Okay, welcome back to week three of intro to film. This is Noah Namong, your professor here with your week three lecture. Uh, last week we talked about image and sound.
How sound changes the image that sound and image have a relationship to each other and one necessarily cannot exist without the support of the other that these are two sticks in the house of cinema. Now let's talk about maybe another two sticks, two pillars of cinema, fiction and reality. Is a movie ultimately real or is it ultimately fake?
Now, this is kind of a trick question because to be honest, the it's not one or the other. And this is what we're trying to lay out the case for. Uh that a movie isn't necessarily fake and a movie isn't also necessarily real that there is a relationship of illusion and reality that go hand in hand.
So when we ask this question, is a movie ultimately real or fake? What do we mean? Of course, movies are a certain kind of illusion, a certain kind of lie.
Uh for instance, the person you see on screen isn't really there in front of you. It is a projected image of someone from a different time. And also the places that are depicted aren't the places you are in, you are also witnessing the projected image of a place.
So even though it may seem with our eyes and our ears that we are seeing and are hearing stuff that is happening now it is not can say really there in the physical place. So in this sense a cinema works on a certain illusion a certain suspension of disbelief and doesn't a movie sometimes make you feel as if you are there as if you are living this life living as this person sometimes cinema can feel real even though it is not. So when we say fiction, what do we mean fiction or something not real?
Something quote unquote fake, an illusion. And what do we mean usually? Usually we call a fiction film a story, a film with a certain story, with a person that doesn't necessarily exist going through events that necessarily didn't happen.
And I mean think about the millions of stories there are. And now sometimes there are stories with real people going through real events. Um but the telling of this person these events are structured in a way to have a beginning, middle and end.
A conflict that gets resolved. These are sometimes we call the structure of a story a story structure to make sense or connect one event with another. Now we call this a story a certain kind of structuring of events to give a certain idea of something.
Sometimes the storyteller has a philosophy on the world that it wants to impart a certain perspective that it wants to transmute give you the impression of something that they believe in. This we can call maybe fiction. Now what about reality?
Is there a type of movie that is closer to reality? We can say this for documentary. A documentary is usually understood as some kind of plainspoken account of something real.
It doesn't have this kind of a suspension of disbelief that is needed in a film to believe what's happening on the screen. A documentary for a documentary we can believe that it's real that it's happened before. And this is why the documentary exists because this event is real and it wants to give you a certain account of it, feed you certain types of information about it so that we can for instance learn.
But in this class, we like to push back against this notion that a documentary is closer to reality than a quote unquote fiction film is to reality because both have both. that both fiction and reality exist in a fiction film or a documentary film or an experimental film and we will kind of go through this case together. Okay.
So let's talk about fiction and fiction as a story. Now there's many theories about what a story is and actually uh not everyone agrees with each other what is necessarily a story but for the interest of this class we'll make it very simple. Uh a story is something with a beginning, a middle and an end, a protagonist and a kind of moral or theme that is related to the journey of this character going from beginning to end, learning something, realizing something, going through something to gain perspective on their life.
Okay. So now take this with a grain of salt. Not everyone agrees with this.
I don't necessarily agree with that. This is the only kind of story and this is like kind of a overarching uh definition of story. But let's just say for the sake of this class that this is how we'll uh characterize and define a story as just a jumping off point to understand what we mean by fiction.
So, what better way to explain what a story is than to tell one? So, I'll tell you a story that most of you all probably know about the tortoise and the hair. Now, the tortoise and the hair are getting ready to run a race and they are starting at the starting line facing off one another.
And the hair tells the tortoise, "Mr Tortoise, I am going to wipe you clean. You have no chance against me. " And the hair goes, "We'll see about that.
" So they say, "On your marks, get set, go. " And off goes the hair running at the speed of light. And the hair looks back and goes, "What is the tortoise doing?
" And the tortoise is going, very slow, very slow. Now, the hair has gone very far into the race. not seeing even the tortoise close to him and decides, "Hey, well, you know, I'm thirsty.
Maybe I should take a break. " So, he goes to the bear's house and has a cup of lemonade and is hanging out, relaxing on the chair and says, "Oh, yeah. " You know, the bear asks him, "Hey, how is the race going?
" And the the hair goes, "Yeah, it's a piece of cake. " They look out the window and see the tortoise going. slow and steady.
So, the hair says, "Thank you very much for my lemonade. I'll see you later. " And the bear says, "Good luck.
" So, the hair gets out the house and starts to run some more, more, and more. And now he starts to get a little hungry. So, he goes to the mouse's house for a snack.
And so, he enters the mouse's house. And the mouse goes, "Hey, how are you doing? How's the race going?
here's some food. And the hair goes, "Oh, yes, no problem. " And the mouse goes, "Are you sure?
You know, it's not going to be an issue. You taking a break all this, no, look out the window. Look how far the tortois is.
