Prompted Reality

In 1895, the Lumière workers leaving the factory did so in three takes, carefully playing themselves at the request of their director-employers. Thus, one of the earliest “pre-documentary” films in history already bore the marks of “post-documentary” practice. In the public imagination, “documentary” is still synonymous with “truthful” and “objective”, despite the fact that manipulation has always been an ontological necessity of the genre. Soon, AI-generated videos in the documentary style will become indistinguishable from real footage — making it a good time to remember that documentary filmmakers were writing prompts for reality long before AI existed. They simply called them documentary scripts.

For his “ethnographic” masterpiece Land Without Bread, Luis Buñuel hired local residents to stage fictional, shocking scenes from their difficult lives. He made no attempt to conceal the surreal nature of his creation. On the contrary, the film seems to openly declare that directorial expression is impossible without violence, distortion and manipulation. Yet despite the gunpowder cloud of a volley of shots, the “accidental” fall of a goat filmed from three different angles, and a “dead” girl breathing in the frame, viewers remained trapped in the belief that what they were seeing was authentic.

In John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum and Standish Lawder’s Necrology, distortion and manipulation of reality become the central elements that generate meaning. Exploring the limits of a director’s power over their material, both filmmakers playfully demonstrate that this power is boundless. Photographic impressions of the material world, with all the information they contain, obediently become illustrations of the interpreter’s wildest fantasies. Of course, both Smith and Lawder, by supplying anonymous passers-by with comments and captions such as “Murderer’s Assistant No. 2” and “The Man Whose Wife Doesn’t Understand Him”, made sure that we would not feel deceived. But this only confirms that, regardless of the nature of the image, a film’s authenticity depends solely on the author’s intention — what Harun Farocki called the “documentary gesture”.

On the other hand, long before AI became widely associated with deception, documentary footage was often used as a tool of manipulation. It was precisely the belief in the authenticity of archival footage that made documentary images such an effective instrument of propaganda. Newsreels produced by Lenkinokhronika are a striking example. In this sense, perhaps the only images that can, with some reservations, be considered genuine imprints of reality are those filmed “for posterity” and never used in films. Material that was neither needed nor destroyed as useless, but instead transferred to a film archive for preservation, was the only kind to escape the violence of the director-interpreter.

In her book The New Contract, Maria Kuvshinova writes that our belief in the authenticity of photographic images rests on a contract established 200 years ago (the world’s earliest surviving photograph dates back to 1826). At the time, she argues, contemporaries “somehow took it on faith (signed the contract) that a photograph, whether good or bad, was an accurate imprint of reality”. Today, Kuvshinova continues, a new contract between image and viewer is being formed in real time, and for a new generation the question of an image’s authenticity does not arise at all. Every amateur photograph and video has already been algorithmically processed and bears the imprint of “artificial intelligence”, while “documentary” comes to mean nothing more than the sincerity of an experience — something conveyed equally well by analogue and digital films, and even by works created entirely within virtual space.

Will artificial intelligence put an end to our trust in the truthfulness of the document and, consequently, to its exploitation? Once AI learns to authentically imitate documentary footage, what will happen to another important part of this contract — the one in which, as Susan Sontag suggested, real images function as a form of control over the past, simultaneously preserving memory and transforming it? Lisa Zenkova’s Illusion of Reality explores this question in part. Today, many people rarely put their phones down, recording an endless film of their own lives. Any scene in that film can be edited; the past can be rewritten more easily than ever. It seems that, in the future, the Mandela Effect may acquire a faintly paranoid undertone in our minds. Fiction can easily disguise itself as fact, while fact can, at the author’s whim, become indistinguishable from fiction — we can never be completely certain what exactly we are looking at.

Jens Pecho’s Three Casualties explores this idea in part as well. Three action scenes from fiction films, featuring stunt performers, are accompanied by commentary claiming that the performers died during filming. Pecho demonstrates how something that in the media and on social networks would inevitably be accompanied by a “sensitive content” warning can cynically exist as part of a staged performance. We tolerate violence on screen only when we know that what we are seeing is fictional. But what happens when footage of a real tragedy becomes part of the final cut?

Manipulation, however, can expose just as effectively as it conceals. In this sense, AI as a tool also works in two directions. In One and Infinite Chairs, Egor Kraft stages a self-revealing performance by AI, documenting the collapse of a model, or what is sometimes called digital cannibalism. As the internet fills with vast quantities of synthetic content and the supply of high-quality human-written texts, images and code begins to run out, AI starts consuming its own or other generated material, gradually destroying the illusion of reality: with each new iteration, the objects increasingly resemble shapeless patches of colour. John Smith, mentioned earlier, was mocking algorithms much sooner, in 2015, when he invited us to look at London shop signs through an online translator.

