by Travis Mackenzie Hoover
The Revival, Toronto|The more I listen to documentarians, the less I trust the documentary. The line that separates fact from fiction and reportage from drama is so fine that it frequently disappears altogether; even the best-intentioned filmmaker is under pressure to give shape to something that is essentially formless, and in so doing leaves out much essential information. The directors on today's panel, which deals with the vagaries of representing the past for the present, did their best to downplay the dangers of such a situation, but their words kept raising more questions than they answered, and I walked out of Revival even more leery of the form than I was going in.
One problem, as Bill Weber pointed out, is that people's memories are often subjective–the interviewees of his film The Cockettes frequently contradicted each other as they remembered the drag troupe/commune of which they were members. The filmmaker is often in the position of sorting out what to believe, if anything–a process that requires great care. Furthermore, the filmmaker is often in the position of speaking for people who can't speak for themselves, such as the dead: Brenda Longfellow spoke of how she used diaries and actors to evoke the private thoughts of photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston in her film Tina in Mexico. The distinction between assertion of fact and fanciful invention is an important one to make.
That may seem like an obvious caveat in approaching documentary, but a couple of the panellists seemed dangerously oblivious to its implications. When Andres Veiel, director of Black Box Germany, spoke proudly of how there are "no actors as good as my protagonists," it became obvious that truth and fantasy were fused for him, and that the political aspects of his film were as abstract as the aesthetic. This was further reflected by Paul Cowan, whose (awful) mining-disaster film Westray involved weeding out the un-photogenic: He claimed to have looked for subjects "who told stories well," making one wonder what information was being suppressed by those who stumbled over their no-less-important words. Making history come alive and imposing on history the life of performance are not the same thing, whatever the latter gains in excitement.
Only Weber and Linda Ohama, of Obachan's Garden, appeared to be less concerned with form and content than with the form of content. Weber claimed that he and co-director David Weissman, when faced with the potential of creating a hippie freakshow, chose to use the most conventional talking-heads approach possible in order to see the people and not the provocation. And Ohama said she let the material shape her film's aesthetic, noting that "the story takes its own route" and the use of archives, interviews and re-enactments have to serve a function beyond what can be fit into a shapely container.
The point is not that other documentarians are essentially evil; there's no way a 90-minute documentary can exhaust a subject, and a little intellectual self-defence should be employed in approaching every cultural product. But a form that purports to show the truth should announce at every possible convenience its fiction, so that we might not be led to believe what is essentially a delusion.
