2023 Filming trials, filming the practice of justice... the just image? Filming trials, filming the practice of justice... the just image?
In the USSR in the twenties, the government filmed trials, a practice which Lenin praised as being of pedagogical value for the “education of the people”. Under Stalin, Soviet cinema became a formidable judicial accessory during the trials of the great terror. As time passed, a new film genre was born, reactivated in 1943 in Kharkov during the first trials of Nazi criminals, the Soviet prelude to Nuremberg.
Then in November 1945, the international Nuremberg tribunal was set up and staged by the United States. It was also filmed by soldiers from the United States Army Signal Corps, newsreel cameramen from various western countries and a Soviet team headed by the filmmaker Roman Karmen. Three films, three points of view, three destinies of an archive that is far from being a univocal document.
Fifteen years later, the Eichmann trial introduced judicial practice into the era of television. The sessions were completely filmed in video by the American documentarian Leo Hurwitz, with a view to supplying images to newspapers and television programmes around the world. The particularity of this shoot comes from the total freedom that the Jerusalem judges gave to the filmmaker. Using all the resources of cinematic language – zooms, camera movements, alternations between wide shots and extreme close-ups fragmenting space and the body – Hurwitz tried to turn the viewer into an over-powerful observer.
It was a completely opposite conception of filming and judicial philosophy that dominated in France at the end of the eighties. The French Minister of Justice Badinter authorised the complete filming of trials presenting an interest for the “constitution of historical archives of justice”. From the Barbie trial (1987) to that of the Nice attack (2022) the application of this law depended on an ideal of neutrality and an illusory promise of objectivity. Film crews received instructions to follow the source of speech by filming only the people speaking; shots of people listening were not tolerated except under “quite exceptional circumstances”. The public was never filmed.
In these conditions, the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015 (France stadium, café terraces and the Bataclan) were filmed and we were able to follow the sessions.
Today with the law of 2021 on “trust in justice”, our current minister, Éric Dupont-Moretti, dreams of turning these filmed traces into a television show, making the gestures of justice familiar to every household in the country.
Thus is raised a first problem, that of recording and transmitting archives to a population of televiewers anxious to consume crime, arguments, convictions of guilt as well as innocence. Who “holds” the camera? What does it show and what does it dissimulate? Who controls what is on frame, and off?
By re-inscribing the November 13th trial in history, and by giving an account of our experience as spectators having followed the sessions in the courtroom and on the screens of adjacent rooms, we shall reflect on the way that the tools of the audiovisual industry reinforced the powers of the presiding judge, while reducing the spontaneity of testimony. In concertation with the Ministry, presiding judge Périès alone decided what was made visible and what could not be shown.
The problem then becomes double: that of the invisibility of any person who is not speaking (for example the accused when they were silent, the civil parties, members of the “audience”). The presiding judge decided furthermore what photographic or filmed documents shot during the attack could be projected to the audience. The second problem is that of evidence. Can images, yes or no, function as evidence in a trial? In the same movement as the analysis of the image in its status as “judicial evidence”, we will raise the question of fiction by inserting into our reflection some exemplary films (including Bamako by Abderrahmane Sissako). Generally speaking, the question encompasses the relation of cinema to the exercise of justice and the construction of the political and emotional space occupied by the spectator. Inevitably the questioning becomes political.
We will debate all these problems and many others together with an audience to whom will be proposed a certain number of excerpts from films of trials chosen to encourage our thinking rather than to affirm pre-established positions (images of the Soviet trials, Nuremberg, the Eichmann trial; films made from these rushes by Vertov, Karmen, Hurwitz, Perlov, Sivan or Loznitsa).
This seminar questions a particularly sensitive situation at a time when the violence generated by crime seems to be the symptom of a questioning of the judicial institution itself. Faced with images that criminalise or are criminalised, how can we think about an enlightened cinematic practice of the exercise of justice when the flow of images from all sources risks shifting the ground in the direction of a form of mob justice.
Sylvie Lindeperg and Marie José Mondzain
The seminar is extended by a special screening of the film El Juicio by Ulises de la Orden (Wednesday 23.08, 10:00, Salle des fêtes).