Critical Evidence December 07, 2007 | 01:58 PM What's so damn exciting about reality nowadays? Whether you're citing "reality television" or Fahrenheit 9/11 or Abbas Kiarostami, the evidence is all around of a shift from the appearance of scripted, professionally-acted productions toward... what? "Documentary/fiction hybrids" is what Kent Jones calls them in one of the essays collected in his book Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism (Wesleyan). It‚s a prosaic term but everyday reality can look prosaicfrom some perspectives. As an editor of Film Comment and the American correspondent for Cahiers du Cinema, Jones represents the zone of film criticism situated between the banality of the mass-market media and the tyranny of theory that reigns in some precincts of academia. He is a successor to Andrew Sarris, the great writer who influenced most thoughtful American film critics since the 1960s and whose debt Jones gratefully acknowledges in Physical Evidence. It's an interesting book, holding everyone from Orson Welles to Quentin Tarantino to analysis. The essay on the neither fish nor fowl hybrids is pertinent for trying to sort out the Zeitgeist of motion picture "reality" in all its manifestations. "Joe Millionaire," The Blair Witch Project and Taste of Cherrydisconnected as they appear to becan all be seen as different modes in a vast, disharmonious movement. "Not that it's anything new," Jones writes, pointing out that the best documentaries have always aspired to poetry and good fiction has always reflected upon reality. There was a "neo-realist" movement coming out of Italy in the 1940s and a French new wave catching plots on the fly in the streets of Paris. But while there is seldom anything entirely new under the son, something different has been stirring lately. Jones perceptively diagnoses several causes of the new hybrid. For many of us, the old "objective" documentaries have been revealed as no less subjective than any other human artifact. So why not have a little fun with the form and put you agenda upfront a la Michael Moore? As for fiction features, we've all seen "too many American films that seem to tell the same story over and over again, more desultorily each time out." Another way of putting it is that the old genres have become tiresome after so many bad iterations, the conventions of Hollywood have declined and been worn out. It may even have become difficult for Hollywood to compete with actual events. Terrorists piloting airliners into the world's tallest towers? Oh, that's right, it really happenedlive on "Good Morning America." Digital video cameras have also allowed anyone to capture "reality" more easily, allowing any goof with nothing to say to consider himself a filmmaker or become the subject of someone's indie movie. And don't get Jonesor mestarted on the transformation of the political process into a series of well groomed quick edits and sound bites. Is it any wonder that the glitz appears hollow and the scripts threadbare? That "reality," no matter how carefully manipulated from behind the scenes, seems refreshing?
