Earlier today, Iranian state media channels published a video of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commandos seizing a container ship in the Strait of Hormuz.
I think we should talk about it. It can teach us a lot.
Just watch it.
Reuters describes it thus…
Iranian state TV aired a video of the IRGC seizing container ships
But this is not quite true. It would be more accurate to say Iranian state TV aired a video of the IGRC pretending to seize container ships.
Because the footage must be, to one degree or another, fake.
The most real it can possibly be is that the IRGC genuinely seized a ship, then radioed to shore, flew out a camera drone and film crew, and then re-enacted their seizing for the cameras.
In the middle of a warzone.
That is the highest degree of feasible reality. It’s entirely possible it is less real even than that.
Note the angles. I’ve counted, there are at least four.
1. The opening drone footage wide shot.
2. The POV close up of the soldiers climbing the ladder.
3. he hand-held footage of the soldiers checking their corners and sweeping the decks.
4. The water-level wide shots, taken from a boat.
This is not reality. It is cinematography.
The drone footage is an “establishing shot”. The close-ups put us in the action. The hand-held camera following the troops makes the footage dynamic. This is film-making 101.
It is staged. It had to be, and yet no one is saying it.
It takes us back the heady days of 2015, when ISIS were somehow and for some unknown reason, recording their convoys of pristine, matching Toyota trucks tooling around the desert at magic hour, and then uploading them to their socials.
The IRGC clip is exactly the same, the product of obvious contrivance we’re supposed to ignore.
Does that mean the ships don’t exist? Or they weren’t really seized? Or the war is entirely fake?
No. At least not necessarily, and that’s not really the point.
The point is broader than this video or those ships or the war in general.
The point is that the mainstream media is conditioning your consumption of audio-visual content. Training us to see a video, and entirely remove it from the context of its creation. To mentally redact the camera man and lighting rigs and editing software and all the other steps that must take place between an event happening, and the video appearing on social media.
We’re so accustomed to watching movies and television that we just accept the same story telling editing techniques in our “news”. So used to there being cameras everywhere recording everything, that we’ve forgotten someone has to put them there and turn them on.
Watch the IRGC video again. When that actor and/or soldier is scaling the side of the ship toward the camera, he knows there’s no danger, because there’s already a “friendly” on board recording him. His energy and aggression is a performance.
Further, the guy at the top of the ladder has – at least – a camera. Maybe even a lighting rig or microphone. He’s probably telling the performer how fast to climb and to be careful to keep his face in shot.
This is not reality.
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