Disrupting Documentary: Ecstatic Truth & Elusive Fiction
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This document discusses different approaches to documentary filmmaking such as direct cinema, ecstatic truth, and elusive fiction. It provides examples of films that exemplify these concepts, including Chronicle of a Summer, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and Jia Zhangke's films. The document also discusses the relationship between truth, objectivity, and subjectivity in documentaries. Key thinkers cited include Werner Herzog, Abbas Kirostami, and Michel Brault.
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Disrupting Documentary: Ecstatic Truth & Elusive Fiction
- 1. Shannon Walsh | 2016
- 2. OUTLINE 1. The Art of the Real 2. Ecstatic Truth 3. Elusive Fiction 4. Something is Happening! Disrupting Documentary
- 3. WE CAN NEVER GET CLOSE TO THE TRUTH EXCEPT THROUGH LYING. – Abbas Kirostami
- 4. THOUGHT BLOCK What comes to mind when you think of non-fiction films? Can documentaries represent truth? What do you think Kirostami meant?
- 6. Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn & Anonymous (2012)
- 8. THE ART OF THE REAL
- 9. Direct Cinema | Observational Fly-on-the-wall Relationship to Ethics Canada / Quebec / US “Up the Yangtze” Yung Chang
- 13. BUMMING IN BEIJING Wu Wenguang (1990)
- 14. THE SQUARE Duan Jinchuan, Zhang Yuan (1994)
- 16. CINEMA VERITIÉ *Self Reflexivity *Fly-in-the-soup (Winston 1995) Last Train Home, Lixin Fan, 2009
- 17. CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER Chronique d'un été Edgar Morin, Jean Rouche, Michel Brault 1961
- 18. Pierre Perrault, Michel Brault, 1963 POUR LA SUITE DU MONDE
- 19. “There are two ways to conceive of the cinema of the Real: the first is to pretend that you can present reality to be seen; the second is to pose the problem of reality. In the same way, there were two ways to conceive cinéma vérité. The first was to pretend that you brought truth. The second was to pose the problem of truth.” – Edward Morin
- 20. BREATHLESS Jean-Luc Godard (1960) “All images become documentary images once their original contexts are stripped away” (Catherine Russell, 1999, 271)
- 21. ECSTATIC TRUTH
- 22. “Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” – WERNER HERTZOG
- 23. “ecstatic truth,” Little Dieter Needs to Fly 1997 LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY Werner Hertzog (1997)
- 24. Reflexive | Choral STORIES WE TELL Sarah Polley (2012)
- 25. MY WINNIPEG Guy Maddin (2007)
- 26. METAFILM
- 28. LET ME SEE THE REAL YOU
- 29. ELLUSIVE FICTION
- 30. AFTERNOON Tsai Ming-Liang with Lee Kang-sheng (2015)
- 31. LE PETITE SOLDAT Jean-Luc Godard (1963)
- 32. “Photography is truth, and the cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.”
- 33. A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE John Cassavetes (1974)
- 34. “My films are the truth.” - Cassavetes
- 37. MOMENT OF INNOCENCE Mohsen Makhmalbaf (1996)
- 38. THOUGHT BLOCK Do documentaries ‘work’ because we believe them? When would it matter? Does Objectivity matter?
- 41. The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris, 1988
- 42. CENSORSHIP & SUPPRESSION “Zhen” (real), “shan” (benevolence), “mei” (beauty) which represents the phases of aesthetics. “Zhen” (real) is the basis. If your art cannot even portray real emotions and real life, how can you possibly reach “mei” (beauty)? – Jia Zhangke
- 43. “Feature film and fiction are also bridges to reality.” - Jia Zhangke I WISH I KNEW Jia Zhangke (2010)
- 45. THOUGHT BLOCK Have your ideas changed about truth & fiction in film? Do documentaries present the truth? Would you answer the question differently?
