Nomadland: is ‘structured reality’ cinema an exciting new trend, or simply fake news?
Awards frontrunner Nomadland has been widely praised for its mix of poetry and realism. It is as much documentary as it is drama: adapted from a nonfiction book, cast with nonactors playing themselves (apart from Frances McDormand and David Strathairn), filmed in real landscapes and workplaces. It reveals truths purely fictionalised stories could not. This is not a brand new idea but it’s one that is energising American cinema.
Another recent film, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, did a similar thing. It was presented as a fly-on-the-wall documentary of the last night of a Vegas dive bar, but actually the bar is alive and well, and in New Orleans. Its “regulars” were strangers cast by the film-makers. The film played at Sundance in the nonfiction category, but that wasn’t strictly true. Its directors had a category of their own: “Nonbinary”. “I guess if you premiere it as a fiction film it’s viewed in one certain way,” said its co-director Bill Ross. “If you premiere it as a nonfiction film it’s going to get raised eyebrows. It’s a messy middle ground.”
This messy middle ground takes in quite a lot: everything from Italian neorealism to Abbas Kiarostami, mockumentaries to found-footage horrors. And it could be expanding. Chloé
Zhao’s previous films, Songs My Brothers Taught Me and The Rider, similarly blurred the drama/documentary lines to great effect. Nomadland also brings to mind Alma Ha’rel’s 2011 film Bombay Beach, another study of reallife American outsiders, intercut with surreal dance numbers. Or coming from a very different place, Sacha Baron Cohen’s recent Borat movie was also kind of “non-binary”: fictional characters co-opting real people into their narrative. Again, the result revealed a side of America we’d never have seen otherwise, and in the case of Rudy Giuliani, probably didn’t want to.
We’re just not as credulous as we used to be. In 1980, Ruggero Deodato, director of seminal found-footage shocker Cannibal Holocaust, had to prove in court that he hadn’t really killed anyone making the film. It’s unlikely we’d be fooled like that nowadays, although we still don’t always know what we’re getting: fraudulent documentaries such as Robert Flaherty’s infamous 1922 film Nanook of the North share modern parallels in the spread of fake news.
When you think about it, Nomadland is really not a million miles from “structured reality” shows such as Made in Chelsea or Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Or, indeed, The Apprentice, whose stage-managed faux-veracity helped convince the world that Donald Trump was a competent and sane human being. Maybe blurring the boundaries has consequences after all. We like a bit of truth mixed in with our fiction, but we don’t want any fiction mixed into our truth. Non-binary cuts both ways.