N S W FILM AS TEX T
S OF IA AHL BER G
WITNESS THE SPE CTATOR
W
THE CHILD AS WITNESS
Film-making obviously involves particular
uses of the camera. The role of the camera is
to see things in lieu of the viewer. It takes the
audience to places where we, for one reason
or another, cannot go—such as the men’s
ISSUE 30 A U STRALIA N S C R E E N E D U C ATIO N
itness (Peter Weir, 1985) consciously
creates suspense out of the act of
watching, which begs the question, who
exactly does the witnessing and who is being
witnessed? To say that Witness is about the
events that unfold after a child has seen what
he should not have seen is merely to describe the plot of the film. To add that the film
deliberately sets out to create a link between
the innocence of that child and the role of a
witness is to look at the act of (film) viewing
on a broader scale. When the pleasure of
watching relies on the appeal of innocence in
the form of a child, how does this refl ect the
role of the cinema-viewer? Similarly, when
the antiquated world of the Amish community is observed through the hardened eyes
of detective John B ook (H arrison F ord), to
what degree is optic pleasure manipulated for
the purpose of cinematic narration? To what
extent can psychoanalysis address the question of innocence as a cinematic construction
in Witness? These are some of the questions
which this article will discuss.
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ISSUE 30 A U STRALIA N S C R E E N E D U C ATIO N
toilet at a train station in Pennsylvania. The shots that Weir employs
during the ‘witness – scene’ metamorphoses almost imperceptibly into
the gaze of Samuel (Lukas H aas). In
other words, Samuel’s young eyes
become the vehicle for our viewing.
The fact that the audience is about
to witness events through the eyes
of the child is emphasized through a
close-up shot of Samuel’s eye peeping out of a crack of the toilet door.
It is at this point that the camera
relinquishes the viewing power to the
young boy. In the instant that Samuel’s eye is used to propel the narrative of the story, he also becomes the
first person ‘I’. This playful association between ‘eye’ and ‘I’ makes it
clear that what the audience is about
to see is a subjective point of view.
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Even before the actual witnessscene, however, we are told through
a short scene between Daniel (Alexander G odunov), the man who courts
Samuel’s mother Rachel Lapp (K elly
Mc Gillis), and the little boy, that he
will be witness to something. Daniel
predicts to Samuel, who is about
to go on his first trip to the big city,
that he will ‘see a lot of things’. It is a
common enough remark for adults to
make to children, but due to the title
of the film itself, it has the effect of an
ominous prophesy. It also makes the
obvious connection that to see things
for the first time is mainly the privilege of the young. The act of viewing
itself is thus from the beginning manifested with a child-like quality. To see
is to see as a child, the film seems to
say, and children are too good and
innocent. H e who does the seeing is
innocent and he who is being seen
is evil, in this case. A dichotomy of
good and bad is thus established on
the basis of watching.
Samuel is the innocent onlooker
who unwittingly glimpses a world of
wrong-doing. H e is catapulted into
an environment of criminality and
murder through a single instant of
watching. It is enough to have seen,
the film then goes on to suggest, to
become corrupted. When Samuel
returns to the Amish society of nonviolence, he brings something of the
immoral world with him. This message is transmitted to an audience
which would recognize its moral
lesson from the Bible. As in the case
of Eve and the serpent in the G arden
of E den, Samuel’s innocence has
been sacrifi ced as a result of having
gained knowledge. This notion of purity in the midst of corruption is also
a reference to the Amish community.
The presence of B ook and to a
certain extent Samuel in the Amish
society is equivalent to the presence of the serpent in the G arden of
E den. Samuel’s ‘corruption’ is made
obvious in the way that the camera
lingers on his playing with the gun
that B ook leaves unattended in the
house. To the distress of the grandfather (Jan Rubes) who speaks about
the wrong of killing, Samuel declares
that he would only kill a bad man.