- 46. Truth is something unattainable. We can't think we're creating truth with a camera. But what we can do, is reveal something to viewers that allows them to discover their own truth. -Michel Brault
Editor's Notes
- It was Edgar Morin, co-director with Jean Rouch of Chronicle of a Summer, who once mused that fiction film was more honest than documentary because it doesn’t make any attempt to hide its fiction or imaginings by pretending to be a reflection of reality as we do in documentary. As documentary filmmakers, we have inextricably linked ourselves to telling “the truth,” and with that territory comes the responsibility of behaving ethically. PEPITA The Conceit of the “Real”
- DESCRIBE WHAT YOU THINK MAKES A FILM A DOCUMENTARY IS SURVELLIANCE a DOC? Is it ETHICS, POV, etc? Aren’t fiction films doing that too? FORM meets ETHICS They tell us something about the world in which we live Key words you think of when you think of documentary Are you interested in making documentaries? Is a documentary true?
- Docu-fiction The film tells the story of the real-life trial of a man who impersonated film-maker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, conning a family into believing they would star in his new film. It features the people involved, acting as themselves I’m Still Here was first shopped around as a “true” story and then rescinded when it became obvious that Joaquin Phoenix’s “retirement from acting” was just a stunt. The War Game (1965) A masterpiece of what-if storytelling, Peter Watkins's chilling featurette depicts the aftermath of a British nuclear war from a you-are-there perspective. Using scientific research, government statistics, and testimonies on the damage done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Watkins presents manufactured scenes of suburban mayhem under the guise of an emergency news report. Fires rage, children expire, and England is turned into a barren wasteland; no one had used the fake-documentary format to such an extent before, or with such urgency since. Originally made for the BBC, Watkins's wake-up call was quickly banned by the network for being too harsh, yet it still nabbed a Best Documentary Oscar in 1966. Forty-five years later, it remains a high mark for employing vrit styles to construct something much more perverse and profound than your typical cautionary tale.—David Fear
- SHOW CLIP – How do we answer the question of truth here?
- CINEMA VERITE One of the major traditions in documentary is not dead! Continually being remade and re developed, starts in 1922 with Nanook of the North Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer, Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens, Fredrick Wiseman Highschool 1968 Chronique d'un été (1961) Les Raquetteurs (1958) Nanook of the North, Flaugerty, 1922 Lonely Boy (1962) Iraq in Fragments (2007) No voice over, no editorializing Up the Yangtze is a 2007 INDUSTRY calling these Character-driven docs --- slightly different than veritie but borrows a lot from the form John Cassevette’s Woman Under the Influence
- Shot before and shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre, Wu Wenguang?s 1990 video ushered in a new documentary style in China, focusing on urban issues and operating outside the cultural bureaucracy. The five young artists he profiles—a writer, a photographer, two painters, and a director of avant-garde theater—reject a life tethered to the government yet still hope to modernize the urban cultural scene; their frank ruminations about life, art, and the future are punctuated by groundbreaking verite shots of people doing their chores in squalid back alleys and studio apartments. Wu funded the film himself, using a camcorder to capture his subjects at work and at play, and unlike government propagandists he eschews music and voice-over narration for an intimate naturalism akin to Frederick Wiseman’s. Most revealing is Wu’s portrayal of Zhang Xia Ping, a feisty feminist painter who suffers a mental breakdown; her delirious outburst is the first such episode to be documented in mainland China for a Western audience (Wu especially angered the censors by subtitling his documentary in English). The last third of the video takes place after Tiananmen, when two of the artists have gone abroad and two more are about to leave. The massacre is never mentioned, but Wu documents the artists? disillusionment and cynicism as unflinchingly as he did their earlier idealism.
- No. 16 South Barkhor Street (1997), The Square (1994) Duan Jinchuan, Zhang Yuan
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdfXfqlJyb4 Mr. Zhao spent more than 12 years filming Chinese petitioners who would come to Beijing, often for years, to seek redress for wrongdoing by local officials, only to be met by harassment and sometimes detention.
