4.1. “A Familiar Smile”: The Ritz Surveillance Camera Footage During the 2007 Inquest
During the Royal Inquest of 2007, the full length footage from the Ritz was published, changing the symbolic status of the very few images that had been released in 1997. In the most frequently remediated sequence, Diana and Dodi are seen entering the hotel at 4.35pm on 30 August 1997, walking across a lobby before getting into a mirrored lift, where the Princess looks up towards the camera with a “familiar smile” [
29].
Images from the last day of Princess Diana taken by the Ritz security cameras (31 security cameras in and around the hotel) had leaked to the media soon after her death. Disseminated to the public—printed or screened—as mostly single images at first, they belong to the category of “visual obituaries”, as Dietmar Kammerer calls the convention of using CCTV images as last images of event-related deaths. One series of stills became especially famous: Diana passing through the revolving doors entering the lobby, with Dodi shortly behind her. Kammerer sees Diana entering the “media necrocracy”, the group of celebrities who have become symbolically immortal because their image never ages, via
these images of her ([
11], p. 312). Kammerer also observes how the contemporary serialized publication of the sequence of these images (first, Diana entering the lobby through the revolving door, then Dodi following her) in the German magazine
Der Spiegel in an issue from 1997 does not only reconstruct Diana’s last day up to the fatal accident. The way the images are reproduced create what he calls a “rudimentary narrative” ([
11], p. 312). This also creates a dramatic effect—possibly also, one might add, as this is indeed a scene of entering, of an entry to a final scene—unbeknownst to the protagonists.
The more images and footage are released, the less do CCTV images of the last day of Diana fit the analytical frame of near auratic images set up by Kammerer, who concentrates in his discussion on the use of the images in the late 1990s. The ambivalence between stasis and dynamis stressed by Kammerer regarding the image sequence as it was reproduced in
Der Spiegel ([
11], p. 314) is resolved during the inquest by showing the footage as a produced video (albeit, with staggering movements as this is time-lag camera footage). The one hour sequence of Princess Diana’s last day released as evidence during the inquest in October 2007, thus, ten years after the event, is a post-production in a double sense: it is post-produced from the large amount of footage the Ritz hotel possesses, and it is done so in a way that echoes the reports of Dodi’s and Diana’s last day that were long since available. This footage conveys nothing but a visual reiteration of these reports. Yet the comments that accompanied the footage’s broadcast on
SKY News on the evenings of 3 October and 4 October 2007 frame it as a glamour reportage: The reporter’s commentary is focused on the “lush” environment inside the Ritz hotel as well as the “luxurious” imperial suite to which we see Diana and Dodi ascending on the footage from the camera inside the lift, and the commentary also offers several comments on what the Princess is wearing and how she is looking [
29].
2 The investigative footage, fodder for conspiracy theories over the span of ten years, here reveals the only meaning that images of Princess Diana can have, whether on grainy surveillance camera footage or on a high-resolution portrait shot: they are always, and inevitably, footage from the red carpet, celebrity
pics. The reporting on
Sky News was chosen for discussion here because it was the television program that showed the footage most comprehensively at the time in 2007, and it was the program that devoted most airtime to them. Also, it was the news story that received a high number of views on
YouTube, where it was uploaded and shared. The remediation of the
SKY News reporting on the CCTV footage on
You Tube shows the gathering of meaning surrounding these images in an exemplary way.
The factual banality of these images, simultaneously bestowed with so much narrative meaning, echoes David Marriott’s analysis of CCTV images as “empty signs” that he developed in connection with another set of “about-to-die” CCTV images in the British public, the images of Damilola Taylor from 2000, a boy who was stabbed to death in the London suburb of Peckham:
“Like a pure abstraction of the public sphere or an event without history, the CCTV image designates an excess of mimesis over that of narrative meaning […]. The entire three sequences [of video footage of Damilola shortly before him being stabbed, NF] are haunted by this symbolic distance between what appears and what remains ungraspable as resemblance: the death of a boy that cannot be seen and which, because of this, appears everywhere in these images, but without which these images remain an empty sign of that event, a semblance in which his death has vanished. […] Where do we see [the death of the boy]? At first sight it seems untraceable, impossible: the freedom to replay, freeze or enlarge the video image only realizes the following: These images are empty and inaccessible, they cannot act as witnesses to what we know (or imagine) as the death of this boy, a death which remains outside the time and processes of the televisual image.”
This observation of the paradoxical emptiness of images of moments before an event occurs, as they are simultaneously charged with narrative meaning, is illustrated by the fact that
SKY News showed more CCTV footage on 4 October 2007, in which nothing but the empty service corridor behind the Imperial Suite was to be seen for nearly 40 s. In TV news temporality, 40 s are a long time for basically nothing to be shown, so the fact that this corridor footage was indeed given to the public’s scrutiny had to be legitimized by the commentator:
Male Commentator: “Although these seem to be rather boring pictures, these are, in fact, historical. These are the very last pictures we will ever see of Princess Diana alive, and within 15 min of these pictures, Diana and Dodi Fayed will be dead […]. These are moving pictures, I think, although this is just an empty corridor here.”
