“ALL I want is the truth. Just gimme some truth!” John Lennon sang. Lennon, who would have turned 70 last weekend, is the subject of Michael Epstein’s new documentary, “LENNONYC,” shown at the recently concluded New York Film Festival and slated for broadcast on PBS next month. Mr. Epstein’s film is part of a surge of documentaries, some shown on television, some released in theaters, that try to answer Lennon’s plea while demonstrating just how tricky the pursuit of cinematic truth can be.
Documentary seems, more than ever, like a catchall rubric, a label that can be affixed to heterogeneous, even contradictory products, ranging from the pranks of the elusive street artist Banksy (recorded in “Exit Through the Gift Shop”) to “Baseball: The Tenth Inning,” Ken Burns’s meditation on the recent history of baseball. Errol Morris’s “Tabloid” is obviously a documentary, but the term seems small and tidy next to the film itself, which may be visually restrained (Mr. Morris’s usual face-to-camera interviews, spiked by music and counterpointed with old still photographs and bits of stock footage), but is as wild as anything you can imagine. Cloned dogs! Mormon sex scandals! How can such things exist at all, much less coexist in a single movie?
And how can the same word usefully apply to “Jackass 3-D,” the latest anthology of perilous stunts from Johnny Knoxville and his masochistic pals, and to “Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s angry exposé of the roots of the current economic crisis? This is not just a question of tone or subject matter — “Jackass” and “Inside Job” contemplate ingenious and destructive acts of wanton stupidity, while Mr. Burns and Banksy are preoccupied with fame, money and deceit — but also a matter of formal rules and intellectual procedures.
Basic practical considerations — How much voice-over? How much vérité? To re-enact or not? — have a way of opening thorny ethical and philosophical problems. Is the documentarian’s job to show stuff happening or to listen to people talking? To disclose, faithfully and without overt artifice, the way the world is, or to try to explain why it is that way? Is the point of documentary, to cite an old Marxist slogan, not to explain the world, but to change it?
All of the above and more, judging from the available evidence. What is a documentary? It is a perennial question; although these days it might be more appropriate to ask, what isn’t? The seductions of the literal are everywhere. With the reality-television boom well into its second decade, we seem now to be living in the age of the small-screen “docu-soap,” a TV-land term of art that neatly collapses the boundary between the mundane and the melodramatic, between the uninflected capture of actual life and the brazen manipulation of persons and emotion.
Not that these frontiers have ever been policed with much rigor. Sometimes the transgressions are harmless fun. Fake-documentary methods of the kind popularized by Christopher Guest and his co-conspirators in films like “This Is Spinal Tap” (directed by Rob Reiner) and “Best in Show” have become staples, or perhaps clichés, of the small-screen sitcom. Jerky hand-held cameras and head-on, confessional video diaries, somewhat novel when “The Office” was a British import, are now, thanks to the American version and “Modern Family” and “Parks and Recreation,” as familiar as laugh tracks and unchanging living-room sets used to be. Comical fake news, meanwhile, is frequently more credible and serious than the clowning that masquerades as the real thing.
At the movies the found-footage “reality” horror picture has become a subgenre in its own right — so much so that “Catfish,” a bona fide documentary, makes self-conscious use of “The Blair Witch Project” and “Paranormal Activity” techniques. The trailer takes viewers on a journey, recorded in jumpy, poorly framed video, that ends late at night at a lonely farm on a deserted road, a situation that evokes all kinds of eerie, unseen dangers. What’s inside that barn? At this point of high tension we are promised that what we are going to see is “not inspired by true events,” but instead “just true.”
That is a tantalizing promise, and one that is likely to set off alarms. It seems either disingenuous or naïve to say that what happens is “just true,” and “Catfish” flips and flops between these two possibilities. It is bluntly simple-minded even as it makes a great show of its epistemological sophistication. The main character, Nev Shulman — whose older brother, Ariel, directed the film with Henry Joost — is credulous enough to take at face value the self-presentations of a Michigan family he meets on Facebook. He first befriends an 8-year-old girl who is an artistic prodigy, her paintings shown in galleries and sold for impressive sums. The girl’s mother is warm and supportive, and, best of all, she has an older daughter named Megan who is 19, hot, super-talented and, before long, totally in love with Nev.
Too good to be true! But who is fooling whom? The narrative of “Catfish” takes its turn toward the creepy when Nev and his friends uncover evidence that Megan has lifted soundtracks from YouTube videos and posted them on Facebook as her own musical performances. They set out for Michigan to solve a mystery that was the product of their own gullibility, unless, as seems more likely, it was the result of their strategic decision to play the patsies in a sad and somewhat inspired Internet hoax.
