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Nightcrawler(2014)
Written & Directed by Don Gilroy
The people's rapacious appetite for news as events unfolded probably began at the outset of the Gulf War, when the USA believed it had to overrun Kuwait. What was initially thought to be a short surgical strike that would last only a week, we know never stopped. During Operation Desert Storm, we were given the impression that cameras were actually following the tanks into war zones and bringing us live coverage from ground zero, just as Sanjaya narrated the events of the Kurukshetra War to King Dhritarashtra.
The cravings for news never abated after that. People kept wanting more. One after another, everything became groundbreaking news—the 2001 Twin Towers 9/11 tragedy, the 2004 Tsunami, the 2014 missing flight MH370 and the list just kept on going
Soon after that, with the advent of mobile devices and the ease of recording outdoors, citizen journalism became a thing. News channels liberally paid contributors, even for the faintest and scrawniest raw footage, as long as it depicted live coverage of an event dear to the public.
This movie just shows the extent to which photojournalism and citizen reporting can go to capture the most sensational angle of the news. Sometimes crime scenes were altered, bodies were moved to get better lighting, and crime scenes were contaminated; in the rapacious pursuit of having events recorded on film, human decency, like helping the wounded, takes a back seat. Money and the lure of being in the limelight supersede everything else.
Nightcrawler is a neo-noir film that tells the tale of a petty thief who scavenges public property for a few bucks and suddenly discovers the lucrative business of photojournalism on the violence-filled streets of Los Angeles. While most of the city slept, there was a wealth of money in selling exclusive footage of violent and morbid events to a local news station.
Farouk Gulsara (asokansham@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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