While the grandfather preaches,
the boy delivers a radically opposing sermon which makes him so
much more than just the vehicle of
the storytelling, in that it mimics the
world of the cinema. His effortless
distinction between what constitutes
a ‘bad man’ as opposed to a ‘good
man’ is the premise of all mainstream
Hollywood movie-making.
In the real world, the distinction
between ‘bad guys’ from ‘good guys’
is of course more blurred, but in this
film, Weir explores the artifi cial world
of the cinema through the relationship between the viewer and the
screen. Samuel’s remark elevates
him from being merely the surrogate
camera, to becoming an instructor
of the cinematic experience itself.
Through him, the oldest presumption
of Hollywood entertainment, namely
that ‘bad guys’ deserve whatever is
coming to them, is reinforced. What
better way to do this than through
the view-point of a child who has
already become our trusted ‘eye’?
It also seduces the audience into
accepting the action of the other witness in the story, detective B ook.
THE DETECTIVE AS WITNESS
T
he other main strand of the story
is engineered through B ook’s
discovery of his colleagues’ drug
crimes. Like Samuel, he has become
witness to something which endangers his life. As a result, he must go
into hiding with the Amish people.
Though B ook’s violence stands in
stark contrast to the peace-loving nature of the Amish community
and though he kills two men at the
end, his innocence is nevertheless
secured thanks to Samuel’s assertion
that the ‘bad man’ deserves to die.
When he is transported to the oldfashioned world of the Amish who
live without modern conveniences
such as telephone and radio, he becomes something of a time-traveller.
Ironically enough, he too becomes
stripped of modern appliances at
the end of the film. When he is in
the moment of greatest danger, he
fi nds himself without the possession
of a gun. Instead he must outwit his
pursuer with the simple but ingenious
use of grains in a barn.
Without a gun, he is rendered childlike. Even before that, however, he
exhibits child-like qualities. Although
he has the reputation of a tough
policeman, he has no family (apart
from a sister with problems of her
own) and in his wounded state he
appears practically orphaned. H e
survives because he is ‘adopted’
by the Lapp family, and Rachel in
particular. H e is still a detective, but
instead of fi ghting he now practices
carpentry and goes about investigating this new strange world dressed
in ridiculous clothes that make him
look like a ‘big kid’. H e rebuilds the
bird’s house which is symbolic of his
newly innocent perspective of the
world, in that it looks like a real house
in miniature.
B ook’s observations of the Amish community often fall into ‘illicit viewing’. His gaze incriminates
him because he is an outsider, in
the same way that Samuel was an
outsider in the toilet-scene. B ook’s
gaze trespasses the boundaries of
a world which would normally be off
limits to someone like himself. This
reliance on the gaze as a means of
communication is especially the case
in his relationship with Rachel. In a
conversation about Witness recorded
in 1999, 14 years after the release of
the film and included as part of the
‘Extra F eatures’ on the DVD, Weir
contends that he consciously omitted
most of the dialogue between B ook
and Rachel that was originally in the
script. In the end scene, for instance,
he has them looking at each other
rather than verbally explain why they
must part. In fact, seeing also takes
the place of physical manifestations
of their love. It is the erotic gaze, particularly B ook’s gaze, that expresses
their sexual longing.
In the scene in which Rachel washes
herself, for instance, the camera
lingers tantalizingly on her nude body
only to tilt up and track forward into
a shot of the mirror which refl ects
B ook’s watchful eyes. The camera is
thus unashamedly a conduit for the
subjectivity of B ook who in this scene
becomes a kind of ‘Peeping Tom’.
The concept of ‘illicit viewing’ is also
touched upon through the mention of
the tourists who come to peer at the
Amish people as if they were monkeys in a zoo. Though these tourists
only make a brief appearance in the
story itself, the idea of tourism is
explicitly linked to the pleasure of
looking, or scopophilia, as it is called
in cinematic theory. Witness foregrounds the scopophilic pleasures of
cinema, acting as a powerful metaphor for cinema viewing itself.
