This book traces the development, from 1960 to the present, of a previously unrecognized category called “investigative cinema,” whose main characteristic lies in reconstructing actual events, political crises, and conspiracies . Concerned with the intersection between politics and form, the films under consideration are rarely discussed by scholars, especially from a comparative perspective. Nor do they fall into commonly recognized film genres or fit auteur paradigms. In dealing with governmental power as manifested in a Kafkaesque legal system, impersonal bureaucracy, and the repressive forces of the army and police, these documentary-like films refrain from a simplistic depiction of historical events and are mainly concerned with producing what does not immediately appear on the surface of events. Consequently, they raise questions about the nature of the “truth” promoted by institutions, newspapers, archives, dossiers, television and new media reports, or digital audio and video files. By highlighting unanswered questions, they often leave us with a lack of clarity. In fact, while the plot conveys information, the questioning of documentation becomes the actual narrative. By examining issues of image manipulation, the investigative tendency first anticipated and then embraced key ideas behind contemporary convergence culture and multimedia storytelling.
Because they share a common approach to reality, these films are often labeled “political.” Yet this broad label can include works from a spectrum of vastly different periods, from the revolutionary impulse of the Soviet avant-gardes of the 1920s (most notably Sergei Eiseinstein and Dziga Vertov) to the anti-Fascist values of Roberto Rossellini’s “war trilogy” (1945–1948) and the European “political modernism” of the late 1960s and 1970s, to the demand for cultural decolonization both from Hollywood imperialism and from European auteurist cinema expressed in manifestos such as “For an Imperfect Cinema” (1969) by Julio García Espinosa and “Towards a Third Cinema” (1971) by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, to the inflammatory rhetoric of Michael Moore’s documentaries , contemporary digital video-activism, and humanitarian campaigns.1 Investigative cinema differs from all of these in that it calls for a shift from the idea of the political as propaganda, as pedagogical, or as ideological militancy. The political aspect in investigative cinema lies instead in trying to find a cinematic rhetoric able to represent different and even opposing political contexts not as a priori principles but as a dialogical exchange.
If the poetic of the investigative and its relationship to social engagement is unique, on a formal level the tendency is to be considered in the most inclusive sense possible. Investigative cinema unscrupulously absorbs stylistic elements from the examples of political cinema mentioned above, and from the self-reflexive styles typical of Italian neorealism (1945–1948), the French New Wave (1959–1964), film noir (1941–1958) and neo-noir, the New Hollywood (1967–1975), the Latin American New Waves of the early 2000s, and, more recently, network cinema, transmedia adaptations, and the ultraprocedural subgenre. However, investigative works do not belong to any of these artistic tendencies, genres, and subgenres, but oscillate between the three poles of:The selected works that are classified within these three modalities share the same aesthetic problematic. Fictionalized documentaries are to be positioned at the center of investigative cinema. These are films composed entirely of staged scenes that reconstruct the real events in such a way that the end result appears to be a reportage, as, for example, Salvatore Giuliano (Rosi , 1961), The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo , 1966), All the President’s Men (Pakula , 1976), The Moro Affair (Ferrara , 1986), One Hundred Steps (Giordana , 2000), Gomorrah (Garrone , 2008), Diaz. Don’t Clean Up This Blood (Vicari , 2012), and Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow , 2013). Then on one side of these are found the inquest Love Meetings (Pasolini , 1964), some cinéma-vérité and direct cinema (1960–1970) works by Jean Rouch and the Maysles brothers in their modernist phase, along with recent documentaries by Errol Morris, and Laura Poitras, in which filmmakers incessantly interrogate to what degree “reality” is developing in front of the camera by creatively engaging with issues of visibility and invisibility. On the opposite side are a series of fictional films such as Muriel, or the Time of Return (Resnais , 1963), Dillinger Is Dead (Ferreri , 1968), The Parallax View (Pakula , 1974), Todo Modo (Petri , 1976), (Bollaín , 2010), and No (Larraín , 2012) in which, to quote Francesco Rosi’s disclaimer, “the characters and the facts here described are fictitious, but the social and environmental reality they derive from is real” ( Hands Over the City ; 1963).
- (a)fictionalized documentary
- (b)documentary
- (c)fiction inspired by (but not directly based on) actual events.
The subcategories of the investigative are extremely porous, and often hybridize into each other. This happens by way of the insertion of real newsreel or war footage, or clips, cameos, and photographic portrayals featuring the real-life characters in fictionalized documentaries . Conversely, actual documentaries at times include stylized dramatizations that deliberatively fictionalize their own narratives. This strategy is adopted to fill in the gaps in the reconstruction of events, enhance the visual quality of the materials presented, and help audiences orient through their complexity. Furthermore, changing characters’ names or slightly modifying the actual occurrences in fictional films is often an expedient to overcoming governmental censorship or to circumvent legal actions for libel (e.g., French New Wave films allude to the Algerian War only indirectly, through a series of visual periphrases).
Studies by Fredric Jameson (The Geopolitical Aesthetic ; 1992), Kristin Ross (Fast Cars, Clean Bodies; 1995), Angelo Restivo (The Cinema of the Economic Miracles; 2002), Alan O’Leary (Tragedia all’Italiana; 2007), Stephen Prince (Firestorm; 2009), Thomas Stubblefield (9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster), Dana Renga (Unfinished Business; 2013), James Tweedie (The Age of New Waves; 2013), Guy Westwell (Parallel Lines; 2014), Marcia Landy (Cinema and Counter-History; 2015), and Garrett Stewart (Closed Circuits; 2015) have demonstrated the possibility of situating film in relation to the economic changes brought on by massive modernization and the violent forms of resistance to it. These involve the persistence of banditry and organized criminality, political murders, terrorism, the use of torture, rendition, digital surveillance, and the illegal dissemination of classified information. Following these debates, I examine the centrality of investigative cinema in relation to the historical conjunctures of the “economic miracle” and the “years of lead” in Italy, the simultaneous decolonization and reordering of culture in France, the waves of globalization and neoliberalism in post-dictatorial Latin America, and the post-Watergate and post-9/11 climate in US society. Against this background of socioeconomic transformation, my research traces the emergence of a constellation of pressing concerns in contemporary critical theory, namely, the crisis of the national space, post-colonialism, proceduralism, trauma, memory, and technological change in the European, North African, and American contexts. Since some of the movies mentioned earlier featu...