Last week, I saw Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie in cinema, they were rerunning it because the date was included in the plot of the film. I went with a friend and neither of us were aware of anything about the film, I only knew that it was really well recieved on release in february
This film was my, and many others first exposure to this world, but it feels like it was designed with this in mind. It being designed this way is probably due to the fact that the original tv show is considered a piece of lost media, its no longer available to watch anywhere as far as I'm aware. In fact, Matt Johnson encourages people to watch the film blind. The film teaches you the veiwer the structure of the tv show by playing a) a montage of the first episode and b) an episode in full of the show where they climb the CN tower before the movie starts proper.
"Its all real!!"
This is an impression you get from watching the film, it nails the vlog style so well that I could be convinced it contains real interactions with Torontonians etcetc. But its also something the filmmakers themselves say. The question is ofcourse to what extent its "all real" and what extent of movie magic could disqualify any part of it from being real. Is the 2008 sequence where they interact with recordings of themselves from their archives in a set dressed to be an amalgam of what their apartment building looked like in various pieces of that archival footage real? Does them running around drakes house after a shooting occured there make it real narratively?
The impression that its all real is given by its mockumentary style. The original show is chronologically between the mockumentary and the vlog so it makes sense that this film feels like a bridge between the two. The way the film teaches you about the show also realy helps with the impression of reality, beginning with what is so clearly archival footage of something made by three guys with a video camera helps ground the rest of the film, no matter how batshit scifi it all gets.
The way this film creates its reality is in stark contrast to someone like Christopher Nolan, who has this cultural perception that "he does everything for real"(but I get the impression he rejects this narrative). Nolan uses many hollywood practical effects in his batchit scifi movies to ground them, and while he does a very effective job at it, we still need to be told its real, the meme persists because it isnt immediately obvious while watching the film that there is a level of reality to it.
The Movie implies alot about the conditions the Show was made under and its contents through its presentation of realism. While some of the on the street interactions seem staged(the three that come to mind are the repeated one with the brazilian girl outside the CN tower, the one where Jay asks what year it is, and the "Mr Hollywood" one), their prescence imply the show had more "genuine" interactions, and there are still some genuine interactions in the film as well. The "stagedness" of the interactions are also quite ambiguous, did Matt and Jay get some friends to help out or did they go up to random people on the street and ask them to answer in a particular way to allow for the interactions to seem genuine for the different timelines?
The reason I'm articulating so many questions that I'm not answering here is because I don't have the answers. These are the questions posed by the presentation and contents of the film but they are fundamentally unanswerable to me and thats why I cant stop thinking of itself. There are many filmmakers who intentionally draw attention to how a film is made, the quintessential example here is Wes Andersons use of miniature, but I have never in my life seen a film that simultaneously draws attention to how its made and obfuscates it at the exact same time. I am not alone in this sentiment as well, as of writing this review the top three letterboxd reveiws of this film are variations on the same question: "how the fuck did they do that?"
My favourite variation on this reveiw is Demi Adejuyigbe's: "better be a five hour comprehensive making-of bonus feature on that blu-ray".
I really like this reveiw because it reminds me of what Slavoj Zizek says he likes about criterion when he was invited on their internet show where filmmakers pick out some dvds from their collection, namely that he likes the criterion editions because of the bonus scenes and directors commentaries and such. This is a sort of rejection of the notion that a textual analysis must stem purely from the text(Zizek admits in the same video that he fast-forwards through the boring parts of a film all the time), not a notion that I think anyone strictly adheres to, but something that feels to me like it is expected of anyone doing an art analysis. As Zizek himself says: "thats why I like criterion, because I am totally theoretically corrupted.- What you do with the film, comments and so on, are often better than the thing itself"
The cinematic techniques of using documentary filmmaking language, direct address, parody and reference have been around since, probably the french new wave(I have a very surface level understanding of FNW cinema, I might be wrong), so what makes Nirvana the band the show the movie different? Why does this film turn everyone who watches it into a corrupted theorist, why do people want to see inside- or rather(or even additionally), outside it? I think this is because this film leverages an all new cinematic language, one that the show(probably) helped create; that is, the cinematic language of vlogs. Vlogs are interesting because they are, much like documentaries before them, a narrativisation of something captured "for real". As Dan Olsen put it: "The synthesis of subject and performance gives us a format that sells itself on a perception of authenticity. The extemporaneous personality of the person doing the vlogging, merged with an aesthetic delivery that is decidedly in-authentic, the end result becoming a form of hyper-reality." The hyper-reality of vlogs is what people, myself included pick up on in Nirvana when we ask how its all done.
Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie consumes its own context. Alot of movies that are proclaimed to be larger than themselves achieve this by being incredibly large, they are cinematic to an extreme, but Nirvana becomes larger than itself by being a vlog, a medium steeped in the context of the conditions it was made in. Where the cinema closes itself off to the world around it, vlogs create a series where you discover the personality and its enviornment. By being a movie Nirvana the band the show the movie should lose that context but through its delivery it returns in the form of implications, and this materialises as hyper-reality. Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie teaches you Nirvana the Band the Show through being a vlog that is also a movie.