THE SPECTATOR AS WITNESS
P
Cinema consists of a series of images with which the viewer is invited
to identify with. Part of the pleasure
of film-viewing lies in the pleasure
of looking alone, 2 B ook practises a
voyeuristic gaze by vis-à-vis Rachel
N arcissistic viewing in one kind of
visual pleasure afforded by cinematic
spectatorship, in which an audience
member identifi es with an ‘ideal ego’,
usually the idealized hero. Viewers
tend to put themselves in the place
of their heroes or heroines shown on
the screen. In doing so, they invariably project certain characteristics
of themselves onto the stars who
are acting their parts. In most cases,
cinematic conventions conceal these
processes which form the basis for
viewers’ entertainment. Similarly,
viewers suspend their disbelief for
the duration of the cinematic experience. According to the film theorist
Jean-Louis B audry, the cinema
theatre itself lulls the viewer into a
dream-like state: ‘First of all ... taking into account the darkness of the
movie theatre, the relative passivity
of the situation, the forced immobility
of the cine-subject’. 3
Witness, conversely, accentuates
the mechanics of watching, thereby
creating a platform from which the
viewers can question their own
participation in the film and ask who
is doing the seeing and who is being
seen. O n screen the protagonists
Samuel and B ook are the witnesses.
What they see and the impact that it
has on them and their surroundings
is what creates narrative suspense in
the story. Part of the film’s success is
due to the ease with which the viewer
can identify with these characters.
Their innocence makes the identifi cation process easier. They are observers of their surroundings in the same
way that we in the audience observe
them on the screen. In their observation of the world they maintain a
distance between themselves and
what they see which in turn refl ects
the audience’s own relationship to
the screen.
Innocence in Witness is a construction used to both lure and instruct
the viewers on the cinematic experience in total. The spectator of the
cinema becomes complicit with the
process of film-making when the act
of watching transcends the screen.
To focus on the ways images are
perceived in the film Witness is to
learn something about the complexity of the art of watching cinema,
as well. However, it is also to expose the means by which dominant
mainstream Hollywood film-making
constructs the activity of film-viewing
in general.
Sofia Ahlberg is a Swedish writer
who is now living in Melbourne and
working on her second novel.
ENDNOTES
Lacan claims that a child learns to
master its motory functions as well
as develop an understanding of its
relationship to its own body through
the so-called ‘mirror phase’. This is
the process that describes a child’s
discovery of an image outside him
or herself with which he or she can
relate to. The child’s self or ego is
thus developed through the identifi cation with an image of another
baby or someone/something else.
The importance of seeing is essential to that identifi cation process, but
it is also important to remember that
the image is always an external one.
Lacan therefore makes the point
that the child develops an ego at the
same time as it experiences alienation for the first time. See Darian
Leader, and Judy Groves, Lacan for
Beginners , Icon Books, C ambridge,
1995, pp. 18-23.
2
Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey
states there are two kinds of visual
pleasure: the voyeuristic and the
narcissistic. See Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’,
Visual and Other Pleasures , Indiana
University Press, Bloomington and
Indianapolis, 1989, p.17.
3
Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist
Film Theory , Arnold, London, 1997.
1
ISSUE 30 A U STRALIA N S C R E E N E D U C ATIO N
art of the lure of going to the
cinema is not only the pleasure
of looking but also the processes of
identifi cation that this allows. The
link between seeing and identifying
was forged in psychoanalytic theory,
especially in the ‘Theory of the Mirror Phase’ as famously outlined by
the French psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan 1 . How then does this linkage
address the issues of watching in
Witness?
and the Amish community at large.
B ook remains an outsider. It is only
through curiosity and observation
that he participates in the life of the
community. Even when he is involved
in the barn raising, for example, he
has the look of someone who is
bemused at what he is doing rather
than actually taking a genuine part of
it. H e derives pleasure from watching, as already seen in the example
of Rachel and the mirror.
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