" And they look out the window and see the tortoise far behind, going slow. Mouse goes, "Oh, okay. I guess you're right.
" And here says, "Thank you very much for my snack. " And goes running again. And the hair gets very tired.
After all those drinks and food, the hair needs a rest. So the hair lays down on the grass, looks over and sees that the tortoise is back there anyway. I might as well just take a nap and falls asleep.
And hair is nicely asleep. Suddenly he wakes up and looks at the finish line and sees the tortoise is there close to the finish line and the people are cheering for him. Go Tardis.
Go Tardis. And the hair tries to catch up. Tries to beat the tortoise before he makes it across.
And it's too late. The tortoise has won. And the moral of this story is that slow and steady wins the race.
So here's a story that most of you know. Panda is very famous of course. But what makes it this what makes this a story?
I mean for one it's a feeling. I think you can sense when you're being told a story. It's not just telling you what's going on but there is a certain weight of events meaning made and that is uh really uh not only moving but makes you connect with the characters themselves.
But let's break this down. one there are two characters tortoise and the hair and they have very one distinct characteristics but two characteristics that are at the opposition of one another's. So the tortoise is slow and humble while the hair is fast and arrogant.
And we have this event, the race. The race itself is to see who is going to win. The slow one or the fast one, the humble one or the arrogant one.
And so they do this race and actually a quick quick fast hair is going you know way ahead and his arrogance makes him stop by at two places and at a third time takes a rest. So we have this structure of the events um influenced uh motivated by the hair's arrogance thinking that it's a given that he will win and might as well just take a break and so he eats and drinks then falls asleep. So we can see this structure to the story.
One, two, three. People sometimes say that stories happen in threes. And you can see it work here.
These three instances where the hair takes a break. Finally at the end he he takes a nap and wakes up and realizes ah the tortoise has won. that the tortoise's consistency, humility has kept him earnestly on track to getting to the end and hair in his arrogance and frankly his laziness has caused him to lose the race.
So we say the moral is slow and steady wins the race. actually can even say that humility is much stronger than arrogance can be. So okay so we have this story.
Okay. So we can say that fiction films operate a little bit like this. They make you uh one believe in a different world.
A world of tortoise and hairs running a race with each other and a bear with a home and a mouse with a home and um a race to be won. We have a certain suspension of disbelief. I mean this is not something that necessarily happens in real life.
Tortoises and hairs running against each other yet we believe in it. Why? Because it tells you a certain moral about the human condition actually about characteristics of a human of arrogance of uh of humility and racis competition.
this need to know uh what's better. Something like this is at the center of this story working for us to connect with. We inevitably connect with this story, connect with its meaning.
Uh but what about documentary? Does documentary have a element of fiction? And if it does, where does it come in?
I mean, it's about real people and real events. How can that be fake? How can that have any element of fiction in it if it's about real people and real places?
Uh so let's uh do a little exercise then with a nature documentary about penguins and uh a scene from Happy Feet. At the colony, two weeks have passed. The chicks are testing their independence and spending time away from their mothers.
All that is except one. As the last to hatch, he's way behind in development. While the older chicks are boisterous and confident, he still feels most comfortable in his mother's pouch.
But penguins are sociable birds, and to survive, he must learn to play his part in the colony. It's a daunting prospect. But the little chick finds some courage.
Get me out. It's a shaky start, but he mustn't lose his nerve. Time for a bit of tough love.
With every step, he gains more confidence. Get out of here. Memphis H.
Is everything okay? Uh, I I don't know. I can't hear anything.
Is it empty? Honey, can I have it? Gloria, it's okay.
memories. It happens sometimes, Memphis. Yeah.
Wait, you hear that? Yeah. Hey, I can hear I can hear you, but hopefully your papa's here.
It's okay. Oh, he's okay. Maurice, you come.
Oh, there it is. That's his little foot there. Oh, there's another one.
That's different. Hey, come back here, Mr M. Gloria.
Oh, she can call him whatever the hell she likes. Whoa, little mama. You okay?
Squeezy. Oh, you get used to it. Come on, son.
Come to your daddy. What do you make of that? A little wobbly in the knees, huh?
Is he okay? I don't know. What What you doing there, boy?
I'm happy. P. What you doing with your feet?
They're happy, too. I wouldn't do that around folks, son. Why not?
Well, it just ain't Penguin. Okay. Okay.
Yeah. You come on over here. Get under here.
Get warm. Watch the beak. Watch the beak.
Beak. The beak. Okay.
Good boy. So late. Okay.
So, both these clips have characters. They have the father, the mother, and the baby, and the community of penguins. They both have uh a setting.
um the iceberg, the winter land of this snowy land of this place. Um and both express the feelings of these characters, both express the feelings of the parents, of the young child. They express how it feels and and there is a certain structure to both of these scenes all have a certain beginning, middle and end.
