We should not be distracted by a mere record, though.
They all promoted the photograph as a means of artistic expression rather than as a mere record of actuality, as in the scientific approach.
Like everyone else, his money is on his countryman but he can see it beyond the terms of a mere record-shattering sporting event.
The video provides the show with a dynamic background, but it also neatly symbolizes the self-consciousness of Sontag's writing process: even as she confides her most intimate secrets to the page, she observes herself doing so, aware that the journal is more than a mere record of experience, but a tool she is consciously employing to shape it.
This isn't a mere record player either; it actually uses a laser to scan the surface, and like a CD player will let you skip around, rewind and even pause the music.
McBride turns Holzman into something of a cinematic tummler, an anything-for-a-response comedian with a camera who is seeking to break through the conventions of mere recording in quest of a jolt of revelation.
At the same time, constructing a script like a libretto, Renoir was able to make images that were both neutral in their sense of mere recording, of moderated inflections, and yet freed, like music, from storytelling in the interest of subtly expressive elaboration.
His images are simultaneously straightforward and shamanistic, direct and mystical, sophisticated and primeval; he blends the Lumière brothers' painterly wonder at the artistic possibilities of mere recording with Georges Méliès's revelry in the medium's power to depict the imaginary, the invisible, the impossible.
It's all the more troubling because when Stern (who was also one of the three credited "cameramen," along with Courtney Hafela and Ray Phealan) films performers, he films them musically, creating images that fuse with the performances to overcome the visual weight of mere recording and take on the rhythms, textures, moods, and human relationships of the music itself.
