Reality?

I am reading “Altman” a truly wonderful oral biography of Robert Altman by Mitchell Zuckoff.   It quotes from the “Player”:

- It lacked certain elements that we need to market a film successfully.

- What elements?

- Suspense, laughter, violence.  Hope, heart, nudity, sex.  Happy endings.  Mainly happy endings. -

- What about reality?

The struggle to question the recognizable and safe narrative elements (which are not necessarily cliches) is at the heart of any honest attempt to make one step closer to something as elusive as reality.  

And what is “reality”?

A maverick storyteller faces a tremendously impossible task: to come up with new tools to describe something that has not even been properly defined.   All the “aristotelian” tools, all subtle or not so subtle tricks and conventions of sustaining the audience’s attention crumble when the “what about reality” question releases its inconvenient roar.  

Philosophy and mystery

My favorite director, Roman Polanski, a very pragmatic, precise and logical filmmaker, when asked what’s more important in life: chance or fate, responds (in my translation from an interview in Polish) 

“To me it’s something between chance and necessity.  It seems to me that chance plays the main part, however if one thinks about it - if one has a realistic approach and thinks that the world begun with the Big Bang - then one has to conclude that everything that happens results from that which was before.  Therefore it can’t happen any other way.  If one talks to God, one is religious.  If however God responds to him, one is schizophrenic.  But these are philosophical issues, and we live in times that are unkind to philosophy.  Philosophy has been replaced by science.  There is no place for mystery.”  

The skin of the images

Naran Ja (One Act Orange Dance) 

Commenting on his bold and powerful 12 min. short Once Act Orange Dance Oscar nominated Alejandro G. Iñárritu (Biutiful (2010), Babel (2006)) says about his format choice (VHS):

“We have lost the skin of the images. Cameras reproduce reality much more sharply than my eyes can see and that’s why it looks fake”.

VHS! And it works!

The brilliance of the piece does not relay on technology, but the format choice enhances the dreamy quality of the flow of the dance.

It is somehow liberating to stop carrying so much about whether it should be shot on 2K or 4K when telling a story.

Yesterday I watched a documentary about a poet. It was beautifully shot using the latest HD gear. Carefully staged shots were just breathtaking. Yet, half way through its length the doc simply folded, froze, died and barely crawled to its end. Seems like the physical weight of the technology got the makers down. They run out of steam. They also came up way too close to the poet so that instead of getting to know her soul I was attacked by the imperfections of her skin. Hmmm.

Clearly the sharper is not always the better.  Clearly a filmmaker should respect “the skin of the images”.

No excuses

The following was written in 1956 by Leszek Kolakowski and immediately confiscated by censorship:  

“Let’s not say that we were cheated.  Nobody is excused by being a victim of a cheat.  Furthermore, let’s not claim that, when we saw crimes, the situation deprived us of the courage to speak the truth.  The lack of courage does not explain anything, even if it can be historically explained because a man is responsible for everything he does.  Let’s not say that we lacked the knowledge of what was indeed going on: because even though back then we had it in less supply than we have it now, we still had it more than enough to gain clear understanding of the abyss between the socialism and the Russian and our own social reality.   What’s more: we were not blind: thousand of facts kept awakening our horror or laughter - both of them platonic, not-threatening and toothless.  

That’s why let’s not kid ourselves that only having the newly acquired knowledge and seeing the dreadful new facts we found ourselves standing on the silent earth from which Gods had left.  Our mirages were not fueled by the lack of knowledge.  They were fueled by the mental and moral system of the organization of that knowledge, in which each uncomfortable fact was easily explained by a network of ideological myths.  These myths served as tools for voluntary self-blinding to reality.  The crisis of the communist consciousness does not therefore arise from the new knowledge about the word: it arrises from the collapse of the mythology that initially gave shape to this knowledge.”  

How does it work today?  We are living in the free world but not everything is perfect (let’s just leave it with that).  The suffocating  oppression of yesterday is gone and we the lucky inhabitants of the Western democracies enjoy good life, freedom and wealth.  However, who knows how our today’s choices will be judged in the future from the perspective of the global, environmental consciousness?  

The world of ideological myths does not allow a vacuum.   What than would be small, uncomfortable facts that we sweep under the carpet  in order not to see the truth of today?  What are the present ideological myths that do not allow for the unobstructed view of the world?  

The hubris of knowing

Shadows, 

by John Cassavetes

To understand or not. To know or not. These are the questions for a director.

Claude Lanzman in the Spiegel interview states there are no historical explanations in his movies. Not understanding is his iron rule. To him, to ask “why” is obscene. To me it means that as a filmmaker he only wants to represent, to bring closer, to allow us to experience something that cannot be experienced. In the interview he says that “When posed the question, "why?" by Primo Levi, then a prisoner, an SS officer answered: "There is no why here." This is the truth. The search for why is absolutely obscene.”

This brings in a troublesome dilemma: if a murderer presents a disturbing point of view that could pass for truth and the insight (in this case, the insight would be that there is no insight) than wouldn’t accepting such a position be playing into his own, the murderer, view of things? Therefore on the level of thinking about the events I would disagree with Lanzman, but then on the level of showing them through the filmmaking process I would agree with him. I would agree because when faced with the task of showing on the screen something that clearly exceeds any previously known paradigm seeking the “whys” is plain hubris. If that is indeed the case than film directing does not necessarily gain from “seeking understanding”. Whoa! What a strange conclusion.

