Abstract
Capturing reality has been a constant aim of different movements throughout the history of the cinema. Historically, this challenge has been taken up by makers of both documentaries and fiction, through hybrid proposals that blended strategies from both fields. Even though these proposals have been ignored by traditional film historians, they constitute a persistent tendency from the cinema’s earliest times, as Rhodes and Springer pointed out in their book Docufictions: Essay on the intersection of documentary and fictional filmmaking (2006). There are good examples of these proposals in contemporary cinema that have even won awards at leading international film festivals, including the two movies referred to in this paper: the fictional Chop Shop made by Ramin Bahrani in 2007 and the documentary Foreign Parts by Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki in 2010. Both movies try to portray the same reality in the form of the little known Willets Point (Queens, New York City). Both films aim to show the truth behind the reality portrayed by its inhabitants in real life situations. The main goal of this paper is to reveal their manner of doing this and to show how both movies, even though belonging to different genres, share the same strategies to such an extent that their images could be interchangeable.
Highlights
Godard once said, "All great fiction films tend toward the documentary, just as all great documentaries tend toward fiction"
The specific reality described in this research is relatively unknown, paradoxically it belongs to the city most often portrayed in the history of the cinema, the Willets Point neighborhood in New York City
This paper studies a fictional film Chop Shop, which uses strategies, resources and codes of the documentary to present the authentic face of the reality that it seeks to portray
Summary
"All great fiction films tend toward the documentary, just as all great documentaries tend toward fiction". There are attempts to represent either the reconstruction of historical events or immediate reality using codes from both fiction and the documentary, and others that narrate fictional content using documentary strategies to give it false authenticity Among all these alternatives, the core of this work focuses especially on those proposals whose content is the reality around the author and his times, such as that portrayed by the Lumière brothers in their earliest films or by Dziga Vertov a few decades later in the first productions of the Soviet government, the Kino Nedelia (Film Week, between 1918 and 1919). The specific reality described in this research is relatively unknown, paradoxically it belongs to the city most often portrayed in the history of the cinema, the Willets Point neighborhood in New York City.
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