Perpetuum mobile: colour, sound and motion

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Spicer v Commissioner for Police of the Metropolis [2019] EWHC 1439 (QB) before The Honourable Mr Justice Warby.

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Spicer v Commissioner for Police of the Metropolis [2021] EWHC 1099 (QB) par. 9-11, before The Honourable Mr Justice Julian Knowles.

The libel claim made by William Alexander Spicer against the Metropolitan Police Commissioner was lost three times in the Court of Queen’s Bench between 2019 and 2021. Spicer, described in the Particulars of Claim as a “respectable and widely-liked young man” was a student at Kingston University in South London (Spicer v Commissioner for Police of the Metropolis 2019).¹ On the night of March 31, the claimant was driving his car on Penrhyn Road in South London when the car in front of his, driven at a speed well above the 30 MPH speed limit, by one Farid Reza, hit and killed a Sports Science student Hina Shamin, who was crossing the street at a zebra crossing on her way to the library. Reza’s car subsequently crashed but Spicer continued on without incident and parked some way off before he returned to the scene. Reza and Spicer were both charged with causing death by dangerous driving, and causing serious injury by dangerous driving, contrary to ss 1 and s 1A of the Road Traffic Act 1988 respectively (Spicer v Commissioner for Police of the Metropolis 2021).² The Old Bailey jury found Reza guilty of both offenses and he was sentenced to five years and three months in prison. Spicer was acquitted of both charges, but the prosecution was allowed to add alternative counts of dangerous driving and careless driving (contrary to ss 2 & 3) and he was found guilty of the lesser of these two, careless driving. He received a fine and nine penalty points on his license.

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Spicer 2021: par. 11.

On the day of the verdicts and sentencing, the Metropolitan Police Press Office published an article which begins: “two guilty of killing a woman while racing their cars. [Picture Hina Shamin] [1] Two men who raced their high performance cars along a street in Kingston, leading to the death of a young woman, have been found guilty by a jury” (Spicer 2021).³ Two paragraphs later, the article states that Spicer was found not guilty of the two offenses but of careless driving. The libel action complained of the inaccuracy of the opening to the article, of harm to reputation and consequent effects of being shunned by Kingston University alumni, refused references by lecturers and being the subject of a campaign to have his degree removed. Central to the defense in the case was the truth of the article and as CCTV footage of the street where the accident occurred was available from local authority street cameras and from Kingston University cameras, the assertion of truth was eventually to be based on the filmic evidence that Spicer had been recklessly racing Reza at the time that Hina Shamin was run down.

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Spicer 2019: 7, column 2.

In the trial court before Warby J, no images are reproduced and it is the textual veracity of the report that is treated as the sole issue, rather than the evidence of the CCTV footage. That said, a picture of Hina Shamin is incorporated by reference into the judgment, but is not reproduced. The linear text, the monochrome black letter of law, has priority over visualization of the event, and so the Judge concludes that read as a whole, it was impossible to view the claimant as defamed by the article: “Reading the article and headline together the reasonable reader would conclude that the headline was wrong” (Spicer 2019).⁴ Omission of the picture is striking in its blatant evasion of the affective impact of the article. It eviscerates the emotional force of the opening line of the news item and their visceral augmentation by a photo-portrait of the “much-loved”, family oriented, diligent and studious young female victim of a hit and crash occasioned by Farid Reza’s dangerous driving. This raises the question, both semiotic and synaesthetic, verbal and visual, linear and lateral of the role of imagery in legal reasoning. The question comes to the fore in the appeal from Warby J’s judgment, where colour, sound and motion, graphs and tables, are manipulated to legitimate the rejection of the claim and to finally dismiss the case as lacking both merit and morals. The images play a pivotal role but do not get their due. The point has been made before, of course, in terms of the priority of the legal text, the prison house of language, the dead weight of law’s littera mortua, but seldom argued in specific detail let alone viewed in relation to an instant case, as will be the optical purpose of the ensuing ocular account of juridical occlusion.

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Metz 1982: 219-20.

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Metz 1982: 221-222.

