What is real?

Rating: Null/10 (3 October 1999)

The arrival of The Blair Witch Project (1999) might very well represent a turning point in filmmaking. The film seems to declare, "No longer is television learning from cinema." This cinema of impact draws a digital line across the screen and sets off on a historical stylistic course. "Reality" based television, through Blair Witch and others, has adapted to a bigger screen, only now its called "method filmmaking," so say the Blair Witch filmmakers. Their improvisational filmmaking, however, is not new to cinema. The trend may reveal a youthful audience that is growing passive to traditional storytelling techniques, a trend that suggests a danger of sorts.
American filmmaker John Cassavetes, Faces (1968), Husbands (1970), and many European directors like Ken Loach, Kes (1969), Carla's Song (1996), and Mike Leigh Naked (1993), Secrets and Lies (1996), use improvisation to develop character and dramatic tension. The use of cinéma vérité in Blair Witch, though, is another clever device which may further convince the audience that what they are seeing is "real." This, of course, is also not new.
The French New Wave filmmakers also used hand held cameras for the same reason as the Blair Witch, and most independent filmmakers do. It is much less expensive to shoot on location with a small crew, on videotape and 16-millimeter film, and a tape recorder, than it is to pay for a studio, professional actors, and state-of-the-art equipment and effects.
So what is so new about method filmmaking? Not much.
Not even the marketing objectives for Blair Witch are new. The Beatles made a bundle on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and the albums that followed by the developing the myth that Paul McCartney was dead (I am the walrus!). Alfred Hitchcock used hyperbole for the marketing of Psycho (1960) by announcing in trailers and on posters for the film, "No one . BUT NO ONE . will be admitted to the theatre after the start of each performance of Psycho." Hitch implied a seriousness and immediacy which helped to create an interest in the unknown.
So why is Blair Witch so successful? Most reviewers mention the clever use of style and the filmmakers' objective of wanting to "Make this thing to be 100 percent real." The strength of Blair Witch and other "reality" productions such as MTV's Real World or Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1993), is the ability to draw from our sense of what is real and how it is represented.
In the same style that television reveals space walks, or provides point of view shots from deadly smart bombs falling on invisible enemies, - all "real" events - we see three college kids, tormented by unseen demons, run in fear into foreboding darkness. Their fear is real, our reactions tell us, and their absurd video camera captures their irrational and eventually hopeless flight. This style vividly recalls the terror of wartime film journalists during nighttime firefights (where is the enemy?). The effect is real, immediate, and frightening.
If we are to believe that television reveals the truth, then we must also sense that there is a truth to a production using similar production techniques. If audiences begin to expect a truth from fiction, that there must be something "real" in dramatic narrative cinema for it to be entertaining, we enter the spin city world of Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987). When that happens, audiences will literally believe anything they are told, and what is "real" may turn out to be fiction after all.
Does anyone remember a person named Nixon?