![]() ![]() ![]() When Kiarostami read about a man named Hossain Sabzian, who’d impersonated director Mohsen Makhmalbaf-posing as him to a couple and taking money from them to make a film-he thought it might lead to something. Though the two films have different techniques and philosophies, they are united in their determination to continually shift the narrative sands under the viewer’s feet. Could this screening, and possible subsequent ones, have meant that it was seen and appreciated by budding directors who’d go on to make their own sly, rough-edged, quasi-documentary films? Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990), in particular, is difficult to imagine without the influence of F For Fake. One strange detail about F For Fake was that it was funded with Iranian money, and had its premiere at the 1973 Tehran International Film Festival. These various strands of deception are tied together with brilliant associative editing and the smoothness of Welles’ baritone-saying so much, saying so little. There’s nothing quite like F For Fake (1973), which is about whatever Welles told Rosenbaum, but also about Picasso, Oja Kodar (the director’s partner), magic tricks, the 1938 radio broadcast, and the making of the film itself. “No, not a documentary-a new kind of film,” Welles said. In 1972, Welles told critic Jonathan Rosenbaum that he was making a film on art forger Elmyr de Hory, his biographer Clifford Irving, and millionaire inventor Howard Hughes (who Clifford wrote a fake biography of). Three decades later, abandoned by the studios and making films on the fly, Welles would further muddy the relationship between fact and fiction, artist and viewer. His debut feature, Citizen Kane (1941), is one of the most influential films of all time, and very modern in its challenge to audiences that they would not be emerging from the theatre with any clear “truth” regarding the central character. Nanook wasn’t even Nanook: his real name was Allakariallak, and his “wife” in the film was actually Flaherty’s companion.Įven before he began making movies, Orson Welles was pulling wool over people’s eyes-or ears, with his realistic-sounding but entirely fake War Of The Worlds radio broadcast in 1938, which convinced several listeners that aliens had landed in New Jersey. ![]() Only, as it turned out, several of the details that so dazzled audiences in 1922 were Flaherty’s embellishments, including the substitution of a traditional spear for Nanook’s regular hunting gun. Flaherty’s Nanook Of The North is one of the first great documentaries-the life of an Inuk hunter, captured with an eye for dramatic detail. Yet, from the start, non-fiction film has shown a tendency to shake off this burden. Inasmuch as any film can be regarded as the truth-you are, after all, watching only the maker’s truth, a subjective cutting and arrangement of moving images-it is documentary that’s supposed to carry the burden of authenticity. You know certain reactions would have been discussed beforehand, movements choreographed, but it all looks so real. We could really be any place in the city within 20 minutes and do our shoot.” This commitment to capturing elusive revealing moments lends a vivid immediacy to almost every scene in the film. “Everybody was always on the phone on standby. “We had everything prepared, always, for any occasion: rain, underwater, everything,” he told MovieMaker magazine. Marczak brought the ever-readiness of guerrilla film-making to his semi-fictional story. They drew on their own lives for their “performances”, and the film follows them for a year and a half as they hang out, party and fall in and out of love. Krzys and Michal weren’t actors, but young men Marczak met at a house party. ![]() Though the film won the directing award in the World Cinema-Documentary section at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, it isn’t exactly non-fiction. It’s shot by Marczak himself in the manner of Emmanuel Lubezki, regular cinematographer to Terrence Malick and Alejandro González Iñárritu the camera dives and swirls and seems intent on conveying the thoughts of the protagonists.Īs an immersive look at contemporary Polish rave culture, this would have been a striking film, but what makes All These Sleepless Nights one of the most exciting cinematic experiments in recent memory is how it blurs the line between fact and fiction. Michal Marczak’s film follows two young Warsaw residents, Michal and Krzys, as they bounce from one party to another, blow off steam with angsty worrying, and generally live a life without visible responsibilities. And they’re always in motion-or at least that’s what All These Sleepless Nights makes it seem like. They say things like “Your empathy is really stellar” and “My sense of stability has never been more out of whack”. Young people in Poland do the best drunken existential rambling. ![]()
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