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. As Spicer eventually involved CCTV film, it might be logical to turn to film studies, as some academics have suggested, to enable and facilitate a critical viewing. Here, however, one also encounters an element of conservatism, a propensity to look back so as to orient both prospect and progress. From early on one of the major tendencies of film theory and criticism was that of designating moving images as being like a language. The metaphor of film as a language came to dominate much of the semiotics of cinema. The best known and most rigorous proponent was probably Christian Metz, author of Film Language, who even in his Psychoanalysis and Cinema is captive to the Lacanian definition of an unconscious structured like a language. Thus, even though Metz productively distinguishes theatre and cinema and stresses the dream-like and hallucinatory character of the latter, analysis is nonetheless framed in terms of dream discourses, and rhetorical tropes, figures and colours extended from word to icon. Borrowing from Saussure and Barthes, Metz offers the following: “the metaphor-metonymy conception has the further advantage, which rhetoric obviously cannot provide, of having been formulated from the outset within the framework of a general semiology ... extending beyond language and including images”⁵ but nonetheless starting from and structured by the linguistic. Thus, Metz continues to argue that although cinema has no code that can be equated exactly with the language system, “cinematic codifications are related to a kind of grammar and a kind of rhetoric...” (Metz 1982: 219-220).⁶

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Cf. Metz 1982: 74 and 109.

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Cf. Mitry 2000: ix.

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Cf. Mitry 2000: 135.

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Cf. Wollen 2019 remains a useful overview of this genealogy.

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The cliché is used as the title of Rebecca Tushnet, “Worth a Thousand Words: The Images of Copyright” (2012) 125 Harvard Law Review 683 (Tushnet 2012: 683); and in numerous judicial opinions, as for example in Kochanski v. Speedway SuperAmerica, LLC, 356 Wis.2d 1 (2014) where the Judge opines: “A picture says a thousand words and represents some of the best evidence. But if a picture says a thousand words, then a video speaks volumes”.

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Logocentric bias comes from Boehme-Neßler: 2011: 106, where he correctly prefaces the term with the Reformist slogan sola scriptura.

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 (Metz 1982: 74 and 109).⁷ Until coralled and subjugated to prose the image is something of a threat. For Jean Mitry, in his retrospective preface to his collection Semiotics and the Analysis of Film, his principal achievement is noted as “I believe I was one of the first to argue that cinema is effectively a language” (Mitry 2000: IX).⁸ He proceeds then to the analogy of cinema and linguistics, which are aligned “in that significations in both are essentially relational” (Mitry 2000: 135).⁹ The influence of the structural linguist Saussure is evident throughout and as the literature of film criticism proliferated, filmic texts and discourses, syntax and grammar also escalated (Wollen 2019).¹⁰ There are, of course, other approaches, filmosophies, theories of montage and movement, time and image, often lodged in art history and theory as much as cinema, but in juridical terms the visual depiction is measured in prose and valued quite regularly as worth a thousand words (Tushnet 2012: 125).¹¹ The “logocentric bias” of law propels the jurist to demand verbalisation of visualization and in so doing rushes headlong into the reductive and optically truncated viewing of images as static depictions that can be essentialized in their referent (Boehme-Neßler 2011: 106).¹²

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Cf. Bittar 2021.

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Cf. Bittar 2021: 90.

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Cf. Metz 1974: 235.

Based in tradition and in the case of common law traditio defined as oral, esoteric and often tacit, convention it is hardly surprising that textualism would be viewed as the norm to be followed both historically and analytically. The context for viewing is scriptural and images are at best subject to a diagrammatology. Eduardo Bittar makes the point extensively in his treatise on the topic, developing a method that moves from the semiotic confines of language to the diagrammatic semiotic carré or square to the plastic and pictorial (Bittar 2021).¹³ His argument is that the verbal is always connected to the visual, to the body that speaks or the print that manifests and that figures of justice are always surrounded by verbal signs, texts, books and libraries. There is a semiotic mesh that includes a wild variety of distinctive figures, symbols, rites and signs. To this, the learned Professor adds that “the image has something to do with what the sign-verbal does not have, since it is able to function in a syncretic way ... broadening the complex and perception of aesthetic text”. He further notes that “it is certain that the image appears as something that creates strangeness to the culture of Law” (Bittar 2021: 90).¹⁴ Even here, however, there remains an implicit hierarchy between verbal and visual signs by means of which the aesthetic becomes aesthetic text and subject “to the work of reading and decoding of meaning”. What the semiotics of painting and of plasticity opens towards is an aesthetic sensorium and haptic space of improvisation that is epistemically autonomous, a heterotopia of sensible apprehension that in deleuzian terms forms it own plateau and rhizomatic system. What Metz termed the “imprisoning quandary” of the “said” determining the “saying”, the book dictating the message of the film is more restrictive by virtue of the verbal binary, the opposition or indeed complementarity of restriction to dual forms of linguistic enunciation than by dint of the hierarchy between past and present tense, writing and speech (Metz 1974: 235).¹⁵

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A point that can also be made in terms of the restraint of rhetoric, as analysed in Barthes 1988: 92. Originally published as “L’Ancienne rhétorique. Aide Mémoire” (Barthes 1970: 172) and also Genette 1982.

