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CHAPTER THREE

THE NEW REALNESS

“If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis,” Bazin begins his “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” then “the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation.” If the motion pictures of the twenty-first century were placed under psychoanalysis, their symptoms might reveal two types of anxiety—one objective, the other hysterical.

Objective anxiety is manifested both in a recognition that the motion picture medium, as it has more or less existed since 1896, is in an apparently irreversible decline—the mass audience is eroded, national film industries have been defunded, film labs are shuttered, film stocks terminated and formats rendered obsolete, parts for broken 16mm-projectors are irreplaceable, laptop computers have been introduced as a delivery system—and then in a feeling among cinema-oriented intellectuals that film culture is disappearing. The latter may be seen in the increased marginalization of movie criticism as a journalistic practice and the experience of a more general lost love of movies (or cinephilia), as most eloquently and pessimistically articulated by Susan Sontag in her widely read centennial essay, “The Decay of Cinema.”

“Each art breeds its fanatics,” Sontag declared. “The love that cinema inspired, however, was special.

It was born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other: quintessentially modern; distinctively accessible; poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral—all at the same time. Cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life.1

This objective anxiety is also a factor of what film theorist David Rodowick has termed the “digital will”—namely the sense that CGI technology inherently strives to remake the world while motion pictures (as we knew them), having surrendered their privileged relationship with the real, are in some sense obsolete. It is this anxiety that underscores the neo-neo-realist position of the Danish Dogma ’95 group despite, or perhaps because of, its use of digital video. The most important motion pictures produced according to Dogma’s ten commandments were Lars von Trier’s Idiots (1997) and Jesper Jargil’s The Humiliated, a 1998 documentary on the making of Idiots, precisely because of their emphasis on “life-acting,” namely the staging and documenting of authentic transgressive behavior.2

The key expression of objective anxiety, however, is Jean-Luc Godard’s magisterial In Praise of Love (2001) which, no less than Godard’s first feature Breathless—albeit with somewhat less jouissance—responds to a new situation in cinema history.

Two-thirds shot on black-and-white 35mm and the rest on luridly synthesized digital video, In Praise of Love mourns the loss of photographic cinema, as well as the memory and history that, more than an indexical trace, photography makes material. Studied as they are, Godard’s unprepossessing, sometimes harsh images of the city and its inhabitants—many of them dispossessed—feel as newly minted as the earliest Lumière brothers views; they evoke the thrill of light becoming emulsion. Much of the movie is a voluptuous urban nocturne with particular emphasis on the transitory sensations that were the essence of the first motion pictures. (Pace Bazin, there are passages where In Praise of Love appears like a fact of nature while Hollywood movies, exemplified by Schindler’s List and The Matrix—which are, at least by association, digital—are rather, Godard insists, a substitute for history.)

Such cinematic eulogies were not uncommon in the early twenty-first century. These twilight movies include Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), a lament for vanished popular cinema, its audience, and its means of presentation, in a specifically Taiwanese context, as well as several notable avant-garde films such as Pat O’Neill’s Decay of Fiction, Bill Morrison’s Decasia, and Ernie Gehr’s Cotton Candy (all released in 2002). As Tsai presented the ghost-ridden movie theater, so Decay of Fiction evokes a haunted movie set. O’Neill spectrally populated the abandoned Ambassador Hotel, an old-time movie-star hangout and frequent movie location, with transparent actors dressed according to period styles.3

In a 2011 roundtable on experimental digital cinema, filmmaker Lynne Sachs identified a nostalgic “fetishism of decay,” noting digital effects designed to simulate film scratches and dust: “We don’t want things to age. Nevertheless, we miss the chemical reactions, the fact that physical things change, so we simulate decay.” Each in its way, Decasia and Cotton Candy savor photographic disintegration even as they are overtly preservationist in intent. Rather than a moldering hotel, Morrison documents decomposing 35mm nitrate footage culled from a number of film archives, while Gehr records the ancient pre-cinematic toys in San Francisco’s Musée Mécanique, notably the sort of hand-cranked photo­graphic flip-book known as mutoscopes and most particularly (so it seems) those with photographs that are torn, faded or damaged.4

We may not, per Babette Mangolte, experience time according to the rhythm of twenty-four frames per second, but we are watching change. That Decasia and The Decay of Fiction have been largely exhibited in digital form while Cotton Candy was digitally produced infuses their pragmatism with a measure of rueful, guilty digital ambivalence. (The abandonment of the old medium is similarly acknowledged in Linkletter’s Waking Life which, shot and edited as an ordinary motion picture, yet proposes a new sort of indexicality.) At the same time, however, several distinguished film artists created digital works which in their use of real time and duration, could be said to make the motion picture medium more itself. However dissimilar, Abbas Kiarostami’s “undirected” Warholian tracking film and acting vehicle Ten and Aleksandr Sokurov’s ninety-five-minute single take Russian Ark amplified each other for both premiering in competition at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. (Neither won any awards.)

