Perpetuum mobile: colour, sound and motion

The prison house of language, the penitentiary of print, as also the practices of precedent all encourage a degree of recidivism, of default repetition and so it not surprising that photograph and film are apprehended initially as being like texts and needing to the read. Visual literacy is frequently invoked as the desired state and method of looking and training the legal gaze. The point to be stressed is that in analytic and critical terms the image is secondary, requires careful “reading”, and is assumed to be somewhat removed or unloosed from rational analysis. The visual figure is to be restrained or brought back from the “theatre of shadows” or sciography of cinema and dream, phantasy and hallucination. This article examines the use of film and photographs in a recent UK case to evince the resistance to images and the blindness of judges to the affective force of colour.