Is it really the case? Let’s take John Cassavetes who claimed not to plan anything because to him the main force that destroys the storytelling is the knowledge where the film is heading. Supposedly it was his custom to write the ending only a few days before the wrap of shooting. 

Clearly he didn’t want the knowing to intervene with the doing. That’s a really strange statement, except Cassavetes made some truly awesome films. They were bold and challenging. “A movie should be troublesome for the audience”, he used to say. Perhaps the hubris of knowing is just an easy way out of our problems, the problems that we write, sing, film and ponder about.

Step aside

Andrej Tarkovsky (?, I am pretty certain it is him) writes in one of his books: “You have to be a servant of the work of art not a master of it”.  

And his long time editor Michal Leszczylowski says somewhere (I do not remember where)  “in bad movies decisions how to cut are made by either director or editor.  in good movies these decisions are made by the material.” (quoting from memory)

In short, humbleness.  

Perhaps this dynamic can also work in a simple and modest documentary which I am currently producing.  

I took upon myself to tell the story of a certain philosopher who is no longer around.  

The project is tentatively called "The Department of Historical Necessity". 

I just returned from another material collecting trip and discovered there that the hero of my story takes over in a very literal way: he makes me set up shots according to his (specific) physical ways of interacting with the world.  I just looked at these shots and they look eerily real.  

Where will it lead me if I allow it to take over?

Documentary and philosophy (3 of 3)

Switching to a more specific, personal testimony: the easiest way out of the problem how to show an abstract thought on the screen seems to be to equate a thought with a person and profile that person.  I’ve done my share of those documentaries and noticed that they are most effective when their follow their heros’ unique emotions and sensitivities.  For example when working on a Zygmunt Bauman documentary ("Lawnswood Gardens") I kept asking myself "how would Bauman direct" - not to assume I would be able to approach the world the way he does (I would not) but to keep myself in check when facing the task of presenting such a person on screen.  The documentary cinema clearly loves emotions and sensitivities while approaches the abstract with hesitation.  

Aside from identifying and mining the hero’s emotions, also a “negation of the abstract” seems to work well when trying to bring philosophy to screen.  In “Philosopher’s Paradise”, a narrator does not understand an abstract idea of the hero of the film.  Constructing a watchable screen tale is helped also by the fact that the narrator is the son of the misunderstood philosopher.   Because of that, there is a constant and personal tension.  In my fictitious 30 min. short “Phenomenology of truth”, a made up philosophical theory (“the truth is only on the surface”) championed by the film’s main character is constantly challenged through opposing its message staging, framing and plot turns.  I am mindful however that this “negation” maneuver however, while working in this fictitious area, could for ethical reasons be unacceptable in a documentary.  

I am currently working on a yet another “philosophical” documentary titled “The Department of Historical Necessity”.  It will be a story of Marek Siemek, the profound, brilliant and esteemed professor of the Warsaw, Bonn, Jena and other universities.  (“there are about 20 people on the planet that can think and Marek was one of them” someone says).  Yet, in what may be a cop out in terms of the subject discussed in this entry, I have to admit that the “juice” and the drive of the film will come mostly from Siemek's tragic life turns, his amazing charisma and personality as well as from his inner demons.  I will of course make an effort to communicate in a clear way his intellectual and philosophical dramas but the overall story will have to be constructed with the classical beginning, middle and end, with the good and the bad guys, with the plot turning and (hopefully) surprising the viewer.  

So, aside from choosing interesting or dramatic people who express abstract thoughts, aside from applying various dramatic devices to make stories about the abstract issues fit formulas of the contemporary storytelling what else can be done to further bridge the disciplines of philosophy and documentary filmmaking?

My tentative list of certain film grammatical figures and structural approaches that might help in a less apodictic and primitive screen storytelling that seems to be the norm of today include:

• to allow each (abstract) beat to sufficiently reverberate so that a viewer can absorb it. 

• to seek rather than to preach. 

• to pose a finding in a form of a question rather than the answer, since each statement pretending to be the full explanation of a given problem invites by default its opposition and by doing so undermines the effort to “seek together”. 

• to try not to follow the obvious in exploring a problem.  (Aren’t the documentarians charged with the task of showing something that would normally be hidden to a casual observer?)

• to use sound as a driving force for images, rather than the other way around (at present the dimension of sound seems quite mysterious and allowing for forming fresh and unexpected associations)

• to limit spoken abstractions to minimum.

• to seek ways to equate abstract terms or emotional states or intellectual attitudes with spaces.  Once that’s done a space can become a representation of an idea (an example from a feature film world would be “dream” and “consciousness” presented in “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”.  (Yes, despite the main theme of this post, I think the most promising inroads into expanding the film grammar come nowadays from the independent feature film area.)

When all is said and done clearly the bottom line in coming up with (intellectually) satisfying documentary film storytelling is the sensitivity and maturity of a storyteller (not age related) and for that even more than in the subject of “documentary and philosophy” there are not fixed findings, lists to follow or insights to give.  

That’s why I was so late. 

(3 of 3)