Film After Film. J. Hoberman
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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
CHAPTER FOUR
QUID EST VERITAS:
THE REALITY OF UNSPEAKABLE SUFFERING
Objective anxiety became manifest at the height of the dot.com bubble in the late 1990s and the panicky anticipation of the Y2K “virus,” the period Rodowick calls “the summer of digital paranoia,” when (as he paraphrased Marx) The Matrix, et al. suggested that “all that was chemical and photographic [was] disappearing into the electronic and digital.”
Hysterical anxiety can be even more precisely dated. For many, and not just those in Hollywood, the events of September 11, 2001 provided the ultimate movie experience—spectacular destruction predicated on fantastic conspiracy, broadcast live, as well as repeatedly (and even recorded by some participants on their cell phones), and watched by an audience, more or less simultaneously, of billions. This surely is what the composer Karl Stockhausen, among others, meant when, in the course of a press conference at the Hamburg Music Festival on September 16, 2001, he undiplomatically referring to the events of 9/11 as “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.”1
These events—or rather, this Event—established a new cinematic paradigm and Hollywood’s response was fascinating, particularly in that magical thinking is what movies are all about. Only days after the Event, the studios eagerly reported that the FBI had informed them they could be the terrorists’ next target. On September 21, rumors of an impending attack swept Los Angeles. The industry felt somehow guilty and even responsible, although not everyone was as blunt (or innocent in his megalomania) as Robert Altman, who told the Associated Press that, “These people have copied the movies. Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they’d seen it in a movie … We created this atmosphere and taught them how to do it.”2
Did the history-changing shock of this cinematic event plunge the nascent twenty-first century into an alternative universe, one in which motion picture fairy tales actually did come true? Or was it rather a red pill that parted the veil on a new reality that already existed? The 9/11 Event was understood by some filmmakers as a horrible unintended consequence of their medium and taken by others as a challenge to the notion of the movies as a medium with a privileged relationship to the real.3
This was not necessarily conscious as when, during the course of an on-set press conference, Steven Spielberg would describe his fantastic War of the Worlds (2005), the first Hollywood movie to allegorize 9/11, as an exercise in realism, even insisting upon a key concept of the New Realness: “The whole thing is very experiential [sic].” War of the Worlds, Spielberg maintained, was not simply entertainment, like such earlier fantasies of interplanetary warfare as Independence Day (1996) or Starship Troopers (1997): “We take it much more seriously than that.” The movie, he promised reporters, would be “as ultra-realistic as I’ve ever attempted to make a movie, in terms of its documentary style …” Spielberg, like Altman, was speaking on behalf of his medium. Cinema itself would insure that the post 9/11 disaster film would be experiential, communal and above all naturalistic.4
Although the mayhem in War of the Worlds references 9/11 in every instance, the most brutal New Realness is manifest in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), a movie that seemingly stands opposed to all entertainment values and which, in fact, aspired to be far more than a movie by representing and, in a sense, identifying with a unique instance of divine intervention—and hence, proposing itself as a cinematic event to trump even 9/11. For a true believer, The Passion of the Christ is not a narrative but an icon—an object through which to meditate upon the spectacle of a defenseless man beaten, stomped, and tortured to death