In order to attend press screenings at the New York Film Festival, you have to scan in your ID badge. These badges are color-coded, with orange and red representing high value members of the industry and press who always get in; the rest of us greens have to line up and hope the Walter Reade Theater doesn’t fill before we reach the doors. If you manage to make it through the queue, the Lincoln Center ushers scan a barcode on your badge, collecting important information on who attended which screening when — information which is passed along to PR companies, film distributors, and (presumably) the festival itself.
Thanks to the barcode on my ID badge, dozens if not hundreds of people know that I showed up for two Hong Sang-Soo films to make sure I caught Sean Baker’s Anora, that I skipped Who By Fire yet came back to see Maria (whoops), and that I had to miss The Shrouds and Queer (but not why: to officiate my sister’s wedding). This on top of all the information I myself made available on my twitter, my letterboxd, my camera roll, and my metrocard. Simply to take in one film—The Brutalist, say, or Harvest — I let my data be captured by countless information-gathering systems, from electronic doorbells, traffic cameras, and bodega security systems.
Such is the basic condition of post-modern life: to be is to be surveilled. Surveillance — as a subject and as a practice — has been baked-into the medium of film making from the beginning: consider the Lumiere brothers, who turned their brand-new camera on their own employees. No wonder the medium’s great artists, from Hitchcock and Antonioni to Park Chan-wook and Michael Haneke, have all treated the theme.
So has Yeo Siew Hua, a Singaporean writer-director whose Stranger Eyes bears more than a little resemblance to Cache. When the film begins, Bo, the baby daughter of Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna), has already been missing for some time. In a perversely electrifying early section, we watch as the husband tails a woman around a mall, apparently convinced that her daughter is his own. His behavior is strange, but understandable; this is a worried man who only wants his daughter back.
Yet soon afterwards the couple begins to receive DVDs which complicate this narrative. Filmed from a distance, they first show Junyang on that initial mall visit before slipping back in time to reveal a series of much greater transgressions: ignoring Bo, flirting with a supermarket cashier, and eventually cheating on Peiying with his colleagues at an indoor ice rink. The voyeur has been following him for some time — for so long, it seems, that he must have been the one who took their daughter in the first place.
Yeo depicts this opening stretch as a series of distant, voyeuristic frames, capturing his characters on security cameras, smart phones, and livestreams. He frames the densely-packed urban environment as a series of screens, a choice that transforms apartment windows and stairwell cut-outs into little stages, always viewed from afar. In the film’s signature image, a police investigator stands before a monitor on which the footage from dozens of security cameras can be seen, invading many unrelated lives in search of a single relevant figure. None of this is footage of little Bo, and it won’t actually help to find her. But then society has already been transformed into a system of mutual surveillance in which we are always sharing our every action, even our exact coordinates, practically begging strangers to peer in.
These concerns about the two-way relationship between the surveillance state and its subjects also bubble up in Neo Sora’s brash, punky Happyend. As much teen drama as techno-thriller, it takes place in a near-future Tokyo, where a right-wing backlash against forms of ‘social disorder’ — all the usual vilifications: underground music, teen vandalism, the existence of racial minorities — has begun to calcify into a semi-authoritarian state. Yet rather than taking a panoramic portrait, Sora zooms in on a prestigious high school where an act of vandalism prompts the administrators to install a state-of-the-art security system which records students across campus and broadcasts their misdeeds — smoking, littering, lewd gestures — for everyone to see. These transgressions are connected with a social credit system, a real-time deduction of points that can lead to students being punished, suspended, or expelled.
In the movie, surveillance systems are essentially sorting mechanisms meant to separate citizens into clear categories: studious and delinquent, suspicious and reliable, etc. Yet the film’s heroes defy easy categorization: all evince hybrid identities which the nativist political order seems intent on quashing. Kou (Yukito Hidaka) was born in Japan, but as the descendent of a family originally from Korea, he finds himself both socially and economically marginalized, and only attends this elite school on scholarship. This is in stark contrast to his best friend Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), a listless Japanese boy from a well-off, absent family. Yuta can flout the rules, knowing they will always protect him.
For a while, the pair and their friends conspire to mess with and circumvent the system; in one of the funniest sequences, they manipulate the cameras to make it seem like their jock antagonist is repeatedly smoking and littering a cigarette. But Sora spends too little time playing with his setting or its deeper implications. The school ends up not being quite such a tight metaphor for the surrounding society; the vain and vindictive principal, for one, ends up being considerably more decent than he initially appears. Like the massive earthquake which the film repeatedly teases, but never delivers, you want him to dig deeper, to drop the other shoe. So too Yeo, who, in revealing his voyeur to be yet another sad man, deflates all tension, all menace, and most of the profundity. Both men approach our unsettling future, and turn back.