So one cannot say a documentary is just depicting something as it is without a certain kind of reading of the situation. For instance in the nature documentary a nar a narrator is interpreting what is happening so we can understand it that we can get a sense of what is going on. Without the narrator, maybe we don't understand the dynamics at play between parent and child and what the child is going through to walk, what could possibly be going on in the minds of these penguins.
The narrator in the documentary gives us an idea of this and not to tell necessarily a story but using the elements of story to tell you about the nature of penguins. So yes, of course, a documentary is trying to show us in a certain sense a fact of life, a fact of nature, a facts of these penguins. But how does it elicit and articulate these ideas and these events and these facts?
Often they are using story an element of fiction storytelling because we have to say that the documentary isn't just showing it as it is. It is interpreting the information. What if there's a different narrator with a different idea of what is happening?
Then we have two conflicting quote unquote truths and two conflicting facts. So we have to one believe in this narrator to be the authority on this topic and two it does not offer a competing idea. It doesn't offer a different interpretation.
It is kind of saying to you this is what it is. Now is that necessarily true or not? But this uh documentary doesn't leave us the room to wonder.
It tells us very authoritatively actually. This is what it is. So how can that not have a certain element of fiction in it to kind of say that this is the truth?
This is what it is. This is what the penguins are thinking or going through. I mean maybe they're not.
Maybe they are thinking something else. I don't know. Maybe they, you know, maybe they have some kind of vindictive feeling against their child.
We would never know. We have to suspend our disbelief and trust the narrator on what they're saying. And how do they kind of evoke this quote unquote truth is through narrative itself, through fiction itself.
Now, Happy Feet, of course, is a animated film. These are not real penguins. These are animations of penguins.
Uh but yet there is still an element of reality in it. I mean just kind of compare and contrast the similarities in the clips. Um there are many similarities actually and for instance uh we if you just watched happy feet as an example of what uh life of a penguin is like you would understand in this instance that the egg is between the parents uh legs and under their belly and they water like this and also the hatching of the egg and the walking of the baby is a very important part of a penguin's birth and arrival went to life.
We can understand this this in the movie Happy Feet, which is something that the documentary is also trying to depict and portray and and tell its viewers, educate its viewers on. So, both movies actually share this quote unquote reality of penguins. uh you can learn basically just as much from happy feet as you can from the documentary about these aspects of the birth of a penguin.
So how can we say that happy feet has no relationship to reality? Of course, it has a clear suspension of disbelief that these penguins can speak English and they can dance and they can sing and you know this of course is not necessarily real but penguins are a real creature and penguins do mate in a certain kind of ritual of embarkment. So we can say that there is a relationship happy has with the reality of penguins.
uh it is not just purely imagination. It has some relationship to reality. So we can say in both these cases that both scenes share a certain relationship with fiction and reality that both are working in conversation to elicit something in happy feet a feeling and in the documentary information.
But on the flip side is that the documentary within it there is feeling uh you can feel the the um kind of emotion of birthing a child um that is actually human not necessarily penguin like do penguins have the emotions that we have we will never know but for us to understand it the documentary documentarians have to use the element of story to evoke that within us. And it's the same with Happy Feet. Of course, they're working on this emotional level, on this entertainment level, but at the very same time, there is some real information that you can glean from this movie about penguins.
If you tell someone about the the life of penguins in a very academic way, someone who sees happy feet have a has a reference to understand this information with ah yes I saw something like that in happy feet. Maybe not exactly but something like that. So uh film has always had a preoccupation to reality to representing reality and we can say that the aspiration of film and photography is to show real life because unlike a painting and unlike a book they can show something about the physical reality of what we live in a way that a book can a painting cannot.
Um, a photo of a person is much more quote unquote real than a painting of a person in terms of what it looks like. Just on a first glancing impression, we can say, "Ah, this photo is closer to a real person. " So, film has always had this preoccupation with reality.
uh uh we'll talk about the Lumiere brothers um and George Melier um two early cinema filmmakers and we can say at the foundation of uh cinema as a art form um and also a technological invention uh you know the camera um so first let's watch a lumiere of this film called workers leaving the factory Three. Uh now this film is uh ins one breath a very plain spoken account depiction of something that supposedly happens every day in many places across the world workers leaving the factory. But there is an element of fiction in this film.
And where does that come in is that the kind of you could say dirty secret about this film is that this film what we see is not the first take, but the third or fourth, I don't know which take, but wasn't the first one that they did multiple multiple takes of this film to get it quote unquote right. So we say that the moment the Lumiere brothers to take two fiction has entered the room of cinema. So why is this fiction is that this film isn't just showing workers leaving the factory in real time.