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Cf. Vesting 2018: 455.

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On the imaginal, see Bottici 2014; and in a legal context, see Manderson 2018.

There is a reason for restraint which is that restriction to the verbal allows law historically to confine judgement and decision to text and presence (Barthes 1988: 92).¹⁶ The rhetorical confinement operates in a manner similar to the unities of time, space and action in the closely aligned practice of theatre. What is critical, however, is not the incarceration in text and discourse but rather, as Bittar discerns, visual attention to what the verbal sign does not have. The legal maxim, pro lectione pictura est, the picture takes the place of knowing how to read, the image being the book of the illiterate, will continue to dominate the realm of law’s senses unless emphasis is removed from lecture and reading and an equal force is given to visual epistemology and pictorial sensibility as independent modes of knowing, distinct both neuro-physiologically and epistemically. What matters, the issue, is that of the encounter, the event of apprehending an image, as living knowledge and as a mobile relationship across time and space. In place of restraint, diagram and dictations which draw encounter back to word and text, the concept of opening the image and opening to the image requires a sensible methodology of viewing that engages all of the senses in an affective and heuristic relationship with the mobility of the depiction, object, document, portrait, mask or subject of engagement. At issue in the increasingly imaginal relay of law is not only a remediation in fragments, viral relays, blog platforms, email and text messaged images but also the environment of socially mediated pictures. There is a shift to apprehension through viral networks that decentralise and fragment knowledge, innundating the videosphere with images that suspend the status of what appears between real and illusory: “The new epistemology of the network has transformed this experience of not knowing into the general basis for all action” (Vesting 2018: 455).¹⁷ Uncertainty or an optimistic openness to the imaginal inundations of online networks generates an exponential acceleration. Knowledge always requires more knowledge, generating the perpetuum mobile of the internet and the manifestation of the unconscious in the imaginal forms of web relay and presence (Bottici 2014).¹⁸

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Cf. Debray 2013: 19.

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Cf. Debray 2013: 17.

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Cf. Debray 2013: 68-69. This theme is, of course, central to the oeuvre of Pierre Legendre, who elaborates famously upon love of the censor and desire and power. See, for example, Legendre 1998.

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Cf. Debray 2013: 72. For more on stupefaction and the fetish, see also Sutherland 2015.

The avenue of access, visibilisation on screen necessitates an openness to images, to the videosphere, to the affects and drives that it triggers. The classical maxim ubi oculus ibi amor –where there is an eye, there is love– translates into a dialectic of opportunity and stupefaction. The latter term derives for our purposes from the surrealist Louis Aragon who refers to the ‘stupefying image’ (l’image stupéfiante) as the passionate and unregulated imaginal conduit of infancy and the opium of adults (Debray 2013: 19).¹⁹ It is in the latter sense of stupefaction, meaning to astonish and intoxicate, as well as to daze, stun and deprive of speech, that the lure and power of images resides. For Debray the image takes hold of the unconscious which, far from being structured like a language “is destructured like an album”, a disordered atlas whose temulent confusion owes much to the unsettling of emotions and the lateral or rhizomatic roots of imagery in the visual archive of experience, the gallery of autobiography (Debray 2013: 17).²⁰ The image is a matter of sensible life, an encounter of a sensory kind, an apparition, whose history, as Debray has lengthily elaborated is that of taking hold of the entire person, of generating faith, within the Christian tradition, by “lighting the fire of the imagination” so that the subject “loves and follows” Christ, the Pope, the King, the Archbishop, President or Archepirate (Debray 2013: 68-69).²¹ The power of the image resides beyond words in the obscure sciography of imaginal transmission and transformation of will. Mute eloquence is converted politically into efficacious stupefaction, an astonishment as also a compliant or pious reverie: “A thousand signs can attest to... the transfer of the most traditional religious vocabulary of piety into the domain of aesthetics: epiphany, vocation, ineffable silence, pilgrimage, together with the vibrato and lyrical effusions that are attached to them” (Debray 2013: 72).²² Reconversion of the image from sacral to profane use, critical scrutiny of unconscious relays, of the emotive mnemonics and affective forces released by the imaginal in the videosphere requires learning to see in a more open and sensible fashion, to view stupefaction as the nascence of desire and so also as a critical opportunity.

