So, why pair up The Blair Witch Project and Stranger with a Camera? Beyond the fact that both are about documentary filmmakers who go to the hills and don’t come back—and that they both did pretty good at Sundance. Many of you can probably guess from the subtitle of my text some of what you are about to hear: something along the lines of Blair Witch bad, Stranger good; "outsider" stereotyping bad, homegrown challenges to those stereotypes good. And there is an extent to which I support just such a proposition, if not so crudely stated. Approaching these two films on ethical terms, there is a lot in Blair Witch that is troubling, and much in Stranger to praise.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Stranger with a Camera, it’s Appalshop’s superb recent release exploring the 1969 shooting in Letcher County KY of Canadian filmmaker Hugh O’Connor by local resident Hobart Ison, a landlord enraged by O’Connor’s filming of some of his fairly shabby rental houses. But it’s also a quietly complicated meditation about the dynamics of community and the ethical obligations of filmmakers as it mixes its history with the autobiography of director Elizabeth Barret.

The Blair Witch Project is certainly better-known. Even folks who haven’t seen it by now recognize the "look" of the film whose homemade low-budget style has become the subject of parody even as the film running on $30,000 blew multi-million-dollar summer blockbusters out of the water. Its improvised dialogue and hand-held camera work tell the story of director Heather, cameraman Josh, and soundman Mike as they pursue and are pursued by the legendary Blair Witch (a fictional and more bloodthirsty version of Tennessee folklore’s Bell Witch) in the Black Hills region of Western Maryland.

The Blair Witch Project in many ways centers on, is fuelled by, a body of stereotypical images and ideas about the Appalachian region (here, western Maryland) and mountain landscapes more generally that should be painfully familiar for most folks interested in Appalachian culture. You don’t have to think hard about this film to link the "city-folk-get-in-big-trouble-in-the-hills" motif to the ur-text of Appalachian stereotyping, Johns Boorman’s 1972 film version of Deliverance. In fact, you don’t have to think about it at all: the characters mention Deliverance specifically at (at least) one point in the story, comparing their plight to that of Ned Beatty and company.

But Blair Witch in some respects goes its forefather one better, adding to that tale of masculinity in crisis a dimension of misogyny that’s quite troubling in its own right. You probably can’t tell a story of witchcraft—especially one whose backstory is rooted, as this one is, in the era of the witchcraft delusions in America—without tangling with issues of woman-hating. Blair Witch not only blithely ignores this dimension of its narrative, spinning a yarn of a monstrous, supernatural feminine menace, it compounds it, intensifies it through a narrative that vilifies its female main character. If Deliverance is about masculine hubris, Blair Witch is in some respects a story of the hubris of a woman who dares to lead two (surly, complaining) men into the woods. It’s a story of Heather’s failure as a leader, her overestimation of her abilities. The film’s most famous (and most parodied) scene, its emotional climax, is Heather’s teary confrontation with her own helplessness, her confession of her total responsibility for the disastrous expedition, and her apology to the parents of the men whose deaths she causes.

Contrast that with Stranger’s complex meditation not only on the masculinities of its main characters, title character Hugh O’Connor and his killer Hobart Ison: one of the subtler aspects of an already tremendously subtle film. Liz Barret carefully develops a picture of both of these men as men—as fathers, as husbands, but also in more abstract ways as creators, owners, adventurers. Masculinity is one of the many cultural and political strands of Barret’s pathology of this incident. Without getting too mired in psychoanalysis, I can’t help but wonder if had Hobart not been jilted, building that sad little dream house that he boarded up and walked away from, if he would have been so fixated on possession, on controlling those other little houses he built later in his life to house families he would never have. If he would have responded so violently to the perceived threat of another man trying to "possess," on film, "his" houses, "his" families. Refusing to blithely ignore any implications of her narrative, Barret is careful also to make her own femininity an issue as well—making clear that mainstream gender roles and expectations have shaped her own past and contextualize her present, that she’s been cheerleader and homecoming queen candidate as well as documentary filmmaker.

This forthright handling of gender is just an example of the larger contrast between these two meta-documentaries, in which Stranger looks for the root of its violent crisis in human agency and human history, while Blair Witch literally mystifies the origins of its violence, suggesting an animus to the very landscape that transcends human activity. The film crew in Blair Witch entertains the possibility they are being harassed by locals, but they ultimately dismiss it, saying, "No redneck could be this creative." If Deliverance conflates the people with the landscape, suggesting the latter are mere extensions of the former, Blair Witch suggests the landscape itself behaves in a hostile manner; since we never see the Blair Witch herself, we’re left to assume that the entire landscape is the Witch, an act of personification so radical it can only be called super-natural. As if to confirm this point, the Blair Witch’s calling card is to leave tiny rock piles and totemic stick-figures in the wake of its nocturnal visits. Blair Witch does the same thing to history that it does to the landscape: invoking its complexity only to evade a complex explanation or critique in favor of broad strokes of mystification.

