"The Blair Witch Project": A New Reality?

“...for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.”

“Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.”

The Blair Witch Project was heralded in to the film world in 1999 as an inventive new way to make movies. It was told completely from the characters’ point of view: what they could see through the cameras that they held. In essence, the character was also the cameraman, showing the audience exactly what they could see and hear – with no extra information, like movie-goers tend to get. This idea was revolutionary because it made what was on the screen seem so much more real. Was this a scripted movie or was the audience watching actual footage of a real-life event? From then on, filmmakers saw the cameras they used in a whole new light with new ways to view the worlds and stories they were creating. They could make the audience feel like they were part of the story, not just a bystander to it.

Because the audience got a whole new perspective to the reality of the movie, the characters also seemed more real. No longer was it obvious to viewers that the characters were really actors pretending to be someone else. The Blair Witch Project was formatted like a home video, giving the eerie feel that the audience was watching real people – not actors – going through the events of the movie. It made it much easier for viewers to feel concern when the people on screen were in trouble because they had to question whether real people had actually gotten lost in the woods and died. The connection to the characters that the audience made, as well as the new level of reality that the camera style brought to the movie, changed the way films would be made in the future.