South By Midwest: Dispatching True/False and SXSW

Armadillo

By Eric Hynes

As suggested by the slash, the True/False Festival plays around the line between fiction and non-fiction. The slanted punctuation doesn’t pose a question, make a claim, or even assume an opposition. This highly concentrated, highly curated weekend survey distinguishes itself from a glut of North American film festivals not by taking a local or easily defined thematic angle, but by making a strong critical claim against formal distinctions between documentary and fiction.

This past year, as True/False celebrated its eighth anniversary—it ran from March 3-6 in the culture-rich college town of Columbia, Missouri—that claim reached the mainstream as questionable docs Catfish and Exit Through the Gift Shop became modest box-office hits, with the latter ultimately receiving an Academy Award nomination, a remarkable achievement for a film many consider to be a work of veiled fiction. With recent films like Alamar (2009), Sweetgrass (2009), and Our Beloved Month of August (2008) approaching non-fiction filmmaking as an artistic as much as a factual pursuit, and the vérité model of witness seemingly ceding ground to a kind of Bazinian interest in reality as defined by cinematic time and space, the argument behind True/False, echoed in these pages by Robert Koehler, and later by Dennis Lim in The New York Times, seems more prescient and relevant than ever. What Koehler coined “a cinema of in-betweenness”—using documentary or real-life elements to tell a fictional story, or fictive elements marshaled toward a non-fictional end, or thwarting expectations from either side— dominated the excellent slate of 38 features at this year’s fest. In a material, mechanical, ethical, and narrative sense, all films freight elements of both fiction and non-fiction, a truth that’s been floating around since Flaherty and the Lumières. But after years dominated by issue-oriented, blandly talking-head docs, there are signs that the art of non-fiction film is learning to embrace rather than deny its ambiguities, and that this might be a time when non-fiction films resemble the print non-fiction of the New Journalism movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s: a time for creative non-fiction on film. (more…)

Welcome

Welcome to Cinema Scope online, a weekly updated web supplement to the print version of Cinema Scope. In the magazine, we have a limited amount of space to pack the world of Cinema As We Know It in. So, for example, while we might cover the “major” “premiere” festivals in print, in the weekly updates you’ll find more festival reports, as well as articles on retrospectives and the like taking place in our immediate and general global jurisdiction. This is a Canadian film magazine based in Toronto, and that’s an important part of the mandate. (more…)

Berlinale 2011: Twenty Questions for James Benning on Twenty Cigarettes

By Mark Peranson

1. When was the first time you smoked a cigarette?

I was about eight years old. My parents weren’t at home. I lit up one of my father’s Camels using the kitchen stove and burnt my eyebrows.

2. When was the last time you smoked a cigarette?

I never smoked again. My mother offered me $200 if I wouldn’t try smoking until I was 18. My mother was very smart. (more…)