The dizzying speed with which images are decontextualized and then radically recontextualized is well illustrated when considering the recent movie The Rundown (US, 2003). Set in Brazil (but shot in L.A. and Hawai’i), it features Christopher Walken as a ruthless mine owner pitted against a bounty hunter, played by The Rock.

The mine itself is, as many people have noted, based on a series of stunning photographs taken in the 1980s by ‘concerned photographer’ Sebastião Salgado of some of the tens of thousands of ‘garimpeiros’ working at the Serra Pelada goldmine (Pará state, Brazil). The political context – the horrendous exploitation and human suffering that Salgado surely wished to convey – becomes, in The Rundown, merely a highly aestheticized feat of contemporary special effects. This is conveyed clearly enough in the two commentary tracks on the DVD. The producers merely refer to it as “Salgado’s mine”; the chummy chitchat between Peter Berg, the director, and The Rock, is more revealing:

Berg: We stole our photographs from… we didn’t steal actually, but we looked at some photographs by a photographer named Salgado, who went and photographed the Brazilian mines, so if anybody’s interested in looking at some really cool pictures of real Brazilian mines go check out Salgado’s photographs.

Rock: Yeah, and people who are basically being enslaved by..these guys…and there’s guys with guns…

Berg: Sure. There’s some great footage that exists, in National Geographic films, and then all the photos.

More stills from “Salgado’s mine” can be found here.