Fenster writes:

Despite the name, Cinema Verite (2011) is not a straight-up documentary like those of Frederick Wiseman.  Nor is is a documentary about a the making of a feature film, like Lost in La Mancha.  It is the rarer bird: a feature film about the making of a documentary.  (Sidenote: on the DVD, there’s a “making of Cinema Verite” short, so that would constitute a documentary about a feature film about the making of a documentary–the possibilities are endless!)

The film charts the making of a series created for public television back when it was more often referred to as educational TV.  That show was An American Family, and it charted over 12 episodes in 1973 the comings and goings, cinema vérité style, of the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California.

I wonder how many of this blog’s younger ‘viewers’ will recall the show, and how large an impact it had at the time.  It was quite a phenom.  The first reality TV show, beginning a lineage that runs to Albert Brooks’ Real Life as well as to Snooki and Jersey Shore.

As is the case with today’s reality TV, all “cast members” had their day in the sun on An American Family.  But the stars of the show, if you will, were husband and wife Pat and Bill (seated, right) and son Lance (standing, right).  Pat and Bill created drama because their marriage came apart on screen.  Lance created drama because he came out on screen–flamboyantly ahead of his time in 1971, when the series was filmed.

The idea behind the show was faintly anthropological.  James Gandolfini, playing the show’s creator Craig Gilbert, pitches the show to Pat Loud (Diane Lane) by arguing that the time is right to bring Margaret Mead to America.  If so, I suspect he found it hard to be the classic participant observer in his own culture.  Everybody got caught up in ways that you might expect when all are members of the same tribe.

In his introduction to the family in the show’s first installment, the real Gilbert says:

The family was filmed as it went about its daily routine.   There is no question that the presence of the camera crew and equipment had an effect on the Louds, one which is impossible to evaluate (emphasis added).

One way of thinking of Cinema Verite is that is an attempt to do just that: to evaluate anew the interplay between camera, crew, family, audience–the whole schmear.  The new filmmakers want to make it clear that the camera disrupted immensely.  And of course they take liberties with the parts of the backstory that never made it to film in “real life” (highlighting the relationship between Gilbert and Pat Loud, for instance) that were clearly not part of the original series, looking to “explain” the goings on in a way that the Gilbert could not in the moment.

But this is a tall order for a feature film out to entertain.  For one, there’s the cutting room floor problem.  An American Family tried to distill multiple lives over seven months into 300 hours of raw footage and then down to 12 hours of television.  The movie condenses further, to 86 minutes.  So while the original series had the time to precipitate out at least three dramatic leads (Pat, Bill and Lance), the feature film makes do with one–Pat–and so Cinema Verite is mostly her drama.  Seneca Falls trumps even Stonewall, with Selma nowhere to be seen.

Tim Robbins and Diane Lane are well cast.  They capture that odd early 70’s moment when hip flowed up to the older, moneyed, upper-middle class.  And they could both pass for the characters they portray–especially Robbins, who is a dead ringer for Bill.

My questions:

1.  An American Family was high-toned educational TV.  Jersey Shore is to laugh.  Is this inevitable cultural atrophy, as Hitchcock leads to Hostel or D.H. Lawrence to Debbie in Dallas?

2.  Or maybe the gap between the two series is not nearly so great, just as Downton Abbey is not much more than a high-toned soap?