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Dreama Walker as Becky |
On seven screens and lasting 14 days, there are hundreds of stories being told at the Milwaukee Film Festival. But the most interesting story may be unfolding in the projection booth rather than on the screen. Sunday afternoon’s talk by film critic J. Hoberman focused on the technology behind recent movies—the means of production as an academic might call it—and suggested that the changes are having a profound effect not only on film culture, but on life beyond the Cineplex.
Questions about film technology have been part of movie-talk for a while now, ever since digital technology became advanced enough to begin displacing traditional celluloid projection. Whether you notice it or not, almost all movies are screened digitally today. And some filmmakers and scholars are bemoaning the shift as a compromise in the quality of the image—just as audiophiles cling to vinyl recordings as the truest reproduction of a sound wave. Paul Thomas Anderson, in fact, released his latest film, The Master, on 65mm film, a format once celebrated in epics by David Lean, but now so rare that only a handful of theaters around the country had the equipment to show it (it’s being shown digitally in most American multiplexes).
But Hoberman’s concern isn’t so much with the nuances of the image reproduction, but with the nature of the image itself. Photographs and motion pictures have long been seen as a “true” reproduction because the film is a record of the actual light waves that bounce off the object being photographed. Sure there are filters and developing room tricks to shape the final image, but the initial photograph is something essential—a “trace” or index of “the real” as it is often called.
But that, of course, has changed. With the growth of special effects and manipulation, all films are essentially “animated”—they have lost that direct connection to the real world.
For Hoberman, this is neither good nor bad. It has happened. In one of the more provocative ideas of the talk, he speculated that film as a medium will come to be thought of as “animated”—and that the century or so of film history that used lenses and celluloid will be thought of as just another way of creating an essentially “artificial” image.
Academic theorists have been debunking the idea of movies as “realistic” for some time now, and Hoberman has no argument with that. But thinking of movies like Avatar and The Matrix (a watershed moment in its use of special effects) in this way brings the idea home in a more profound way.
As Hoberman suggested, it’s particularly apt that The Matrix was the film that marked a leap forward in digital effects. It is, after all, a film about a population that exists in an alternate, artificial reality that keeps them passively unaware of their truly bleak existence. While life as we know hasn’t yet sunk to the dark world of killer robots and gunmetal gray landscapes, the power of artificial, digital realities continues to grow—at the cinema and at home. Figuring out The Real Thing gets harder and harder.
There’s nothing artificial about Craig Zobel’s Compliance, which received a single screening at a packed Downer Theatre screen Monday night. Perhaps word got around that the film’s Sundance screening was interrupted by several walk-outs, and offered a post-screening panel discussion by psychologists. Perhaps some of the film’s rave reviews got around. While I didn’t notice any walkouts on Monday, there was plenty of audible wincing and guttural feedback.
No, this isn’t Saw XI. Compliance, in fact, is horrifying in ways completely contrary to the stuff of “torture porn.” Instead, Zobel uses stillness, long takes, and the banal mise en scene of a suburban fast food restaurant to let the events of the story work their way into your psyche.
We start with a typical weekend at a Chick-fil-A-style fast food joint in the heartland. As the dinner rush starts, manager Sandra gets a call from a police officer that accuses a young employee of stealing money from a customer’s purse. She is asked to bring the employee, Becky, back to the office and interrogate her. Becky claims her innocence.
But the officer persists, persuading Sandra and her coworkers to subject Becky to greater and greater humiliations before we learn that the caller isn’t a police officer at all but a prankster with much more serious intentions that your basic “Is your refrigerator running?” caller.
Zobel’s story telling is harrowingly effective because of its simplicity, from the simple camera style to sparing use of music (though Heather McIntosh’s score sometimes pushes the dramatic moments too much) to some understated “Everyperson” performances by his cast.
And as if to bring home Hoberman’s point, the closing moments of the film announces that the events aren’t fictional—and they have occurred more than a few times. Simple and realistic, Compliance nonetheless gets an extra kick from that old imprimatur “Based on Real Events.”
