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Truth Approaches, Reality Affects – Afterword to Milcho Manchevski’s |
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Like Milcho Manchevski, I have frequently been
stunned, bemused or frankly puzzled at what people take or experience to be real in any given film.
This is not, in any simple or primary way, a matter of
the conventional distinction in cinema between documentary and fiction; nor is
it confined to any particular filmic genre. The moment of truth – to use the title of Francesco Rosi’s 1965
documentary on bullfighting, made (as its DVD distributor Criterion proudly
boasts) by a “great Italian truth seeker” – can impress itself upon viewers in the least
likely contexts.
I tried to test this business once, on and with my
students at a university. I devised a course that was called, somewhat
cryptically and open-endedly, “Truth, Fiction, Belief”. From week to week, the
movies shown as part of the curriculum were a surprise, an improvisation: there
was no guiding thread beyond the multiple paradoxes generated by these three
terms when brought into collision.
Is truth in cinema just what we believe or feel to be
true – something, therefore, not objective, but subjective? Can fiction deliver
forth a truth and, if so, what kind? Where do the various modes and schools of
documentary – not to mention all the various realist or neo-realist movements
in fiction film – sit on the continuum between ideal transparency and total
fabrication? And what’s naturalism? Manchevski sifts through a number of these
issues, from his point of view and experience, in Truth and Fiction.
For my part, I discovered that the class on truth,
fiction and belief kept turning up the most bizarre responses in its participants.
On the one hand, the American cinéma-vérité or direct cinema exemplars of the early 1960s – about
elections, electrocutions or pop stars on tour – impressed my students as real
(even hyperreal), but only when the screen dissolved in a frenzy of bodies
shoving and screaming, uncontainable within the camera lens.
On the other hand, they came away from a screening of
Wim Wenders’ almost three-hour long Kings
of the Road (1976) with a single, indelible memory: when, in the midst of a
deliberately banal, plotless stretch, one of the uncommunicative male heroes
dropped his jeans, crouched down in the sand, and took a shit right before the
camera. That was definitely real! No
cut-aways or special effects there, we all saw it with our own eyes!
Ah, the innocence of those analogue days of the 1980s
…
Some students were disconcerted when, midway through
the course, I voiced my provisional, analytic conclusion: that the real, for
them, obviously happens in only two screen registers, at two stark extremes –
either total catastrophe, or absolute mundanity. Everything else in-between was
mere fiction.
Manchevski, like the experimentalist James Benning,
likes to point at the rectangular movie screen and assert, in any public
situation, that it’s all, in some sense, a fiction, all constructed: at every
point and every level, there is art and craft, contrivance and manipulation.
There should be, in an ideal world, no shame in that;
it’s just a fact, it’s what happens when you assemble anything with a mind to
its structure, its point, and its impact. This is certainly what Manchevski
elaborates when he reminds us of the powers of framing, of montage, of sound
design, of even the least seemingly rehearsed or staged effusion of human
behaviour that, before a camera, can become, almost magically, telling or
emblematic.
As the teacher-filmmaker-essayist Jean-Pierre Gorin
once formulated it – in his specific case, in relation to the fiction films of
Maurice Pialat, but it works for all cinema – every director does three basic
things with his or her material. (1) In the first place, there is the effort to catalyse or create some kind of
interesting or meaningful situation in the real space in front of the camera –
a process that may have started long before filming begins. In the second
place, and still as the camera rolls, there is some manner of manoeuvring: a particular, decisive
choice of angle or style of shooting, some distance or perspective chosen in
relation to what is occurring. In the third place, now in postproduction
(editing, sound design, etc.), there is the necessary working of and on the material gathered: finding or inventing a
form for it, creating the global, aesthetic context in which it will be
received by audiences.
What Manchevski and Gorin are saying, each in their
own ways, makes me think that what is crucially missing from a lot of discussion
of documentary (no matter how ‘dramatically reconstructed’ or essayistic it may
be) is a simple but flexible application of the famous Lacanian triad of Real,
Symbolic and Imaginary. You capture something on camera and place it in your
film. Is it automatically the Real? No, because the Real is going to be
something essentially fleeting, elusive, hard to grasp and even harder to take
in.
But, Real or not – and whether you, as a filmmaker,
like it or not – the footage is going to inevitably come freighted with two
other layers: Symbolic and Imaginary. It’s going to reflect, be embedded in, a
whole range of social codings you can only fitfully control – that’s the
Symbolic realm. And it’s going to be completely shaped, even warped, by the
dreams and drives, the projections and phantasmic scenarios that impel you to
pick up a camera and keep it trained on someone or something in the first
place. That’s your Imaginary at work, but bear in mind what Serge Daney once
said: “Fantasies
are the least personal thing in the world. They are collective. A dream is only
a montage of coded elements, obeying precise, impersonal rules.” (2)
As someone involved with theory and critique, I came
to a position not unlike Mancehevski’s via the powerful arguments, which
initially circulated throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, concerning reality-effects (Roland Barthes) and truth-effects (Michel Foucault). There’s
no such absolute, universal thing as Reality or Truth; there are only
instances, effects, performances (in the widest sense) that strike us as such.
