I recently took an online course at UCL with the Open City Docs School. The course was called “Within and Beyond Reality” and it explored international trends throughout history of blurring the line between fiction and reality.
For our last class we were asked to play with the concept of “reality” and what it conveys. I was inspired by the short documentary, “Dreaming Gave Us Wings,” in which creator Sophia Nahli Allison says, “if energy cannot be created nor destroyed, then the residue, particles or remnants of the past and near future live among us, constantly overlapping with the present.” I have often thought about this concept of future, past, and present coexisting, interacting, ebbing and flowing. When I think about my own inner reality, my thoughts and how I exist and interact in the world, it is impossible to disentangle my memories, my spontaneous feelings, and my aspirations. They shape every word that exits my mouth, every breath, sigh, and smile. Therefore, I attempted to represent this “reality” visually.
Coming out of this course I would like to play more with blending forms and genre. The focus can be more on the story and its message (if it has one or not) rather than on the accuracy, ethics, and timing that constricts traditional documentary filmmaking. We studied Italian Neorealism, a post war cynical cinematic movement that made reality its reference point and moved away from aestheticism of the influential 30’s French cinema. Directors often used real people, who could pull from personal experience, as their actors and shot long takes that breed a certain patience and conveys deeper emotions. Additionally, because the core of neorealist films were principally political and used to critique the conditions and institutions of the time, as a viewer you understand the reality and weight behind the scripted story. This technique to convey the real with elements of reality constructed into fiction is very interesting and I feel like it opens up the possibilities of what we can accomplish with cinema. It bypasses many of the ethical issues of documentary intervening on real lives and drawing the line of what can pass as reality or not (staging and reproduction) while also possessing the ability to communicate real emotions on real issues. No matter how few cuts or little your crew is or how attentive to your presence you are, there will always be illusion within a nonfiction film. Life as it goes on naturally is immediately altered by the introduction of a camera or even a person asking questions. It is impossible to capture reality or truth in their purest form and perhaps that is because they don’t really exist, or yet a singular idea of them doesn’t exist. All the more reason to play around with them.
Sources:
- https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/dreaming-gave-us-wings
- Professor Ludovica Fales