Before Big Brother, There was Blair Witch: The Selling of "Reality"

Abstract

<i>The Blair Witch Project</i> is a model example of the emerging style of "postcinema" movie-making. More of a "total package" than a film, <i>The Blair Witch Project</i> represents a fusion of independent filmmaking with blockbuster marketing strategies, which creates a dispersal of narrative across several media (film, television, the Internet, comics, books, music), while exposing a mainstream multiplex audience to documentary and avant-garde aesthetics. This essay investigates <i>The Blair Witch Project</i> both as a film (the 87 minute feature screened in theatres) and as a popular culture event (the "mythology" and the marketing), which may be regarded as symptomatic of the changes in cinema leading up to the twenty-first century. In particular, the film's blending of genres (documentary, horror and avant-garde) together with its wilful blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction cast it as an exemplary postmodern cultural product. Throughout this essay, reference is made to the context of the film's reception in the United States and Australia, as gleaned from reviews, interviews and articles in mainstream newspapers and magazines. This sociohistorical analysis is buttressed by reference to theories about documentary and avant-garde aesthetics, as well as more general discussion about postmodern cultural production and the challenges for film in the digital era. This assembly of various discourses demonstrates the necessity for a pluralist approach towards a film like <i>The Blair Witch Project</i>, with its dispersed, multimedia narrative and its persistent cross-over of boundaries between genres, between independent production and mass-market distribution, between reality and its representation.