- This feature-length documentary is the unrehearsed story of what happened when old-timers from Île-aux-Coudres, a small island in the St. Lawrence River, were persuaded to revive a local whale-catching practice. Through the magic of words and the mystery of the catch, the film uncovers a spirituality rooted in the moon and the rhythm of the tides. More than a documentary, it is a fresco of the myths and legends among the traditional fishing communities of Quebec. In French with English subtitles. At its 1963 Cannes premiere, it was billed as For Those Who Will Follow.[1] The NFB has also promoted the film in English as Of Whales, the Moon and Men [5] or The Moontrap,[6] depending upon whether it was the 105 minute or 84 minute version, respectively. The release of a 2007 "Île-aux-Coudres Trilogy" DVD trilogy also translates the film title as For the Ones to Come
- Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
- This is the film that inspired Herzog’s narrative drama Rescue Dawn, starring Christian Bale and Steve Zahn. While that adaptation drew some criticism for the liberties Herzog took with the original story, Little Dieter Needs to Fly is known to contain just as many falsities. In one scene, subject Dieter Dengler talks of his time spent as a prisoner of war in Laos. Herzog shows him getting out of his car and shutting the door multiple times. He then opens and closes the front door of his house over and over, explaining that this obsessive behavior is a lingering result of having spent so much time under lock and key. In truth, Herzog orchestrated this scene to elevate this theme through the use of visuals. It’s this experimentation with fact and fiction (“ecstatic truth,” as Herzog calls it) that makes him one of the more daring filmmakers in the documentary world, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly as exciting and engaging as its big-budget Hollywood counterpart. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=214&v=LbATTyDCN7A
- Historic & Subjective Essay Film
- Afternoon, in which two men sit in a room talking for 137 minutes, in four locked shots from exactly the same camera position. Of the two, Tsai and Lee Kang-sheng themselves, only one does much talking. MUSE – trying to access someone – the REAL person http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/film-week-afternoon-tsai-ming-liang/?utm_source=wordfly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=FC04-01-16&utm_content=version_A
- Kent Jones https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/340-a-woman-under-the-influence-the-war-at-home
- SAYEH and my experience of REAL TIME with a camera. THE MAGIC
- GODARD’s crazy desire to prove something, to do something real… not unlike Hertzog. Cinema makes us want to PROVOKE the REAL, sometimes in quite violent ways.
- DESCRIBE WHAT YOU THINK MAKES A FILM A DOCUMENTARY IS SURVELLIANCE a DOC? Is it ETHICS, POV, etc? Aren’t fiction films doing that too? FORM meets ETHICS They tell us something about the world in which we live Key words you think of when you think of documentary Are you interested in making documentaries? Is a documentary true?
- Thin blue line trailer You might call this one the original Serial. It didn't exactly change the world, but The Thin Blue Line did change a life. Randall Dale Adams, who was sent to jail for the murder of a police officer, had his case reviewed after the documentary. He was found innocent and released from prison approximately a year after the film was released The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris, 1988 The Thin Blue Line (1988) We now take it for granted that documentaries employ re-creations of events, borrow the narrative thrust of fiction and tiptoe into the realm of the poetic. When Errol Morris introduced those techniques into his true-crime tale of a murdered Dallas police officer, however, the effect was galvanizing—and undeniably game-changing. Structured like a whodunit thriller, Morris's case study proved that documentaries could become popular hits, and ended up exonerating an innocent man. But the filmmaker was also crafting a meta-statement about the concept of truth itself, and it treats what could have been a typical investigative film into a real-life Rashomon. He'd pushed the nonfiction form into bold, exciting territory: Once he'd crossed that line, a legion of other filmmakers followed.—David Fear .
- “Feature film and fiction are also bridges to reality” Jia Zhangke Like his earlier film, 24 City/24 chengji (2008), I Wish I Knew relies on a series of interviews as a gesture towards authenticity. In these interviews individuals recount memories of Shanghai including the suffering during the Japanese occupation. What keeps the film from being a straightforward documentary — and this is where Jia comes into his own as China’s most internationally celebrated arthouse filmmaker today — is that as the interviews progress, the histories and memories of Shanghai increasingly become interspersed with footage of films set or made in Shanghai. The message is unequivocal: we cannot pay homage to Shanghai without also paying homage to it through the history of Chinese cinema.
- DocuFiction
- DESCRIBE WHAT YOU THINK MAKES A FILM A DOCUMENTARY IS SURVELLIANCE a DOC? Is it ETHICS, POV, etc? Aren’t fiction films doing that too? FORM meets ETHICS They tell us something about the world in which we live Key words you think of when you think of documentary Are you interested in making documentaries? Is a documentary true?