Much of what we know of much of the world comes from film. Filling the frame of every film, no matter how "fictional", is an endless documentation of its contemporary life. This documentation becomes most apparent with chronological or geographical distance. Every Hollywood production bears a subversive documentary message for viewers in China or Chad : this is what ordinary people in the U.S. or in France have in their house, this is what they have in their refrigerator.

after Eliot Weinberger in The Camera People