"Reality is always magic," said the great Jean Renoir. And his own vast body of work he demonstrated that the definition of reality can never be fixed--at one moment objective and at the next moment subjective, sometimes comforting and sometimes terrifying. What we call reality is also elusive: it is always in motion and refuses to stand still for the camera. Perhaps this is why we often use the verb "capture" when we’re discussing reality.
All good film images are documentary images in the sense that they capture something essential about the people or places or objects they’re examining. That’s why fictional films often move us with a strong sense of historical reality, while documentaries often captivate us with their drama. But, as I learned from my own experience, the docmentary impulse originates with the desire to capture something that can only be experienced spontaneously and directly. In other words, to work responsibly in the documentary form means that you are taking an enormous chance: you are essentially putting your faith in reality.
In my own recent work, I’ve become interested in mixing the two forms, in pushing fiction as far as possible into documentary but at the same time staying within its limits. I’ve found it an interesting and fruitful way of working. In each case it’s been a matter of creating as complete a picture as possible of a certain world--the world of small-time local gangsters in GoodFellas, the New York society of the 1870s in The Age of Innocence, precorporate Las Vegas in Casino, and Tibet before the Chinese invasion in my new film, Kundun. The idea is to give the worlds in which these characters live so much detail that they take on the force and presence of another character, perhaps a dominant or all-seeing character. In each case, the dynamic of these worlds affects the action of their characters on an intimate level.
In a sense, this is true of any good film. The Red Shoes, one of my very favorite films may be the height of studio artifice, but a great deal of its impact depends on the fact that Powell and Pressburger spent so much time giving life to the world of ballet--the tragedy at the end of that film would not have had such a profound impact had they not done so. Citizen Kane is another striking example. There has been a great deal written about the fact that Welles owed so much to German expressionism, and there are few films more stylish and flamboyant than Kane. But another way of looking at Welles’ visual strategy in that film is that he made the world in which his characters lived not only present but intrusive, claustrophobic. Many directors put ceilings on their sets and used deep-focus photography, and in each case the effect was visually striking. In the Welles film, it has real meaning because of the way that it embodies a real world--and not an expressionist exaggeration--that hems in his characters.
And if you look at the work of all the great documentary filmmakers--Flaherty, Wiseman, Rosogin, the Maysles, Marcel Ophuls, Jean Rouch--you’ll see how close they move to fiction in the way they pace them, the way they structure them. There’s no such thing as just turning on a camera and cutting a slice out of reality--reality always has to be interpreted, because otherwise it is a blur. Even a supposed "slice of life" like Helen Levitt’s In the Street is artfully edited and builds up to the moment in the end when the cameraman reveals himself--the "climax." In many ways, the tension between documentary and fiction lies at the heart of cinema. It’s as though the two forms have a pact to keep each other honest.
© 1998 by Double Take magazine (contributor: Martin Scorsese)
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