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Richard Mosse: What the Camera Cannot See

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    (calm music)
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    - Climate change exists
    outside of human perception.
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    It's bigger than us.
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    We can see local expressions of it,
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    but we can't see the climate changing
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    and that's really the inherent problem.
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    It's on a scale beyond
    what we can perceive.
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    The rain forest itself
    spans nine countries.
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    So as a subject alone,
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    it's hard to imagine as an object.
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    (tree falling)
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    We're really on the tipping point now.
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    New research suggests that
    actually the rainforest
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    is no longer absorbing carbon.
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    There's so much burning happening,
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    it's now a net producer of carbon.
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    But how to tell the story adequately,
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    I mean we've seen one picture
    of a burning rainforest,
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    we've seen them all in a way.
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    And those pictures are very important,
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    but you know,
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    there's so much more to unpack
    in the Brazilian Amazon.
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    I'm very interested in
    trying to find a way to
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    express extremely, deeply complex things
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    by looking very carefully
    at these loaded landscapes,
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    bigger subjects that the
    camera can't necessarily see.
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    My first big project is
    my first real project,
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    but I chose the missing persons crisis
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    in postwar Balkan nations.
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    A lot of people had not come home
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    from war and had disappeared.
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    They were assumed to have
    been buried in mass graves
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    which had never been identified.
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    So the beautiful landscape of Bosnia
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    and across the Balkans was
    underwritten by this tragedy.
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    And so there was an inherent
    tension within the land itself,
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    but also an inherent abstraction
    within the subject matter.
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    And I was going around trying
    to photograph something
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    that you can't put in front of the lens.
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    And I couldn't see.
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    The lack of closure of an entire society
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    to move on from war
    because of an inability
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    to mourn the dead.
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    And I started just
    looking at the landscape
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    and documenting
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    I suppose the absence within
    the lived environment,
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    the inscription on the land,
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    at least emotionally.
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    But for me it was foundational.
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    In a way it's something
    that I keep coming back
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    to in maybe all my projects.
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    Kodak had announced the discontinuation
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    of a specific infrared
    film called Aerohrome
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    that was invented in World
    War II in collaboration
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    with the US military for
    camouflage detection.
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    So infrared light bounces
    off the chlorophyll
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    in healthy plants.
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    Camouflage tends to be made of material,
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    fabric or paint
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    and all of those don't have chlorophyll.
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    If you could image register infrared light
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    you could instantly pick
    out the enemy targets
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    essentially seeing through the camouflage.
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    In Congo, back then there was at least 50
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    different arm groups.
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    I think now there's more than 80
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    fighting against each other.
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    So it's a very opaque conflict
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    and that as a result means
    it's very overlooked.
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    I was taking a medium that literally
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    can make visible what we can't see
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    and I was smashing it into an unseeness.
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    That metaphoric leap was very important
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    and it turned out the more I pushed it
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    it began to really bare fruit.
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    It started to be raising awareness
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    of some of these narratives
    that I was documenting
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    and that was remarkable.
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    But that was the sort of
    beginning of a new phase
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    in my practice which I
    think is kind of continuing
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    until today of using
    surveillance technologies
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    to try to push the limits of the camera,
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    of the documentary image specifically.
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    Finishing my project in Congo
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    I found out about a
    specific surveillance camera
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    that can see and perceive heat.
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    It's proven to image the human body heat
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    from 30 kilometers distance,
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    which is a good 19 miles.
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    The image that it produced
    was very uncanny and haunting.
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    The heat within our blood and our veins
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    is instantly depicted in
    ways that we can't see
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    with the human eye,
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    our breath, our sweat.
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    (beeping sound)
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    - Wait, wait, wait, wait.
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    Just a moment.
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    Just a moment.
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    - And at that time,
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    there was this exponential
    wave of illegal immigration
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    into the European Union.
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    Refugees come to claim their
    human rights of asylum.
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    This camera itself can be
    seen as a weapons technology
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    to detect and to turn them back.
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    So it was the perfect prism to mediate all
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    of the complex narratives
    that I began to document
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    over a course of several years.
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    There were a lot of people
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    and there still are a lot of people,
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    dying, drowning of
    exposure to the weather.
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    And this camera is designed to indexically
