“Art of the Real,” the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual series dedicated to work that expands the definition of documentary film, is, by its very nature, constantly moving backward and forward. A documentary film is always looking behind itself, documenting what came before. But what does it mean, exactly, to document? And are the old methods not just overused but somehow insufficient?There are many ways to find truth on film, and many of them, as the series displays, involve incorporating various, and sometime obvious, fictional modes. José Luis Guerín’s “Academy of the Muses” plays with this idea in a way that sneaks up on the viewer. What begins as a document of a lecture hall discussion about the role of muses in the creation of art becomes a portrait of the students, mostly women who appear to be actors, and who, through conversations together and with the professor, reveal the intricacies of their intertwined lives. The movement from nonfiction to fiction isn’t announced or even really acknowledged. It subtly emerges, allowing the viewer to decide what falls into what category, or if either of the categories even apply here. Andrea Bussmann and Nicolás Pereda’s “Tales of Two Who Dreamt,” about a Hungarian family waiting out the decision over their asylum application in a dreary housing block in Toronto, is involved in a similar, if more obvious, exchange of ideas about what is real. The film shifts from what appear to be observational shots of the family and life around the housing complex to more overtly scripted scenes involving mythical stories — including one about a boy who mysteriously turns into a bird — that the main character first announces in a series of retakes at the beginning of the film.The characters or subjects of “Tales of Two” are engaged in the creation of their own reality in front of the camera. Through a breaking of traditional models they are revealing a hidden truth about documentary cinema and the subjectivity of the camera. The same can be said for the painter Rose Wylie, who is at the center of Ben Rivers’s “What Means Something.” The film, a portrait of the artist’s life in isolation as she sips coffee and works in her studio, collapses the distance between filmed and being filmed. Rivers does not try to hide his own voice, and Wylie frequently asks him questions and performs the duty of using her hands as a clapperboard between takes. What we get is something more akin to collaboration. In a different way, Claire Simon’s “The Woods Dreams Are Made Of” is also a collaboration between the person filming and what and who are being filmed. Shot entirely in Paris’s massive Le Bois de Vincennes, the largest public park in the city, the work follows all the different visitors and residents of the park. These include prostitutes, fisherman, homeless people, dog walkers, cyclists, groundskeepers, and old men who use the park’s natural resources as their expansive gym. Each is given ample time to tell their story and to explain their use of the space. No one is held above another, all are treated compassionately and fairly, and each is essential to the intricate puzzle Simon weaves of the necessity of public space. (With its abundance of outdoor sequences, the film makes an interesting pair with the very different work of Bruce Baillie, who is deservedly getting his own sidebar-retrospective as part of the series).“The Woods,” in its dissection of public and private space, also dovetails nicely with “The Prison in Twelve Landscapes,” Brett Story’s deft examination of how the endless construction of prisons has effects that reach outside its walls. We see men in Washington Square Park in New York talking about how they honed their chess game at Rikers, get a tour of Quicken Loans’ sprawling corporate campus in downtown Detroit, where the tour guide at once extols the current hipness and former dangers of the neighborhood, and arrive at the street in Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was shot in 2014.“Twelve Landscapes” achieves much of its power through its lack of informational explanation. The connections don’t need to be spelled out or described; they are shown, felt, understood. It’s essayistic, but never didactic and not afraid to let abstraction become part of its depiction of reality. It’s engaged in presenting a new way of seeing. Thom Andersen’s “The Thoughts That Once We Had” and Jean-Gabriel Périot’s “A German Youth,” using very different formal methods, are involved in a similar reorganization of how we see the world and film itself. “Thoughts” is a dense film that utilizes Gilles Deleuze’s writings on cinema as the loose structure for a personal history of the medium, using footage from different films as its body. This allows Andersen to free-associate, making connections across the history of cinema and finding visual patterns and linking them together. A familiarity with Deleuze (who also shows up, via his daughter, in “The Woods Dreams Are Made Of,” a phantom presence who haunts the series) and his ideas might help when watching “Thoughts,” but Andersen seems to be using his work so loosely and without restriction that it’s not without its pleasures. “A German Youth” is engaged with a comparable formal strategy, using found footage — from films, television broadcasts — and recreated events to reexamine the formation of the Red Army Faction, a group of intellectuals turned militants known for their escalating political actions in West Germany in the 1970s. The film, through an investigation of what the group was saying and how they were saying it, but also what was being said about them, recreates the mood and tensions of the time, and makes the argument that the atmosphere of the time pushed the group into existence.“A German Youth” is part of recent trend of documentary film that uses existing footage, the debris of daily visual life, to take another look at our past. Instead of analysis through interviews with experts, and/or a flimsy attempt at ethical observation, these films are finding new ways to look at personal, and political, and cinematic history — separately or at the same time — through a reshaping of material that already exists. The truth is out there; sometimes it just takes another look, another voice, to bring it to the surface.
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