You couldn’t say the same thing about Mohammad Rasoulof. But then censorship and repression are hardly science fiction for him. The Iranian director filmed his Cannes prize-winning The Seed of the Sacred Fig in secret, in between prison sentences for “propaganda against the regime.” When the film was announced for this year’s Cannes lineup, that regime demanded that it be withdrawn, banned the cast and crew from leaving the country, and sentenced Rasoulof to eight years in prison and flogging. He fled across the border to Turkey and then eventually to Germany.
An authoritarian structure bleeding itself dry to maintain the pretense of order: this describes the plot of Seed as well as its attempted suppression. The devout, loyal lawyer Iman (Missagh Zareh) is appointed to the position of investigating judge in Tehran, a promotion which promises to raise his profile in the Revolutionary Court and provide greater wealth and space for his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), and their two daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki), who all live on top of one another in the same apartment. Iman is introduced as an upstanding man, and is intent on following not only the letter but the spirit of the law in his new position. Yet he is immediately confronted by injustice and corruption, and is made to sign judgments for which he cannot even see the evidence.
Rasoulof presents a familiar-enough premise: the man of ideals, contorting himself to survive in an oppressive system. But he is interested less in the man than the system, and how it has, as explained by a title card, strangled the country as the sacred fig suffocates its host. Iman’s promotion comes just before the Fall 2022 protests against the mandatory hijab, events which begin to leak into the family home sowing distrust between father and daughters and eventually the otherwise loyal Najmeh. Rasoulof and his editor Andrew Bird insert these events directly into the film, deploying cell phone footage of the protests and the violent police crackdown taken straight from social media. Presented in a narrow vertical format, this footage is utterly electrifying, real images of demonstration and defiance and, eventually, death — as brutal on film as it was in life. These images are dangerous, both for what they show — crowds chanting, women tearing off their hijabs, a police van plowing through a group of civilians—and for how they were almost certainly used by authorities to identify and detain protestors. The tools they used to spread their message are the tools their oppressors used to punish them for it.
Seed occasionally cuts back to this footage, which grows more grisly as the film goes on. But these real images unbalance the film; what the drama attempts to say via metaphor they just show. Rasoulof had to work under conditions of total secrecy, which leaves his film feeling claustrophobic to the point of inertness, only occasionally rising to the power of the interpolated documentary evidence. Late in the film, Iman interrogates his family, attempting to coerce confessions regarding the protests and a handgun which has gone missing. He films the interrogations, a cynically naïve act, as if by documenting his desired falsehoods they will somehow become true. Iman is essentially making a film, manipulating images until they achieve his desired end. The Iranian state has said as much about Rasoulof. But where he dramatizes to document, his censors intend the reverse. It is the work of a regime more interested in order than justice, seeking to mold reality in its own image, until nothing is reliable and everything is suspect.
2024’s NYFF was similarly unreliable. In film after film, from documentaries to narrative films to experimental hybrids of the two, filmmakers called attention to the insufficiency of their own images, applying additional formal and stylistic layers to tease out the truth of their material. Consider for example Matt Diop’s Mati Diop’s Golden Bear-winning Dahomey. The movie depicts the repatriation of twenty-six plundered treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey beginning in Paris and concluding in the Republic of Benin. Her camera is largely observational, hanging back from the action of boxing and unboxing, lingering on close-ups of the objects and the people put in charge of their repatriation and reception in Abomey.
Yet hers is not the only perspective. Diop spices her film with a bevy of voices lifted from footage of official events related to the exhibition of the artifacts. Viewers watch museum historians, government officials, and red carpet attendees alike, all of whom see something different in these sacred artifacts. In an electric sequence which she intercuts across the back third of the film, Diop films a group discussion among university students, all of whom take something different from the event. Is it a success that twenty-six plundered works were returned, or a failure that some seven thousand are still being held in Paris? Can this spur a new sense of national identity and pride, or does it provide a false victory of an otherwise incompetent government? And what does it mean that the works were stolen from a kingdom which spoke Fon, and returned to a nation which can only laud them in French?
In order to do justice to her subject, Diop does not simply observe it in the dispassionate manner of a Wiseman. She intervenes, she sculpts, she expands the purview beyond the bounds of documentary. The Hatian writer Makenzy Orcel gives a buzzing, guttural, pitch-shifted vocal performance, voicing the thoughts of a sculpture of the Dahomeyan King Ghézo. Orcel-Ghézo muses on his century of captivity, trapped in boxes of glass and plywood, and his eventual return to a land transformed in the image of his captors. By letting in this panoply of gathered and imagined voices, Diop rejects the safe distance of imagemaking in favor of something more provocative. Dahomey is a livewire, shocking the viewer into engaging with its subjects, pushing us to parse their perspectives and respond to their arguments, rather than simply receive them, and move on.