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    reveal human mortality expressed
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    through cellular combustion.
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    This is a remarkable instance
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    of the camera showing us
    something we can't even see.
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    Red Cross volunteers
    rubbing the life giving heat
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    onto the blankets that have been swaddled
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    around this dying person.
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    And you could see the thermal hand print,
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    the life giving warmth being transferred.
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    I'm there primarily as a human
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    and there are instances
    where we put our things
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    things down and help
    when there's no one else.
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    That's just what humans do.
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    But in the instances
    when we continue to film,
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    when there are other volunteers
    for example, working,
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    there's a real sense of
    belief in what we do,
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    a sense of faith in the importance
    of the documentary image
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    of the evidential image.
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    Otherwise you wouldn't go
    to those lengths to carry
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    those that kind of recording out.
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    So I made a series of
    panoramic large scale images,
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    heat maps of refugee camps.
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    And I also made a three
    screen immersive video
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    called Incoming with sound by Ben Frost
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    and cinematography by Trevor Tweeten.
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    So these are the good friends of mine
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    who I collaborated with
    also in the Enclave in Congo
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    and whom I worked with again
    on my new film, Broken Spectre.
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    Can we try ultra on this screen?
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    Photography is at the very heart
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    of understanding the
    velocity of deforestation
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    and I began researching the cameras
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    in the satellites that
    produce all the data.
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    But what really made me
    more curious was the fact
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    that the same cameras are
    being used by agribusiness
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    and mining to maximize the
    exploitation of the land.
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    But I also wanted to change gears
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    because a lot of the
    stuff we see in the Amazon
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    is taken from over, from a high altitude.
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    What about the stuff we
    don't see, the non-human?
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    If you take one square inch
    of life in the rainforest,
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    it's just, it's tripping with life.
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    Just the amount of
    species is extraordinary.
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    Scientists use ultraviolet lights to try
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    and show things about plants.
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    So I borrow that language
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    and created these very strange,
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    almost gothic nocturns.
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    - Yeah, we can put the big flat bar here.
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    Let's keep that.
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    - You can see actually little animals
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    in there moving around.
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    We had a lot of technical issues.
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    - Yeah, we'd spend hours and hours
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    and then all of a sudden
    the light would turn off
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    and then or the camera would shut down.
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    Actually half the time the
    camera was overheating.
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    - The third scale that I chose to examine
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    was the human scale.
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    We hold a lot of responsibility
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    for the processes that
    unfold in the Amazon.
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    A lot of the cheap beef
    directly coming straight
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    from encroached primary forest
    and also just our banks.
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    A lot of that money's predicated
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    on agribusiness interests in Brazil.
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    So it's everywhere.
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    It surrounds us, but how
    do we implicate the viewer?
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    This is the real problem and
    one that we wanted to do.
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    And our answer was to make a western.
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    And that's weirdly incongruous
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    you would think with the rainforest,
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    but actually everywhere
    we went in the rainforest
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    a lot of the processes we were
    witnessing of deforestation
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    were being carried out by cowboys.
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    Cowboy culture actually
    began centuries ago in Spain
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    and then it was exported to North America
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    where it became its own distinct thing.
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    And when it made its way to
    Northern Brazil in the Amazon
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    it became sort of bastardized
    by the cultural aspirations
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    of the United States, of manifest destiny
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    which had already
    devastated the environment
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    and the Indigenous communities
    in the United States,
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    but is now doing the same in the Amazon,
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    and it's almost identical in spirit.
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    The texture of the Spaghetti Western
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    immediately resonates with the viewer,
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    with the Western viewer anyway.
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    And I think that hopefully
    that will be overly
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    familiar to us.
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    This is our culture.
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    We don't set out,
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    open the door one
    morning with a fixed idea
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    that we have to go and prove.
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    We try to absorb the narrative
    in the field in real life
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    and that's a conversation with the subject
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    and with the people whom
    we meet along the way.
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    - There's nothing that
    is like actually being
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    in the field and you
    just learn so much just
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    from conversations with
    people on the ground.
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    It's just amazing.
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    - My power, if I have any, is
    to be able to show you this
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    what I've seen in a
    more powerful way than,
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    I dunno than perhaps the
    pictures that you've seen
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    in the newspaper of the same thing.
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    Or in a new and different way
    and to make you remember that.
Title:
Richard Mosse: What the Camera Cannot See
Description:

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Video Language:
English
Team:
Art21
Project:
"Extended Play" series
Duration:
12:56

English subtitles

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