The loss of
aura of these images, and journalistic ventures to act against this loss by reminding the viewer why she is supposed to give her attention to images of an empty hotel corridor, is also obvious from the advertising language that, to give a complementary example,
The Daily Mail used in its reportage of the footage in 2007 [
31]. It had to be stressed as early as in the title of the article, that these images were indeed “new and unseen” to a public to which no image of Diana can ever appear unseen, nor new. The “auratic” presence that the images seem to possess in the analysis of Kammerer referred to above lose their aspect of singularity in the ongoing footage. Rather, these images were moved back into the juridical idiom of a public coroner’s inquest, and public reporting failed to bestow them with the cultural import that they had in 1997. The images, long since artefacts of media memory, are supposed to become again that for which they were made: legal evidence. This objective in combination with the attempts to historicize and glamourize the images again, as it occurred not only in
SKY News but also in national newspapers such as
The Guardian,
The Daily Mail and
The Daily Telegraph, which were similar in their interpretation of the images, creates a friction as to where the cultural location of these images is actually to be found. They have become simultaneously artifacts of legal evidence—factual and objective—and the material of public remembering—affective and affecting.
4.2. Narrating A Befitting Death: Keith Allen’s Unlawful Killing (2011)
As stated above, the CCTV images of Diana and Dodi are now signifying conspiracy stories, symbols for the affective certainty that the icon could not have died a banal death. The quasi-documentary film
Unlawful Killing [
32] was shown at Cannes film festival in 2011 and managed to cause a slight stir in the British public, which was at the time, as film-maker Keith Allen states in the entry narration to his movie, “demented by another Royal wedding”, that of Diana’s son William: itself a ceremonial media event that resonated with the remembering of Diana. Although the film was strategically launched and very expensive, it failed to secure a distributor either for the US or for the UK, where it’s screening pended 87 changes to become legal in cinemas. After a struggle to find a distributor, the film was made available on DVD in early 2015, without aiming to show it in cinemas anymore. Allen’s documentary, aiming for a controversial style in the vein of Michael Moore’s films, was unsuccessful.
Unlawful Killing not only has the problem that its dramaturgy lags and is confused. The supposed “inquest of the inquest” represents the Royal family and especially Prince Phillip as murderers. The movie has one aim: re-opening the questions that the inquest of 2007 had closed [
33]. While the movie takes its title from the verdict of the inquest, it does not mention that the jury decided on 7 April 2008 that Diana and Dodi had been unlawfully killed due to grossly negligent driving by the chauffeur, Henri Paul, contributed to by the equally reckless driving of pursuing vehicles. Rather, the movie pretends that the perpetrators of an “unlawful killing” was still open to investigation and interpretation, here in the person of the—Al-Fayed financed—director Keith Allen.
The above mentioned released footage from the Paris Ritz security cameras plays a pivotal role in the movie. The known Paris Ritz footage is used for various reasons at different points of the narration, and for different aims, although it is the same set of images that is used repeatedly in the film to move the plot forward and illustrate the narration. It is divided into three distinct scenes: the first shows Diana and Dodi entering the Ritz through revolving doors on the evening of 31 August. A second scene shows them leaving the Imperial Suite towards the elevator. A third scene is compiled from the footage from the elevator. The last set of images post-produced into a scene shows the couple passing through a corridor towards the rear exit of the hotel that leads into the backstreet, where a Mercedes was parked in which the couple departed with Diana’s bodyguard and the driver at around 00:20 h, on the journey which ended with the accident in the Alma tunnel. In addition to this footage of Di and Dodi, there is a set of footage of Henri Paul also entering the Ritz at around 22:00 h on 31 August through the revolving doors, walking around the hotel lobby around 22:20, and a set of images of Henri Paul standing outside the hotel in the backstreet where the Mercedes was parked, waving at someone on the opposite side of the street at around 00:15 on 1 September 1, just prior to the departure of the car with Diana and Dodi.
The film opens with a black screen on which a handwritten letter gradually appears, supposedly by Diana, in which she predicts—or fantasizes, according to epistemic community—her former husband plotting her death in a car crash made to look like an accident. This is followed by a fast cut of Diana and Dodi in the Ritz corridor and elevator, leaving for the fatal drive. These images, as they were also seen on TV, are now made affect-creating by the fast-forward mode in which they are shown, and by a soundtrack of pulsating indie-rock produced by Dave Stewart. In this way, the post-production use of the film Unlawful Killing gives a new meaning to those stale images that the commentators of SKY News could do little to make interesting. They are now weaved into the story that will culminate in the assertion that Prince Phillip ordered the death of Diana and Dodi. As a constitutive part of this narrative, the CCTV images now can regain their auratic quality: they are employed as a fully experiential medium that is supposed to induce a gut feeling in the viewers of Allen’s movie that Dodi’s and Diana’s accident was indeed suspicious.
