Introduction 21
life story of Arielle Holmes, a nineteen-year-old heroin addict, whom Josh Safdie cast from the streets of Manhattan. The filmmakers actually used psychodrama as an inducement for her to reenact her own life story on film. Nathan Silver, who rejects the use of traditional scripts, experimented with his own brand of psychodrama in five features to date, most notably in Stinking Heaven (2015), where the technique of performers recreating past traumatic experiences for the camera was borrowed directly from Moreno’s work. How does scriptless filmmaking overlap or differ from documentary? The films discussed in chapter 11 attempt to blur the boundary between fiction and documentary. Robert Greene’s Actress (2014) provides an unusual example. In making an observational documentary about his neighbor, Brandy Burre, a former actor who appeared in the television series, The Wire (2002–2008), Greene deftly questions the underpinnings of the documentary form when the actor is asked to portray her life on camera. Is the film a documentary, or has the actor singlehandedly commandeered it into fiction? Although Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason and Robert Greene’s Actress might be considered borderline exceptions, this study mainly looks at fiction films that, through extreme improvisation involving personal material, cross the line into nonfiction. James Solomon’s The Witness (2015), which deals with impact of Kitty Genovese’s murder upon her younger brother, Bill, provides an example of a film that initially started as a scripted film but turned into a documentary. Yet its climax is a restaged dramatic scene that transforms into a psychodrama that becomes frighteningly vivid.
S EEING AND HEARING TH E DI FFER EN C E
Industrial Hollywood films today continue to be dominated by traditional screenplays and more stylized celebrity acting. Yet, as the following chapters make clear, those filmmakers drawn to creating more personal, independent films often turned to alternative scripting methods that utilize improvisation and psychodrama. The use of improvisation and psychodrama, however, is no guarantee that a film will be more successful than