Higley, Sarah L. “‘People Just Want to See Something’: Art, Death, and Document in Blair Witch, The Last Broadcast, and Paradise Lost.” In Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the Blair Witch Controversies. Ed. Sarah Lynn Higley and Andrew Weinstock. Contemporary film and television series. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 87-110.

Bill Nichols addresses this blurred distinction by declaring that what matters is ultimately “what we make of the documentary’s representation of the evidence it presents” (125—Winston’s emphasis, 253). Winston approves, stating that the formal difference between fiction and documentary “is to be found in the mind of the audience” (253). 92

Plantinga returns to the role of the viewer in identifying the intent of a film. We know a film to be fiction or parody “because it is socially marked or indexed, because through it the filmmakers make direct assertions about the actual world, and because when audiences recognize a film as nonfiction, they mobilize different viewing strategies than they do in the case of fiction” (“Gender” 331 n. 2). 93

paratexts 94

The real myth is that the camera cannot lie. 94

This film [The Last Broadcast] was made early in 1998, a good year and a half, claim its producers, before BWP aired, but it was overlooked. Instead, it came out on video in November 1999, riding the success of the other. 98

[The Last Broadcast]: A damaged section of the tape comes into focus to reveal Leigh’s own face at the murder site, proving how effectively digital imaging can find the “murder weapon” through the devices that Leigh associates with the devil. 100

. . . whereas David Leigh puts down his camera and grabs a plastic curtain with which he slowly suffocates the restorer of film in a scene that discomfitingly reminds one of “snuff.” 100

The Last Broadcast is a terrific mockumentary, and a more sophisticated, if less impactful, film than The Blair Witch Project or even Curse of the Blair Witch. 101

Ironically, that aesthetic was attributed to the other film that labored for over a year at keeping us interested in the “witch.” What that industry had going for it was a ready-made method to produce extensions of its fiction in video and print. It gave the average viewer what it thought he or she wanted: constant stroking of that elusive, external event—not a cerebral comment on the artifices of narrative and self-referentiality. 101

Jeff vindicates his foray into the woods with the aforementioned remark that “video never lies; . . . but film does.” 102

Ironically, BWP succeeded because so many of its viewers trusted the Griersonian bond between image and reality, camera and “truth.” 105

Had it not been demoted in the eye of the public by the hype, the print books, Heather’s diary (see Joseph Walker’s essay in this volume), its sequel, and other manifestations of Artisan’s industrial greed, The Blair Witch Project might have retained some of its initial prestige as an independent art film and Internet phenomenon—an honor that belongs as well to The Last Broadcast. 105

Taken together, then, all four films, strangely attracted into orbit around this issue of death and photography, express a profound distrust that reality can be known or seen without some kind of demise—a diminishment, an absence, a disappearance, a tampering. 106