One thing that has struck me through the pieces that we've looked at so far is the tension between respecting the privacy of the subjects and providing viewers with an accurate and complete portrayal of their stories.
In Belovs we talked about the possibility that certain parts were left out, and that the subjects were censoring themselves for the camera. The director respects this, choosing not to give his audience the complete truth in favor of protecting the privacy of Anna and her brothers. No Lies originally struck me as more "real" and unfiltered than Belovs. This was probably due to the disrespect that seemed to be shown to the subject- it seemed unlikely that the director had cut parts out on an ethical basis.
Finding out that the woman was an actress made me question the entire concept of a documentary. Can documentaries have actors? Can a documentary actually be more honest and effective if it takes real life stories and uses actors to portray them? I think the fact that documentary filmmakers have to respect their subjects' privacy can actually take away from the impact of the film.
The line between documentary and interpretation is becoming more and more blurry from my perspective. I found No Lies to be extremely powerful in its message, and finding out that it's not quite as candid as I thought hasn't really changed its impact. We all know that the story is true somewhere, so maybe it doesn't matter if it really happened to that specific woman. Maybe the fact that we believed for a few minutes that it was real is enough to convince us of its message. I think the use of documentary tropes was all the director needed to achieve his desired impact, and whether or not it is actually a documentary becomes kind of irrelevant.
After reading Kassakovsky's "Rules of Documentary," I am inclined to assign greater legitimacy to Belovs, as opposed to No Lies. The credit the Russian filmmaker loses by virtue of being both self-effacing and a blowhard is more than made up for by commandments like "Never ask anybody to repeat an action," which, he asserts, he lived by while filming the Russian siblings.
ReplyDeleteThe tenet that I am most intrigued by is #4: You need a brain when you are making art. But don't use it when you are filming." This indicates to me that the subjects of Kossakovsky's film are allowed to project (at least as far as the raw footage) their own autonomy--free from any kind of direction or motive. In No Lies, we are informed of the presence of an intention the moment the credits start rolling. I suppose this objective does not render the film illegitimate as a documentary--as Fani pointed out, it is staged only to highlight truth.
It is also interesting that the dialogue between Anna and Mikhail seems so staged at times, or as the writer put it, "they have a habit of declaiming rather that conversing."