16 Feb Crop Circles: Quest for Truth (2002)

Space Between Circles

The documentary is an elastic category that doesn’t know itself. Like the crop circles that are the subject of this one, they in more or less intriguing and attractive manner, secure that our need for a ‘message‘ will impose a narrative.

Nominally, documentarians are journalists, the vanguard of history. Often that means that this viewer imposes an alternative narrative, because the one presented by the filmmaker fails. I recently saw an award-winning film on the financial meltdown and I was channeled into a revery about the attractiveness of fundamentalist religion and politics.

Now here we have that very story: some extreme supernatural intelligence is giving us a message. And you know what, I liked it because it was so transparent. Especially toward the end, it resembled the Hale-Bopp videos of the soon-to-commit-suicide members of Heaven‘s Gate. It may be that this filmmaker decided to make a film about delusion. After all, the crop circles follow exclusively human trends and fashionable design trends. Many of their makers have come forward, and signs of their construction are obvious. Some of the more prominent former believers have admitted defeat, so this decision must have been conscious.

Then the whole film merged with another award winning documentary, another goof. This one (‘Exit through the Gift Shop‘) was also a hoax perpetrated with the assistance of an on screen character. It was an exploration of the power of anonymous art, deliberately puzzling and confrontationally and surreptitiously put in the public eye.

Narrative has power. It moves from film to film, being to being, truth to desire overwhelming whatever constraints are placed in its way.

Posted in 2011

Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

IMDB