Reality Cinema 2002 - 2006 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 31

Thirty-first chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

The first clip contains footage from inside the World Trade Center on September 11, and the third includes images of a violent bus hijacking in Brazil. Neither contains graphic content, but as with the Rodney King footage from Chapter 27, it may not be something people are comfortable watching in this context.

View "Chapter 31: Reality Cinema"

Reality Cinema

This was the age of ubiquituous "reality" - reality TV of course, but also a slew of film documentaries, a form that had never been more popular or prolific. This entry contains more documentaries than any other, from historical subjects to on-the-spot current affairs to raw cinema-verite-style concerts. Some of the non-documentary clips reflect this fascination with reality as well, from ultra-low budget "home movies" to the stylized humanism of a prolific and creative Asian cinema.

Yet there's an element of escapism too, not the old-fashioned bang-bang kind, but something more ethereal and moody - a sort of impressionistic daydream stylization reflecting the era of iPod and internet, in which inner space expanded to swallow up a whole generation. Sometimes the two trends (impressionism and realism) merge, as they do in the last clip, a sad and brilliant sequence mirroring the first clip across an unbridgeable gap of time and space. To a certain extent, today's chapter plays like a fitful waking dream, mixing fragments of memory, fantasy, and reality.

Before reverting to a more straightforward title, I considered calling Chapter 31 "Screening Reality" as a play on words, because this was a time not only of reality onscreen but filters and strategies applied to take the edge off of it.

(continued below, along with NSFW warnings)

Iraq in Fragments

Mid-decade, filmmaker James Longley took his small camera to Iraq, where he shot, directed, and sound-recorded, and later composed music for and co-edited, a truly fascinating movie. Insinuating himself into various Iraqi populations, he formulated a graceful, poetic film which feels as different from other Iraq docs as a verse feels from a newspaper article. Iraq in Fragments presents the documentary as art film, in an unusual but captivating approach. Much of the film has the feel of narrative fiction, but by sidestepping continuity - the cutting is impressionistic, the sound design musical, the photography close-quartered and graceful - the movie avoids most of the compromises inherent in documentary form. This is a good movie with which to draw my election series to a close, because it's a reminder of the humanistic and individualistic elements underpinning politics and world affairs...the soul in the body politic.

Iraq in Fragments exists in three fragments of its own. The first fragment follows a little Sunni boy in Baghdad - he has difficulty in school and works for a machinist who is alternatively tough-loving and physically rough. The second fragment does not focus on one individual but rather the collective passion of the Shiites in Iraq's South as they coalesce around Moqtada al-Sadr to discover their post-Saddam identity.The third and final fragment travels to the north, visiting with Kurdish peasants who bake bricks, herd goats, and rush to polling places when they get the chance to vote, hoping to stake a claim on their own land. Each fragment is poetic in texture, ranging from the distracted sadness of the little boy to the fierce, frenetic violence of the militias to the cozy pastoral lives of the Kurds. Form scrupulously echoes content and the free flow of impressions and experiences and images and sounds is liberating and indeed startling after experiencing so many informationally-focused documentaries.