Does it make a difference? Does the dishonesty of the Facebook trickster justify the coyness of the young men who set out to unmask her? This ethical question is part of what makes “Catfish” an interesting movie, but it would be something else — a serious and searching piece of filmmaking rather than a cute and evasive provocation — if Mr. Shulman and Mr. Joost had been honest enough to investigate the genuinely unsettling aspects of their project.
But then again, why would they have? Or, rather, who would have made them? Documentary is, at present, heterogeneous almost to the point of anarchy. The most sustained and systematic attempt to formulate a set of rules was the cinéma vérité movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Conceived partly as a reaction to the stultifying norms of educational filmmaking, with lab-coated experts addressing the camera while stock footage helpfully illustrated their didactic claims, vérité took advantage of technological advances (in particular lighter-weight, portable cameras) and the spirit of the times (suspicious of interpretation and enamored of immediacy and authenticity) to produce movies that were immersive and in the moment, descriptive rather than analytical.
A retrospective at the Paley Center for Media in Manhattan celebrates “Cinéma Vérité at 50,” presenting films by Albert and David Maysles, D. A. Pennebaker, Robert Drew and Richard Leacock. This week, “Boxing Gym,” the latest film by Frederick Wiseman, who practices a kind of ultravérité (though he disdains the term) will open in limited release, and serve as a reminder of just how much life is left in this rigorous, nonintrusive, observational approach to reality. Mr. Wiseman has, over more than 40 years, patiently devoted himself to the fly-on-the-wall ethnography of institutions and places, studying collective behavior in a way that reveals the hidden logic of schools, hospitals, small towns and ballet companies while also taking note of the irreducibly unpredictable facts of human behavior. His work has become more overtly lyrical and sensuous, as interested in the movements of bodies (the boxers in “Boxing Gym,” the dancers in “La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet”) as in the structures that contain them.
But the dominant approach to documentary filmmaking nowadays is more argumentative, even prosecutorial. The two nonfiction movies that have received the most attention this year so far — Mr. Ferguson’s “Inside Job” and Davis Guggenheim’s “Waiting for Superman” — address complex, highly politicized and enormously consequential issues in a way that combines explanation with advocacy. “Inside Job,” as the title suggests, is hardly a neutral account of recent economic history. And Mr. Guggenheim’s anatomy of the crisis in American education is similarly impassioned and accusatory.
In both cases, though, the filmmakers nod in the direction of structural and other impersonal explanations; they prefer to point a finger in the direction of identifiable culprits. In Mr. Ferguson’s case these are legion: the investment bankers who enriched themselves trading dubious securities built on shaky debt, the politicians who enabled the practice and the academic economists who provided intellectual cover. Mr. Guggenheim, addressing a problem that is almost as vast — failing schools, the “achievement gap” that bedevils poor and minority children in America, the loss of competitive position with the rest of the developed world — finds a narrower set of villains: the teacher unions.
Both films end on a note of exhortation, urging viewers to get involved, to fight back, to do something. (Mr. Guggenheim, as he did with a previous film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” sends audiences to a Web site that will help turn their witness into activism.) The implied solutions may be a bit vague — Break up the banks? Smash the teacher’s unions? — but specificity is less important than urgency, and the feeling that these are more than just movies. But it is only if they are movies first, attentive to the integrity of their stories, the cogency of their images and the coherence of their ideas, that they can hope to be anything else. There may be more well-intentioned bad nonfiction movies than any other kind, films that satisfy the moral aspirations of their makers, but not much else.
So the salient question might not be, “What is a documentary?” — an abstract, theoretical approach to a form that is grounded in the concrete facts of life. Instead it might make sense to ask what (or whom) a given documentary is for? Is it a goad to awareness, an incitement to action, a spur to further thought? A window? A mirror? The more you think about it, the less obvious the truth appears to be.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
David Arquette apologizes for his Howard Stern interview
David Arquette took some flak yesterday for his extremely candid interview with Howard Stern, and he’s taken to Twitter to apologize. “I went on Howard Stern yesterday to provide clarity and honesty about what I’m experiencing,” he wrote, “but while doing that I shared too much….it’s alright for me to be honest about my own feelings but in retrospect some of the information I provided involved others and for that I am sorry and humbled.” Sadface for you, David Arquette. I’m so torn between loving juicy, horribly too-private details, and having a shred of dignity and human decency. It’s tough!
And this was a couple that I thought would make it in Hollywood. I'm still hoping beyond all hope that they'll get back together.
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