Experiencing Interruptions?

Reality Frictions

Reality Frictions explores the intersection of fact and fiction on the screens of Hollywood, highlighting moments when images, people or events from the real world intrude on the cinematic one.

In an age when generative AI and synthetic imaging provoke anxieties about our ability to tell the difference between real and fake, Reality Frictions demonstrates that spectators have long traversed the borders of believability, developing nuanced skills for navigating the pleasures and paradoxes that emerge when reality and fiction collide.

Richly illustrated with clips from more than 100 movies and TV shows, Reality Frictions is an entertaining, but also serious, investigation of media’s role in revealing truth and making history.

  • Steve Anderson
    Director
  • Steve Anderson
    Writer
  • Holly Willis
    Producer
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Other
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 10 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    February 29, 2024
  • Production Budget:
    0 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Found footage
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Madrid International Film Festival
    Madrid
    Spain
    September 3, 2024
    World
    Official selection / Award nominee
Director Biography - Steve Anderson

Steve F. Anderson is a filmmaker, media artist, curator and writer working at the intersection of media, history and technology. A former documentary film and sound editor for National Geographic and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Steve founded the public media archive Critical Commons in 2008 to support the transformative use of media by artists and educators. He has written or edited books on media historiography, technologies of vision and popular documentary. An award-winning media artist, his work has been exhibited in the US and abroad, including the 2021 Beijing International Film Festival and the 2024 Madrid International Film Festival. His video essays have appeared in InTransition, American Literature, Visible Language, Screening Scholarship, and the Paratissima Film Festival. He received an MFA from CalArts and currently teaches documentary and digital media arts at UCLA.

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Director Statement

Reality Frictions is the result of nearly a decade of research, culminating in a feature-length video essay that draws on over 100 sources from commercial film and television. The film focuses on what Vivian Sobchack termed “documentary intrusion” – roughly defined as moments when elements from the real world (archival images, real people, inimitable performance, irreversible death, etc.) intrude on fictional or quasi-fictional story worlds.

The film is partly motivated by the recent proliferation generative AI for image synthesis, which have prompted anxieties among documentarians and journalists who feel confidence in photographic and videographic representation slipping away. While I totally understand and am sympathetic to these concerns, challenges to truth-telling in journalism and documentary film hardly began with digital imaging, let alone generative AI. It is axiomatic to this project that viewers have long negotiated the boundaries between images and reality. The skills we have developed at recognizing or confirming the truth or artifice found in all kinds of media remain useful when considering synthetic images.

My goal with this project is to heighten viewers’ attentiveness to the ways reality purports to be represented on screen; to dissolve overly simplistic binaries, and to suggest the need for skepticism, especially when dramatic flourishes or uplifting endings seem designed to trigger readymade responses. While stories of resilient individuals and obstacles that are overcome conform to Hollywood’s obsession with emotional closure and narrative resolution, we should be mindful of the events and people who are excluded by the presumptions underlying these structures.

In Reality Frictions, the films with the most consistently complex and deliberate structures for engaging the problematics of representing reality on film often come from filmmakers who directly engage systems of power and privilege, especially related to race. From Ava DuVernay’s re-writing of Martin Luther King’s speeches in Selma (2014), to Ryan Coogler and Spike Lee’s inclusions of documentary footage in Fruitvale Station (2013), Malcolm X (1992), and BlacKkKlansman (2018), the stakes are raised for history films with direct implications for continuing injustice in the present.

In the end, I view Reality Frictions as offering a critical lens on a cinematic and televisual phenomenon that is more common and more complex than one might initially expect. Do I wish the final film were less than an hour long? Yes, and I have no doubt this will dissuade some prospective viewers from investing the time, but once you start heading down this path, there’s no turning back and my sincere hope is that you will find it to be worth your while.

Joshua Tree, CA