I need to write this after watching Frederick Wiseman's latest verite opus, National Gallery. So many feelings went through my mind watching this film.
Initially, watching the film gave me chills. It felt like home. I almost cried seeing someone capture society with a similar set of eyes as myself. I am a constant observer which is why I love the medium of verite. I love capturing human interaction, how groups interact, and institutions function. It helps me better understand the world and myself.
Watching a verite film about an institution, especially one as high
profile and establishment as The National Gallery, is fascinating.
While I loved seeing the art and the educational programs the museum has
to offer in action, I really loved watching the business meetings. I
loved that the director of the museum scoffs at the marketing person and
that he wants a say in all events that happen near "his" museum. I
simply love watching business meetings as an outsider, seeing that all
arts nonprofits, no matter how big, have the same tussles about money,
ego, programming, territory, etc. Fascinating stuff, to me at least. Makes me feel
like my path in the world is not as small as I think it is.
Then, as I watched, I started to get very sad. I got sad that
verite has such a small audience. Only I and a handful of folks over
the age of 70 were in the theater. How can verite films survive with a
sparse audience like this? Hardly anyone even knows what verite means
these days. I, myself, had to change my own film's marketing materials to read
"observational" instead of verite because people had trouble
understanding what I meant. I am sad that "reality" television and "verite" are thought of as the same thing by many.
Then as the film went on, my feelings of fascination and sadness turned to frustration, anger, and sadly, boredom. I say this because the film is three hours long. I had no idea of the length when I entered. Fortunately, my son went over to a friend's house after school on the day I went otherwise I would have been getting angry, worried texts from him about why I was late (I was driving afternoon carpool that week; the glamorous life of an artist mom). I am blaming myself as I never checked the running time on the film before I went; I simply figured that a verite film has to be 1 hour 30 min or everyone would run screaming from the theater or be asleep. I figured wrong.
I have to say that at 1 hour 30 minutes into the film, I was ready for it to be finished. It felt very repetitive after that and covered much of the same ground. As such, as a verite filmmaker (director/producer/editor), I got a bit angry and frustrated. Here I am slogging away on my films, looking for ways to tell my stories in the most efficient way possible, "killing my darlings" many times over, and Mr. Wiseman is taking his sweet, sweet, and in my eyes, unnecessary time, saying the same thing over and over. Watching this go on and on, made me worried for the state of verite film. How we will we keep our very small audience with films of this length?
Making verite stories are so important as they put a mirror up to society and forces it to see and come to terms with itself. No other form of storytelling does that. However, it's precisely the verite stories that are the most difficult to make; they take time to follow the course of the subjects, usually many years. They cost a lot of money to fund the crew(s) that does the following. Lastly, these types of films have the most limited audience of all documentaries, I think. And I have to say, I get it. They usually include no narration, little titling and sit-down interviews; not a lot of the typical structure that gives more standard documentary shape. Even I, a self-proclaimed verite lover, has to be in the exact right mood to see one of these films, my own included.
I don't how to inspire verite appreciation or if that is even necessary. I just don't want this medium to die out.
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