Siblings Fabio and Damiano D’Innocenzo, Bill and Turner Ross made two sensational movies.

A delight of the Berlinale every year is to find a film or two that will make students share emotional truths on the screen, as Scorsese notes in “The Persisting Vision”, an essay of 2013. Last year was what turned out to be Agnès Varda’s farewell, Varda, by Agnès, a documentary about her love of cinema.  Now available on DVD, I have used it this semester, a great gift of the director to my emerging filmmakers.

Bill and Turner Ross

Fabio and Damiano D'Innocenzo

I have seen many films these past week, interesting for a number of reasons, but the two I discuss below are excellent for the classroom: Broken Nose, Empty Pockets, the fifth feature by Bill and Turner Ross, filmmakers in their late thirties, working from New Orleans; and Favolacce, or Bad Tales, second film by Fabio and Damiano D’Innocenzo, twins in their late twenties, born in the outskirts of Rome and not the product of film school. Both works defy the pigeon-hole of genres, and categorization in general. Hence, their value to show students how to think outside the fiction/non-fiction framework, in the first film, and the subversion of narrative logic, in the Italian case.

I had read about Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, directed by Bill and Turner Ross in the Los Angeles Times when it premiered in Sundance in January.  When I saw it in the Panorama section of the festival, I understood why this “documentary” is the right one to bring up the key philosophical issue on day one of the documentary class: what makes a film a documentary.  Bloody Nose is a “creative treatment of actuality”, per Grierson, but like Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), it ultimately escapes the boundaries of the non-fiction film. This question is unavoidable after viewing Bloody Nose, one that pits the purist against the pragmatic - the critics that still object to Flaherty enlarging Nanook's igloo versus those that forgive interventions in search of a larger truth.

The Ross brothers had a lively Q&A with the public after the screening.  They described how they were interested in making a film about “a space of shared events” – in their case, a bar. A source of inspiration, they noted, had been The Iceman Cometh, the Eugene O’Neil 1940s play, where the saloon is the “container” where the hopes, illusions and despair of the characters play out.  A bar in New Orleans, the Roaring 20s, became the locale where in November 2016 they shot the interaction of people they cast during one unbroken scene for eighteen consecutive hours, with two cameras and fifteen mics.  The conceit was no script, no staging, and a point of departure: the last night before the watering hole closes its doors forever. Twenty people – bar habitués, carefully selected to represent “archetypes” - reacted to the “stimuli”, as the directors referred to this set up, and they in turn responded to their dialogue and movements. In direct cinema style, no conflicts were staged but the brothers gave their actors some cues, so that they would have a dramatic arc within which to play themselves.  The Ross siblings captured some raw emotional truths on the screen, shaped and trimmed in an editing process that unfolded over three years, while they supported themselves doing other film work.  The music is purely diagetic, coming from the bar’s juke box. 

To the brothers’ surprise, Sundance selected Broken Nose, Empty Pockets for their always very strong documentary section, a decision that opened up a frank conversation about the nature of documentary.   The brothers recounted how the Sundance programmers argued that Broken Nose “constructs situations in order to invite a level of chaos and candor that feels more fitting for the nonfiction space.”

After their Q&A, I approached the very personable Ross brothers to ask about what comes next.  Distribution is still in the works, they replied. One of them could not help but say about the Berlinale, “Being here is f … unreal”.  

In Favolacce (a made-up Italian noun, with “fabulation”, perhaps, in its root), the D’Innocenzo siblings plumb a dark quarry, one that the English-language translation of the title aptly captures: a fictional story with moral and/or esthetic connotations.  The intriguing voiceover that opens and closes the film is both self-reflexive and revelatory; it alerts the viewers that the tragic events at the heart of the story may also be embroidered by fabulation; that there is something else to the story of middle-class children and their parents, set in a cookie-cutter suburban development encroaching on nature during a torrid summer.  Realism and logical plot construction may be a façade waiting to be subverted.  Fellini’s 8 ½ and Buñuel’s logic of dreams help make sense of the unravelling of four pre-teenagers, whose fathers are totally toxic and the mothers ineffectual, while other adults are literally and morally dangerous. Since realism is not the name of the game, the audience is  challenged to sort out what is actually happening on the screen, and who doing the telling.  Like the opening monologue of Nolan’s The Prestige (2006), the clue to the story is hidden in plain sight. 

The press conference was lively; when asked about their influences, one of the D' Innocenzo brothers provided an eclectic list: Gus Van Sunt, Takeshi Kitano, John Cassavetes, John Ford, Billy Wilder and Chantal Akerman. Regarding Italian directors, they acknowledged Matteo Garrone, Ermanno Olmi, and Pietro Germi as references.

Broken Nose, Empty Pockets, and Bad Tales merit a wide audience, and their directors, the recognition that fresh talents have arrived to the film scene.