You know the work day has ended and suddenly these people are just going home and the camera just happened to be there capturing what was going on. And this is not the case though it is the impression actually what is happening is a certain controlled environment where the workers are leaving and not as workers but basically as actors moving out in a certain way in a certain fashion controlled by the Lumiere brothers asked to walk a certain direction at a certain pace etc etc and done multiple times to get it Right? So we cannot say that this is just a kind of everyday occurrence just happened to be uh captured.
We have this element of fiction of control by the Lumiere brothers to show it a certain way maybe to tell a certain kind of story. Now I'll show you some Melier's films. And Melier was really known for his uh camera trickery.
Wanted to show kind of something fantastic uh about the camera and the edit uh to show a kind of suspension of reality. Actually getting away from the realm of the real and into the realm of imagination. So we'll see some Millier film.
Now, of course, this is not something that could happen in real life, heads on a table like this. But what can we say about the reality of imagination? All of us have uh imaginations, have dreams.
Um and sometimes our dreams are very uh fantastical maybe like a melier film. What about this uh kind of uh mode of a person to show in a film how our minds work outside of our physical reality? But what about the reality of our imagination?
We can say this. Okay. So the film for this week is Closeup by Abus Kerstami.
Abus Kristami is a Iranian filmmaker uh one of the prominent filmmakers of the Iranian new wave filmmakers from postrevolution Iran. Um and this movie Close-up is his seinal film kind of his most well-known and well regarded film uh particularly because it of its slippery relationship with documentary and fiction. And so we call this film uh kind of the genre of this film or the classification of this film is docu a kind of blend of both.
Now why it is uh so is because one I'll tell you a little bit about the film itself is it's about this man named Sabzian who is impersonating a famous Iranian film maker Makmab and he convinces this family that he is Makmab and kind of elicits a lots of favors and uh also houses him for a little bit. he sleeps over and uh they feed him food and he also convinces the sons of this family that he is interested in casting them all of this stuff and eventually the family finds out and puts him to trial, takes him to trial and he is uh on trial trying to make the case for his remorse that uh he doesn't do this out of some kind of vindictive kind of manipulative intention but actually out of his genuine love for cinema for genuine interest in being a director and didn't mean any harm. Now where the docu element comes in is that this trial and this occurrence and this u situation is uh reenacted and performed by the real life people.
So the real life Samsian is in the film. The real life family is in the film and there are moments in the film that play between reality and uh fiction with documentary and fiction because some scenes are clearly uh fictionalized reenactments of what had happened. For instance, the meeting of Sabzian and the mother of the family.
Um so actually this is the kind of center of the film. We are always curious about Samsian and what is going on in his head. It is what he is saying true or not just like we are asking the film the same kinds of questions.
Is this real or not? And so this is really at the center of this film really making us wonder question the authenticity the truth the genuine sincere reality of Samsian's words his being his spirit his character we are wondering always about this and the film really produces this not just by showing Sabzian but the way it shows Sabzian and the events of the story. Okay.
So, I'll play a short clip of the commentary from Jonathan Rosenbomb and Manar Say Fafa about uh closeup and we you can hear them talk about this uh relationship of reality and performance and fiction. It's some of the canoon films were fiction and some were documentaries and some were closer to essays and this is all of those things and at every moment it's not that it sort of shifts if it shifts back and forth from fiction to documentary we can't tell when it does and I think Kristami is has made some very interesting statements about this he says the difference between a fiction and a non-fiction film is less important than the than the distinction between a good and a bad film. Mhm.
He and I think that this is something that's very important in the history of cinema. Throughout the history of cinema, breakdowns between fiction and non-fiction are major stages always. I mean we see it happening all the time.
Even in Genon Wells like an F for fake but I mean we see it in Lumiere films at the very beginning. We see it and in mill we see it in um it's something that is constantly coming up in in sort of like progressive film practice of various kinds because our notion of what reality is is based so much on convention that filmmakers are constantly forced to play with convention in order to do either you know to represent either one and that automatically leads into all kinds of complex paradoxes I think. See the border lines are not quite clear here and you know that's why I think uh to my mind closeup is uh my favorite film of Kami and also it is a film that is very uh maybe a turning point in his career as well as you know a big time you know film in history of Iran postrevolution Iran he affected influenced many other filmmakers including Mahm Buff you know look at the films that he made later on salam cinema once upon a time cinema the actor uh moment of innocent they are all you know in some ways bringing the idea of cinema.
Yes. And in some ways you could say that they're even critiquing the idea of this film. Okay.
Thanks for coming to this class. Um I hope you enjoyed it. Uh maybe it's a little bit difficult this kind of distinction between reality and fiction but we should say that this is a very important thing to consider and ruminate on because a film is always at odds with this relationship.
always combating its impulse to be realistic uh with uh reality itself and also the kind of communicative power of fiction. Okay, so I hope this uh lesson was helpful and interesting. Thanks for coming and see you next time.
Bye.