Read: Video doesn’t capture truth

Film and photography purport to capture events as they really took place in the world, so it’s always tempting to take them at their word. But when multiple videos present multiple possible truths, which one is to be believed? Given the new footage, some, such as the libertarian outlet Reason, said the students were “wildly mischaracterized.” Others, such as The Washington Post, tried to cast the matter more neutrally, concluding that the aftermath “seemed to capture the worst of America at a moment of extreme political polarization.”

But rather than drawing conclusions about who was vicious or righteous—or lamenting the political miasma that makes the question unanswerable—it might be better to stop and look at how film footage constructs rather than reflects the truths of a debate like this one. Despite the widespread creation and dissemination of video online, people still seem to believe that cameras depict the world as it really is; the truth comes from finding the right material from the right camera. That idea is mistaken, and it’s bringing forth just as much animosity as the polarization that is thought to produce the conflicts cameras record.

There’s an old dispute in film theory between form and content. For most people, the meaning of moving images seems to relate to the footage inside them—the people, settings, and events that the camera pointed at and captured. But in fact, the way those elements were selected, edited, and re-presented has an enormous impact on the way they are received and understood. In the case of the Lincoln Memorial encounter, neither the original video nor the new one explains what “really happened.” Instead, both offer raw material that can take on various meanings in different contexts.

Because the newer video of the Lincoln Memorial encounter is so much longer, some would contend that it offers clarity about how the conflict arose. But if you watch the video in its entirety, it’s hard to find much clarification. Instead, it offers a large quantity of raw material from the same time and place. That footage betrays just how easy it is to find provocative moments in an otherwise ordinary sequence of events.

For example: At one point, the Black Hebrew Israelite protester holding the camera engages with a woman who had pointed out that Guatemala and Panama are indigenous names with their own meaning, different from names such as Indian or Puerto Rico ascribed by Spanish conquistadors. “I am from Panama,” the cameraman claims, “so now I’m indigenous from Panama … We indigenous, so we out here fighting for you.”

As best I can tell, the speaker means to argue that allegedly being from Panama, a place host to some indigenous peoples that bears an indigenous name, aligns his interests with those of North American indigenous peoples who had assembled for the Indigenous Peoples March. To say that this is a spurious argument would be putting it mildly; it’s a bit like me, a white man who lives in Atlanta, home of the civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., arguing that my intentions are necessarily aligned with those of modern extensions of the black civil-rights movement, such as Black Lives Matter.