Travelling on a Eurostar train recently, I noticed that their film service had two categories of what to watch: Entertainment, for fiction films and TV series, however grim and serious; and Documentaries, for nonfiction. As with the in-flight service on planes, the assumption is that there are “proper” films and programmes with made-up stories, and they shouldn’t be confused with the films about reality, which inevitably are not going to be entertaining. The People v OJ Simpson gets to cruise with the flashy, made-up tales; OJ: Made in America has to stay in the slow lane with the boring old bangers, even though they’re telling almost exactly the same story at the same, extended length.
This ignores two facts: that documentaries are sometimes fun to watch, and that the rigid boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in films don’t make sense. Observational footage is of course the main component of many docs, but some use scripted dramatic reconstruction; some rely on improvised material, featuring characters riffing on their real lives; some experiment visually with the whole idea of truth.
So the return, for its third year, of the Frames of Representation festival at the ICA in London last week was welcome. An event whose website avoids using the term documentary – it’s described as a showcase for the “cinema of the real” – it showed a mix of definitely observational films, probably improvised films, part-scripted or part-staged films, essay films and general oddities.
None fitted this freewheeling brief more than the Special Preview of Khalik Allah’s stunning Black Mother, set in Jamaica, and the follow-up to the New Yorker’s acclaimed debut, Field Niggas. Allah specialises in tales of the urban, particularly the black experience, in claustrophobic locations. However, Black Mother is impossible to contain in any demographic box. Scattered personal histories, prayer and song, frequently delivered in Jamaican patois, are layered over intensely close shots of faces and bodies, many shot on 16mm and Super 8. Structured around the three trimesters of pregnancy, it’s a love letter to Allah’s mother and other Jamaican women, and blossoms into a wider cosmic meditation on spirituality, slavery and death. All in 75 minutes.
Black Mother is constructed meticulously to make mythology out of real stories, and its use of fantasy and imagination takes it a long way from a classic observational documentary. Even further down this track was Boris Mitić’s playful In Praise of Nothing, in which narrator Iggy Pop drawls a tale of a character/concept called Nothing, who embarks on an epic philosophical ramble across the world, discussing how we know whether something is there or not.
This may well sound like a film disappearing up its own behind, but it’s very funny, often deeply silly, and aware of its own pretensions. Shot over eight years by 62 cinematographers who were all told to attempt to film “nothing”, the visuals seem real but the narration is a yarn being spun. Is it fiction or is it documentary? It doesn’t matter.
Looking beyond Frames of Representation, one film-maker working across fiction/nonfiction genre lines who has broken through more than others is Alma Har’el. Her films Bombay Beach and LoveTrue feature dance sequences and acted segments alongside beautifully observed traditional documentary material, and offer an insight into characters’ fantasies and emotions that few other nonfiction film-makers have emulated. Most of the time it’s difficult to decide whether you’re watching “real” reality or verbatim reconstructions.
Specialising in films about youth and love, Har’el knows there’s more than one cinematic way to provoke empathy for real people, and sometimes that means stepping away from a literal representation. With a background in advertising and music videos, she’s emblematic of a generation of documentary makers for whom the definition of nonfiction is flexible.
