Hold a Kaleidoscope to the World

A new swathe of films are rejecting realism and returning to a bolder, more liberated kind of filmmaking. Why did we ever want films to be real in the first place?

In 1967, the renowned French film critic and theorist André Bazin famously heralded realism in cinema as the truest pursuit of the form, cautiously aware of the power of other modes like expressionism or dialectical montage to ‘cheat’, ‘trick’ or ‘deform’ the real. Images should be left open for the viewer’s analysis, in Bazin’s approach, not distorted so as to lead the audience in the director’s vision. But realism has never been without contradiction – after all, why would a world, shot and mediated through the lens of a camera, ever be considered truly real? And how does the history of cinema contest this, when the earliest modes of filmmaking, a ‘cinema of attractions’, to borrow the film historian Tom Gunning’s term, posit the potential of the new technology for tricks, illusions and entertainment as its most exciting attribute. The mundanity of workers leaving a factory or a train rolling into a station could become awe-inspiring landmarks of film history, not just because of the realness of the events themselves, but because here they were, captured and held in the promising infancy of a new medium. If it was merely ‘real’, would anyone keep watching?

Perhaps a more fundamental question is at stake today: why would we want films to be real, anyway? ‘Cinema makes too much effort to convince audiences that they’re seeing something of this world,’ the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes said in a recent interview with Film Comment. ‘But we’re not; we’re seeing the parallel world of cinema, with different laws.’ This parallel world is a place where artifice and reality coexist by default, where logic has fewer conventions, and thus where the real invention is to be found. Indeed Gomes’s new film, Grand Tour, playing at Toronto Film Festival next month, grasps at this parallel world to explore the boundaries between filmic reality, the world as we know it and the spectacle of cinema itself.

To do so, Gomes finds a recognisable point of entry – the city – and layers fiction against a landscape of changing urban environments, paying homage to another early mode of filmmaking, the city symphony. A natural development of the actualités of the late nineteenth century that made the Lumière brothers so renowned, city symphonies were urban documentaries made with experimental formal techniques to showcase the architecture and pace of life in major metropolitan areas. Films like Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) or Robert Florey’s Skyscraper Symphony (1929) captured the temporal and spatial atmosphere of cities through rhythmic montage and unusual camera angles. Ruttmann’s formalist closeup shots of the city’s cogs, machinations and industrial networks are sequentially vertiginous; Florey’s camera looks up at such a low and close angle that a highrise soars into the sky forever. They rendered life in the bustling metropolis cinematic. Yet, they purported to be real, or at least observant documentary; often structured as a day in the life, they attempted to give an impression, both geographically and culturally, of what it was really like to live there. In this distortion, they continued what began with the Lumières’ train – life on screen became spectacle, a funhouse-mirror world to the real one returned to after the show.

And so, in Gomes’s own quasi-city symphony, we enter a world close to ours yet not. Grand Tour follows Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a British officer based in Rangoon, Myanmar, who flees the city moments before his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate) is due to arrive. A chase ensues as Edward embarks on a country-hopping picaresque that takes him to Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines and China, while Molly follows behind, never quite catching up. Edward’s marital apprehension is never explained, nor is the fact that these expats of the British Empire during the late 1910s all speak Portuguese. All the while, Gomes refutes conventional logic and plays with the expectations of spectatorship: the elements of historical fiction are all shot in vivid black and white, while moments of colour arrive when Gomes captures present-day documentary snapshots of life in the cities that Edward occupies in the past; local puppet shows pale in comparison to footage of men operating a ferris wheel by hand. Such is the whimsy of Gomes’s film, where time is collapsed in order to playfully distort these worlds, and to shrink the distance between his film and the early silent cinema that inspires him.

Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, which combines new material with footage taken from his own archive and past work, similarly navigates this parallel world. Spanning 20 years, the film’s loose plot follows Qiao Qiao (Jia’s longtime collaborator, the inimitable Zhao Tao), a performer in search of her lover Bin (Li Zhubin). China changes around her, with the arrival of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and later, the COVID-19 pandemic. In reusing his own films to depict this shapeshifting world, Jia creates further layers of artifice in pursuit of something more experiential, more closely connected to memory – of his characters, and of his own filmography – than stark reality. Jia uses music extensively in the film, capturing documentary-style footage of groups of friends singing traditional ballads or setting montages to the pulsing Eurodance played in small-town clubs. As such, the film is at once an expansion and a collapsing of time and cultural reflection; it draws together several themes from Jia’s career – the rapid development of modern China, the displacement of communities and the complicated longings of love – and condenses them into one film, while simultaneously expressing the dense history of this time and place. 

Working more subtly in this style is Payal Kapadia, the first Indian filmmaker to win the Grand Prix – and even to feature – in the Cannes competition for 30 years with All We Imagine as Light at this year’s festival. Like Jia’s film, Kapadia’s work feels lacquered with memory and melancholy; her parallel world is one closer to a dream state, inhabited by lonely dwellers. Following two nurses living in Mumbai, the film explores the generational divide between the elder, more reserved Prabha (Kani Kusruti), and her younger roommate Anu (Divya Prabha), a bold, desiring young woman in a relationship with a Muslim boy. The women are not originally from the city yet drift along in its current like many other people who, displaced from their homes by economic circumstance, have come to find work. Kapadia observes all of this with her poetic realist style: at the beginning of the film, Kapadia interweaves a series of narrated documentary vignettes of Mumbai city life. Later, when a colleague is forced out of her home by a new building development, Prabha and Anu help her return to her coastal hometown. There, time slows to a hallucinatory pace and the film becomes more fantastical; Prabha, haunted by memories of her distant husband, and Anu, longing for her lover, each find the dreamlike escapism they need to live freely. 

And all the while the world awaits the September release of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, a brutish feat of a film that dazzles in its sheer magnitude, toying with the time and space of both history and its own narrative. Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver) is Coppola’s mad architect of ‘New Rome’, with a vision for a harmonious world built from a supermaterial called Megalon. To enact this, he needs to knock down a swathe of low-income homes, of course. The slightly more, let’s say, regressive politics of Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), however, ensure that the two men are locked in a battle for power. In a film already maniacally stuffed with half-baked ideas, grand motifs, gaudy visuals and baffling plotting, the abstraction of time and place is somehow the piece that holds it all in a strange togetherness, a gravitational force of disorder keeping these floating parts in a mystifying orbit. Megalopolis abandons legibility in favour of a bolder, more liberated kind of filmmaking that seems more interested in holding a kaleidoscope up to the real world, than a mirror.

If the city symphony showcased a sparkling new era, artifice and all, these films depict cities not as we see them but as we know them to be: heavy with life, upheaval and memory. The interweaving of the real and the constructed in these works, so clearly inspired by older modes of filmmaking, defies Bazin to make space for tricks and manipulations, authorial suggestions and layered histories. Today’s cinema is seemingly trapped in a dichotomy: the sober realism of its social dramas and, opposingly, the escapist artifice of its fantasies; each revealing an endemic cultural inflexibility, as if we couldn’t possibly do both at once. And that is the parallel world Gomes describes: cinema as a radical form, neither real nor fantasy but something impossible – better.

Caitlin Quinlan is a film critic and writer from London