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Spicer 2019: pars. 25-31.

Despite the classical soubriquet of ars iuris, jurists from the early modern era onwards, influenced, as noted above, by the Reformist principal of textualism, were hostile to images and to all other superfluities, ornaments or paratextual instruments. Precedent is Protestant, a fact that is fairly obvious when the prerequisite of printed law reports is taken into account. For current purposes the threat that the image poses leads to a species of looking away in which the legal gaze seeks to see through the picture and to view a beyond of the image in the imagined real that is putatively depicted. In evidential procedure, it is only if the form and matter of the photograph or less frequently film clip can be discarded as nothing other than what it represents, that it can be admitted into the gallery of the legal. Returning to Spicer v Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and the first instance decision, we can note the incorporation of an image from the Police Press release that was in issue in the libel litigation (Figure 1). It is assigned to the Appendix, a position of minority and incident but acts as a trigger for a lengthy judicial digression in which Justice Warby “would like to commend Miss Shamin’s family for their dignity throughout the trial” and then follows this with an impact statement, quoting Hina’s father, Shamin Khan saying “On the day Hina died, a part of me died with her”. Much more emotive description of loss follows: “the day she was born was the happiest day of my life... Hina was a delightful child… a compassionate and selfless woman... She loved her family and her family loved her... Not a day has passed without my wife crying. The upset has caused her eyesight to suffer and she has been diagnosed with glaucoma. She is truly heartbroken... now our last memory of Hina is of seeing her in a coffin at our local mosque” (Spicer 2019).²³

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The Third Man (Dir. Carol Reed, 1949).

The photoportrait is far from incidental or mere appendage but rather would appear to make Hina the heroine of a libel trial which legally is concerned only with whether the Press release is defamatory of the claimant. Hina, the victim of an accident in which a third party, Reza had run her over, becomes the star, the model student, the passionate professional, the upstanding citizen who was mown down. The photograph shows a well-groomed, sparky young woman in Western dress. Full frontal, staring directly at the camera with large dark eyes and full lips, she is assimilated, fashion conscious, sexy. A gold chain around her neck suggests affluence, while the style of the portrait is reminiscent of the movie The Third Man, the background being tilted 75 degrees, giving a sense of both talent and sophistication.²⁴ Hina’s shoulders playfully mimic the angle of the background. It is as if she is gold, which is certainly the purport of the judicial appendix. A tragedy has occurred and whether relevant to the determination or not, consciously or more likely unconsciously, the referenced image looms large over the affective force of the decision and its justificatory argument. William Spicer, who was too close to the accident, who was driving carelessly, is by implication responsible and so is justifiably chastised by having his reputation destroyed and is punished again by the Court, which holds that he has not been defamed but rather deserves the description and designation provided in the Press Release.

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Spicer 2021: par. 292.

As the entire sequence of events has been captured on film by CCTV cameras belonging to the local authority and to Kingston University there is certainly a sense in which seeing what happened could contribute to determining how right-thinking people would view the events to which the Police report refers. Whether these images could show William racing or showing off is a slightly more complex affective decision, particularly as the one witness referenced as being shocked by the speed of the cars, Ms Jones, could not see who was driving them (Spicer 2021).²⁵ Intriguingly, although the Court does not note this, the picture in which the witness is shown viewing the cars depicts only a flash of bright light, indicative perhaps of being astonished, dazzled or blinded by speed (Fig. 2.1). Justice Knowles is not however reproducing this image to give any direct sense of performative glibness, arrogance or insouciance, but rather to provide a chorography of the events. This can lead to a first question. The filmic footage is a live digital relay of the vehicles in motion, but the judgment reproduces still images. Where speed and so time is of the essence, the pictures are taken out of time and reproduced as stills in the judgment. Although film has been hyperlinked to decisions, most famously in the US Supreme Court case Scott v Harris, this is not done here. One can only conclude that objectivity might, in the view of Justice Knowles, be diminished by live footage, by sound and motion. The passage of two cars, which is to be judged by their appearance of racing and showing off, is to be decided without seeing them in either facet of commotion.