Allen uses this technique throughout the movie, weaving the self-same sets of CCTV footage into various interpretative and experiential frames: combined with newspaper images and red carpet footage of Diana, the images are used to narrate the love affair with Dodi and to generally represent the memory of Diana; they act as artefacts of mediatized mourning. Combined with photos of the blood samples and images of written documents in the case of the Henri Paul images, the images are used as a supposedly evidential medium once more. Allen’s film creates different moods with the self-same set of images by adding different soundtracks, by editing and replaying them in fast-forward or slow-motion mode, and combining them with various other sorts of image material. Allen’s film even shows that an empty screen can be made to narrate.
One recurrent ingredient of the conventionalized Diana conspiracy narrative is the missing footage from traffic video cameras along the route that could have been used to establish how fast the Mercedes had actually been going. It could have also established if it was followed or hindered by other vehicles—or it could even have captured the ominous bright flash that is repeatedly stated by conspiracy theorists as the reason for their belief that Diana’s death was not a pure accident. A bright flash is supposedly a technique used by security services in order to blind drivers. The missing footage from the traffic cameras is therefore one of those double-bind tropes within the pragmatics of conspiracy stories: the fact that it
should exist makes its non-existence suspicious, but its factual non-existence also enables conspiracy theorists to keep to their sinister versions of happenings, as David Cohen states in his non-fiction book on Diana,
Death of A Goddess:
“It is true that no CCTV footage was ever produced or mentioned by the police. […]. Once the police said that the speed camera at the Alma was malfunctioning, the disinformation spread and was exaggerated in a way very familiar to those who study rumor. Soon the story spiraled into the ‘fact’ that all the cameras on the route were out of action that night.”
Keith Allen’s movie performs the story of the non-existent footage. The following is a transcript from the movie. On the left, you will find the run time, then, given in italics, the video proper, i.e., what you see during the given runtime, then Keith Allen’s voiceover narration. I have not considered other soundtracks in this transcript.
1:04:54–1:04:59 empty video tape running on screen
Narrator: “what you are seeing is what the CCTV camera at the entry of the Alma tunnel was recording at the time of the crash.”
1:05:00–1:05:01 empty video tape running on screen
Narrator: “nothing.”
1:05:02–1:05:09 Alma tunnel entry, normal daytime traffic
Narrator: “because it was switched off, although it is usually switched on 24 hours a day.”
01:05:10 image of the CCTV camera outside the tunnel
Narrator: “was that just another coincidence…”
01:05:12 poster of Di at Alma tunnel entry, handwritten on it: “ti amo sempre”
Narrator: “…or something more sinister?”
Again, “empty images” are used to narrate a story. The aim of the narrator’s speech act is clearly to create doubt in the listener/viewer concerning the prevalent explanation that the non-production of CCTV footage of that night is a coincidence. The film narration expresses this through the second sentence that accompanies the images from normal traffic at the Alma: on that night when Diana died, the CCTV camera was not running, although it is “usually switched on 24 hours a day”. The combination of this attempt to convince the viewer of the “fact” that the disabled camera is no mere coincidence is framed in a question. Thus, the illocutionary force of the utterance, the aim for the listener/viewer to provide her own answer to this given possibility, is especially obvious. What the viewer actually sees while she hears the commentary is pushing the emptiness of images that can be put to narrative used to an extreme: In the short time frame of only 16 s, we have three cuts. Of a sequence of 16 s, nearly half (seven seconds) are devoted to showing a reeling video tape.
A reeling video tape is not the same kind of blank screen that the computer age is used to. On a computer or a digital recording, a blank screen is blank, there is nothing but static blackness, even if the time is running. Instead, here we see a video tape running, which means that there is actually something moving on the screen. The empty screen actually does represent something: it has a temporal dimension, a memory dimension. It assumes that the factual reel of video from the CCTV camera at the Alma tunnel looked like this in 1997. That we are presented with a close-up of this camera in the next cut, supposedly doing its job in daytime traffic, seems like a validation of the factuality of the narration. This evocation of non-existing video footage to tell a story of conspiracy is also interesting for the implications it makes about visual surveillance: it is what is missing which is understood as problematic, therefore asking for comprehensive surveillance and policing in a context that could have brought clarity. In an underlying appraisal, surveillance is therefore perceived in a positive light—paradoxically, in a film that is marketing a conspiracy story.
The final cut presents us with a symbolically loaded image: a poster of Diana in a tiara, situated at the column that stands on the roof of the Alma tunnel entry, with the handwritten words “ti amo sempre”. This image caters to the mournful tone the movie slips into, even when it is supposed to be “the inquest of the inquest”, as the narrator announces at the beginning of the movie. However, where the short sequence does wish to bring about an argument (the CCTV was switched off, this was not a coincidence), it closes and centres on an image mourning Diana, who some people obviously still personally love. The poster shown is not withered but brand new, therefore testifying to the fact that the entry of the Alma tunnel is now a memory site. Like the TV footage discussed in the previous section, Keith Allen’s film reveals the same friction that is created by the use of CCTV in the narrative: here, a friction between the investigative journalism the film supposedly performs and a media document of mourning, in the case of this film, probably less public mourning but the very personal one of the billionaire who financed the contentious film.