Can 'fake' documentaries still tell the truth_ _ Film _ The Guardian.pdf

8/29/13 Can 'fake' documentaries still tell the truth? | Film | The Guardian

www.theguardian.com/film/2010/sep/30/fake-documentaries-the-arbor 1/6

Gloriously perplexing ... The Arbor, directed by Clio Barnard.

First, a warning about the truth or otherwise of what you are about to read. This is anarticle about documentary features. Specifically, it is an article about documentaryfeatures that alert us to the fact that they are documentary features. Documentariesthat lift the bonnet to show the engine. Documentaries that remind us that they areauthored pieces of work as opposed to some objective, inviolate truth. Films are madeby film-makers, after all, just as newspaper features are written by journalists with oneeye on the deadline and the other on the tea break. They cherry-pick their sources andmanipulate their material. As such, they are not entirely to be trusted.

The Arbor is a superb new film by the British artist ClioBarnard. It paints a portrait of the Bradford playwright Andrea

Can 'fake' documentaries still tell thetruth?Filmsthatuselipsynching,stagedscenesandothertruthmassagingtechniquesaremakingourolddefinitionsof'documentary'lookdecidedlywell,artificial.XanBrooksgoesafterthefacts

XanBrooksThe Guardian, Thursday 30 September 2010 23.00 BST

TheArbor

Productionyear:2010



Dunbar and then charts the tragic fallout from her death courtesy of an alcohol-induced brain haemorrhage at the ageof 29. Barnard interviewed Dunbar's family friends and then, inan ingenious twist, hired professional actors to lip-synch overthe audio track. The effect is compelling, because it drawsattention to what is "real" (the audio) and what is "fake" (theacting). It makes the two forms talk to each other, as it were, tothe point where we start to question the veracity of everythingwe are seeing and hearing.

This, it transpires, is what Barnard intended. "If you examine any documentary, you seehow shaped it is, and how similar the narrative structure is to that of a fiction film,"she says. "The lip-synching allows the actor to look directly down the lens at theaudience: to acknowledge the illusion and break the fourth wall."

The negotiation between fiction and reality, she adds, is always tricky. "Drawingattention to that negotiation is a more honest way forward than relying on thetechnique to do the job and smooth out the tensions."

It also chimes with the material. In the first place, Dunbar wrote plays that were semi-autobiographical representations of her experiences on the Bradford estates. Shebrushed up true-life conversations and dropped them into the mouths of middle-classperformers. Then there is the fact that Barnard's film is expressly concerned with falsememory, with conflicting versions of the truth. One of Dunbar's daughters (Lisa) won'tsay a bad word against her mum. The other (Lorraine) says nothing but. All of whichmakes The Arbor intriguing, and gloriously perplexing, too. At this year's Tribeca filmfestival, where it picked up a prize, some members of the jury disputed the idea that itwas a documentary at all. "Some people were annoyed by it," Barnard admits. "Theyfelt cheated in some way."

"Documentary," says the dictionary. "Noun. Based on or recreating an actual event, era,life story, that purports to be factually accurate and contains no fictional elements."Small wonder the jury were split. This ironclad definition leaves no room for the likesof The Arbor, with its lip-synching actors, and no room for the recent Alamar, a stageddocumentary about a Mexican fisherman and his son that nonetheless manages to betender, touching and true. Presumably it also locks the door on Ari Folman'selectrifying animated Waltz With Bashir; a film that was all about false memory andthat opened, memorably, with a dream sequence involving a pack of devil dogs. ErrolMorris, whose groundbreaking The Thin Blue Line, from 1988, lays on a buffet ofdodgy eye-witnesses and corrupted reconstructions, is likewise barred from the party.

It's simply that the further back in film history one goes, the more limiting if notoutright redundant the dictionary definition turns out to be. The pioneering early

Country: UKCert(UK): 15Runtime: 90 minsDirectors: ClioBarnardCast: ChristineBottomley, ManjinderVirk, Monica Dolan,Natalie Gavin, NeilDudgeonMore on this film



documentaries of John Grierson were heavily and openly scripted. Robert Flaherty's1922 classic Nanook of the North, while embraced as an authentic window on the Inuitlifestyle, was actually staged for the cameras. In fact, it was only with the arrival ofcinema vrit in the 1960s that the documentary and the dictionary begins to dovetail.Our concept of the genre as representing a pure and overriding truth is drawn straightfrom the films of Fred Wiseman, Barbara Kopple and the Maysles brothers, with theirhandheld cameras, mobile mics and freewheeling sense of life on the run.