Russian Ark, in which Sokurov’s camera tours Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum in one choreographed movement, was distinguished by a number of historical achievements—as the first unedited single-screen, single-take full-length feature film; as the longest single SteadiCam sequence; and as the first uncompressed High Definition movie recorded onto a portable hard disc. And yet, as pointed out by Rodowick, who insists that “digitally acquired information has no ontological distinctiveness from digitally synthesized outputs that construct virtual worlds,” the certainty of watching absolute, unmediated continuity is gone. Rodowick does not address the possibility of an automatically printed time code, assuming perhaps that it could be easily forged. Russian Ark has significant post-production manipulation. In some instances, the frame has been resized to eliminate unwanted objects, the camera speed adjusted, the lighting modified, and the color temperatures conformed. In one scene the perspective of a wide-angle lens is simulated, while the movie ends with a swirl of digitally-created snow and fog. No less than The Matrix, then, Russian Ark is an animated movie created from photographic material.5

And yet, Russian Ark’s single take is what Tarkovsky would have called the “impression of time” and the movie is essentially Bazinian, most radically in its performative aspect—that is, in the orchestration of the camera and profilmic event. The same is true for Ten, for which the filmmaker placed his mini-camera on an automobile dashboard to document the conversations of the car’s driver and passengers as they drove through Tehran. Each in its own way, these digitally created “film objects” confound the distinction between staged fiction and documented “truth.” In both cases, the directors have made something happen in life. While these motion pictures may be considered as a form of canned theater, both employ digital technology in order make quintessential motion pictures.

Elsewhere, the loss of indexicality has promoted a new, compensatory “real-ness,” emphasizing film as an object (if only an object in decay). In Praise of Love, which begins in media res and ends with a prolonged flashback, can be understood as a continuous loop—and hence, as a film installation. Goodbye, Dragon Inn—a sort of superimposed double-feature with the older movie “inserted” inside or framed by the newer one—also suggests an installation, perhaps one designed to be projected in the since-demolished Taipei theater where the movie is set. Both Decay of Fiction and Michael Snow’s 2002 perceptual vaudeville show *Corpus Callosum (which, like Decay of Fiction or Eric Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke, is a twenty-first-century Méliès trick-film to Kiarostami and Sokurov’s digital actualités) were exhibited as gallery installations.

History doubles back on itself. *Corpus Callosum ends in a screening room with the presentation of Snow’s crude cartoon of a weirdly elastic, waving human with a twisty foot kick. Rigorously predicated on irreducible cinematic facts, Snow’s structuralist epics—Wavelength (1967) and La Région Centrale (1971)—announced the imminent passing of the film era. Rich with new possibilities, *Corpus Callosum’s self-described “tableau of transformation,” largely set in a generic fun-house office and featuring wackily distorted “information workers,” heralds the advent of the next. Snow and Gehr were at one point in the late 1960s and early 70s considered to be part of the “structural” tendency in avant-garde filmmaking, heavily invested in the specific properties of the film medium. In switching to digital technology, they had demonstrated a comparable concern with the nature of this new medium.

So too, Guy Maddin’s confessional narrative Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), which was initially shown as a ten-part peep show installed on a battery of mutoscopes. Cowards Bend the Knee employed the conventions of silent cinema with transitions marked by irises and intertitles standing in for dialogue; when projected, the action was accompanied by a combination of classical and program music, as well as sound effects. Such gratuitous anachronism is something other (and nuttier) than mere nostalgia. Artisanal puppet animations like Trey Parker’s Team America: World Police (2004) and particularly Henry Selick’s 3-D Coraline (2009), with its perverse, although not absolute, refusal of CGI, are further instances of what might be called the New Realness; related, albeit disparate, examples of willful, neo-retro primitivism would include Maddin’s deliberately silent feature Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), Neil Young’s post-dubbed super-8 protest opera Greendale (2003), and Ken Jacob’s reworked 1903 actualité Razzle Dazzle (2006) which, like Gehr’s Cotton Candy, programmatically fuses ancient photographic and modern digital technology.

The cinema of international film festivals has showcased many successors to the short-lived Dogma movement in the form of modestly produced motion pictures, digital or analog, which, like Kiarostami’s Ten, purposefully blur the distinction between staged fiction and recorded reality. Neither pseudo nor mock documentaries, these movies might be characterized as “situation documentaries,” asserting their media specific realness through the use of long takes, minimal editing, behavioral performances, and leisurely contemplation of their subjects or setting. Drama is subsumed in observation. Landscape trumps performance.

