Stranger Than Fiction

One Moscow summer night, I was talking with a scriptwriter friend on his balcony. “Look,” he said, “Something’s going to happen – something always happens to people at this crossroads.” Sure enough, a cheerful group of pedestrians came to a standstill, unaware of us watching. Several of them abruptly broke away and hurried into a side street. “I told you,” my friend said. “Last time I saw a couple reach this place, the girl threw away her bouquet and ran off. Some people break up, some just turn around and walk back,” he added.

Jokingly, I suggested he install a camera on the balcony, to film such events and make a documentary about the secret of the crossroads. What happens to people as they approach it; what notions start to pulsate in their brains? What happened in their lives an hour or day before that moment? There would be raw material for horror movies, melodramas, thrillers or comedies… authenticity could never be recreated by actors or directors. Nothing short of a candid camera can picture life as is, dispassionately reflecting reality in all its extraordinary strangeness.

One of the first ever films screened by the Lumière brothers in 1895 at a Parisian café was The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. People froze in their seats or fled in terror that the train would break out of the screen and crush the stalls. At other early screenings, people began to sob when shown a blowup of a crying female face. Arousing strong emotions became one of the avenues of cinema development, and the stock in trade of what would become the film industry. Today, many feel that cinema is a victim of its own success at emotional manipulation and special effects, recycling stale, predictable formulas.

No wonder there is renewed interest in documentaries. Documentaries go back to the birth of cinema: the first films were nothing more than documentary footage. They allowed people to see things beyond their reach – the Niagara Falls or the lifestyles of foreigners. Filmgoers could observe wildlife in its natural habitat, or significant events in history. Filmmakers were pioneers who often risked their lives; one cameraman kept turning filming an angry lion until the beast tore him to pieces.

Many pioneers of the documentary genre started out as photographers. Some used movie cameras simply to record real life; others, to try to understand the world, reveal its facets or praise it. You can trace these two trends back to two individuals, Robert Flaherty (1884–1951) and Dziga Vertov (1896-1954).

Brothers Lumiere

Flaherty began his career as a prospector in Canada’s Hudson Bay region. His films of the local Inuit tribes made him famous and established the genre of anthropological documentaries. Vertov, by contrast, was a neuro-psychologist by training, who glorified the Bolshevik revolution in his native Russia, and film itself as a revolutionary new art.

Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) was a manifesto of the new art, rejecting all theatrical effects and explanatory subtitles. Life itself was the plot of documentaries and dictated the future nature of cinema. It often happened that, after scanning miles of film, a director ended up making a film that had nothing in common with the original idea.

Television created demand for various documentary genres: news reports, stories, biographic films, essays… As documentary cinema diversified, some film-makers returned to Vertov’s conception of it as a unique form of art, giving rise to the current trend of “Real Cinema”.

As the movement’s manifesto proclaims “Real Cinema does not defy the work of its precursors and is not the ultimate result of the evolution of the cinema. The top of the pyramid is reality itself which cannot be expected to fit into the limits of a film frame. Rather, the opposite will happen: reality will engulf the cinema, making it one of its substances”. Footage of real events, people and objects is used to produce art projects whose meaning diverges from that of the original fact or event, and is inseparable from the film-maker’s subjective vision.

A case in point is the work of the US director Godfrey Reggio, who at the age of fourteen decided that the world was absurd, and spent the next two decades as a Catholic monk sworn to silence. On his return to the world, Reggio decided to shoot a “non-narrative, plot-less meditative film that compares natural phenomena to the modern civilization”. The result was Koyaanisqatsi (1983), which took nine years and 35 kilometres of film to produce; followed by Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002), likewise with a score by Philip Glass. This epic trilogy defies description, and can only be experienced.

More accessible to critics and the public alike were two documentaries released in 2004. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 set box-office records by taking over $220 million within a few months of its release, and won an unprecedented 20-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. While some explain its popularity as evidence of anti-Americanism, or condemn the film as sensationalist, neither is a valid criticism of Morgan Sperlock’s Super Size Me, a devastating expose of the nutritional horror that is McDonalds.

Alongside these are whimsical amalgams of art and documentary like Sansa (2003), made by Siegfried Debrebant, which follows an Arab artist from Montmartre who hikes from Paris to Tokyo without a passport. As Debrebant admitted, “I had a scenario but I sort of lost it”. The result was two hours of wonderful adventures, randomly shot in the streets of cities where the character found himself by pure chance. The Web is also changing documentary cinema. Video blogs like YouTube are a compendium of private mini-cinemas. Alongside sloppy footage made with a mobile phone, blogs often host professional work by individuals or groups, such as the short film Kashi made by 1more life. The popularity of video blogging proves that people are bored with both the fictional reality of movies and the sleek images presented by print media and television. They want authenticity.

And so my friend and I remained on the balcony as the sun set behind the rooftops and lights came on in the windows. In one I saw a man in a dressing-gown cleaning a pistol. In another, someone knelt in prayer before an icon, crossing himself and touching his forehead on the floor. Directly opposite, a semi-naked girl with a phone in her hand leant from an open window, finished talking, and blew us kisses. If I was making a film of her, who knows how the evening might have ended?