Documentary/narrative fusionLarry Charles’s Borat:
Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious
Nation of Kazakhstan(2006) pushes the documentary/
narrative marriage to its extreme by placing the fictional
character of Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) in real-life situations
with people who were led to believe that they (and Borat)
were the subjects of a documentary about a foreign reporter’s
exploration of American culture. The result functions as
both documentary and narrative: we experience a very
deliberately structured character pursuing a clearly
defined goal, but that pursuit is punctuated with a series
of spontaneous explosions of authentic human behavior
provoked and manipulated by Borat/Cohen and captured
by a documentary film crew.dominate our culture. Popular cinema is largely
commercial, universal, and narrative. When most
of us think of movies, we picture movies that con-
ceal their artifice, reinforce viewer expectations,
and seek a common, accessible interpretation.
While purely experimental cinema rarely pene-
trates into the mainstream, this highly personal and
innovative approach to cinematic expression con-
tinues to thrive on the fringes of popular culture.
A grass-roots “microcinema” subculture has grown
out of the affordability and accessibility of digital
video formats, personal computer–based editing
systems, and video-hosting Web sites like YouTube
and Vimeo. Most film festivals, from the most influ-
ential international competitions to the smallest
local showcases, feature experimental programs.
Many prestigious film festivals specializing in
experimental cinema, such as the Ann Arbor Film
Festival, attract hundreds of submissions and thou-
sands of patrons each year. International organiza-
tions like Flickr provide experimental filmmakers
with an online venue to share and promote their
work. Peripheral Produce and Invisible Cinema are
among a growing number of companies and cooper-
atives that distribute experimental film and video
compilations on DVD. Many art museums consider
experimental applications of cinematic principles a
fine-art form worthy of public display along with
painting and sculpture. Artists such as Bill Viola
and Matthew Barney have attracted great atten-
tion to their avant-garde video installations, which
change the traditional ways in which viewers expe-
rience and interact with moving images.
And, finally, while truly experimental films
rarely if ever reach mass audiences, experimental
approaches to narrative construction, visual style,
and editing techniques do often find their way into
movies made by filmmakers sympathetic to the
avant-garde’s spirit of invention. Many of the Holly-
wood directors incorporating experimental tech-
niques developed a taste for unconventional
innovation in film school or art school, or while
honing their craft on music videos, commercials,
and independent art films. These filmmakers include
David Lynch (Inland Empire, 2006), Spike Jonze
(Where the Wild Things Are, 2009); Michel Gondry
(The Science of Sleep, 2006), Richard Linklater (A
Scanner Darkly, 2006), and Charlie Kaufman
(Synecdoche, New York, 2008). Experimental sensi-
bilities have emerged in a growing number of main-
stream productions, from Christian Wagner’s
wildly kinetic editing in Tony Scott movies like Man
on Fire(2004) and Domino(2005), to the simulated
found-footage sequence that opens each episode of
the HBO dramatic series True Blood(2008).Hybrid Movies
The flexibility of film form has made cross-pollination
among experimental, documentary, and narrative
approaches an inevitable and desirable aspect of
cinematic evolution. The resulting hybrids have
blurred what were once distinct borders among
the three primary film-type categories. For exam-
ple, Roger Beebe’s experimental movie The Strip
Mall Trilogy(2001) documents a mile-long stretch
of strip malls in Florida but so isolates and
abstracts the images that he evokes meanings that82 CHAPTER 3TYPES OF MOVIES