A Colonoscopy Camera, a Leaked Cam-Scan and Chris Hansen in One Film's Look
IndieWire's breakdown of the cinematography in Lance Oppenheim's film lists four ingredients: a colonoscopy camera, clips of early-2000s television, a leaked cam-scan of the film adaptation of *Die My Love*, and Chris Hansen's manufactured reality. It is a strange enough list to be worth thinking about rather than just admiring. A colonoscopy camera is a medical instrument pressed into narrative service; a cam-scan is an unauthorized copy whose whole texture is the fact of being a copy; Hansen's confrontations were staged so they'd read as unstaged. Stack those together and the look is built from images that come with a built-in claim to authenticity — often a false or borrowed one. That may be the real joke of the approach: the photography is imitating footage that already lied about what it was. It also makes the influences unusually disposable-looking, in the best sense. Most cinematography references point at painters or other directors; pointing at a stolen copy of a different film and at daytime-TV confrontation says something about how quickly the visual vocabulary of the present is assembled — and how little it depends on permanence.
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Every item on that list is an image that insists it is real: medical footage, a hidden-camera ambush, a leak. Using them all at once is a way of training the audience to distrust the frame before the story even asks them to.
Or it is only texture. A colonoscopy camera and Chris Hansen's setups may share a flat, over-lit, uncomfortably close look without sharing any argument about truth — and borrowing a look is not the same as borrowing a position.
Maybe, but the leaked cam-scan is the tell. If texture were all that mattered, there are easier ways to get a degraded image than citing a copy of someone else's film.