Like OMG I Can't Believe Cinema Verité

Just gonna state the obvious example here for the first part of Dharmik's prompt

I, Tonya was based on true events. If you recall, a surprising amount of the source material was recreated word-for-word (or triple-axel-by-triple-axel) in the film. Or, to quote sports writer Katie Baker: "Rogers combined both stories into a fast-moving meta-narrative “based on irony free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly,” as the I, Tonya title card puts it." This is an important point to consider: even within factual events there can be information that doesn't add up. Heck, the real Tonya Harding's interview about the film in New York Times alone is full of inconsistencies (my favorite would be her take on how often she is portrayed cursing). These antithetical points in reports of an event have to be combed out into a consistent narrative for a theatrical work. Similarly, some parts of the story need to be condensed, altered, etc. to move the plot along. That said, it isn't as if more exact tellings of an occurrence don't contend with the same issues. Even in accurate recounting of an event, you will have biases, a focus on a certain person or group of people over others, etc. You can read incredibly compelling histories of the American Revolution that laud it as a remarkable fight against tyranny but also find equally convincing narratives of it being an inevitable event for when a colonial power overreached itself. Both varieties will be impeccably sourced.

Or, you know, sometimes we make musicals about one particular founding father. Whatever works.

Wait wait wait but not like alternative facts or anything

No! But it is hard to wrestle with the issue that you will often run into with verbatim works/documentaries is what constitutes the ever elusive "capital T" truth. Honestly, sometimes I think it's better to lean into the fact that you are trying to be persuasive or expressive than to try to present something as a 100% precise recounting. The best way I can think of to get into this in a snappy blog format is to focus on Werner Herzog and his concept of "ecstatic truth."


His famous Minnesota Declaration makes some fascinating and insightful points about the limits of Cinema Verité and what truth is in cinema.

"Minnesota declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema
1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."

Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue."

He has since provided six addendums to these points. These were predominantly inspired the recent discourse on post-truth/truthiness/fake news/what-have-you.

"I. With the arrival of the new term “alternative facts” in the political arena, the question of facts and the question of truth have acquired an unexpected urgency.
II. Facts cannot be underestimated as they have normative power. But they do not give us insight into the truth, or the illumination of poetry. Yes, accepted, the phone directory of Manhattan contains four million entries, all of them factually verifiable. But do we know why Jonathan Smith, correctly listed, cries into his pillow every night?
III. The argument of rearranging facts constituting a lie points only to shallow thinking and the fetish of self-reference.
IV. Patron Saints of the Minnesota Declaration:
William Shakespeare: “The most truthful poetry is the most feigning.”
V. André Gide: “I modify facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality.”
VI. Michelangelo:
Taking a good look at his statue of the Pietà, we notice that Jesus taken from the cross is a man of 33, but his mother is only 17.
Does Michelangelo lie to us? Does he mislead us? Does he defraud us?
He just shows us the innermost truth about the Man of Sorrows, and his mother, the Virgin."

These points resonate with me to a certain extent because I struggle to imagine a documentary devoid of politics, immune to bias, and always in the habit of providing completely accurate context. To err is human. Also, I don't think anyone can every be truly objective.

But the longer I go down that rabbit hole, the closer I get to being a full-on participant in Philosophical Truth or Dare.

Mini play because eff it

"Queer Eye, Sex, and Taxes"

1: Oh my goddd I was supposed to leave for coffee twenty minutes ago but this awful comedian one has me glued! (A beat) I need to see his hair cut. (Pause) He's so awful.

2: Oh yeah that one is really something. I got a kick out of when they were testing the room to see if he could have sex (awkward giggle).

1: Oh yeah! The kicker was "mom just fast forward through this next part please"

(2 laughs.)

1: Their fucking redecorations and extra things are tens and tens of thousands-- I need a show that gives me thousands of free money in redecorations and makeover and photoshoot and website.

2: (A beat) I wonder if they have to claim any of it on their taxes.

Bodily Harm and High-Brow Russian Art

First, my twitter play!

[Curtain up to reveal a desolate wasteland. A heroic looking man in torn clothes emerges from the darkness.]

MAN: This war isn’t over yet! True-- everything may have been taken from us, but I vow it: friends, as long as I have these two hands and this fire in my heart we shall persevere!

[Hand falls off of MAN and speeds away offstage.]

MAN: Shit.

[Blackout]

I dunno, guys. Midterms are turning my ass even more nihilistic and absurdist than it normally is.

Sometimes Making Art Can Be a Long Shot

Get it? It's a pun! Yay!

