In an interview with Anurag Minus Verma (whose podcast is easily the best Indian podcast around, though unfortunately for my non-Indian readers, most of his episodes are not in English), director Shaunak Sen, who made the documentary All That Breathes, talks about fiction and non-fiction in film, and the separation between the two. He makes the point that if Tarkovsky, for example, has a contemplative shot of a tree swaying in the wind, is that not a non-fiction shot?
My friend Omkar and I discuss film quite a bit (it’s a big reason we became friends – he’s forgotten more about film that most people learn in their lifetimes), and one day, we were talking about ideas of genre, and I said something on the lines of – the difference between genres is not as impermeable as the distance between fiction and documentaries, and he tsked and said, “I don’t believe in that distinction either.”
I acknowledged that even documentary or non-fiction filmmaking isn’t necessarily “the truth”, since you are still scripting it and assembling a story out of the filmed moments (plus, what about the moments you missed on filming?), but he said that his point was bigger. For example, look at a film by Jafar Panahi, such as Taxi Tehran and Three Faces – are these fiction or non-fiction? They are unscripted, the “actors” are usually playing themselves, most of the dialogue is not just improvised, but comes directly from the people in the film, and yet they are taking part in a “story” – less directly in Taxi Tehran than in Three Faces. In fact, Taxi Tehran ends by implying that the film itself wasn’t even released by Panahi, but by the thieves who stole his camera at the end of the movie. Does the idea of distinguishing this as fiction or non-fiction even make sense?
Recently, I watched Michael Mann’s Collateral, and enjoyed it about fine, though I felt that the story was a bit contrived, and much of the dialogue felt artificial. The best moment in the movie – you already know what I’m going to talk about if you’ve watched the film – is when Jamie Foxx’s character stops his taxi for some coyotes crossing the street, and then you cut back to Foxx and Tom Cruise, the juxtaposition telling you more about the characters than any dialogue so far. Reportedly, this was an improvised moment – either fully an accident where Mann insisted his cinematographer keep filming as these coyotes wandered into the scene, or a scene with a trained coyote being intruded on by wild ones – though this is disputed, given that Cruise talks in interviews about loving the moment in the script. The “non-fiction” of it, the sudden move outside the human paradigm, to wild creatures that share a manmade environment, makes the film deeper, a little more epic, like Sen talks about in his interview. Is the fact of whether it was staged or not more interesting than the story of the wild world intruding upon the filmed world? This vibrancy then throws the rest of the film’s artifice into relief, showing it to be smaller.
There is another shot I’m reminded of here, one that wasn’t in the structure of this post as I’d conceived of it – halfway through Memoria, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s wonderful collaboration with Tilda Swinton, a paean to sound and memory. This is a film that is meant to be heard, and everything that happens on screen, everything that you see, is in some way an interruption of the process, even as it provides information. In one of its striking long shots, a dog follows Tilda Swinton’s character as she walks around a plaza. At first she avoids it, and then she doubles back, as if trying to chase him, and then we, with her, watch the dog leave. She sits under a tree, processing the experience. I have no idea if this encounter was staged or spontaneous, but there’s a wildness to it, within this film about what connects us to the world.
Lastly, I recently watched Kiyoji Kurosawa’s Cure – a marvel of a film, incidentally – and came upon this clip of him talking about the fear and the temptation of the filming process. He says that most of filmmaking is a fairly logical process, other than the filming itself, which has the potential to go off the rails at any moment. Partly because of errors that can compound, but partly from the potential of the things you work with while you’re filming. Everyone will have suggestions and ideas, but it is the director’s job to hold the film in their mind and keep everyone looking in the same direction. And that by not working like that, by going forth with the temptations of those he was working with, Shinji Sōmai, who made films like Moving and Typhoon Club, exposes the reality of filming.
This is what I feel someone like Panahi does – by filming in this observational mode, by breaking the distinction between filmmaker and performer, between fiction and non-fiction, he tries to obviate the separation between film and life. That, I think, is the best thing about this kind of filmmaking, whether it does fit into the strictures of fiction or non-fiction. Something that yearns towards life, whether one frames it as “authenticity” or as “truth”.
I’ll leave you with a final anecdote Omkar told me. A filmmaker friend of his, in a fit of on-set improvisation, saw a rooster running past the set and decided to shoot it and include it in the film, tweaking the story to fit. A wonderful bit of “non-fiction” filmmaking added to a fiction film. The problem arose when the Animal Welfare Board objected to the film on the grounds that there had been no supervision on the set to make sure the rooster had not been treated cruelly as a performing animal. Make of that what you will.
