The truth of the matter in cinema-verite

By Peter Calder


PABLO PICASSO, not noted for his naturalism, had the measure of it: "Art is a lie," he said, "which makes us realise the truth."

It's an idea that practically leaped off the screen as I watched a preview tape of Campaign, the documentary about the fight for Wellington Central at the last election. Two time-counters in the corner of the image clearly showed events filmed at different times and edited so they appeared to have occurred in rapid succession.

It was a stark demonstration of the way in which chronological order can be amended for effect and it reminds us to remember this: we think we're watching real life, but what we're seeing is an artifice - a lie if you like - and just the filmmaker's version of the truth.

It's worth keeping in mind while watching some of the excellent clutch of non-fiction films in the programme of the 31st Auckland International Film Festival which begins on Friday.

Seasoned festivalgoers always target the documentaries knowing that few if any will get a commercial release or attract television schedulers. And this year's lineup rewards attention.

Among more than a dozen documentaries in the programme this year, one of the standouts has to be Genghis Blues, which is likely to bring Tuvan throat-singing from the world music fringe into the mainstream. The film, made by a couple of Chicago youngsters, is often rough, occasionally downright inept, but is completely redeemed by its central figure who proves the importance of a main character to a good documentary.

Paul Pena, a blind bluesman from San Francisco who wrote the Steve Miller Band hit Big Old Jet Airliner all those years ago, picks up on his shortwave radio some Tuvan throat-singing - that otherworldly music which sounds like a Jew's harp and a penny whistle played simultaneously - and conceives a wild desire to head for Asia's remotest centre (Tuva, once known as Tannu-Tuva, is north of Mongolia).

The adventures that follow are the stuff of the best filmmaking, taking us to wild and alien landscapes on a thrilling journey which is equal parts anthropology, musical ethnography and touching human story. It's something very special, largely because of the irresistible charm of the shambling, humble and vulnerable Pena.

The troubled 14-year gestation of the billion-dollar Getty Centre on a Los Angeles hilltop is the pretext for Concert of Wills, the most accomplished - and certainly the most patient - of the selection previewed.

Architecture and cinema have always made good partners, as last year's film about Frank Lloyd Wright proved. And this year's film is a wonderful portrait of a clash of visions as architect Richard Meier ceaselessly negotiates with Getty Trust president Harold Williams and then wrestles his way through a titanic struggle with artist Robert Irwin, who designed the gardens.

A striking demonstration of Californians' unique ability to trade insults through wide smiles, this movie sets new standards for the "fly on the wall" genre - and it has a gloriously happy ending.

Divorce Iranian Style takes us where we've never been and breaks down a few stereotypes in the process. A British filmmaker collaborated with an Iranian anthropologist, which lent her project the legitimacy it needed, and the film that results is an eye-opener, a bleakly comic soap opera which underlines the profound inequality of Muslim marriage law.

What's extraordinary about the film, for most of which the camera hovers within a metre or two of the judge's bench in the busy Teheran divorce court, is that it shows the Iranian women as anything but downtrodden. The poise and persistence of a 16-year-old petitioner, saddled with a husband almost three times her age, is at once inspiring and heartbreaking.

Film buffs of every stripe won't want to miss Hitchcock, Selznick and the End of Hollywood, which is both an engrossing portrait of one of the American movies' most fraught creative partnerships and a historic charting of the end of the age of the Hollywood mogul.

Selznick, who had rocketed to stardom as the producer of Gone With The Wind - and incidentally became the first person to win the best picture Oscar two years in a row - imported and tried to tame England's most mercurial directing talent, but when he fell from grace Hitch's best was still ahead of him.

Heddy Honigmann, the Dutch director responsible for such diverse projects as the smouldering tale of illicit passion Au Revoir and last year's deceptively offhand documentary The Underground Orchestra, about buskers in the Paris Metro, always invests old ideas with vigorous new life.

In 2 Minutes Silence, Please she records the approaches of a dozen of her compatriots to a annual national remembrance day and creates a potent and thoughtful document. To generations who see world war as history rather than memory and can often take freedom for granted, it is a sobering and unsentimental reminder of what ought never be forgotten.

Watch out too for the icy and precise Homo Sapiens, a history of eugenics replete with some staggering information: that compulsory sterilisation laws were in place in America in the first decade of this century and, on the books at least, in Sweden in the 1970s.

In an ideal world many if not most of these documentaries would find slots, even at unsociable hours, on one or other of our television channels - some of them, after all, were made for or by television companies. But it won't happen. This is your chance; choose wisely.

*The 31st Auckland International Film Festival opens on Thursday at the St James.