Cinema: Myths and Illusions

As we enter the annual blockbuster high-season, here is my look back at the world of smoke, mirrors and sprockets:


MYTHS and ILLUSIONS

If you watch just about any TV programme about the First World War, you are going to see the shot of British soldiers going 'over the top' and one hit by a bullet, falling back into the trench. It's ancient and scratchy as you would expect, but it was filmed in the 'twenties.
It's all illusion, of course. Our perception of cinema has come a long way since the Lumiere Brothers had music-hall audiences rushing for the door as they were faced by a speeding locomotive. We accept that light particles bouncing off a white screen are no more than that, but willingly leave this flesh, blood and brick world to suspend our disbelief and allow our emotions to be assaulted or pampered. More than that: cinema now demands that we accept several layers of reality. It began with jumps in space as the scene cut, for instance, from one lonely Romeo to his far-away Juliet. Charlie Chaplin and the delectable Edna Purviance.
Early masters like Abel Gance topped this by sticking two or more related events together in a multiscreen, as in the 1927 'Napoleon'. It was time-travel that really took off, though, with the flashback quickly growing from an insert to being the whole film, like 'The Lavender Hill Mob' (1951), where we start in the present and only return to it for Alec Guiness' punch line, which completely trashes all the assumptions we would have made about the story's outcome.

Concurrent with the growth of mainstream fictional cinema has been the documentary, which, although for most of its history has been predominantly in the service of hard fact, also enabled us to learn about alternative worlds, e.g. 'Nanook of the North', while giving directors a freedom to experiment they would not have had with bigger budgets hanging round their necks. 'The Night Mail', mixing film, poetry and music being just one example. Rap cinema. Often through budget limitation, films have included bits of what is later recognised as valuable documentary, like the original Titanic film, 'A Night to Remember', where The Queen Elizabeth played the lead role for the launching scene. But story-telling and information have usually tended to keep well apart, although now there are plenty of straightforward dramas which function as documentaries too, like 'In the Name of the Father' (the story of the Guildford Four) although it bent the facts by combining the characters of solicitor and barrister for the American market, casting some doubt on the rest of it. (Incidentally, complaints have also been made against the 2006 film, 'Provoked', based on the story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, who killed her violent husband, in that it lost by having the legal process 'Americanised'.) 'Fellow Travellers', too, the 'eighties film about how blacklisted Hollywood writers came to work on British TV, putting words in the mouths of Robin Hood and Ivanhoe. An ideal double bill with 'Good Night, and Good Luck'.

Inbetween we have the honestly 'based on real events' film; starting with historical fact but jumping off to create a slightly, or completely, new story. A special mention here must go to the Italian 'Private', the Golden Leopard award-winning tale of a Palestinian family playing unwilling host to some frightened Israeli boy-soldiers. Based on a true story, or perhaps a couple of true stories, it works a little like a 'reality TV' show, the camera sharing confined airspace with improvising actors. The Coen Brothers' 'Fargo' is another one of the legions of examples, and one of the best. It isn't so new, though: Two directors separately made differing films both based on a murder committed by two bored youths just to see if they could carry out the perfect crime; one being 'Rope', by Alfred Hitchcock. If you want to really stretch the point, you could include half of all films ever made, taking in gangsters, men in tights, westerns and war movies.

Meanwhile, books (and not just Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and James Joyce's Ulysses) have been taking increasing liberties with genres; but the landmark event in demolishing the wall was surely on the wireless with Orson Welles' 'War of the Worlds'. He managed to top even that, in a sense, with 'F for Fake' (1974) . 'Art itself is a forgery, of nature or the imagination' - (is an interpreter a forger?) An investigation linking two art forgers including Elmer Hory, with Howard Hughes the recluse who employed stand-ins for his rare public appearances (cf A. Warhol), a hoax biographer and Orson the amateur magician himself, 'Fake' jams together visual puns, stills, other films, reconstructions and actual documentary footage in an exhilarating but disorientating experience. It was not a great success at the box-office as it was born ahead of its category.

Two strands of new cinema can be traced back to that film: most of Charlie Kaufman's scripts especially 'Adaptation' and plenty of Michael Winterbottom's output stand out as a recognisable genre, combining a film, with a film about the film and chopping together the script with its source and the business of writing it. Jean Luc Godard has also had a considerable effect in this area, although since he came over all analytical, only the most determined film scholars would sit through his films more than once. In 'One Plus One' (comparatively a symbolist drama) , combining a fictional group of black kids planning bloody revolution on the banks of the Thames, with the Rolling Stones interminably trying to record 'Sympathy for the Devil', Jagger spoke for us all when he burst into an exasperated 'Jeeziz Christ!'. Winterbottom has made several films which combined genuine documentary with fiction, particularly 'Welcome to Sarajevo'. Documentary has now become a 'style' to take its place with other movie forms including musical, noir and comedy. In the end it's a matter of degree: 'Apocalypse Now' looked, in its time, quite like the 'real thing', but 'The Road to Guantanamo' and now 'Shooting Dogs' leave it looking relatively stylised. Films like this which look like documentaries actually contain quite a lot of acting and inter-acting. Such leading cinema has a chicken/ egg relationship with technology. As it was with oil paint and easel pictures, offset litho and Private Eye, Marshall Amplifiers and Jimi Hendrix, photocopiers and samizdat or punk fanzines, so it goes with video/ digital and (usually) small-budget postmodern cinema.

