Reality Bites: The Fiction of Documentary Filmmaking’s New Golden Age

There’s been a recent revival of, if not documentary filmmaking, at least film writing about documentaries. Before leaving the A.V. Club, critic Scott Tobias made the (righteous) argument that documentaries have to be just as formally sharp as the most skilled narratives to merit serious discussion rather than getting rubber-stamped approval simply by offering up informative talking points. That premise differed markedly from two triumphal pieces on the allegedly rising commercial and critical status of the documentary. First, David Edelstein enthused that the form had become “incredibly sexy”; following his lead, Tom Shone said that “the recent renaissance of documentary film-making is a direct antibody response to the superhero steroids being pumped through multiplexes every weekend.”

You might remember a similar wave of trend pieces about ten years ago. Then, the success of seven titles — 2002's “Bowling For Columbine,” 2003's “Spellbound” and “Winged Migration,” 2004's “Super Size Me” and “Fahrenheit 9/11,” 2005's “March of the Penguins” and “Mad Hot Ballroom” — had entertainment writers cranking out pieces on how the documentary, after years of critical/commercial marginalization, was here to stay and take its rightful place alongside narrative films on the box-office charts. That optimism was a short-lived reiteration of equally gung-ho sentiments from the mid-’90s, when there was another much-noted (albeit lower-grossing) wave of documentaries, led by “Crumb,” “When We Were Kings” and the perpetually-revered “Hoop Dreams.”

The arguments made by Shone and Edelstein go back even further in time. Intentionally or not, both directly echo Pauline Kael, who concluded her 1969 essay “Trash, Art, And the Movies” by saying that “now, for example, I really want documentaries. [...] I am desperate to know something, desperate for facts, for information, for faces of non-actors and for knowledge of how people live—for revelations, not for the little bits of show-business detail worked up for us by show-business minds who got them from the same movies we’re tired of.” Kael’s “I” is Shone’s public, but the idea in both cases is effectively the same: reality (however tenuously defined) is craved when Hollywood’s fantasies seem increasingly threadbare and unrewarding. Likewise, when Edelstein says the word “documentary” “carries an implicit threat: ‘Time for class, children,’” he’s following Kael’s lead when she observed that as kids, “there are categories of films we don’t like — documentaries generally (they’re too much like education).”

I’d argue (politely!) that both Shone and Edelstein are wrong about the documentary’s rising status and what the public generally wants from them, and that the reasons they’re wrong are germane to why mainstream discussion about the “documentary” form is wrong and unhelpful. The term “documentary” is increasingly untenable, seeing as it’s come to have connotations untampered reality: “non-fiction film” is more to the mark, implying a basis in at least some degree of unconstructed/unmediated footage without firm quotas on the ratio of truth to fiction. That said, Edelstein’s article includes a plausible breakdown of the documentary into 17 different sub-genres. Some seem unquestionable (“Ken Burns [...] Photos, archival footage, talking heads”), others tenuous (“Arty/Collage”?), but it’s a reasonably thorough stab at current taxonomy, with room for hybrids and undefinable outliers.

Now let’s take a look at the movies dating back over the last decade that could (charitably) be called “non-fiction” which actually cracked the domestic top 100 for each year:

2012: “2016: Obama’s America” (#95 — one slot below “Monster’s Inc. 3D”)
2011: “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never” (#50)
2010: “Jackass 3-D” (#23); “Hubble 3D” (#82)
2009: “Michael Jackson’s This Is It” (#46); “Bruno” (#55); “Earth” (#88); “Under The Sea 3D” (#92)
2008: “Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour” (#48)
2007: “Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric Adventure (IMAX)” (#100)
2006: “Borat” (#16); “Jackass: Number Two” (#33);
2005: “March Of The Penguins” (#27)
2004: “Fahrenheit 9/11? (#17)
2003: none (!)
2002: “Space Station 3D (IMAX)” (#30); “The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course” (#92)

None of these have very much to do with “reality” in the sense of “look, learn and challenge your reality.” “Borat” and the “Jackass” films are borderline “documentaries” (they record basically unfaked realities provoked into existence, so I’m including them), while “Fahrenheit 9/11? and 2016: “Obama’s America” are political polemics with built-in, pre-ordained audiences. That leaves us with IMAX spectacles, cute animals/kids, political self-righteousness, and close-ups of celebrities and musicians on stage and “behind the scenes.” These movies are hardly representatives of tough, unvarnished reality, and their narrative approaches are likewise comfortingly familiar.

