Trial films on
trial: law, justice, and popular culture
Austin Sarat, Jessica Silbey, Martha
Merrill Umphrey (eds.)
Tuscaloosa:
The University of Alabama Press, 2019, 240 pp,
ISBN:
9780817320263
A collection of wide-ranging critical
essays that examine how the judicial system is represented on screen.
Historically, the emergence of the trial film genre coincided with the
development of motion pictures. In fact, one of the very first feature-length
films, Falsely Accused!, released in
1908, was a courtroom drama. Since then, this niche genre has produced such
critically acclaimed films as Twelve
Angry Men, To Kill a Mockingbird,
and Anatomy of a Murder. The
popularity and success of these films can be attributed to the fundamental
similarities of filmic narratives and trial proceedings. Both seek to construct
a «»reality»» through storytelling and representation and
in so doing persuade the audience or jury to believe what they see. Trial Films on Trial: Law, Justice, and
Popular Culture is the first book to focus exclusively on the special
significance of trial films for both film and legal studies. The contributors
to this volume offer a contemporary approach to the trial film genre. Despite
the fact that the medium of film is one of the most pervasive means by which
many citizens receive come to know the justice system, these trial films are
rarely analyzed and critiqued. The chapters cover a variety of topics, such as
how and why film audiences adopt the role of the jury, the narrative and visual
conventions employed by directors, and the ways mid-to-late-twentieth-century
trial films offered insights into the events of that period.
—
Introduction: the pleasures and possibilities of trial films
Austin
Sarat, Jessica Silbey, Martha Merrill Umphrey
—
Law and the order of popular culture
Carol
J. Clover
—
Knowing it when we see it: realism and melodrama in American film since The
birth of a nation
Ticien
Marie Sassoubre
—
Reasonable doubts, unspoken fears: reassessing the trial film’s «heroic
age»
Barry
Langford
—
Disorder in court: representations of resistance to law in trial film dramas
Norman
W. Spaulding
—
«I am here. I was there.»: haunted testimony in the memory of justice
and the specialist
Katie
Model
—
The appearance of truth: juridical reception and photographic evidence in
standard operating procedure
Jennifer
Petersen.
