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The author Philip Pullman recently criticised the overuse of the present tense in contemporary literature, a criticism he stretched to the use of handheld cameras in film Both made him feel ‘claustrophobic’, he wrote, ‘always pressed up against the immediate’   Pullman’s article was a little sweeping and you may disagree with some of its conclusions, which suggested that an author’s reliance on the present tense was often the sign of an inability to handle narrative and that, correspondingly, the use of a hand-held camera was no more than a facetious way of achieving a sense of ‘authenticity’ But I think his uneasiness touched upon some broader issues that might be linked not only to the stylistic or formal inadequacies of individual authors and directors but also, via the problematic relation between narrative discourse and historical representation, to our troubled experience of contemporary history   I am thinking here in particular of those jerky videos which in many ways have defined our perception of the so-called Arab Spring These highly pixelated, out-of-focus images seem to play upon a convention often associated with the ‘documentary’: the more grainy and imperfect they are, the more they appear to be the signifiers of authenticity Shot in ‘real time’, these images seem ideologically neutral, the markers of documentary truth, positing a kind of metonymic relation between the representations produced by low-tech recording devices and the experiential truths of the socially disempowered What we encounter is an inverted epistemological hierarchy where clarity (read ideology) is subordinate to roughness (read truth) The events are recorded as and how they appear And when we see them no one speaks The events seem to recount themselves   Yet the seemingly self-evident correlation between roughness, authenticity and social disempowerment conceals a deeper, more contradictory relation, which the artist Hito Steyerl has termed ‘the uncertainty principle of modern documentarism’ For it is also often the case that the more immediate these forms of documentation become, the more unintelligible they are and the less there is for us to see Steyerl gives only one example – a fuzzy film shot by an American general with his