Screen Machine

Feature: MIFF Diary, Day 11 & 12: Fiction versus documentary

Yesterday two friends independently told me about people they know who make it their business to watch only documentaries at the Melbourne International Film Festival and ignore the fiction films. This seems a bizarre idea for me because I find that the documentaries end up being some of the worst things about the festival, often coasting on the topicality of their subject matter with an often mediocre approach to film form.

What is the difference between fiction films and documentaries? Should we apply different standards of judgement to the two? My tentative idea on this is that we should not judge fiction films differently from documentaries and that values we hold about cinema specific to one or the other will uncover interesting questions about how we watch films. Take, for example, the importance placed on aesthetic beauty. With documentaries, it is not often that one is denounced for having ugly cinematography but with fiction films it is often a point of fixation. We could say this suggests that beautiful cinematography is overvalued in our appreciation of fiction films but we could also say that light and composition are under-analysed in documentaries. The main point I’m putting forth here is that our appreciation of one form will enrich our appreciation of the other.

Takeshi Kitano has made another excellent, violent and funny yakuza film with Outrage. While there is nothing really novel about the plot (it involves betrayals and vendettas within and amongst Japanese mob groups) what is interesting about the film is how it unfolds like an indifferent computer program. There are no main characters in the film (the first shot dollies across several faces right past Takeshi Kitano as if he were just a background actor); there is just a system continually eating itself.

It is this emphasis on systems rather than individuals that characterises the work of master documentarian Frederick Wiseman who has brought us another great work with Boxing Gym. Wiseman’s style must be seen as relatively accessible now having been adopted in such popular fiction works as HBO television series The Wire and Treme whose creator David Simon cites Wiseman as a major influence. Wiseman makes films about institutions that cut through the clichéd rhetoric through patiently observing its different parties until a portrait of a network slowly builds. For the director of such distressing fare as Titicut Follies and Primate, Boxing Gym constitutes a surprise by being a real life-affirming experience. Through its repetitive scenes of exercise, advice-giving and socialisation, it becomes apparent that the film’s boxing gym is not a space of violence but of community, where the hypnotic routines of sport become the very stuff of life.

One cannot muster the same enthusiasm for Page One: Inside the New York Times, a film that fully buys into the fantasy of journalists as the liberal heroes of the Fourth Estate. There are a whole slew of problems with the film including its tendency to want to cover a whole range of topics from Wikileaks to the challenge of new media in the most superficial manner. But what Kitano’s and Wiseman’s films both highlight about Page One is its ideology of individualism, from the way it luxuriates in the vivid personality of David Carr (once crack addict, now crack reporter) to the way it glosses over such events as the reporting of WMD threats from Iraq as a mere problem of renegade individuals rather than seeing these journalistic failures as symptoms of an institutional malady. (Interestingly enough, the way institutions of journalism are built to fail is the subject of season five of The Wire.)

Much more interesting was Khodorkovsky, a film about the man who became the richest man in Russia after the liberalisation of its economy in the 1990s (making it a good film for a double bill with A Stoker) only to end up in prison after frictions with Vladimir Putin. There are some irritating elements to the film—animated sequences of Khodorkovsky swimming in a pool of money, enhancing old photos with 3D effects—but it is generally a fascinating look at a man and era full of contradictions. The director Cyril Tuschi has managed to get interviews with key figures in the events leading up to Khodorkovsky’s arrest and the resulting image is of an irrational confusion of interests.

Khodorkovsky sees the irrational on the surface of reality. Jan Svankmajer’s Surviving Life rationalises everything below the surface of reality (the subconscious). The great Czech animator’s latest work is not without its own pleasures. The final image of a child swimming in an ocean of blood is definitely arresting. But on the whole, I can’t help but see it as a betrayal of Svankmajer’s previous surrealist works, something like Svankmajer’s attempt to make a crowd-pleasing film. What was unsettling and uncanny in his previous works is merely carnivalesque in Surviving Life. Where his films once produced a wonderful excess of meanings, in this film there is a disturbing tidiness to how Svankmajer connects his protagonist’s dream life to a single event of childhood trauma. It’s fairly faithful to Freud’s early work on dreams, but to today’s students of psychoanalysis Surviving Life must come off as fairly embarassing.

FILMS WATCHED:

• Page One: Inside the New York Times — Andrew Rossi
• Good Bye — Mohammad Rasoulof
• The Fourth Portrait — Chung Mong-Hong
• Surviving Life — Jan Svankmajer
• Boxing Gym — Frederick Wiseman
• Principles of Life — Constantin Popescu
• Khodorkovsky — Cyril Tuschi
• Outrage — Takeshi Kitano

PREVIOUS DIARY ENTRIES:

• Day 1: Drinking games, anticipation
• Day 2: On the value of film festivals, love, outcasts
• Day 3: The indignities of employment, the importance of caffeine
• Day 4: On the problem of relating to films
• Day 5 & 6: Man is alone!
• Day 7 & 8: More thoughts on love, the materiality of film
• Day 9 & 10: On children

Brad Nguyen is a co-editor of Screen Machine. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne, was the film reviewer for Triple R Breakfasters and has written for Senses of Cinema.

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