Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass Media, and the Imagined Lives of Strangers

Abstract

These words open a television documentary called State of Terror: A Dispatches Investigation, made for and broadcast by the UK’s Channel Four in May 2002. The documentary attempts both to explain the bloody intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to ascertain whether or not the Israeli army massacred Palestinian civilians in the Jenin refugee camp during ‘Operation Defensive Shield’ in 2002.¹ Accompanied by shaky, handheld visual images of the inside of a car traveling through the West Bank, and featuring direct address to the camera by the film’s narrator and central character, the journalist Deborah Davies, these words signal a fundamental textual ambition at work throughout the film as a whole. They establish the presence of the journalist and her crew as witnesses of the depicted events, and, since the first word ‘we’ can refer to both those in the car and to the watching television audience, the co-presence of the viewers alongside them. Presence is thus discursively created, told verbally and visually, referentially and virtually, in space (the war zone) and time (the present tense). It putatively unites, in the same communicative interaction, the two faces of witnessing (Peters, 2001): direct experience of an event and discourse about the event to others who were not there. Presence is not just told. It is also telling — it makes a difference — since it anchors the discursive authority of the film as a source of testimony about an event which is removed from its audience in space and time. They (the journalists) are there, their bodily sensation and experience authoring and testifying to the knowledge they impart to distant others.

‘We are driving through a war zone.’