Stranger than truth: how new documentaries are radicalising reflexivity
In the wake of The Act of Killing, a wave of documentaries have playfully laid bare their own means of production, but two current films show exciting new wrinkles in the trend for meta movies.
At the start of 2019, two competing streaming giants released two rival documentaries, both promising a thorough overview of the notorious Fyre Festival debacle of April 2017: Hulu’s Fyre Fraud and Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.
As critic Adrian Horton pointed out at the time, the Hulu project explicitly addresses the production of the rival work within the film itself, taking aim at the conflict of interest inherent to Jerry Media – the same PR company that promoted Fyre in the months leading up to the disaster – producing the film.
Meanwhile, Chris Smith, director of the Netflix project, took public aim at the Hulu project for soliciting an interview with Fyre impresario and convicted fraudster Billy McFarland for their film. Smith went into some detail as to the kind of money McFarland had demanded to appear in his own film, implying that the Hulu filmmakers had crossed an ethical boundary by agreeing to pay him for an interview.
Both films, quite conventional in form, are interesting in themselves, offering up strikingly different approaches to a hot-button topic. Netflix’s takes a more comedic, anarchic approach; Hulu’s is more concerned with procedural detail and the wider implications of the Fyre phenomenon. But just as interesting is the extra-textual dimension at play. The simultaneous launches and the spat laid bare the evident rivalry and commercial interests inherent to producing and distributing documentary films around in-demand topics.
However, it also exposed the kinds of compromises and editorial choices needed in filmmaking in order to make work with the cooperation of involved parties – an aspect all too often glossed over in documentary films and the discourse around them.
In his film The Amazing Johnathan Documentary (released in the UK on 22 November) increasingly baffled filmmaker Ben Berman goes a step further with this kind of meta-industrial and artistic critique. The film chronicles the making of an apparently doomed project of Berman’s, an attempt to chronicle dying magician John Edward Szeles, aka ‘The Amazing Johnathan’ on his farewell tour. Across the film’s svelte, breathless runtime, Berman begins to doubt Jonathan’s motivations in agreeing to participate in his project, learning he has solicited rival filmmakers to pay him to make films about himself, and even beginning to doubt the truth around the status of Jonathan’s impending demise.
Such exasperating revelations make for exciting viewing, but the meat of the film lies in its intense reflexivity. What begins as a quite conventional biopic doc morphs into something far more experimental and confrontational. Berman goes to unflinching lengths on screen to document the financial and personal compromises he made to get his film produced, taking us fully behind the scenes of the production, exploring his own personal motivations for pursuing the project, and documenting the extremity of the demands made on him by his subject and the cutthroat business of the documentaries marketplace.
Finally, Berman records the elaborate good fortune that led to the project turning around via the 11th-hour involvement of a documentary-producer powerhouse. He finishes the film apparently fully aware of the irony of his good fortune, surreptitiously flipping the gaze onto us as consumers of the film itself. A contrived ‘feelgood’ ending only heightens the sense of artificiality of a work that has made its way to us in no small part due to last-minute happenstance in a brutal and unfair industrial landscape we’ve just witnessed being so painfully lambasted.
The contemporary documentary landscape is no stranger to playful metatextuality and laying bare the means of production. The success of Joshua Oppenheimer’s staggering The Act of Killing (2012) revitalised the fashion for films that blur the boundary between reality and fiction in doc-making. Films that attempt to ape that film’s situationist aesthetic have proved popular particularly on the festival circuit, with filmmakers striving to generate similarly artificial scenarios to illicit truths from their subjects. But this can often amount to not much more than a kind of postmodern clearing of the throat, gesturing little beyond a self-important statement of artifice and superficial ‘what is real?’ musings.
Of course, Berman’s raw confessional approach to artifice brings with it all kinds of questions around his own editorial choices and motivations in presenting selective information and in a chosen order. But, without getting lost in that particular rhetorical cul-de-sac, it’s safe to say that his bracingly confrontational approach exposes more harsh economic realities and filmmaking practicalities than many meta-textual works, simply by virtue of getting into the numbers, the behind-the-scenes dealings and actual industrial gymnastics needed to get a film made.
Danish documentarian Mads Brügger takes his own reflexive strategies to more absurdist but utilitarian places with an initially shocking quasi-comedic approach in his new film Cold Case Hammarsköld, screend in competition at this year’s London Film Festival, in which he investigates the mysterious death of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961. Taking on an exaggeratedly ‘colonialist’ persona in the film, replete with old-fashioned dress, mannerisms and a pair of black African assistants instructed to type out his research, Brügger cuts a cringe-worthily artificial figure in the film as its host and flamboyantly upfront auteur, interviewing various subjects as the investigation apparently goes nowhere.
But when, in the second half of the film, Brügger’s focus shifts away from Hammarskjöld’s death and onto the activities of a shadowy paramilitary organisation with white supremacist connections active in Apartheid South Africa, the true intent behind the persona and the artificiality become strikingly apparent. Without this persona, it’s clear that Brügger would never have got himself into the rooms he needed to enter to meet his interview subjects and witnesses.
Moreover, the heightened sense of artificiality and anachronism established in the film’s self-consciously dead-end first half, lend its second an extremely nightmarish quality. Brutal realities and conspiracy theories play out and Brügger finds a formal equivalence between his own presentational code-switching and the jovial misdirection of his interview subjects, who are cheerfully prepared to let slip details of their crimes in the company of those they apparently believe their own.
Again, such meta devices are not new in documentary: investigative documentarians have routinely used artificial personas in order to gain access and achieve scoops in their work. But typically this is done under false pretexts negotiated behind the scenes, rather than on screen and under the auspices of a meta-fiction painstakingly detailed for the audience. If this new vogue for deploying the tropes of reflexivity to more tangible and substantive investigative purposes persists, then the state of postmodern documentary has avoided entropy and continues to remain thrillingly innovative.