There certainly is an entirely new genre: depicting real events and using non-actors to play themselves or people like them. Or 'real' actors to impersonate them. That's the other strand. There has been a wave of no-budget films from Iran, notably 'Kandahar' ( an Afghani-born woman receives a letter from her suicidal sister, taking a dangerously unaccompanied journey through Afghanistan to try to find her), by Mosen Makhmalbaf, 'The Apple' by his daughter Samira (two daughters are released from their prison home by their jealous and paranoid father), and 'The Day I Became a Woman' (the three ages of woman) by Marzieh Meshkini AKA Mrs Makhmalbaf. All are shot in the middle of their real-life scenario with combined actors and non-actors, often apparently playing themselves. The ubiquitous Winterbottom has also done this, perhaps with a little more money, as in 'In This World', the harrowing study of people-smuggling. The perfidious logic of our film distributors shows up in the way that, although Makhmalbaf has been established as a film maker since at least 1981, it was that charmer, The Apple, by his 21 year-old daughter, that was the break-through for Iran in the UK.

Just as in Iran, Africa has been growing as a film-making country. Widely regarded as the father of African film and called by his colleagues, 'Uncle' or 'The Old Man', Ousmane Sembene has been working in films for a quarter century. His latest, 'Moolaade', seen at the 2005 bath Film festival, appeared, deceptively, to feature 'real' people playing themselves, but they were in fact actors from all over the continent. His stories are placed in convincingly real surroundings, and as well as setting out to show their intended audiences their world and themselves, are heavily polemical; none more so than Moolaade, which deals with female genital mutilation. Combining the illusion of reality with strong ideas, and ideals, these films will inevitably become as important part of history as the attitudes, cultural and political, they portray.

At the same time, there has been the rise of 'Dogme': director Lars von Trier and his confederates issued a manifesto and followed its puritanical rules - to get rid of trickery in cinema. No more overdubbing, sound effects, back-projection, artificial light. A return to the absolute basics, 'Festen', 'The Idiots' and other productions rolled out before it became apparent that these revolutionaries were only using their new 'style' for what they could squeeze out of it. They have, perhaps inevitably, got more sophisticated and now have their choice of established movie technique. Von Trier's recent 'Manderlay' was mostly post-synched (overdubbed). In any case, their pared-down approach didn't necessarily always lead to a heightened sense of realism, although by sticking to one kind of film-making throughout a production, they made it a lot easier for audiences to maintain one level of disbelief-suspension. The unobtrusive camera, the fly-on-the-wall observation felt a little like documentary but there was never any doubt that we were watching actors acting.

'Documentary' has elided with 'fiction' for the sake of style as much as for the sake of budget. '24 Hour Party People' and 'A Cock and Bull Story' played jokes with the idea of doing such a thing, and the first was a mock-documentary with Steve Coogan playing 'pop svengali' Tony Wilson, who also plays the part of 'Tony Wilson' in the latter, parts of which were indistinguishable from hard-fact documentary. But there are also plenty of films which regardless of their believability levels, look like documentaries: 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' for instance. A film made by Remy Belvaux in 1992, on the other hand, set out from the start to look like a documentary, made by a team who by their presence are implicated in the crimes being carried out by the protagonist. 'Man Bites Dog' beguiles us all into assuming the relaxed attitude of the disinterested observer, to the extent of finding our man amusing and sympatico. I am tempted to give more details, but it's too good to spoil, and I'm sure there are some amongst you who have not yet seen it. Enough to say that when we eventually become aware of how far we, the audience, have strayed, it's as amusing as a kick in the solar plexus.

Yoko Ono in one of her darker moments made a short film called 'Rape', in which the camera stalked an increasingly frightened girl through streets and round corners. That's it. It's an Art Film, which means taking one idea and hammering it to death. The fad for 'snuff movies' in the States went a little further, by hammering the protagonist to death. They seemed to have lost popularity when it became clear that they were, despite their hand-held immediacy, fiction. Perhaps. Anyway, as far as their hardcore audience goes, it probably wouldn't make that much difference.

'The Blair Witch Project' probably fooled some of the people, some of the time. As it begins with the bald statement: 'In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was discovered.' - it's obvious what we are expected to believe, or credit. The students' film begins professionally enough for beginners, but deteriorates into thoughtless pointing and shooting as they get lost and descend into danger. The really clever thing is getting us to accept that three people who are only in the end concerned with struggling to survive, would take the trouble to film themselves struggling. There are plenty of setups which are palpably not unplanned; simply not what real people without a film crew would really do - but it doesn't matter. We believe. The three students' personality clashes, frustration, anger and distress are 'true to life' and they at least must be 'real kids' even if the film requires us to make that credibility jump. It's necessary to watch the DVD complete with the extras, to see the light. They are believable because they are actors. As they plan to make their documentary one of them makes a passing reference to 'Deliverance', a drama which followed a similar plot, and also convinced as a portrayal of a bizarre and dangerous other world. John Boorman is a great director, and so we believed the scenario, but we may have had reservations about such horrible people really existing. One of them was in the Whitehouse, you might say; so life imitates art, as it always has done.