SIX O'CLOCK NEWS (78)

Directed by: Ross McElwee

The Pitch: McElwee and his camera travel across America, meeting people whose tales of woe have made headlines on the Six O'Clock News.

[ NOTE: I managed to find this on a French satellite channel, in a version which had replaced McElwee's narration - running intermittently throughout the movie - with a translation in French, a language I speak only imperfectly. I'm fairly sure I got most of what was said, but I still suspect that my rating for the "real" Six O'Clock News - which, like most of us, I'll almost certainly never get to see - would be significantly higher.]

Theo Sez: To call this a meditation on God, film and the texture of our lives would be accurate but far too dry, ignoring the effect of this director's laid-back, self-deprecating persona - and, even more, of his whimsical approach to documentary-making : he goes, as he delights in claiming, where the road takes him, even his subjects chosen on the spur of the moment. It is, of course, a put-on - there's abundant evidence of an organised mind in the film's quiet symmetries (each natural disaster corresponding to one of the four elements, stuff like that) - but this is still a very personal documentary, quirky and restless, mixing straight interview footage with information about McElwee himself, his career and his family (including a disquisition on God from his three-year-old son). That the result isn't self-indulgent is because (like ROGER AND ME, only more intricately) it depends on this mix of information, on our always being aware that there's someone behind the camera, filming (and editing) the "action" - even, in one memorable scene, filming a film crew who've come to interview him, and who then film him filming them (for his film) for their film! The subtle way reality gets reshaped when we try to "capture" it is the film's most explicit (though not only) theme, questioning not just the validity of documentaries but the whole panoply of ruses by which people try to control Life, from religion to the Six O'Clock News - trying to impose structure on the randomness that comes with living, and to make sense of something based inescapably on chance. Thematically it's not dissimilar to something like THROUGH THE OLIVE TREES, except that McElwee's freewheeling approach - mixing in jokes, irrelevancies (a hilarious meeting with a Hollywood producer) and musings on the American Dream - makes for a headier mix than Kiarostami's wry, thoughtful style. It also makes for a film that's slightly overlong, but it'd be ungrateful to dwell on that : this is a bracing experience, so rich and stimulating it almost makes you feel ashamed for wasting time on "real" movies. Why should our notions of "entertainment" exclude this kind of metaphysical adventure story?