Photo: massdirection via flickr
As the biopic of an artist, the new film American Splendour is as removed from Charlton Heston and The Agony and the Ecstasy as it is possible to be. It tells the "true life story" of the comics writer Harvey Pekar - a grumbling, unglamorous figure who worked as a file clerk in a Cleveland hospital until his retirement a few years ago. A jazz lover and friend of cult comics artist Robert Crumb, Pekar documentated his banal, day to day experiences in a series of comic books, also called American Splendour.
What makes the film extraordinary, however, is its combination of documentary (the real Pekar, his wife and friends), drama (Pekar played by Paul Giamatti), animation (inspired by the drawings in the comics) and archive footage. At one point we see Giamatti, the actor, portraying Pekar backstage at the David Letterman show. The next cut takes us to some archive footage of the real Pekar appearing on the real Letterman show in the 1980s.
In other words, American Splendour is a bold exploration of how film portrays "reality." Some of the lessons of the movie are simple enough. For instance, when I first saw Pekar's friend Toby in the drama element of the film, I thought, "Now they are overdoing it - this character is too extreme to be real." Toby is portrayed as a man clearly suffering from Asperger's syndrome, who wears kipper ties and Elton John specs, and drives 200 miles to see a film called Revenge of the Nerds because he feels it is a commentary on his own life. But then, in a terrific coup de th??tre, we meet the real Toby. And what do you know? He turns out to be even more of a cartoon character than his "fictional" counterpart.
What struck me as I watched the film was how happy we the audience were to accept this self-referential cutting back and forth between documentary, drama and animation. You would have thought it would be jarring, or disconcerting. But it seemed normal. I wonder if I would always have taken this for granted - or has something changed in the way we respond to this conflation of the "imagined" and the "real." And if so, is it to be welcomed or worried about?
Switch on the television, almost any night of the week, and you will be confronted with history documentaries in which actors "reconstruct" events of the past. A programme about ancient Egypt is now defunct unless it has hordes of digital soldiers and slaves. My own recent documentary movie, Touching the Void, uses a combination of genuine interviews with real people and dramatic scenes of those same people played by actors.
From the other corner, drama filmmakers are encroaching ever more closely on documentary. Many feature films, such as Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, deliberately adopt documentary style camerawork to promote a sense of gritty reality. On British television, some of the most powerful and original dramas have been the work of documentary directors such as Pawel Pawlikowski (Last Resort), Dominic Savage (Nice Girl) and Penny Woolcock (Tina Goes Shopping), using their documentary techniques in the service of fiction. In the cinema, Michael Winterbottom's recent movie In This World is perhaps the most extreme example. It followed two real Afghan refugees on the immigrant trail from Pakistan to London. The film portrayed these non-actors (one of whom did subsequently claim asylum here) dealing with the well researched, but fictional, struggle of an illegal immigrant.
Such cross-fertilisation seems to me to be enriching our filmgoing (and television viewing) experience. Stories with the texture of life as it is lived are reaching audiences bored of saccharine confections. As for documentarians, we are learning the simple fact that it is not enough to educate your audience; you have to entertain them too. And if you can do so successfully, then your documentary can have a healthy life at the cinema as well as on television.
That's the optimistic view. There is another perspective, and it was articulated the other day by a BBC radio presenter who was interviewing me about my recent film. He was concerned about the moral implications for documentaries - that "people will soon not be able to tell what is real and what is not." I shrugged this off; audiences had a nose for these things, I said; they knew instinctively what was "real" (as in documentary) and what was not. Moreover, I thought, the more serious threat to documentary was something else entirely: the infantile intellectual level at which most of them were pitched.
An hour later, I found myself in another radio studio. The presenter asked me why I had used actors to "stage" the interviews in my film. When I told him they were not actors but the real, genuine flesh and blood individuals, he thought I was joking.
The message of American Splendour is that real people can be as interesting as actors, and vice versa, and that even the most rank and dreary life can, in the right hands, be transformed into artistic gold. I had thought this an unquestionably positive theme. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe the dull and ordinary ought to remain just that.
