As with the Oulipo style exercises (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) [Workshop of Potential Literature] [1], in The Accident Tape, William Wegman superposes the three different points of view of three witnesses of an accident. With an alternating montage, Wegman weaves the narrative perspectives together in a non-linear sequence, and presents a confusing version of the facts, diametrically opposed to the objective of a police interrogation, while the conceptual framework (a close-up hand-held shot in a frontal view) may in fact simultaneously refer to it. The final conclusion is contradictory, playing on the discrepancies between each person's truth, revealing the impossible concordance between what we see and what we say, between what we are told and the reality that escapes us.

Manon Schwich
Translated by Jo Garden

[1] Oulipo is a group of literary and international mathematicians meeting once a month to reflect on the concept of formal constraint ; Raymond Queneau's Exercice de style is an example of literary restraint, in this book he has written 99 times the same story each time differently.