Kraft’s work, observing an algorithm’s inability to creatively reinterpret the results of its own experience, resonates with the performance film 47 Storeys by Paul Litherland and Monica Mumblo. In 1996, Litherland parachuted from a skyscraper in Montreal and recorded his account on video while the experience was still fresh. Twenty years later, he and Mumblo edit the original recording and attempt to reproduce his story word for word, including every pause and gesture. The creators describe the work as an ironic illustration of the “performative act of creating memories”. According to this concept, proposed by Annette Kuhn, memory is not a data repository but an active creative process. Memories change and are reinterpreted every time we return to them. As we now know, video is no longer as reliable a repository as it was in Susan Sontag’s time either.

In The Hollow Coin and War Pigeon, Frank Heath uses provocation to expose the hidden mechanisms of capitalist society. Together with actor Jesse Wakeman, he plays tricks on call-centre operators, forcing them to become characters in his ironic spy thriller. Wakeman approaches them with problems that cannot be solved by following their predefined job instructions. He asks one operator to retrieve a hollow coin containing a memory card from a payphone — the same kind supposedly used by an uncovered Soviet spy. Another he convinces that he has become the target of a vengeful pigeon connected to secret government programmes. At a time when technologies are becoming increasingly contactless and automated, requiring less and less actual human involvement, Heath creates new connections. He brings together spy stories, pigeon photographers, Wikipedia articles and a spilled milkshake in a bizarre plot capable of jolting the unsuspecting person at the other end of the line out of autopilot, transforming them from a function into a living interlocutor.

In Nicolae, Mihai Grecu turns to new technologies and provocation to show how selective collective memory is and how easily history can now be rewritten. Using holography and artificial intelligence, he “resurrects” Nicolae Ceaușescu, who delivers a speech to the residents of a Romanian village. The dictator’s ghost becomes a projection of the nostalgic sentiments lingering in the air, an image of the spectral return of nationalist regimes and growing disappointment with democracy. Grecu shows how easily new technologies can fill a void created by a crisis with ideas that were thought to have been buried long ago. The only people immune to the familiar propaganda slogans are the local elderly women, who push back against the director-provocateur: “He’s dead, we’re free, I’m going to bed.”

Chris Marker turns to Ceaușescu for an entirely different purpose. In 1990, shortly after the coup d’état, whose footage appeared on news broadcasts around the world, Marker created a collage of television commercials and news footage from the French national broadcaster TF1. His subject was the confusion caused by the Romanian Revolution on Christmas Eve. French correspondents reporting live use material from an American reporter, trying to make sense of his English, while their American colleague unexpectedly launches into a passage about the need to “help the people of Panama build a democratic society”. Eventually, having found themselves completely at a loss, the TF1 journalists add a reading of Victor Hugo’s poetry to the broadcast, drawing parallels between the writer’s Enlightenment ideas and the situation in Bucharest. Marker takes these absurd associations even further, editing footage of the trial and execution together with commercials. The dictator’s death, broadcast live, becomes a spectacle — and, like any spectacle, reveals its commercial potential.

“I have nothing against documentary film, but essentially it’s a fucking manipulative art form,” admits filmmaker Vincent Boy Kars, who uses the methods of fiction film to reveal the protagonists of his documentaries. In Drama Girl, Kars asks Leila, a student at a dance academy, to reenact key scenes from her biography with actors, shooting several takes and then discussing the scenes afterwards. The result is a strange hybrid: simultaneously a film and a film about a film, fiction and documentary at once. The experiment quickly gets out of control — Leila begins a real relationship with her on-screen boyfriend, while the actress playing her mother develops increasingly genuine parental feelings towards her. Kars attempts to tell a real story according to the laws of dramaturgy; Leila puts its authenticity to the test.

Vincent Boy Kars’s method is a striking example of both open manipulation of reality and a sincere pursuit of authenticity. After Drama Girl, he attempts to turn his own biography into a film. The result is a poignant documentary about a director losing control. The key scenes from Vincent’s life turn out to be universal and, broadly speaking, much the same as Leila’s: relationships with family, relationships with a partner, and the experience of loss. This is hardly surprising, since Kars draws on a psychological theory according to which people perceive their identity as a story and construct it according to the conventions of cinematic dramaturgy they have absorbed since childhood. Unlike Leila, Kars does not participate in the staged scenes himself, instead casting an actor to play him. This split between the protagonist and the person portraying him illustrates the film’s central conflict: Vincent’s desire, both as a character and as a director, to be both at once — to experience and observe his own emotions simultaneously, to live and direct, constantly distancing himself from those closest to him and perceiving his personal dramas as a story about someone else. By delegating both functions within the film, Boy Kars, by his own admission, found himself trapped inside his own method and inside his worst nightmare.

The relationship between documentary cinema and manipulation has continued throughout the history of the genre. The relationship between documentary filmmakers and reality has never been an equal one — programming reality, approaching it with a specific request, was standard practice long before neural networks appeared. Yet the most attentive filmmakers manage to incorporate into their films even those results that clearly depart from the scenario they had planned in advance, and in doing so come just a little closer to reality.

Anastasia Senchenko