First, I shared this with Dharmik in my week's digest but I think it bears repeating: the fight in Oldboy (2003) that lasts over three minutes in one, continuous take is mesmerizing and exhausting to watch. This usage of time has a profound effect emotional effect on me unlike anything I've felt before when watching a fight scene. This is brutal and unromantic. This is relentless. Something with more conventional methods (jump cuts, angle variation, etc) wouldn't have been so impactful. You may have seen an homage to the scene in the Netflix Daredevil and for good reason! Park Chan-wook's team devoted 3 days and 17 takes toward making something truly iconic. Hold on to your Schechner articles! Here it is:


I'm not the only one saying this is something special, by the way. It gets some solid attention in the Washington Post, from Rodger Ebert, and in the Guardian (from the latter: "He then takes on dozens of aggressors, and Park's camera tracks along the narrow corridor watching the pitched battle in profile, right-to-left, like a video-game graphic or a Bayeux Tapestry of urban warfare: another extraordinary coup du cinéma").

But Surely We Can Have Longer Takes Than Three and a Half Minutes!

Hell, let's get the whole damn movie in one shot. If you haven't heard of Russian Ark, I'll break it down like this: a ghost with a tragic history guides you through 300 years of Russian History, it's a single 96 minute long take, it made cinema history, and it's bloody gorgeous!

Here's the trailer:

Oh, and in case you're in Meisner-brain and think it still sounds too easy to do, guess what? They only had four hours on a single day to shoot this in the museum. No pressure, team! If nothing else, it is an impressive and gargantuan feat. That said, I can't reiterate enough how positively stunning it is! Here is the entire film if you want to watch it and want to watch it NOW (the audio isn't always the best on this upload, though, so I'd recommend streaming it instead if at all possible):

I'm in Grad School. I Need Something Short.

Fine. Then, it is important you know about the comedic genius of the 30-Second Bunny movies of Jennifer Shiman. Most of her re-enactments are of R-rated films of a certain brutality... which makes the juxtaposition of cartoon bunnies performing them... well, frankly, hilarious. And I doubt they would be as funny or interesting if they were, say, 30 minutes. Or feature films in their own right.

Here are some of my faves. Bask in the leporine glory:

Miley Cyrus, Cicadas, and The Changeling

First I was all...

When I think about interpretations of plays that use a "found" or "transformed space," my mind usually jumps to Shakespeare. For example, Edward Hall and Michael Boyd put on a production of the Henry VI cycle in an abattoir. This was used to ultimately highlight the butchery and brutality of the War of the Roses as the characters describe it.

Another work that had inspired me used a script as a jumping-off point rather than gospel (see axiom 6): Cry, Trojans! The Wooster group's take on Troilus and Cressida features lacrosse, (what many considered offensive portrayals of) Native Americans, and an "utter disregard" for the text. For a review, see: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/theater/review-cry-trojans-is-the-wooster-groups-take-on-troilus-and-cressida.html

For some moments of "wait... what is happening???" see below:

Talkback about the show:

But then I was all...

I remember Austin talking about an app that guides you through a murder mystery and I couldn't help thinking about alternate reality games like Cicada 3301. To the uninitiated, here's an adorable British man giving you the run-down:

I think it could be really fun to take some elements of this game (perhaps on a more surface level; I sure as hell don't want to download Tor) and use it for a show not unlike how The 15th Line used twitter. I'm just being more expansive than that. We can use the Internet itself as a found space where the space belongs to both the performer and the audience. Within this framework we could use elements of the text of The Changeling (you know-- the one our Voice 2 book is obsessed with) as our guide for a disjointed narrative about appearance, deceit, and... how nothing is secret forever once it's on the internet. The biggest reveals of the show (murder and deception) should be the secrets uncovered by our digital audience.

I know we graduate students have soooo much time so here's the Helen Mirren Changeling in its 3-hour-long glory:

Naturally, as we are using the text as not necessarily "the starting point nor the goal of the production," we have a lot of interpretive freedom. Beatrice could be a make-up tutorial blogger, for instance! Maybe you could find Alsemero's potions in real life by following a handful of clues! We could uncover the plot to murder Diaphanta by following certain twitter threads-- and Diaphanta herself can have a vlog that brings back memories of Lonelygirl15. Why stop there? We can have multiple vlogs or blog postings from the various characters. The romance in the madhouse can be expressed by coded cabalistic writings on reddit a la r/A858. The possibilities are endless, y'all!

That's all well and good but how do we get people hot on The Changeling trail?

You'll call me crazy (and maybe I am), but something like Chatroulette would be ideal. The audience is actively putting themselves out there to see something unusual (so you aren't forcing a show on them necessarily). They could be easily enticed by something with viral potential and then given the requisite information to fall down the rabbit hole we have concocted for them. We could take a top 40 hit (like "Bad at Love" or "Havana," for instance) and give it the Steve Kardynal treatment all within a vague context of our narrative:

What sorts of things would you say about the piece you want to create?

It's a love letter to the Internet's history of the mysterious and unexpected. Simultaneously, we have an examination of the isolation and artifice of the digital age-- how it corrupts us, maddens us, and entrances us.