in how they are conveyed.

Most of the camera work in Control Room was done with medium to close shots, trying to keep the context of the situation to a minimum as it spent its time focusing on the personalities in the interviews and their viewpoints on the situation. The principal subjects of the documentary were showing in close shots, as they were the people hemmed in by their circumstances, as the camera attempted to get a better perspective of their thoughts and their lives as the situation unfolded around them. It also offered a certain sense of being locked into the situation at hand, rather than being able to escape the circumstances and gain a different perspective. The Central Command building was shown to be claustrophobic, heavily populated, and divided into small, cramped offices that the reporters were forced to work from. The scale offered a sort of solidarity between the Al-Jazeera reporters and the foreign correspondents. Only occasionally was a longer shot put forth, and that was to emphasize the personal distance between the organizers of the press conferences and the reporters in the audience. The rest of the time, all of the camera shots were close at hand, creating little personal distance between the audience of the documentary and its subjects.

Set against the backdrop of an unfolding war, the expectation would have been to show long shots to give an impression of the scale of the conflict unfolding, but the few long vistas that were shown were mainly used to illustrate that things were going on around the characters rather than show that the characters themselves were interacting with the situation at all. The war itself was only important in the context that it provided the events for the characters to react to and consider in their own personal narratives. It had an effect on the characters only really in the ways that it offered for them to consider their own world and the relationships or dynamics that it suggested. The few times that long shots were used as a structural part of the narrative was to show that the reports put forth by the foreign media and the American propaganda were contextually false and unreliable. The most easily available example of this was the march on the central square in Baghdad that was played up in the American media. By showing the relatively few people that were involved, noting their unlikely props (specifically the old Iraqi flag that symbolized the removal of Saddam Hussein), and their lack of diversity, the documentary reinforced the viewpoints of the people within the documentary. In the context, the camera argued, this was unlikely at best, wholly false at worst.

Notably, the representation of the American media and authority was always shown through the filter of a viewscreen that the camera recorded. By doing so, it was emphasized that this viewpoint (most often showing the American President or Defense Secretary) was disconnected from the real life and the relationships that the rest of the documentary focused itself upon. Since these personalities had no perspective on the situation that was being offered to the viewer of the documentary, they could have wildly incoherent and confused viewpoints that the viewer of the film would be unable to connect with. By showing the implied distance that they were removed from the situation, they could put forth demonstrably false perspectives as a result of their personal distance.

Overall, I find Berger’s theories on the camera to be fairly interesting, albeit relatively straightforward. There’s nothing that is inherently surprising about the discussion of how the perspective of the camera implies the perspective of the viewer, but examining the intentions and the signifiers of the production of a documentary such as Control Room gives the audience a better idea of the methods that the production used to convey their message.