The Forbidden Files

Watch closely for what is about to happen.

From 1988 to 2010, television commercial director Jean-Teddy Filippe created a series of 13 short films in a series known as The Forbidden Files, with each episode purporting to be a discovered document of mysterious phenomena and experiences.

With its elliptical narration and mostly silent handheld recording, The Forbidden Files is one of the earliest examples of the 'found footage' genre, where the rawness of the filming and the sparseness of context creates an atmosphere where the viewer must fill in the gaps of the unknown left by the filmmakers, so that the 'authenticity' of reality is a speculative activity.

Filippe intended the series to comment on the willingness of people to believe what is shown to them, given the right 'aura' of what they assume as the signifiers of realism: incompleteness, awkwardness, and a lack of any definitive structure. And in that way, he succeeds: before watching the series, I realized that I had already watched one of the episodes years ago, and had assumed it was 'real' for all this time -- but wasn't it?

It is this question of authenticity in cinema, and in media/art in general, that I am concerned with today.

For the found footage genre, what seemed initially appealing was the tricksterish veracity of the style: handheld cameras becoming normal by the middle of the century, we then had video cameras introduced, and the public was becoming accustomed to the idea that they can and would be the subjects of filming on a common basis, not just by people involved in the film industry or broadcast news, but by their friends and relatives. What began as a little way to make 'home movies' was gradually made more accessible to the working class individual, and as they got used to the presence of cameras everywhere being used by individuals or by corporations in surveillance systems, a double-consciousness emerged that was for most of human history reserved for the paranoid: you now not only had to inhabit your perspective, but you had to perceive yourself through the eyes of the camera, which takes your momentary behavior and renders it in pseudo-objective images and audio for others to see for years to come. So the public learns to behave for 'itself', and then also 'for' the omnipresent lens.

There is no arguing today in 2025 that the transparent use of video for surveillance is near-total in its implication, and that we are always being observed to one extent or another, if not by governments or corporations, then by the social body, we cannot escape being monitored, even if we were to travel to the middle of nowhere there would still be an overhead satellite that would capture some trace of our exodus, not to mention GPS and our digital footprint interlinked with the flow of debit/credit card commerce. I find it very rare that I do not consider this in the back of my mind on a daily basis, and then act accordingly with this awareness -- can't jaywalk because of the street cameras, can't watch this video on YouTube because it'll then taint my recommendations, must not get upset in public otherwise someone might record me and upload it to social media, on and on in infinite varieties of casual paranoia that doesn't even get into my Actual Paranoia.

For The Forbidden Files, the problem of reality is whether or not what you see on screen is identical with the narrator's story and the stylistic conceit -- the narrator is constantly telling us that this footage is real, that none of this has been altered, even though it clearly has been spliced together by an ad-hoc editor that belies the immediacy of the photography. The Forbidden Files suggests that, with the right context, any image can seem 'real' -- but in a sense, it IS real, because Filippe and his team filmed it with their cameras. Is it then an 'authentic' document of the strange and paranormal? Only if you don't know that it was faked -- but the faking is so good sometimes that even knowing it, you wonder if perhaps it isn't still true.

This dichotomy can be extended further: I grew up in the 'pics or it didn't happen' era of the internet, where a photograph and a timestamp, if not 'proof', at least was a sign of a collective reality that we could all acknowledge. And video, even after the advent of CGI, was still taken to be a mostly 'real' image. But today, with deepfake software, AI image generation, and voice capture imitation, it is harder and harder to concede that most of what we see in the mediasphere is 'real', because the tools of fakery are so far in advance of early CGI and Photoshop -- now you can be a regular person and easily create hundreds of fake photos of the past, you can insert any real human into any virtual situation, and with a little clever knowledge, you can make it very difficult for the average individual to casually detect whether what you're showing them is AI-created or not.

So now the power of surveillance, how our identities have become interpenetrated by cameras, has mutated into the power of hallucination, where the digital universe has the capacity to have little relation at all to actual material history, and to where it might even begin to override that other reality with its innate fabrication -- you can imagine a future where fake images of World War 2 are inserted into school textbooks, with no one the wiser. This always could have been done on some level by forgers and con men, but the extent and ease of it is frightening today, because it obliterates our mass correspondence of images and their objects.

The Forbidden Files is a sort of prank, but also a challenge, asking us to consider these short films on their own terms purely as potential artefacts, and each of them functions on both a fictional and non-fictional level, we can juxtapose both sides just as we can say that Antonioni was actually out there in Italian locales with Monica Vitti, even if the fiction surrounding the filming creates a certain distance between the images and us. That distance enables a critical faculty to work its wiles, so that we can believe in the drama without being subsumed by it, and it maintains a healthy relationship between truth and lies, weaving them together into a single quilt.

What worries me is that in the future we will have to make one of two radical choices: to deny all that we see in media, to consider it exclusively the province of lies created by AI algorithms, or to dogmatically accept whatever is placed in front of us by the digital control, which is constantly modulating and contorting itself to be a mirror for us to find ourselves within its grasp. Neither seems tenable to me, because we have to somehow create a reality on our terms and to then be able to share that as a society if we are to persist at all -- that means we cannot reject all authenticity in media, it has to exist somewhere. But at the same time, we cannot then go and accept whatever is being spontaneously spewed out by this system, because increasingly it is becoming a fluid field of insanity that erodes life itself via its bottomless pit of replacement images that have the possibility of erasing the previous reality that we thought we lived in.

What has become very important to me is that film represents an 'outside' from what's within my head, that it is an objective correlate to my subjective experience, so that it brings me beyond my assumptions and biases and forces me to transcend what I previously thought was a complete understanding -- this process of expansion and enrichment, where cinema adds to the growing authenticity of the world with its variety of images, like how The Forbidden Files clarifies the mystery of how we relate to a certain mode of presentation, that nuanced complication is what I value, that is why I am writing about film.

But right now we are seeing the seeds of a world to come, where the image not only has no direct relation to any physical process of the creation of art, it also seeks to mold the non-art world into a flattened singular digital aesthetic of smooth surfaces and gradually ratcheted derangement, as facts lose their moorings and history becomes a playground for AI inputs to imagine an alternative -- this isn't expansion and enrichment, it is an imperial takeover of a system consolidating its hold over a competitor. I hope to God that it does not succeed.