Reality Frictions

Although I have been researching and gathering materials for Reality Frictions for several years, the project went into high gear about a year ago when I posted a call to the scholars and makers associated with the Visible Evidence documentary film community, requesting examples of “documentary intrusions” – 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 response was overwhelming – in just a few days, I received some 85 suggestions and enthusiastic expressions of support. This community immediately recognized the phenomenon and reinforced many of the examples I had already gathered, while also directing me to dozens more, such as the bizarre and troubling inclusion of Bruce Lee’s funeral as a plot device in his final film, Game of Death (1978). For practical reasons, I decided to limit the scope of the project to Hollywood films and their immediate siblings in streaming media & television, but the international community of Visible Evidence noted the erosion or complication of fact/fiction binaries in many non-US contexts as well.

As the editing progressed, I quickly realized that the real challenge lay in curating and clarifying the throughline of the project without becoming overwhelmed or distracted by the many possible variations on the fact/fiction theme. The conceptual core of the project was always inspired by Vivian Sobchack’s concept of “documentary consciousness,” described in her book Carnal Thoughts (2000).

Sobchack’s inspiration, in turn, derived from a scene in Jean Renoir’s film The Rules of the Game (1939) depicting the undeniable, physical deaths of more than a dozen animals as part of the film’s critique of the apathetic narcissism of France’s pre-war bourgeoisie. Sobchack returned to this scene in two separate chapters of the book for meditations on the ethics and impact of these animal deaths for filmmakers and viewers alike, relating them to both semiotic and phenomenological theories of viewership.

On the advice of filmmakers and scholars who viewed early cuts of the film, nearly all academic jargon has been chiseled out of the narration, leaving what I hope is a more watchable and engaging visual essay that embraces the pleasures and paradoxes found at the intersection of reality and fiction. Additional feedback convinced me to stop trying to make my own VO sound like Encke King, my former classmate who supplies the gravelly, world-weary narration for Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003). I’ve done my best to talk more like myself here, but there’s no denying Thom’s influence on this project – both as a former mentor at CalArts and for the strategies of counter-viewing modeled in LAPI.

Going back even further, I would note that it was my work as one of the researchers for Thom’s earlier film (made with Noel Burch), Red Hollywood (1996), that got me started thinking about the role of copyright in historiography and the ethical imperative for scholars and media makers to assert fair use rights rather than allowing copyright owners to define what histories may be told with images. This singular insight guided much of my work for the past two decades, realized principally in my ongoing administration of the public media archive Critical Commons as an open resource for the transformation and sharing of copyrighted media.

This project also bridges the gap between my first two books, Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (2011) and Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images (2017). The historiographical focus of this project emerged as an unplanned but retrospectively inescapable artifact of engaging questions of authenticity and artifice, and it afforded the pleasures of revisiting some of my favorite examples, such as Cheryl Dunye’s Watermelon Woman (1996) and Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), both exemplary for their historiographical eccentricity. An additional, important element of context is the recent emergence and proliferation of generative AI for image synthesis. Technologies of Vision addressed some of the precursors to the current generation of synthetic imaging, which has only accelerated the arms-race between data and images, but recent developments in the field have sharpened the need for improved literacy about the way these systems work – as well as the kind of agency it is reasonable to attribute to them.

Reality Frictions also aims to intervene in the anxious discourse that has emerged in response to image synthesis, especially among documentarians who feel confidence in photographic and videographic representation slipping away, and journalists besieged by knee-jerk charges of fake news. 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 kind of media remain useful when considering synthetic images. Admittedly, we are in a moment of transition and rapid emergence in generative AI, but I stand by this project’s call to look to the past for patterns of disruption and resolution when it comes to technologies of vision and the always tenuous truth claim of non-fiction media.

Although the format of this project evolved more or less organically, starting with a personal narrative rooted in childhood revelations about the world improbably drawn from TV of the 1970s, the final structure approaches a comprehensive taxonomy of the ways reality manages to intrude on fictional worlds. Of course the volume and diversity of these instances makes it necessary to select and distill exemplary moments and patterns, all of which provides what I regard as this project’s main source of pleasure. One unexpected tangent turned out to be the different ways that side-by-side comparisons trigger uncanny fascination at the boundary between the real and the nearly real. Hopefully without belaboring the point, I aim to parse these strategies from the pleasures of uncanny resemblance to what I view as superficial and mendacious attempts to bolster a flimsy truth claim simply by casting (and costuming, etc.) actors to “look like” the people they are supposed to portray.

Other intersections of fact and fiction are less overt, requiring extra-textual knowledge or the decoding of clues that transform the apparent meaning of a scene. Ultimately, I prefer it when filmmakers respect viewers’ ability to deploy existing critical faculties and infer their own meanings. Part of the goal of 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.

A realization that develops over the course of the video is that the films with the most consistently complex and deliberate structures for engaging the problematics of representing reality on film 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. For these makers – as for the cause of racial justice or the critique of structural power writ large – the significance of recognizing continuities between the real world and the cinematic one is clear. This is not to argue for a straightforward correspondence between cinema and reality; on the contrary, in the examples noted here, we witness the most complex and controlled entanglements of both past and present; reality and fiction.

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