The All-Seeing Eye

THESE AREN’T IDEAL TIMES FOR TREADING THE SOFT SOIL of cinematic hybridity. It’s become harder to justify flights of factual indeterminacy. Questions that might have been stimulating as rhetoric or theory—what is truth? does the camera only lie? are people only ever performing?—feel queasier in a political environment where such indeterminacy has been perverted and weaponized. The questions remain—in fact they’ve taken on greater weight—but it’s not something to fuck with, not something to kick around as idle provocation. This puts documentaries in a tricky place, particularly documentaries that aim to wrestle with rather than affirm their own authority. In immensely insecure times, revealing the fictive edges of the nonfiction canvas can seem like an aggressive pile-on, regardless of honest intent.

Maybe it’s time to invert the picture, consider the photographic negative. Maybe instead of emphasizing how filmic, the new film by Carlos Reygadas. After debuting at Venice last year, it recently played as part of this year’s Neighboring Scenes: New Latin American Cinema at the Film Society. It’s also part of this year’s True/False Film Fest program, even though it’s not a work of documentary.