Movin' on Up

THE CLASS. MAN ON WIRE. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED. A WHOLE SHIT-TON OF OTHER MOVIES AND TOPICS. There's a fascinating exchange going on in the comment threads that has turned to a direction I would like to elevate to an entire posting. It seems to have turned toward the subject of genre and I was writing a comment and deciding I had more to say and it had to do with two films on my Best of 2008 list, so why not turn their direction.

Here's the post's comments that I would like to move up:

Owen said...

And my point on that subject is that it's impossible for documentarians to do that for the same reasons that it's impossible for other filmmakers. I also think that creating a dichotomy of documentaries on the one hand and history-based fictional films on the other doesn't make much sense, since they're both making the claim, either explicitly or implicitly, that they're depicting the facts. Frankly, I don't see much difference between documentaries and fiction other than the fact that documentaries have non-actors and usually have narration. They're still trying to convey a vision or message, and will pick and choose what they show and how they show it based on that vision or message; any difference that exists is one only of degree, not of kind. That goes both for sensationalist stuff like Michael Moore's docs and for more meditative, less beat-you-over-the-head docs like Herzog's. So I really don't see why some films have this responsibility because they call themselves "documentaries," while others don't because they're "history-based fictional films," when they all face the exact same dilemmas.

Anonymous said...

I do understand your point. As one final volley i offer the following: genre selection is an important part in the filmmaking process. Choosing the lens that you want to view the material through and then executing it determines to a large extent how your film will be received. To combine the genres, which you argue is an acceptable outcome, is to say that there is not much difference between comedy and drama except that one is funny. The entire expectation changes based on the genre that you choose -- which gets back to my original point of different expectations for documentaries than for historical or biographical films...

I know you may say that dramas and comedies are too dissimilar and do not fit the point you were making concerning documentaries and historical films. I simply disagree.

Some pretty significant ideas there, but I'm going to have to come down toward the side of Owen. Sorry Anonymous (whom I think I might start thinking of as Mr. A in the style of Mr. F from AD). Might thought here actually goes a bit further than Owen in that I would say I think the idea of genre is a construct that doesn't have a whole lot of meaning intrinsically and is instead more of a construct used to classify because people like to classify things. I find myself returning to the idea of gender and discussing in a human sexuality class how the idea is really more of a social construct of what men and women are as opposed to sex which has to do with what wobbly bits one possesses. Odd analogy, I know. The idea of comedies and dramas does not disprove Owen's point but in fact emphasized it as there are two many dramatic movies that are highly comedic and two many comedies that are in reality quite dramatic. Some recent examples that blur that line are Little Miss Sunshine, American Beauty, and Lost in Translation. The last in that list was so in between that there were a number of arguments I heard over whether it was a drama or a comedy.

My larger point and the reason I chose to make this a post, is the unreliability of genre as in regards to the idea of a documentary. First of all, any film that does not capture something as it is actually happening is not truly "documenting" anything -- most documentaries are like narrative films in that they tell a story of something that happened in the way a filmmaker chooses to construct it. The process is the same for someone writing a screenplay and then directing a movie. I offer for discussion of these issues two films that Owen and I both thought were among the best films of last year and exemplify the difficulty in categorizing films. Man on Wire (trailer) contains quite a bit of dramatization to tell the story of the high-wire act and is constructed as a tightly bound narrative with very little larger importance outside the individual story it is telling. But it is undeniably a documentary and won an Oscar for it. I contrast that with The Class (trailer), a French film that does not qualify as a documentary but stars the man who wrote the autobiographical book on which the movie is based and features mostly actual students in the roles of students and was built by a lot of improvised scenes where the teacher was actually trying to teach the class and the cameras were capturing it. But this is not a documentary. My point is not to argue that these films are miscategorized but instead to point out that they exemplify how both genres influence each other and to limit either one by the how we decided to categorize them would detract from both of their effectiveness.

Where I do think genre is important is in the subject of exploiting it and I think in this realm I do kind of agree with Mr. A, but I see it slightly differently. What I think is important is the ability of the filmmaker to exploit what he or she thinks the viewer will expect from a particular genre more so than the genre itself dictating the decisions of the filmmaker. I was listening to an episode of Fresh Air this morning featuring an interview with Jonathan Demme. The Oscar-winning director has recently focused a lot of his attention on making documentaries, including Neil Young: Heart of Gold and Jimmy Carter Man from Plains. The movie he was discussing in the interview was mainly Rachel Getting Married (trailer) and he talked about deciding to use the style of cinematography from his documentaries when making the film and attempting to find ways to mimic the overall style by not using rehearsal, for example. The goal was to create an intimacy with the viewer by making it seem like it was documenting events that were actually unfolding by utilizing elements of documentary filmmaking. What I believe he was doing, and having seen the movie I can attest I think he succeeded, was in riffing on genre. There is an article in The New York Times Magazine today that I have not yet read but kind of scene the headline on Neo-Neo-Realism in movies and I think it also relates to the same idea that what can be important in documentaries can be just as important in narrative film and just as effective.

So my general idea is that genre is not a limiting factor that filmmakers use or should use to decide how to approach their stories. True categorization does not really exist except in the minds of viewers and some of the truly great directors and screenwriters are in tune enough with the psyche of the viewers to realize how those preconceived ideas of genre can be a tool to exploit doubt and confusion in people's minds.

P.S. I think that the post I just wrote might have just crossed the border into pretentiousness. I think I need to watch something that will allow me to talk about fart jokes next time. Except, damn it, I do have something to say about The Enigma of Kasper Hauser. OK, so fart jokes in the post after that.