Last weekend, two new movies opened in art houses to mixed-to-positive notices. A Place At The Table, a documentary about hunger in America, got kinder reviews overall than Park Chan-wook’s dark coming-of-age film Stoker, with a 68 Metacritic score to Stoker’s 59. And I can understand why the numbers broke down like they did: A Place At The Table provides a lot of good information about the facts and myths behind a problem that affects upward of 50 million people, and it ought to leave any conscientious person seething with outrage. Stoker, for all its directorial flourishes, has trouble overcoming a scenario far more banal than the gothic mystique that swirls around it.
And yet, rhetorically, I can’t understand it at all. I’ve often argued that the “movieness” of movies is undervalued—that we accept the indifferent, workmanlike craft of deliberate mediocrities over flashier, more conspicuous failures. But the “movieness” of documentaries rarely becomes an issue, which only encourages the stereotype of the documentary as a hearty gruel of talking heads and archival footage, spooned out as artlessly as the school lunches A Place At The Table criticizes so vociferously.
The thinking that documentaries need merely to seek or present some kind of truth, regardless of how those truths are presented, strikes me as dated at a time when the elasticity of the format is constantly being tested. Why should documentaries be forgiven any more than fiction films for failing to use the medium expressively or dynamically? Why give a pass to bland info-dumps like A Place At The Table?
“I hate most documentaries,” said Lucien Castaing-Taylor, co-director of the impressionistic new fishing doc Leviathan. “The moment I feel like I’m being told what to think about something, I feel that I want to resist the authority of the documentarian. We’re more interested in making films that are more open-ended, that ask the spectators to make their own conclusions. We’re always implicitly, if not explicitly, fighting against how bad documentary is. Documentary claims to have this privileged purchase on a truthful version of reality—it’s not fiction, this is the real—but most documentaries’ representation of the real is so attenuated and so discourse-based and language-based. We lie and we mystify ourselves with words. Words can only take us so far.”
60. .What is true about A Place At The Table?
61. .Which of the following is the best equivalent to the word “banal”?
62. .In Paragraph 2, the author ( ).
63. .What can be inferred from Paragraph 3?
64. .Lucien Castaing-Taylor hates documentaries because ( ).
65. .The reality most documentaries represent is ( ).