The Treachery of Images

The Treachery of Images

by Ethan de Seife / University of Wisconsin

http://www.spinaltapfan.com/articles/seife/seife1.html

In an article from Magill's Cinema Annual 1984, Rob Edelman, writing about Woody Allen's Zelig (1983), says, "With Zelig, Allen has come up with a totally new form of cinema, a fictional documentary that plays like an extended newsreel." Edelman goes on to say how, in particular, the appearance of historical and present-day "real life" celebrities lend believability to the film. Then, he takes it a step further:

"Maybe with Zelig, Allen has stretched the medium of cinema as far as he can. He has gone from pure comedy to comedy with a plot and characters with points of view. He has experimented with straight drama. So what is next? A fictional documentary."

While I agree with Edelman that Zelig is in many ways a groundbreaking film, I find his opinion useful but flawed. Edelman implies that the fictional documentary — or "mock documentary" — is perhaps the highest form of cinema art, presumably for its ability to convincingly blend fact and fiction. While I think a case could be made for this position, Edelman passes over the several steps that exist between "straight drama" and fictional documentary, if indeed there is a clear progression. (Such a progression seems to be purely the creation of Edelman himself.) It is easy to be impressed by the ingenuity with which Allen blends new and archival footage, and also by the skill with which he imitates the tried-and-true newsreel format. Zelig is probably Allen's most technically accomplished film and one of his most insightful, but it certainly did not invent the genre of the mock documentary.

Three years before Zelig was released, Peter Greenaway made a staggeringly complex, heavily self-referential, and extremely funny mock documentary called The Falls (1980), which was supposedly a filmed biographical account of 92 of the 19 million survivors of something called the Violent Unknown Event. Greenaway's film, the conception and execution of which is almost unfathomable for its remarkable density, was the co-winner of the British Film Institute's award for Best Film in 1980. Though it remains relatively unknown and difficult to see despite Greenaway's subsequent success, the film received a good amount of coverage and was definitely known to those in the filmmaking industry. As such, it could be the inspiration for the spate of mock documentaries in the early 1980s and early to mid-1990s.

But Greenaway, too, had predecessors. It is certainly conceivable that Greenaway, a prolific maker of short films, had seen, before 1980, Mitchell Block's 1973 short No Lies. No Lies is one of the earliest mock documentaries, and also perhaps the most convincing. Its premise is that a male film student turns the camera on a friend as she gets ready to go out for the evening. The film is banal until the woman reveals that she has been raped recently. The filmmaker presses her to answer more and more questions about the event, thereby instigating the action of the film. She becomes visibly upset, not only at the rape, but at the camera's presence. Thanks largely to an incredibly naturalistic performance by Shelby Leverington as the woman and to the hand-held "vérité" camera, No Lies is completely convincing as a documentary ... until the credits roll. (Credits play an important part in establishing and/or destroying the illusion created by mock documentaries, and I will discuss this subject presently.) It is then that we learn that the people on screen were actors, and that this was a fiction film, not a documentary.

But the history of the mock documentary goes back much farther than the early Seventies. There is, of course, a long line of documentarists whose work contains some staged or fictive material. Can we call their films mock documentaries? Robert Flaherty's reputation still suffers as a result of his somewhat heavy hand in shaping the events depicted in Nanook of the North (1922), a film that purported to depict how Eskimos really lived ... not how Eskimos really lived when a camera was in their midst. But even Flaherty was not working without precedent. Erik Barnouw, in his seminal work on the history of documentary, notes that, as far back as 1898, "...documentary film was infected with increasing fakery." He mentions in particular a filmed battle of the Spanish- American War fought with cardboard ships and cigar smoke, and a Boer War skirmish that took place on a golf course.

Such instances of fakery are not too distantly related to the notion of the mock documentary, though obviously they have different purposes. The fakery in the early films was, according to Barnouw, there to provide excitement and authenticity; staged scenes were included to illustrate the actions depicted in the actuality footage and to enhance their credibility. The idea was that, if audiences could see even a re-creation of a historic event, they would more readily believe it actually happened. The idea behind the mock documentary is similar: if the audience sees something presented in documentary mode, they will be more apt to believe it. But the ultimate goal of the mock documentary is not to enhance believability but to question it. While numerous turn-of-the-century actuality films of wars and natural disasters were partially faked in order to make them seem more real, mock documentaries are made to look as real as possible in part to fake out the audience, and in part to challenge them to question what they see.

In other words, documentarists, for as long as such a word has existed, have taken liberties with the form of documentary: they have embellished the truth to make the truth more believable, "real," convincing, vivid, memorable, or otherwise more suitable for filming. As Barnouw states, the creative embellishment of actual events "was not so much `deceit' as enterprise." A history of the manipulation of "truth" in documentary film is, essentially, a history of documentary itself. Barnouw goes on to make a rather bold claim: "The public was accustomed to news pictures having an uncertain and remote link to events. The relationship was scarcely thought about." While this statement may be hard to take at face value, it holds a grain of truth. In its nascency, cinema and its viewers were still feeling each other out to understand what they could expect from each other. Having never seen battle footage before, not all viewers may have stopped to think about whether it was 100 percent genuine.