In these and other respects Stranger has it all over Blair Wtich, the most important among these being the means of production of these films, in which one appears to be a "grassroots" production but is so quickly and easily assimilated into Hollywood culture that it’s already a cliché, while the other is part of a thirty-year project designed to democratize access to the materials of media production. I could go on. But the very number and variety of points at which we can draw distinct contrasts between these two films illustrates the number of points at which there is some shared content, some matter of common concern. In part because it is so easy to contrast these two films, it might be more useful to think about what they share—which it turns out is rather a lot. And the things they share are important, I assert, because they point to what is new about both films, rather than how they re-enact old struggles and resurrect old motifs.

Most apparent among these shared traits is the fact that both films problematize and foreground the conditions and the process of their own creation. Stranger with a Camera is not only a documentary, of course, but a meta-documentary; while it is concerned with exploring the Hugh O’Connor shooting, it is in some ways even more concerned with the question of how one adequately and truthfully represents a place, a people, a set of events. The last words in Stranger express Barret’s belief that the filmmaker can only try to be fair and honest, "and hope that that is enough." It’s significant that the film’s closing moments concern not what the implications are of the shooting itself, but instead question whether or not a documentary filmmaker’s efforts can ever be fair or complete, or even any more than just sufficient. Opening the process of filmmaking to discussion in this way destabilizes that implied hierarchy between filmmaker and audience, calling the viewer to a heightened state of attention and awareness to the intellectual craft that is being practiced here, just as Appalshop’s community-based approach to filmmaking increases access to the material needs and technical skills required for participation in film art. In fact, my first encounter with this film was at Appalachian Studies in Abingdon two years ago, when a "rough draft" of them film was shown and held out for commentary and critique that resulted in a significantly different final cut. In content and in form, Stranger renders the terms and procedures of its own creation visible in ways that invite the viewer to participate rather than simply consume.

Blair Witch is at least putatively a meta-documentary as well, at least inasmuch as we appear to be watching the making of a documentary. Just as Elizabeth Barret’s concern with her own role and responsibilities is the hallmark of Stranger, the hand-held camera work and improvised dialogue is Blair Witch’s center of interest, the quality that moved it formally out of the ranks of routine horror films—most folks, like me, had never seen a film where the characters are the crew. This film goes "subjective camera" one better here; the cameras themselves become part of the subject. The presence of multiple cameras and the mixing of footage from the two in the final cut of the film forces viewers to reckon not only with the events of the narrative but with the fact of the mediation of those events, the distance and the perspectivity that intercedes between viewer and media spectacle.

What’s more, Blair Witch extends this ironic, destablizing effect out beyond the film’s borders. This strategy recalls the way that Stranger pieces together other strands of documentary film to create a portrait of discourse about the region, and locates itself carefully among them. But with Blair Witch, we aren’t dealing just with a movie but with a full-blown multimedia phenomenon. The film itself is only the centerpiece of an intertextual network of web sites and video games, and to top it off another mock documentary. The Curse of the Blair Witch is an hour-long pastiche that extends the ironic undercutting of documentary film’s truth-claims so central to the feature film to a whole range of genres. Itself a mock-up of a Fox-network style "reality program," it incorporates parodies and sub-parodies of "In Search Of," local news broadcasters, and Ken-Burns-style history TV as it fleshes out the Blair Witch backstory—and there, in the midst of it all, it includes clips from the film itself, bringing the chain of ironies full circle. In each case, the makers of Blair Witch seem to target and undermine all the modes of media culture that make the greatest claims to truth, accuracy, and impartiality; even academics get drawn into the fray with a dead-on parody of Shelby Foote. Finally, if the line between documentary and fiction film wasn’t blurry enough, documentarian Joe Berlinger (maker of Brother’s Keeper among others) has been brought on to direct the big-budget sequel, Blair Witch II: Book of Shadows.