Yet were these pictures really the embodiment of purity? Isn't there something doublysuspect about a cinematic technique that pretends it is not a technique at all? "Whatwe are seeing now is a crop of cinema releases that are all about the fluctuationbetween what's staged and what's real," says Stella Bruzzi, author of the book NewDocumentary. "And I think those are more trustworthy than films that try to representtruth in an uncomplicated way. The 1960s vrit films that purported to have noauthorial intervention are actually much more problematic. I have less of an issue withfilms that reveal the dialogue between the film-maker and the audience."

Is there a downside in all of this? Bruzzi admits that there may a potential risk offrivolity; the danger that directors will become so wrapped up in the form that theyneglect the content. Maybe it will mean less films that make a big statement about theworld we live in, and that aren't scared to nail their colours to the mast. Overall,however, she sees it as a healthy development.

"Audiences aren't dumb," she says. "They know that people act differently when youput them in front of a camera, and that just because something is being performeddoesn't automatically make it fake. And a technique that distances us from a filmneedn't make us distrust the film; it just invites us to view it in a different way. Besides,I think we rather enjoy playing those games with a film."

Meanwhile, I find myself thinking about I'm Still Here, Casey Affleck's movie aboutJoaquin Phoenix, which premiered in Venice last month. Notoriously, I'm Still Herecame billed as an access-all-areas documentary, but the film's wild, extrovert stylingsset alarm bells ringing. Two weeks ago, Affleck admitted the entire thing was staged; abravura piece of performance art. And that, by rights, should be the end of that. ExceptI still find myself wondering if there remains a kernel of truth in there, and whetherI'm Still Here might qualify as another of Bruzzi's fluctuations: a film about a troubled,disillusioned actor who decides to play the part of a troubled, disillusioned actor.Think about these things too long and your brain begins to melt.

I turn for advice to Kevin Macdonald. The director has yet to see I'm Still Here, but hasa theory on it just the same. "My take on that, knowing some of the people involved, isthat the decision [to say it was staged] was made in retrospect," he says. "In that it wasan expedient justification to tell everyone it's a fraud. Whereas, on balance, it's



probably not."

Macdonald, incidentally, began his career in documentaries. He won an Oscar for OneDay in September and a Bafta for Touching the Void, before branching into fiction withThe Last King of Scotland and State of Play. He's back in documentary mode when Icall, sifting footage for his latest project, Life in a Day. Earlier this year, Macdonaldinvited the public to shoot a video snapshot of their life on a single day (24 July 2010)and post the footage on YouTube. He now has 80,000 films to view, judge and discardand plans to bring the survivors in at a final running time of under 90 minutes.

Some of the submitted films are not quite what they seem. "We're seeing stuff that ispurely faked," he tells me. "Someone in Windhoek faked themselves being mugged. Iwas watching the film and thinking, 'This doesn't feel right,' and then at the end you seethat the mugger is laughing, and has somehow been caught on camera. So I find myselfconstantly arguing with my editor about what's real and what's not." He cannot beentirely certain that some of these forgeries won't make it through to the final cut.

I like Macdonald because he says stuff I agree with and yet puts it with more eleganceand authority than I am able to muster. In Macdonald's view, all documentaries areessentially fictions because they are about organising the chaos of ordinary life; aboutselecting material and putting that in the service of telling a story. He says film-makersshape the world in their own image. But isn't that what we all do anyway?

"In some ways, making documentaries is like being a journalist," he says. "Youinterview people and then use the bits you want to use as opposed to the bits they wantyou to use. I've fallen out very badly with some of the subjects I've interviewed, becausethey see their lives a certain way; to step into a cinema and see your life depicted inanother way can come as a terrible shock."

Like Bruzzi, Macdonald remains broadly supportive of the new strain of documentary,those slippery enterprises that confound the dictionary, employ unreliable witnessesand hazardous fictions, and invite the viewer to play the role of co-conspirator orfellow investigator. He reveres Errol Morris and cites The Thin Blue Line as hismasterpiece, even if the film's use of dramatic reconstructions made it ineligible for thebest documentary Oscar. "The same thing happened with Touching the Void [whichalso used reconstructions]," Macdonald says. "But now I think that anything goes.Literally anything. And that's good, so long as the technique tells you something youdidn't already know. The only obligation you have as a film-maker is to tell yourversion of the truth and to use your film to illuminate reality." He laughs. "Whateverthat means."

TheArborisreleasedonOctober22.



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Can 'fake' documentaries still tell the truth_ _ Film _ The Guardian.pdf