But in 1963, a film version of the Living Theatre's production of The Brig, shot with hand-held cameras, was mistaken by the Venice jury for a genuine account of life in a US military prison and awarded the best documentary prize. The opening of Citizen Kane is indistinguishable from a March of Time documentary, and that virtuosity is precisely what we relish about it. This convention has been taken over by the movies. In the late nineteenth century, Bram Stoker presented Dracula as an assortment of diary entries, newspaper clippings and letters. In the eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe pretended his Journal of the Plague Year was an actual diary kept in 1665, and Samuel Richardson wrote his novels in epistolary form to suggest that we were privy to the actual writings of his characters. For hundreds of years, authors have been attempting to get under our guards by presenting their tales in factual forms.
The film plays on the fact that we live in a time when the gap between fiction and fact has become blurred, and not merely in docudramas.īut it also belongs to a well-established tradition. Their decision to present the movie as being unmediated reality may in part have been influenced by the excuse it provides for a certain roughness of execution, and having filmmakers as the central characters cuts down on research.
Independent filmmakers working on modest budgets have thrived in it people like George Romero and his associates in Pennsylvania, Hammer Pictures in Britain, Dario Argento in Italy and Roger Corman on the Hollywood fringe. T he enterprising first-time directors of The Blair Witch Project, Florida-based Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, probably turned to the horror movie because it is a flourishing genre with international appeal that demands little experience of life.
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