tendency in avant-garde filmmaking, heavily invested in the specific properties of the film medium. In switching to digital technology, they had demonstrated a comparable concern with the nature of this new medium.
So too, Guy Maddin’s confessional narrative Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), which was initially shown as a ten-part peep show installed on a battery of mutoscopes. Cowards Bend the Knee employed the conventions of silent cinema with transitions marked by irises and intertitles standing in for dialogue; when projected, the action was accompanied by a combination of classical and program music, as well as sound effects. Such gratuitous anachronism is something other (and nuttier) than mere nostalgia. Artisanal puppet animations like Trey Parker’s Team America: World Police (2004) and particularly Henry Selick’s 3-D Coraline (2009), with its perverse, although not absolute, refusal of CGI, are further instances of what might be called the New Realness; related, albeit disparate, examples of willful, neo-retro primitivism would include Maddin’s deliberately silent feature Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), Neil Young’s post-dubbed super-8 protest opera Greendale (2003), and Ken Jacob’s reworked 1903 actualité Razzle Dazzle (2006) which, like Gehr’s Cotton Candy, programmatically fuses ancient photographic and modern digital technology.
The cinema of international film festivals has showcased many successors to the short-lived Dogma movement in the form of modestly produced motion pictures, digital or analog, which, like Kiarostami’s Ten, purposefully blur the distinction between staged fiction and recorded reality. Neither pseudo nor mock documentaries, these movies might be characterized as “situation documentaries,” asserting their media specific realness through the use of long takes, minimal editing, behavioral performances, and leisurely contemplation of their subjects or setting. Drama is subsumed in observation. Landscape trumps performance.
Pedro Costa’s Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000), and Colossal Youth (2006) allow Lisbon slum-dwellers to dramatize their lives or, at least, play themselves talking before the camera. With their deliberate compositions and purposeful lighting, Costa’s features have the feel of staged documentaries—as do certain works by China’s Jia Zhangke or the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl. More radical and less stylized are those unprepossessing, minimalist narratives which are shot like documentaries, notably Kiarostami’s Ten and those of Argentine director Lisandro Alonso—La Libertad (2000), Los Muertos (2004), and Liverpool (2008). Related artists include Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra and the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes; a quintessential example of this rudimentary, rock-hard ultra-literalism is Paz Encina’s Paraguayan Hammock (2006) in which, rather than coaxing a narrative from a documentary situation, simply uses voiceover and editing to impose one.
The first 35mm all-Paraguayan feature produced since the 1970s, Encina’s willfully primitive movie could have been made a century ago—albeit in black and white, with a pair of actors behind the screen presenting the movie’s asynchronous dialogue. It opens with a lengthy, static long shot in which an elderly couple emerges from the woods to hang their hammock in a clearing. “What is wrong with you?” one asks the other. Their words—like all of the movie’s dialogue—are obviously post-dubbed and delivered in the indigenous Guaraní language. From their conversation, it gradually becomes apparent that their son is a soldier fighting in a war. The day goes on. The couple performs their separate chores as each remembers or imagines a conversation with the absent boy. With their repetitive discourse, the protagonists suggest a pair of Beckett characters. Inevitably, the movie comes full circle. As day ends, the old couple returns to their hammock—once more seen in long shot. In the fading light, they expand their three topics of conversation (the dog, the weather, their son) to acknowledge death and even each other. Then the old man lights a lamp, and the two shuffle off back into the woods. Encino holds the blank screen for a minute or two, ending with the sound of rain.
Such “situation documentaries” operate in the gap between non-fiction and fiction recognized by Italian neo-realist films like Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948), with its cast of non-actors dramatizing their lives in situ, and further refined (or perhaps de-refined) in the Warhol Factory features of the mid 1960s, most notably those starring Edie Sedgwick as herself. Movies like La Libertad and Paraguayan Hammock are predicated on and assert film’s indexical relation to the real even when, as with Ten, they are produced with digital technology.6
The great performance artist of the mode is Sasha Baron Cohen who first introduced his alter-egos Borat and Brüno as television personalities. Indeed, in some ways, the partially-staged situation documentary is analogous to the international phenomenon known as “reality television,” anticipated in the US by MTV’s long-running The Real World (1992– ), precipitated by the network-produced Survivor series (2000– ), and continuing through various editions and iterations of American Idol (2002– ), The Bachelor (2002– ), The Apprentice (2004– ), The Biggest Loser (2004– ), Dancing With the Stars (2005– ), Jersey Shore (2009– ), etc., as well as Jennifer Ringley’s twenty-four-hour dorm room website JenniCAM (1996–2003). Indeed, as demonstrated by the aftermath of the 2008 presidential campaign and the run-up to the 2012 election, reality television has become the template for American politics.
From a philosophical point of view, the most paradoxical exercise in New Realness is Lars von Trier’s post-Dogma Dogville (2003). At once abstract and concrete, Dogville plays out on an obvious, if schematically organized, soundstage and thus, in addition to providing a narrative, documents the scaffolding on which a narrative is conventionally constructed. This soundstage world, in which all the actors on the set are at all times potentially visible, meets the Dogma requirement that “filming must be done on location”—call it Dogmaville. Filled with close-ups and jump-cuts, Dogville was shot on digital video—a format that not only allows for a greater sense of spontaneity than 35mm but in its immediacy effectively precludes any nostalgia inherent in the movie’s period setting.
On the eve of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, scarcely two months before Dogville’s Cannes premiere, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia rose on the floor of the US Senate to announce that he wept for his country:
I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of a strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. The image of America has changed. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned … We flaunt our superpower status with arrogance.
Von Trier’s Rocky Mountain town may be a superpower writ small, but it is explicitly a realm of self-righteous fantasy and proud delusion. In one sense a two-hour-plus build-up to the end credit montage, Dogville saves catharsis for its final moments. The town’s hitherto unseen dog turns “real”—that is, photographic—and so does von Trier’s abstract “America.” What we have previously witnessed was simply a play, as well as a representation. Von Trier’s documentary realness, recording actors on a set in a way that they can never be imagined to be anything else, is ruptured by a greater realness—namely a montage of photographic evidence, wrenching images of human misery in America, set to a disco beat.
It’s a nasty prank, but who could possibly laugh at these indexical images of naked distress? Or readily turn their back, as encouraged to do, by leaving the theater? Is the audience ignoring reality and returning to their Dogville? Or is it vice versa?7
CHAPTER FOUR
QUID EST VERITAS:
THE REALITY OF UNSPEAKABLE SUFFERING
Objective anxiety became manifest at the height of the dot.com bubble in the late 1990s and the panicky anticipation of the Y2K “virus,” the period Rodowick calls “the summer of digital paranoia,” when (as he paraphrased Marx) The Matrix, et al. suggested that “all that was chemical and photographic [was] disappearing into the electronic and digital.”
Hysterical anxiety can be even more precisely dated. For many, and not just those in Hollywood, the events