Box Office Mojo’s list of the highest-grossing documentaries since 1980 excludes IMAX, concert movies and reality TV shows (though it oddly includes “hybrids” like Bieber’s “Never Say Never”), an indication of the term’s connotational slipperiness. Examining the top 20, most entries are political preaching to the choir, concert movies that snuck in anyway (Bieber, “Katy Perry: Pieces Of Me” and “Madonna: Truth Or Dare”) or nature docs. Those aside, we’re left with “Super Size Me” (which managed to jump-start a public health trend rather than latching onto a built-in, food-worried audience) and “Hoop Dreams,” the only classical verite doc in the upper commercial bracket. Things get more interesting as you travel down the list, but the overall balance is clearly in favor of basic pleasures and low on “reality.”

One reason historical or issues docs might be excluded here as a popular genre (except, again, for those with a built-in political audience) is that didactic streak Kael and Edelstein cite, which prompts the recollection of stultifying classroom hours staring at indifferently paced assemblages of still photos and droning voice-overs. For many casual viewers, this’ll be their only association with the genre. Such films are overtly intended to inform, insisting their content precludes any jazziness in approach; their virtue is, precisely, their truth-value, and nothing else. It’s clear viewers don’t feel tugged towards these titles when they exit the classroom and acquire box office purchasing power.

That brings us back to Tobias’ piece. Sticking to movies that actually got American distribution, however token, I can list quite a few as beautifully made as they were commercially marginal: e.g. ”Only The Young,” a deceptively blissed-out look at Christian Cali skater teens and “Whores’ Glory,” a horrific/gorgeously shot triptych on prostitution around the world. Both were scantily reviewed, and both sound quite awful in synoptic form; visual surprises lurk in every shot, but not in outline. Neither critics nor the public are used to talking about documentaries as beautiful/hypnotic/etc., leaving such titles in an awkward lurch. It’s foolish optimism to think hyper-formalist documentaries (where is where really interesting things are occurring now) will have any more commercial success than their strictly fictional components any time soon; right now they don’t even get that. Positing that information and reality are the documentary’s biggest selling points isn’t an argument for the genre: it’s an evaluative checklist ignoring developments in the field, doing both the genre and box-office prognostication an equally big disservice.

Categories: Features

Tags: Documentaries, Jackass, Justin bieber, Op-ed, Searching for sugar man

A Product of their Time: The Danger of Disrespecting Science Fiction

Few genres better lend themselves to metaphor than science fiction. Like the horror film—atop which all manner of symbolism has been traditionally projected—sci-fi often resembles a kind of empty vessel readily filled with keen insights, which makes the practice of extrapolating social and political allegories from such films, especially from a historical remove, all the more satisfying intellectually. This is not to imply that heady metaphorical readings of science fiction films are anything less than compelling or valid, both of which they very often are. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that our tendency to seek (largely unintended) subtextual depth from horror and sci-fi in particular is founded on some fairly problematic assumptions about the genres themselves, both in terms of their shared history and the implied value of their form.

The roots of cinematic sci-fi, of course, can be traced all the way back to the inception of the cinema itself, a genre born in the magic of Georges Melies and “A Trip to the Moon”. But despite its legacy, the reputation of science fiction as an essentially frivolous genre has more or less endured since the halcyon days of the sci-fi B-movie, a period which for better or worse has long defined our overriding perception of the ambitions and limitations of the style. Which is to say that with the exception of self-consciously major works from outlying auteurs—Stanley Kubrick’s “2001” remains the preeminent example—science fiction continues to be regarded, in a general way, as fundamentally less serious than other genres. Though not quite as overtly ghettoized as horror, it’s nevertheless regarded in the popular imagination as somehow inherently trivial, a breeding ground for little more than shallow spectacle and superficial special effects.