That’s what’s new about Blair Witch. Sure, it dredges up tired old stereotypes, but it does so at least in part to question how and why they have derived power and authority, to question how any medium can make claims to truth, accuracy and impartiality. At the same time it questions its own authority, its own ability to master and contain the power of its material, to completely or even adequately depict its subject matter. Much was made in the popular press of how the film frightens without graphically depicting monsters or gore, but more often than not this was said to hearken back to scary films of yore. But in those old-time horror flicks the unseen forces eventually appeared in full force, triggering the thrilling conclusion. But the Blair Witch never becomes visible, and what we get instead is the horror of the final, ultimate failure of filmmaking, the cameras crashing down, their flow of images ceasing—and the disturbing implication that the worst is yet to come, and what’s more, we won’t get to see it! The effect of all of this is a profound anxiety, not new for a horror film, to be sure, but what is new here is the sense that this anxiety extends beyond the characters and the narrative to encompass the means of representation themselves.

What we have here is not just a melodramatic human crisis but a crisis of representation. Just as the complex of Blair Witch films and videos undercuts a variety of purportedly "truthful" genres, within the film itself not only cameras but also maps, compasses, and even basic strategies of interpreting the earth—following a creek downstream, navigating by the sun—fail the trio of filmmakers. As this crisis comes to a head within the narrative, the characters suggest that the significance of this cascading failure of representation is larger than their personal plight, and they are dumbfounded by the implications.

I’m intrigued here by the sense that they have stumbled onto something not possible in this day and age, that they have stumbled out of the parameters of contemporary life. A predictable motif—Appalachia as lagging behind the rest of the country somehow, a rehash of "Our Contemporary Ancestors." But rather than suggesting that the Appalachians need to be modernized, that a good dose of rationality would shape this place right up, instead we see Appalachia as a place where contemporary cosmopolitan, rational assurance fails. When Heather wonders aloud, "This is America, it’s not possible to get this lost in America," while Josh and Mike sarcastically sing the national anthem, it’s America that’s broken, incomplete, failed somehow, not the mountains. What they confront, allegorically, at least, is a lingering loophole in the national ideology, a space of lack, of incompleteness in the American landscape of plenty and certainty, a fault line stretching back to the earliest moments of U. S. history; the ironic use of the medium suggests that this problem is not only in the world but of our ways of understanding the world, in the stories we choose to tell and not tell and the ways we choose to tell them.

Though less sensational, more modest, Stranger with a Camera, I argue, evokes (perhaps precipitates) a representational crisis of its own. It too is asking in its gentler, subtler way, if the available means of cultural production are enough, are sufficient, are capable of dealing with the messes of our time. And Stranger adds an important additional insight: not only is the camera an unreliable witness to violence and to tragedy, moreover, it can in some ways be a participant, a catalyst. Hugh O’Connor plainly was not to blame for his own shooting, but nor was he an innocent, free from implication in the larger networks of cause and effect that brought him to his fatal confrontation with Hobart Ison. And neither is Elizabeth Barret, a fact she acknowledges not only by drawing her motives and biography into the narrative but also in gestures like adapting O’Connor’s distinctive five-screen mosaic technique into her own film: the Letcher County native paying homage to the medium that got its maker killed by another Letcher County native.

The larger point here is that at a certain level this situation and this film is not about blame and blamelessness, guilt and innocence, insiders and outsiders, but about people caught up in intricate webs of cause and effect, economies of representation, and problems of structural inequality that implicate us all. What Stranger suggests is that High O’Connor’s dying plea, "Why did you have to do that?" is not a rhetorical question. Stranger is an attempt to answer that question, and in answering point towards the way that the Appalachian landscape is again a site where a lack and a longing for wholeness in American culture and in American history can be seen profoundly. Like Blair Witch, Stranger finds in the mountains a place that is out of sync with the rest of American culture. But the problem here again originates as much with the American culture—in both the anthropological and the aesthetic sense—as with the Appalachians. Appalachia becomes a space for critique, a rhetoric that can unsettle the commonplaces of American ideologies.

This fundamental similarity points at last to the fundamental difference between these two films. The Blair Witch Project is at its heart a hoax, a scam. What we marvel at with this film and its whole complex of representations ultimately is the way it approximates and impersonates truth, and what amuses us is the knowledge that it is all ultimately falsehood. Blair Witch is ultimately about its own failure, about representation’s failure. But in pointing to the fallibility and even outright fraudulence of media, the way that truth is an effect rather than a substance of representation, it creates an opportunity. It is into this fissure in the relentless façade of contemporary media that films like Stranger with a Camera can move, to pry open media’s armature even further and engage in a legitimate, purposeful inquiry into the crises of actual places, of how we might hope to understand our past better in terms of our future. Stranger then, is ultimately about, if not its own success, then the need to keep trying to succeed, to ask and to try to answer the questions of history and of culture that are literally, not just figuratively, matters of life and death.