A whole machinery of social persuasion, of contextual discourse, is needed to
deliver us to these precisely coded moments, which are (as it turns out)
pitifully time-bound: the reality-effects of yesterday are, in most cases, the
comedic clichés of today, easily seen for the constructions they are.
Today, we are more likely to grasp these effects that once fooled us as also affects: the heart’s complicity,
stealthily engineered, is never far way from the clever techniques that, for a
moment, conjured an illusion of immediacy, transparency and authenticity.
There is a wonderful phrase in English: truth approaches. It can mean a few
different things, depending on whether you take approach (just like affect)
as noun or verb. It could be referring to diverse approaches to truth itself;
or to something happening: look out, the plot thickens, the truth is
approaching.
Either way, the phrase underlines something dramatic,
theatrical and performative about Truth when it is in the process of hitting
us: there is always going to be something rhetorical about those moments when
the truth is finally revealed and, just as dramatically, withdraws itself.
In fact, I recall a clever, Warholian video art piece made
in Melbourne by Ralph Traviato, based exactly on this theme. It was titled The Truth Approaches (1983): in it, a
series of performers, filmed in simple, static mid-shots, went through the
motions of certain, banal actions – checking their watch, straightening their
tie, stirring a cup of tea … Every time, a certain cumulative effect of
waiting, of suspense, was produced in those who watched the video: what’s up,
what’s about to slip out from hiding here?
Of course, the video was, ultimately, nothing but the
demonstration of this seductive rhetoric in the artful process of enacting
itself. And every kind of time-based media is going about its business of
producing such an audiovisual rhetoric, each moment of the day.
Manchevski alights upon the most puzzling of all the
tricks associated with this kind of rhetoric: the crazy phrase, usually
solemnly declared in writing at the start of a film or TV program, ‘this is a
true story,’ or ‘based on a true story,’ or ‘these events really happened,’ or
some such suitably dramatic variation.
Jerry Lewis was already sending this one up rotten in 1962, when
he began his The Ladies’ Man with the
print-out: “The picture you are about to see is NOT TRUE, only the names have
been changed, because the lawyers worry a lot”. And, almost 40 years on from
that, Monte Hellman ends his labyrinthine,
Robbe-Grillet-style, Chinese-box, noir head-scratcher Road to Nowhere (2010) with the obviously risible boast of “This is
a true story”, clearly meant to indicate the exact opposite of what it says.
But to no avail: as double-whammy truth/reality-effects
go, this true-story business has proven staying power.
I was once involved, at script stage, with a
big-budget production; I was given a chance to see how this True Story business
really works itself out. People begin with what is, indeed, a true story –
something that has been in all the newspapers, TV shows and online. Something
immediately known and recognised by a vast audience. Then, for 20 different
reasons – from dramatic license to legal complications – the filmmaking team,
in the planning phase, begin departing from ‘just the facts, ma’am’.
First, the names are changed. Then, certain
‘characters’ are combined. Maybe genders and races are switched. Then the
events themselves are tinkered with – usually in order to fit one or other of
the preordained story arcs beloved of the Hollywood screenwriting manuals. The
initial set-up, the complicating factors, even the ultimate outcome, can be
tampered with, often arriving at something with precious little resemblance to
the so-called true story. I am sure we can all think of numerous examples.
At several points in this process, I feebly protested
to the producers: we have by now ventured so far away from the true-life premise,
in every particular, why don’t we just wipe the slate clean and write a fiction
that pleases us? Oh no, what heresy! After all, it’s a true story! … And, above all, it is the market-lure of that
declaration, emblazoned on screen at the start, which is going to secure some
sort of effect/affect that is deemed absolutely necessary to both the dramatic
and commercial performance of the piece. (I didn’t last long on that project.)
Manchevski wisely separates the commotion around
reality-effects from the deeper issue about truth. Reality, realism, the
reality-effect, whether comically obvious or deviously surreptitious: ultimately,
these are neither here nor there for him. Truth is what matters – but not as a
mere, performative effect/affect.
To provisionally resolve the paradoxes that so
bedevilled my students and myself once upon a time, Manchevski adds a necessary
and enabling fourth term: Truth, Fiction, Belief … and Faith. Indeed, he refers
to an exceptional faith, not just
some run-of-the-mill, obligatory, routinised practice of faith (or worship). Exceptional
faith not in an ideology, a cause, or a cultural movement, but in Art itself.
And, as we know, faith demands a leap – a leap into what is not yet known or
felt, seen and heard.
1. Jean-Pierre Gorin, “L’Enfance-nue”, Film Comment,
Vol. 40 No. 3 (May-June 2004), p. 36.
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2. Serge Daney and Philippe Garrel, “Dialogue”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 443/444 (May 1991), p. 60 (my translation).
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© Adrian Martin April 2012 |