Directors of mock documentaries, on the other hand, start with a fictional event or person, and then embellish that fiction to make it seem more believable, "real," or convincing. Furthermore, these films often have as one of their specific goals the satire of the documentary form, a goal which, though present in any number of traditional documentaries, is by no means a hallmark of the form. And here we have a curious parallel: One could make a case that Barnouw's claim that the relationship between images and truth went unquestioned is still in effect today, though for vastly different reasons. Bombarded as we are with televised and filmed images of anything and everything, we have seen the lines between truth and fiction blurred, perhaps irreparably. (Witness the promotion strategy of the MTV series The Real World, or CNN's action-movie-like coverage of the Persian Gulf War.) Mock documentaries toy with viewers' abilities to separate truth and fiction by presenting them with a film that may be either truth or fiction—the viewer must decide (though, as we will see, many films do contain numerous hints), and if he or she is not informed enough to make that decision, he or she then becomes an object of satire, too.

So while the numerous partially staged documentaries that pepper film history bear some resemblance to modern mock documentaries, the two are not explicitly related. It is the difference between an embellished historical account and a cleverly concealed lie. If the truth really is stranger than fiction, directors of mock documentaries have their work cut out for them.

Perhaps the mock documentary owes its existence to a single Belgian painter who startled the art world in 1929 with La Trahison des Images. This is, of course, René Magritte's famed oil painting of a pipe, beneath which are painted in pretty cursive the words, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" — "this is not a pipe."

The painting is a challenge, not just to anyone who sees it but to the artistic establishment as a whole. Magritte presents the viewer with a choice: Do you believe your eyes, or do you believe what I'm telling you to believe? By placing the object and its written description in diametrical opposition, Magritte deliberately leaves the viewer in artistic limbo. A successful mock documentary can have the same effect on a viewer, leaving her to wonder, "Could that actually have happened?" or, perhaps even, "Was that for real?" The answer to the latter question, depending on how one looks at it, is either Yes or No: Yes, that was a real film you just saw; No, that was not an actual occurrence depicted within it. Like Magritte's painting, there is no sure answer. Is it a pipe? Or is it not a pipe?

Of course, one one level, Magritte is being totally honest with the viewers of his painting. What they are seeing is not a pipe per se, but a representation of a pipe. So, no, it's not a pipe. It's a painting of a pipe. That hidden degree of honesty that Magritte proffers to the viewer is not unlike the hidden kernel of truth, exhibited as a grounding in the actual world, that is present in most mock documentaries.

Though, obviously, a painting is not a movie and a movie is not a painting, La Trahison des Images is an important predecessor to mock documentary. The pipe in Magritte's painting cannot conceivably be of anything but a pipe, just as the mediocre heavy metal band in This Is Spinal Tap (1984) cannot conceivably be anything other than a mediocre heavy metal band. The meaning of each of the pieces, however, lies in the interplay between what one sees and how one sees it. The title of the painting—"The Treachery of Images"—succinctly applies to the operating principle of the mock documentary, as well. Such films do not simply project an alternate "world" for their spectators to observe—that is the domain of traditional narrative cinema, to which the mock documentary obviously owes a great deal. Mock documentaries use the language of documentary to subvert the ways in which documentaries are made and viewed. They take the tools documentary uses to produce "truth" (or a semblance thereof) and use them instead to produce fictions. They use familiar conventions to trick us.

Mock documentaries raise several questions which I will address. How do directors of mock documentaries render their fictions believable? How do they use the language of documentary to subvert documentary form? How important is it that we buy into the film's central conceit; i.e., will the films "work" even if we do not believe in their authenticity as documentaries? How do mock documentary films differentiate themselves from actual documentaries, and how do they tip their hands to let the viewers in on the joke? Why are most mock documentaries played for comedy? And is it possible to produce a definition of the mock documentary?

If one film exists as a sort of blueprint for the mock documentary, it is No Lies, even though it has little to do with the films that followed it. It is at once the simplest and the most complex of all mock documentaries: its scope is small, its duration is brief, and its filming is technically uncomplicated. Yet, at the same time, it poses larger questions about the nature of the documentary: Can a documentary really tell the truth, and, if it can, how can we know?

No Lies posits itself as a documentary in the vérité mode. Dirk Eitzen, in his article "When Is a Documentary? Documentary as a Mode of Reception," neatly sums up the filmic cues that identify No Lies as a documentary:

"The film scrupulously copies the look of a vérité documentary. The camera is handheld and the camerawork is a bit awkward, the rooms are unevenly lit, there is no nondiegetic sound, and the films consists of what appears to be a single unbroken take. ... The acting in the film is impeccable—as naturally self-conscious (or self-consciously natural) as a 'real' vérité performance."

It is hard to characterize what makes a performance "real," but I, like Eitzen, believe that the performance of the two players in the film — Leverington in particular — is of the utmost important in fooling the audience into thinking that the film is documenting an actual event. Leverington progresses from bemused to slightly exasperated to visibly upset to tearfully distraught in the course of a fifteen-minute film, exhibiting range that Meryl Streep can only dream of. In fact, Meryl Streep could never have played this role, largely because she is Meryl Streep. A recognizable face would have spoiled the illusion instantly.

What else about No Lies makes it so believable? There are the casual references to real-life people and things—the two characters' mutual friends, Night of the Hunter, New York City geography — that lend the film an air of authenticity. I would also argue that the very subject matter that Block has chosen—one woman's rape — pushes the film more toward the real than to the fictional. Rape is rarely presented lightly in films; it could conceivably be on e of the societal problems on which Frederick Wiseman himself would turn his camera — it has that kind of "institutional" power. Treating a dire subject in a matter-of-fact manner is characteristic of the vérité style. More explicitly, cinema vérité is known for presenting a controversial subject in a matter-of-fact style that allows viewers to draw their own conclusions after being presented with "objectively presented" evidence.