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On the inherent socio-historical movement of the image, see especially Didi-Huberman 2018; and on openness and opening, Didi-Huberman, 2004.

In Protestant fashion, the reduction of the live event to still photographs and the diagrams of the appositely named Dr Ford, deprives the viewers of key elements of apprehension. Sound, motion, atmosphere and the pixellated blurr of speeding footage are all excised from the determination. It is not, in the argot of film criticism, an accurate viewing, indeed it is no viewing but rather excision or, for Freudians, castration of the scene. Sensory deprivation dominates the judgment as if seeing the event in the candle-less darkness of the cranium is preferable to exposing the eye to the sting of witnessing the purported race and showing off. As it is imputation and sting, bane and antidote, right thinking perceptions of what is substantially true that are manipulated as the criteria for assessing whether there has been serious damage to reputation, the live scene might well provide the micro-ontology of images that will decide the outcome. Such at least would be the perspective of art criticism and of filmmakers and cineastes. All images are in motion historically and in relation to the living viewers that they constitute as subjects. To still the image is to kill it, in that anachrony is anachronistic, still life is death (Didi-Huberman 2018).²⁶ Justice Knowles, however, is more cautious as to what the precedent will represent visually.

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For fear of being accused of originality, I will note that I am taking the concept of diagrammatology from Charlotte Bigg, “Diagrams”, in Bernard Lightman (ed.), A Companion to the History of Science, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016 (Bigg 2016), where she notes of linear forms of drawing and mapping that they are “less obvious, or less obviously visual, types of scientific two-dimensional representations”. For more on diagrammatic thinking, see Sybille Krämer & Christina Ljungberg (eds), Thinking with Diagrams, Mouton: de Gruyter, 2016 (Krämer, Ljungberg 2016).

The initial device of the judgment is what can be termed diagrammatological (Bigg 2016).²⁷ There is a telematics read out from William’s car and Dr Ford, by apposite appellation at least, an expert in vehicular transport, provides “useful” graphs of the speed and bouts of braking of the vehicle during its exodus from a roundabout where Farid Reza had overtaken it, down Penrhyn Road and past the scene of the crash and crime. Twenty seconds of travel are captured graphically with ascending and descending lines of trajectory, braces, arrows, coded letters and numbers along with commentary (Fig 3).

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On the aesthetic paradigm and the atlas, see Didi-Huberman 2018: 3-5.

Even in relation to the graph shown, the colour and comments, figures of braces and directive arrows all break the epistemic purity of the Idea, and introduce a visual form of knowledge, a sensible dimension into knowing in its incompleteness. The diagram requires an aesthetic paradigm and visual epistemology that subverts the canonical forms of legal knowledge. The graph is diverse, multiple, impure, and in that pollution or burst of colour, impacts in ways that have to be approached via a theory of affect, and imagination (Didi-Huberman 2018: 3-5).²⁸ What is shown as the pinnacle and zenith of this axis of evil –or more accurately, as found by the jury, this careless driving– is the blood red of a trigger point and killing, as if it were William, and I insist on first names because Hina, her father and the experts all receive this intimacy, who had run over the fated victim of Reza’s driving. The circle closes in, the Claimant is boxed into a rectangular graphic quasi-scientific representation of his guilt. The data is presented in the dative case, to and for William, and clearly conveys much more than simple numbers. The graph is graphic, presenting what early modern lawyers would term vividae rationes for decision and in consequence incorporates an aesthetic and affective impetus into the mode of viewing what is represented.

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Cf. Didi-Huberman, 1995: 19.

