During the annual Boston Marathon in 2013, two bombs detonated near its finish line. Fourteen seconds and 190 meters apart, the explosions ripped into the crowd. Three people were killed and several hundred injured.
The event triggered a sweeping manhunt and three days later the FBI released pictures of two suspects, later identified as the Chechen Kyrgyzstani-American Tsarnaev brothers who eventually turned out to be self-radicalized Islamists.
In the first couple of days after the attack a parallel manhunt – with no connection whatsoever to the official investigation – took place on the internet. Lots of footage and pictures from the important minutes before and after the explosions were readily available to the public, and that set a huge number of amateur detectives going. «To all my homies, please go through these photos…These are the mother fuckers who bombed our city, memorize them. Let’s find these bastards and put them away…,» were the words from someone on #Reddit, the discussion website.
No production budget
The French scholar and filmmaker Chloé Galibert-Laîné has made a brilliant #video essay# on this frenzy. At the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, she was working on her doctoral thesis on films making use of media found on the internet, which gave insight into different online communities. This led her to make a film herself. As part of her academic work, she decided to reflect on the political and ethical questions such a cinematic work would raise. Drawing inspiration from Kevin B. Lee’s Transformers: the Premake at the 2014 Viennale she got busy creating her own desktop documentary. The result is astounding. Apart from a few volunteers, she did everything by herself, with no production budget, using her laptop, a webcam, a printer, a wall, and adhesive tape.
It is a film about crowd-sourced #forensics. It is not about the Boston bombings as such, but about what happens when speculations go wild. The film begins like a «Where’s Waldo» album, but what you have to search for are two men about to detonate homemade bombs. But as a crucial difference, you do not have Waldo’s striped sweater and matching hat to look for – you have no idea who the culprits are and what they look like.
The Redditors came up with one conspiracy theory after another. Rather quickly someone established that you had to look for persons that were brown, looking away, alone, and carrying a black backpack. The remains of a backpack had been found at the scene of the crime, but the rest was pure speculation. And that is what happens in cases like this. People get obsessed with finding meaning in each and every meaningless detail. In connection to her work, Chloé Galibert-Laîné consulted a novel she had read years ago, Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz. It is about a person having a completely obsessional relationship with his surroundings. He constantly attempts to find a meaning in everything, be it a crack in the ceiling or the form of a tree.
Analytic frenzy
That is what happened on Reddit. Users contributed to complicated schemes and speculations. Someone spotted a guy that seems to be blinking. Who is blinking at an important sporting event, if not a terrorist? Some of it might have a certain similarity to real police work, while most seem to get out of hand. «I was gonna come to this sub-reddit and mock you guys, but I have to say blue robe guy is lookin’ mighty shifty,” adds somebody else. On what basis, if not speculations? ”This is a moment where we might have to step back and ask if we have the knowledge to do this extremely important work to identify the suspects?» asks the filmmaker, and then something interesting happens.
She herself would start showing signs of this analytic frenzy. She admits that little by little, her research itself would be contaminated by the possibility of multiple meanings. We see the wall in her study, lots of clippings and notes, with red adhesive tape as lines and markers between different theories and possible connections. What happened to the Reddit crowd is happening to her, being swallowed up in the huge amount of information, some of it true and most of it utter speculations but without knowing which is what.
This documentary is a small masterpiece. In all its simplicity it gives a frightening insight into the relativity of knowledge, composed entirely on the computer screen. A film not to be missed.
Forensickness screens as part of Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival «Opus Bonum» programme.