As a playful complement, we have Pavements, Alex Ross Perry’s combination hagiography/concert film/biopic spoof/jukebox musical docu-fictional hybrid. Ostensibly, Perry is looking to tell the story of California 90s indie giants Pavement. But what story? Whatever their anti-corporate positioning, the band is known not for their ethos or their place in a scene, and certainly not anything resembling a hit record. No: Pavement’s legacy is its music, and we’ve already got the records at home.
Thus, Perry martials a series of conceits to highlight and satirize the continued relevance of this band about nothing. For probably too much of the runtime this is an energetically straightforward rock-doc, blending reunion footage with archival materials from across the band’s career. More interesting are the fictional storylines Perry braids throughout. In one alternate reality, he is directing a cheesy Bohemian Rhapsody-style biopic of the band; in another, seen mostly from behind the scenes, we have an American Idiot-style jukebox musical. And in a third, we are given a tour of a Pavement museum, full of artifacts both mock and real, where the band, now mellowed-out and gray, meet to discuss their legacy.
Perry is playing with reality here, interspersing his history of the band with fake objects and storylines that, because he stages them for the film, become part of the band’s real story. In the biopic storyline, real actor Joe Keery plays the role of “Joe Keery,” a method actor dead-set on perfecting Stephen Malkmus’s slacker deal. And though he might not be playing Stephen Malkmus in a big-budget narrative film, he is in Pavements — which is, in its arch way, a semi-fictional telling of the story of Pavement. Perry’s film is at its best when probing and provoking these boundaries, and it will probably play best for people who know enough about Pavements to spot the fakery, and those who can’t because they know nothing at all. As a decently casual fan, I found myself largely engaged but occasionally bored. Perry really did put on a Pavement musical in December of 2022, with plot and choreography and fully-arranged songs. So why only show it to us in clips, or as bland behind-the-scenes footage? For the first time in my life, I wanted to see more musical theater.
A variety of other narrative films, from Jia Zhiangke and Miguel Gomes and Jem Cohen, probed this line between documentary and fiction. But only Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada made it an explicit subject. Adapted from a Russell Banks novel, it centers on the documentarian Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), who has agreed to be interviewed by his former students on what will be the final day of his life. Born in America, Fife fled to Canada during the Vietnam War, an act of resistance which helped to make him famous. But as he begins to tell his life story through flashbacks in which his younger self is played by the much younger British actor Jacob Elordi, the clean lines and established details of this narrative begin to unravel. Is the deeply ill Fife misremembering, as his wife Emma (Uma Thurman) insists, or is he telling the truth for the first time?
The film is roiled by this ambiguously, swapping out color palettes and visual styles to signal where we are in Fife’s story. But it also disorients us, sometimes substituting Gere for Elordi, and allowing character’s from throughout the timeline to step, ghostlike, into the future and the past. Schrader inundates the viewer with images from across Fife’s life and career, confusing not only our sense of perspective and time but also reality. Is the story he tells about his resistance to the draft more truthful than anything put forth in his documentaries? As Gere’s mood and mental state collapses, Schrader cuts to increasingly tight close-ups from a variety of angles, disorienting our relationship to the camera and the documentary crew within the film. All his life Fife has controlled what others see of himself in the world. This loss of control is a true death that precedes the real one, of the body.
Schrader has referenced his own Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, a stunning film about the fluctuating nature of self-knowledge. There, Schrader staged scenes from three of Yukio Mishima’s novels as a kind of covert biography, with the strong implication that it was in these fictional works, not in their author’s pathetic political stunts, where the man’s true self resided. From the bit we see of Fife’s work, he could be broad-minded, public-facing. But by his final interview, the documentarian has far outlived them, and is no longer able to distinguish between his public-facing images and whatever interior life he might have lived. All is confusion, conflation, which is to say: fiction, whatever reality our endlessly surveilled state claims to reveal.
Oh, Canada, like Stranger Eyes, presents us with plentiful images, and then undermines them. The more information we receive, the more confused the self-narrative becomes, until Fife’s final confession comes to appear less like a portrait than an abstract painting, fragmented surfaces which only seem to cohere from a distance. All throughout the festival, filmmakers grappled with precisely that paradox: the more you know, the blurrier the picture becomes. In sentimental works like Stranger Eyes, you can sense the directors attempting to claw back the chaos, landing on emotional explanations, attempting to impose a single picture on their surveillance mosaic. Others let the confusion in, injecting very real images of performance and protest into otherwise controlled projects, a choice which often highlighted the limits of fiction when juxtaposed with the vivid vitality of real life. All these filmmakers pressed on the boundary separating the two, stress-testing the ability of their discipline to hold up under the ambiguity. The stronger the pressure, the better the film.
In the beginning the movie camera was the province of its creators; today we’re all being recorded, virtually every moment of our lives. This state robs us of something, makes us objects when we ought to be subjects, members of that audience which disappear into the dark of the theater our eyes fixed on the projected light. If we’re going to be surveilled we can at least turn the camera back on our captors, and capture them capturing us. Resistance may be futile, but at least we’ll have a record of our own.