Meet the People

Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, truth and artifice, Meet the People presents fourteen ‘characters’ who face the camera in talking head close-ups and speak about their lives and dreams. The intimacy and honesty of their fragmented, autobiographical storytelling is illusory; the credits reveal that these people are professional actors, playing fictional roles, reading a script. As Silver writes, this work points to a complicity on the part of the viewer in his desire to believe and identify with the traditions of and characters on TV. The same television that mimics a perfected form of the identity of the ‘average person’ is also in part responsible for creating this identity; it both researches, uses and manufactures this ‘average person’s‘ hopes and dreams. And so the question of a ‘real person’ becomes ‘real’ compared to what?