Filming reality in an age of fake feelings
After two decades in advertising, filmmaker Christopher Theodore moved into documentary. Here he explores the uneasy relationship between unscripted and fiction and what it means to claim an image is real in an age when almost anything, including emotions, can be fabricated.
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Today, in an alley in Saigon, I filmed a ruptured electrical cable hanging at eye level. It was nearly half an inch thick, torn loose from a knot of wiring overhead. I did not know whether it was live.
The footage doesn't know either. It is a clear, well-lit image of something whose most important property is invisible. That is the trouble with my trade, and with anything that claims to show you what is real.
I would like to say that failure made the film more honest. It isn't that simple.
I am in Vietnam making the second chapter of a documentary series. The first was filmed in China with my fourteen-year-old daughter, on an iPhone and a plan.
Within seventy-two hours the plan had gone sideways. We had hoped to gather people for a salon, a conversation that might reveal something true about the place. Language got in the way, and so did time. We couldn't make it happen, so we filmed what was in front of us.
Above and main image: Scenes from Theodore’s 26-city documentary series, Elsewhere, which puts him, his teenage daughter and their relationship partly in the frame.
I would like to say that failure made the film more honest. It isn't that simple. Here I have spent three weeks arranging things: meeting people, making introductions, hiring a guide, changing plans.
Tomorrow a camera will watch me spend a day with someone I am paying to show me her city. Nothing about that is spontaneous, and I don't think it should pretend to be.
A person who cries on camera because you asked a hard question is real, however carefully you set up the room.
Every documentary is arranged. Someone chooses the lens, the day and the person to ask. Reality television made a business of this, with producers who stage conflicts and edits that supply the music, and audiences who half-know and watch anyway.
The standard objection is that this is fake. I think that misidentifies the offense.
A person who cries on camera because you asked a hard question is real, however carefully you set up the room. A person asked to cry again for a second angle is not. The difference is not whether you intervened. It is whether you manufactured the feeling or merely created the conditions for it, and whether you are willing to say which.
This matters more now than it did. Software can translate a stranger's words, generate a flattering face, and produce an emotional image on demand. I have used some of these tools this month, and they are remarkable. They have helped me find people and keep conversations going that would have died. But they have not told me which wire is live.
The cost of manufacturing a feeling is approaching zero, and what becomes scarce is provenance: what happened, with whom, under what conditions.
The photograph isn't a lie. It is incomplete.
I have been thinking about this because of a newspaper clipping I have kept for years. It shows me as a second grader in a Beverly Hills classroom, standing with two other children as we raised twelve dollars for Vietnamese orphans. Looking at it again this month, I noticed the date for the first time: May 1, 1975, the day after North Vietnamese tanks entered the presidential palace in Saigon.
Above: Theodore used a certain amount of AI enhancement in Elsewhere to enhance the reality of what he was depicting.
The photograph is sincere, and nobody staged anything. But reading the caption closely: One of the children is Monique Truong Miller. Her father, Trương Đình Dzu, was a lawyer who ran for president of South Vietnam in 1967 as a peace candidate and was later imprisoned. Her brother, David Truong, came to the United States, joined the anti-war movement, and became entangled in a controversial espionage case.
None of this is visible. The image shows a classroom, a small donation and three children.
A drop of water held to the light looks like almost nothing. Look longer and there is a world inside.
The truth is all outside the frame. That is the lesson I keep arriving at. The photograph isn't a lie. It is incomplete, and the incomplete image delivered with confidence is more dangerous than the staged one, because nobody thinks to question it. A drop of water held to the light looks like almost nothing. Look longer and there is a world inside.