This line of thinking leads many to the rather misleading conclusion that a sci-fi film, and in particular a low-budget or B-movie sci-fi film, isn’t likely to have been deliberately imbued with meaning or import of any significance, which makes it the job of the critic to read the film as a product of its time and place. This accounts for why, when we talk about, say, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, we tend to describe it as indirectly responding to rather than actively commenting on Red Scare paranoia. We find it easier to accept that a B-movie was subconsciously playing into cold war anxieties rather than thoughtfully articulating them: you can see similar rhetoric cropping up in discussions of the social or political climate and films like “Godzilla” or “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” in most cases denying the artist responsible for the work in question responsibility for serious metaphor and allegory.

It’s true that many of these films, especially during the 1950s, were not necessarily aware of the depth of their own conception, and were any of the artists behind such films to retroactively deny their intention to work in symbolism, readings about cold war fear or implicit propaganda would remain no less valid or interesting. But that’s true of all films—readings can always be compelling whether they do or do not cohere with an artist’s original vision—and yet it’s only sci-fi and horror that continue to be relegated to the status of permanently unintentional meaning, each film a perpetual “product of its time” to be regarded as blank texts made without thought. And this still happens: even Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds,” made by one of the American cinema’s most prominent auteurs, was rarely discussed as a film deliberately engaging with post-9/11 anxieties, leaving such readings to lofty afterthought.

The exception to this tendency, for whatever reason, is satire. Our fascination with science fiction as cautionary tale obviously goes back a long way—it has a basis in literature as much as in film—and we’re still happy to accept a sci-fi film as self-consciously expressing a coherent idea so long as that idea is readily understandable as political critique. The template is veritable cliche: a film is set in some dystopian future world of overt surveillance and oppression, the film a terrifying vision of a place where freedom has been eclipsed by state power and whatever magical drug/incredible technology/televised battle royale. But this kind of artist-admitted “meaning”, which usually begins and ends with a base social fear exaggerated to the point of unquestionable awfulness, very rarely engages with the world in any intelligent or significant way, and it only qualifies as symbolic only insofar as some tenuous connection may be drawn between this future world and our own. A discerning viewer would be hard-pressed to call The Hunger Games a functional “satire”, if only because, if it is indeed satirical, what is its target? A contemporary culture obsessed with the spectacle of violence? The fear that government power will continue growing until we live in a brutal world dictatorship? This isn’t exactly revelatory.

This weekend sees the American release of the new Tom Cruise sci-fi vehicle “Oblivion,” another film in which the only intended meaning one can extrapolate sits right on the surface. The film is essentially post-apocalyptic—it’s set on an uninhabitable earth, not unlike “Wall-E”—but if the point is to suggest that we are on the verge of rendering our planet unlivable, we’ll hardly be amazed or devastated by the critique. It’s more likely that, many years down the line, we’ll look back on “Oblivion” as (probably unintentionally) responding to our current social and political climate, tapping into anxieties regarding, say, burgeoning drone warfare, which the film in fact includes. Perhaps that’s the point of our tendency to extrapolate hidden meanings from sci-fi films: we want to find the message that’s there without yet knowing it, the import only apparent from at least a minor historical remove.

Categories: Features

Tags: Godzilla, Oblivion, Sci-Fi, The Hunger Games, Wall-e

FILM PULP FICTION

Tanggal Rilis :14 October 1994
Jenis Film :Crime | Drama
Diperankan Oleh :John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth
Ringkasan Cerita FILM PULP FICTION :

Pulp Fiction adalah sebuah film tahun 1994 karya sutradara Quentin Tarantino, yang menulis naskah cerita film tersebut bersama Roger Avary. Sebagai sebuah film drama kriminal dengan alur cerita yang non-linear, film tersebut terkenal karena dialog-dialognya yang kaya dan menggunakan kosa kata yang unik, campuran humor dan kekerasan yang ironis, dan masuknya berbagai referensi film dan kebudayaan pop. Film ini dinominasikan untuk tujuh Piala Oscar, termasuk Film Terbaik. Tarantino dan Avary memenangkan Piala Oscar untuk kategori Best Original Screenplay. Film ini juga dianugerahi penghargaan Palme d’Or di Festival Film Cannes. Sebagai sebuah film yang sukses secara komersial, film ini juga menghidupkan kembali karier pemeran utamanya, John Travolta, yang menerima nominasi Piala Oscar, dan pemeran pembantunya, Samuel L. Jackson dan Uma Thurman.

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