Where Greimasian semiotics would differentiate the chromatic from the eidetic, for Peirce colours are most symptomatically icons derived from the bodies of the objects or here persons described. For the art historian Didi-Huberman the significance of colour is that of creating a distinct field of representation in which it is not the absent bodies that are depicted –figures or indeed faces could easily have been reproduced– but rather geometric shapes and patches of colour with arrows of direction painted on them (Didi-Huberman 1995: 19).²⁹ The colour and figures tell a story that the words cannot relay. In the view of Judge Julian Knowles the pictures and illustrative schemata demonstrate a race and showing off although this is for him a question only of speed, of acceleration and braking with the addition of Spicer’s illegal right turn and parking some way from the scene of the accident before returning. What is important is that while the words and the descriptions purport to represent and designated the absent actors in the narrative, at night, on Penhryn Road, what is present in the judgment is a set of colour images and their coda. What is most present in the judgment is thus the pixellated blur of the second frame of Figure 4 and the coloured rectangular figurations. The purple pen of the time stamp, marking the equivalent of royal decree or here the temporal letter of the law, and then the rectangles with arrows in yellow, green and red. The yellow, always yellow for Spicer must also be accounted. The colour of cowardice, of chicken and of straw, as in a straw claim, are not far from this peculiar visual choice. in tandem and confluence these are the vivid reasons –vividae rationes– of the decision and merit close scrutiny in their optical presence.

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Cf. Didi-Huberman 1995: 9.

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A point discussed in detail in Didi-Huberman 2007: 49.

What is present in the judgment is a visual conversion of the portrait in the mysterious pictorial materials of the CCTV footage laid to rest, mortified in stills. As Didi-Huberman proposes, the enigma of colour is that it is the specifically pictorial matter of the image but also takes it out of time, disfiguring here the diagram with purely visual marks that do not purport to represent the actors but simply to provide colouration and indication of a name. The tincture of crimson, the patches of colour are “a way of naming those zones, those moments ... where the visible vacillates and spills into the visual. It is a way of naming the cursed part of paintings, the indexical, nondescriptive, and dissemblant parts” (Didi-Huberman 1995: 9).³⁰ The materiality of the colours opens the image up to the play of associations, and in Freudian terms condenses and displaces, linking the figure to a series of networks and the visual archive, the gallery of renderings of tints, tinges, blushes, intensities, luminescence and irridescence. Didi-Huberman’s discussion of red takes place in relation to the religious depiction of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene in Noli me tangere. Here the blotches of red, in his interpretation, have a theological import as subtle yet effective signs of Christ’s stigmata, marks of the genesis of knowledge in the piercing of the body, the opening of the interior to the exterior: videbunt in quem transfixerunt being the Latin tag: they see inside him whom they pierce.³¹ To open you have to puncture, wound and here destroy. Vision is precipitated by opening and must bear its consequences in materiality.

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On the common law status of maxims, see Edward Whitehouse, Fortescutus illustratus, or a Commentary on That Nervous Treatise “De laudibus legum angliae” (London, 1663), p. 126 et seq.

The figure of red, of blood, marks the opening of the eyes of the judgment and carries vivid visual associations of a node of energy, a condensation or intersection of various optical knowledges that gain force and expression in the colour. The visual intimation of blood is linked in early modern law to printed law books in which red letters, cardinal flaming type would indicate universal norms, most usually in the modality of Latin maxims or other dogmas (Didi-Huberman 2007: 49).³² The significance of law’s red letters bequeaths to the colour the representation of the divine wound, the generative force of the Christian religion, as well as the promise that opens onto another life. There is nothing innocent in the use of the sanguine hue and thus when in Figure 4 we see flaming red marked Hina in both the stills and the diagram it is an optical allusion, an ambulation of the eye towards her wounding and her death. Hina was crushed, her bones broken, her life taken, death occasioned and here her case is opened up and entered into by means of these digital daubs of colour, the materiality and presence of blood in the images and the judgment.

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Huberman, The Eye of History, 2018 xvi.

The second criterion is that of relevance in both evidential and propulsive senses. Here it is a matter of acknowledging the event of the image, the materiality of presence as it filters both perception and judgment. The relevance of what is viewed in the medium of film, CCTV footage, camera capture in its diverse forms and specifically its sound, colour and motion. Borrowing from art theory: “The challenge in this perpetually moving experience of the visible and what it can teach us, consists in not reducing its complexity, of not enclosing what we experience in the realm of the sensible”.³³ To consider annotated stills extracted from film footage as direct evidence is a double error. First it immobilizes the image and isolates it, removing it from its own socius and history, from its incompleteness, rhizome and archive which moves and changes over time. It also objectifies and particularly in legal contexts removes the subjective dimension, ignores the affects triggered, the sensibilities awakened, the trammels, tendrils, rhizomes of the visual experienced over time.