Pedro Costa’s Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and Colossal Youth (2006) allow Lisbon slum-dwellers to dramatize their lives or, at least, play themselves talking before the camera. With their deliberate compositions and purposeful lighting, Costa’s features have the feel of staged documentaries—as do certain works by China’s Jia Zhangke or the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl. More radical and less stylized are those unprepossessing, minimalist narratives which are shot like documentaries, notably Kiarostami’s Ten and those of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso—La Libertad (2000), Los Muertos (2004), and Liverpool (2008). Related artists include Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra and the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes; a quintessential example of this rudimentary, rock-hard ultra-literalism is Paz Encina’s Paraguayan Hammock (2006) in which, rather than coaxing a narrative from a documentary situation, simply uses voiceover and editing to impose one.

The first 35mm all-Paraguayan feature produced since the 1970s, Encina’s willfully primitive movie could have been made a century ago—albeit in black and white, with a pair of actors behind the screen presenting the movie’s asynchronous dialogue. It opens with a lengthy, static long shot in which an elderly couple emerges from the woods to hang their hammock in a clearing. “What is wrong with you?” one asks the other. Their words—like all of the movie’s dialogue—are obviously post-dubbed and delivered in the indigenous Guaraní language. From their conversation, it gradually becomes apparent that their son is a soldier fighting in a war. The day goes on. The couple performs their separate chores as each remembers or imagines a conversation with the absent boy. With their repetitive discourse, the protagonists suggest a pair of Beckett characters. Inevitably, the movie comes full circle. As day ends, the old couple returns to their hammock—once more seen in long shot. In the fading light, they expand their three topics of conversation (the dog, the weather, their son) to acknowledge death and even each other. Then the old man lights a lamp, and the two shuffle off back into the woods. Encino holds the blank screen for a minute or two, ending with the sound of rain.

Such “situation documentaries” operate in the gap between non-fiction and fiction recognized by Italian neo-realist films like Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948), with its cast of non-actors dramatizing their lives in situ, and further refined (or perhaps de-refined) in the Warhol Factory features of the mid 1960s, most notably those starring Edie Sedgwick as herself. Movies like La Libertad and Paraguayan Hammock are predicated on and assert film’s indexical relation to the real even when, as with Ten, they are produced with digital technology.6

The great performance artist of the mode is Sasha Baron Cohen who first introduced his alter-egos Borat and Brüno as television personalities. Indeed, in some ways, the partially-staged situation documentary is analogous to the international phenomenon known as “reality tele­vision,” anticipated in the US by MTV’s long-running The Real World (1992– ), precipitated by the network-produced Survivor series (2000– ), and continuing through various editions and iterations of American Idol (2002– ), The Bachelor (2002– ), The Apprentice (2004– ), The Biggest Loser (2004– ), Dancing With the Stars (2005– ), Jersey Shore (2009– ), etc., as well as Jennifer Ringley’s twenty-four-hour dorm room website JenniCAM (1996–2003). Indeed, as demonstrated by the aftermath of the 2008 presidential campaign and the run-up to the 2012 election, reality television has become the template for American politics.

From a philosophical point of view, the most paradoxical exercise in New Realness is Lars von Trier’s post-Dogma Dogville (2003). At once abstract and concrete, Dogville plays out on an obvious, if schematically organized, soundstage and thus, in addition to providing a narrative, documents the scaffolding on which a narrative is conventionally constructed. This soundstage world, in which all the actors on the set are at all times potentially visible, meets the Dogma requirement that “filming must be done on location”—call it Dogmaville. Filled with close-ups and jump-cuts, Dogville was shot on digital video—a format that not only allows for a greater sense of spontaneity than 35mm but in its immediacy effectively precludes any nostalgia inherent in the movie’s period setting.

On the eve of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, scarcely two months before Dogville’s Cannes premiere, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia rose on the floor of the US Senate to announce that he wept for his country:

I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of a strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. The image of America has changed. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned … We flaunt our superpower status with arrogance.

Von Trier’s Rocky Mountain town may be a superpower writ small, but it is explicitly a realm of self-righteous fantasy and proud delusion. In one sense a two-hour-plus build-up to the end credit montage, Dogville saves catharsis for its final moments. The town’s hitherto unseen dog turns “real”—that is, photographic—and so does von Trier’s abstract “America.” What we have previously witnessed was simply a play, as well as a representation. Von Trier’s documentary realness, recording actors on a set in a way that they can never be imagined to be anything else, is ruptured by a greater realness—namely a montage of photographic evidence, wrenching images of human misery in America, set to a disco beat.

It’s a nasty prank, but who could possibly laugh at these indexical images of naked distress? Or readily turn their back, as encouraged to do, by leaving the theater? Is the audience ignoring reality and returning to their Dogville? Or is it vice versa?7