The ethnographer and filmmaker Jean Rouch once claimed, in an oft-referenced remark, that “fiction is the only way to penetrate reality.” That idea, complicated as it may sound, has been part of the fabric of documentary cinema since its beginnings, as early as the pioneering films of Robert Flaherty (who himself famously said, “Sometimes you have to lie to tell the truth.”). For Rouch, the camera wasn’t simply a recording device, nor could it be, but instead a tool of provocation. What the camera produced was a “truth of cinema” — as opposed to a “cinema of truth,” theorized by Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov — that was willfully constructed out of the elements, all the fiction and nonfiction, of daily life, and what he would later refer to as an “ethno-cinema.”
Rouch’s shadow hangs over “Art of the Real,” an expansive new series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center that is something of a survey of recent cinema — with a few historical detours — that resolutely abandons the strict boundaries of fiction and nonfiction film. The program contains more than 50 short and feature-length films, many of them from filmmakers whose work is rarely shown in the United States, which makes it difficult to parse.
I’ve seen most of the work here, and for what I’ve not seen it’s safe to say it’s worth checking out. But let’s start at the beginning. Rouch’s “Jaguar” (1954/67) will screen as part of a focus on the Sensory Ethnography Lab, whose work was recently featured in the Whitney Biennial and whose practice is uniquely indebted to the former. In many ways, these works define the contours of nonfiction cinema, where it started and where it is now. The Whitney’s presentation of the Sensory Ethnography Lab’s work left much to be desired, so it’s a thrill that the films — including Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s extraordinary “Manakamana” (2013), which opens theatrically in New York (beyond the “Art of the Real” series) on April 18 — will be screened in a theater, bringing out the audio-visual details that are lacking in the clustered Biennial.
Thom Andersen, whose work was included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, will present a host of films, including the dense “Red Hollywood” (1996), a documentary about Communist screenwriters and filmmakers who worked within the studio system from the 1930s to the 1950s, as well as “Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer” (1975), an essay-film that reframes the photographer as one of the earliest practitioners of moving images. The latter will be joined by “Olivia’s Place” (1966/74), an early work, as well as the wonderfully named new film “Hey, Asshole!” (2014). Andersen’s films combine historical research and dry wit, working as much as documentaries as sharp criticism of the documentary form.
Raya Martin and Mark Peranson’s “La ultima pelicula” (2013), along with Robert Greene’s “Actress” (2014), the opening and closing night films respectively, both challenge and mock traditional narrative filmmaking practice in equal measure. “La ultima pelicula” stars filmmaker Alex Ross Perry as, well, essentially himself — although a much more egotistical and self-serving version, I imagine — who’s scouting locations for a film about the end of the world, using the last available film stock. Ostensibly a behind-the-scenes portrait of the fictional narrative film, the two forms begin to blend, and the viewer is left to pick through the remains. “Actress” is a much more subtle and less vexing film. What begins as a documentary about the actress Brandy Burre, who had a recurring role on HBO’s “The Wire” before departing acting for motherhood, becomes a portrait of her inner turmoil visualized. Burre decides to get back into acting at the same time as her family life is crumbling around her, and Greene’s camera collapses Burre the subject and Burre the character, incorporating narrative tropes from Hollywood melodrama into the patchwork of the film.
An illicit affair worthy of a steamy romance picture unfolds in Jane Gillooly’s “Suitcase of Love and Shame” (2013), a film that questions what materials are truly necessary to make a “film.” Composed of hours of audio recordings passed back and forth between a married man and his secret lover, Gillooly recreates the ebb and flow of their relationship through an intimate handling of their private correspondence. “Suitcase,” along with other audio-based works such as Ernst Karel’s “Swiss Mountain Transport Systems” (2011), succinctly pose some of the questions that are weaved throughout the “Art of the Real” program: Is a film that highlights the audio instead of the visual still a film? Does the construction of a narrative obscure the truth?
Two political fictions prove that the construction (or reclaiming) of narrative is not only important toward discovering a “truth of cinema,” as Rouch sought, but it is essential — it does not, as some hardline documentary purists believe, obscure the essential truths of the work. Narimane Mari’s “Bloody Beans” (2013) is a fascinating restaging of the Algerian War for Independence through a cast of children, whose “Lord of the Flies”-style existence transforms into a “Battle of Algiers.” But “Bloody Beans” never loses its sense of freeform excitement, and the film moves from one scene to the next as if it’s floating in the waves of the beach where the children play, as if the film was actually made by the children.
“The Silent Majority Speaks” (2010), a polyphonic portrait of Iran’s long struggle against repression, reclaims the use of images within political struggle. The film, making its North American premiere, was initially credited to the Silent Collective, and reconstructs intertwined narratives: street level action and reaction among the Iranian people following the corrupt 2009 presidential elections, mostly filmed with hidden cameras, along with essayistic asides detailing the country’s long history of unrest. Filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi has recently revealed herself to be the director behind the film, and according to the program notes, she will introduce the film in her first public appearance since the disclosure.
Nicolas Provost’s “Plot Point Trilogy” (2007-12) clandestinely collects imagery as well, but with a much different result. Using footage collected in public places — Times Square, Las Vegas, and Tokyo — Provost then weaves these images into tense and often hilarious narratives that reinforce and mock the codes of traditional narrative cinema. Amie Siegel’s “Black Moon” (2010), screening along with other recent works, uses the conventions of narrative cinema as a loose frame for her hypnotic film about a group of armed female revolutionaries traversing a barren and destroyed landscape. That landscape, however, is not a post-apocalyptic future but the boarded-up and foreclosed housing developments of the present, and the film ingeniously collapses the genre modes and the documentary realism, resulting in something that feels not of an imagined future but of the immediate now.
Part of the excitement of “Art of the Real” is in the many directions it can take the viewer. These are just a few of the many, and there are still numerous avenues to explore. Each one is exciting and challenging and new. When people still confusingly talk about the culture of cinema being dead, we now have something to point toward to prove their view is limited. Cinema is not dead but to my eyes just being born, and “Art of the Real” creates the template to keep asking questions, the questions that will keep the cinema alive.
