MISSION

Festival de Vraisemblance is a curational film festival that spotlights rising filmmakers who formally construct a distinct and unique representation of a self-contained ‘reality’ within a film, challenging conventions in referential filmmaking, generic expectation, suspension of disbelief, and realism in film.

1

REFERENTIAL FILMMAKING & THE POSTMODERN PARADOX : Film began borrowing from literature genres as soon as the medium began to attempt narrative. Borrowing from certain literature traditions eventually established distinct genres based on similarities and expectations (ie the Western, the Melodrama, etc.) When a film intentionally contributes to or borrows from a genre or tradition, this is a referential practice. I will save you, reader, from the whole chicken-or-egg debate of the origins of genres, when and how they become defined, etc. All you need to know, I would argue, is that academia in the 1960s-70s became saturated with structuralism and the urge to define everything (put simply). Born from structuralism, the inclination to question these definitions gave rise to poststructuralism soon after in the ~1970s-80s. Both structuralism and poststructuralism are modes of thought born from the broader shift from modernism to postmodernism, from innovation and certitude to the elusive questioning of objective reality. Steve Neale published Genre in 1980, and genre theory became a defined discourse in the decade to follow. By this logic, I would argue that genre theory is born from the poststructural tendency to interrogate imposed structures, and further, engaging with genre through referential filmmaking is inherently postmodern.
Film is a relatively young medium. The first 30 years of the medium (1896-1927) are often overlooked, seeing the eventual invention of recorded sound as inevitable and the decades prior as necessary innovation to achieve this milestone. A similar narrative is imposed upon the period between invention of sync-sound and the invention of color film stock (which is an innovation often argued to have been motivated by the rise in popularity of televisions). The third period in film’s history is also marked by developments in sound technology, from mono-channel synchronized sound, to multiple channel, surround sound, to Dolby Stereo, et al. The first 75 years of film’s history are thus marked by technological innovation, and therefore postulates the merit of ‘early’ film as a progressive narrative toward establishing the ‘true’ form. Rarely is the merit of the ‘early’ period of film history (pre-1970s) accredited to formal and narrative experimentation and developments, except for those individual films that have ‘managed to withstand the test of time,’ namely those that posited some formal element that eventually became convention (i.e. the transition to tecnicolor in The Wizard of Oz, killing off the supposed protagonist in Psycho, etc.) Without the ability to point to a filmmaker’s intentionality -- intentionality discerned through reference and signification -- much of early cinema is written off as primitive, where formal or narrative experimentation is seen as haphazard when it did not become convention.
The primary shift in filmmaking that fully took hold by the 1970s was to prioritize the reversal of the viewer’s expectations : expectations which are founded upon genre, signification, and the successes and failures of all films that have preceded. Though technological innovation has continued to alter the cinematic apparatus and the tactile viewing experience (notably the shift from celluloid to digital, the rise of streaming, etc.), film is no longer categorized by the ever-forward momentum of innovation. It is instead an infintely increasingly complex language of signfication. The success of the 1970s Blockbusters was not only because of Dolby Stereo, but because many of the directors were of the first film school generation. These directors studied the decades of films that came before them, distilling, packaging, and delivering upon generic reference points that efficiently signify narrative meaning. [note: see the top grossing films of the 1960s vs the 1970s - how many of the titles from the former are ‘pretentious’ and how many from the ladder are household names?] Must a film refer to its predecessors in order to be successful? And must the film challenge generic expectations to establish a unique perspective?
The pessimist would argue that postmodernism arose from the need to create solutions for the problems caused by modernism, by innovation. More bluntly, the pessimist would say that we’ve run out of new ideas, doomed to forever cycling through and referencing the past. In the age of remakes, reboots, nostalgia porn, bio-pics, et al, I sympathize with the pessimist. I myself often am the pessimist, nervous of inferred meaning. But I refuse to accept that novelty is dead, and from this refusal, Festival de Vraisemblance was born.

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GENERIC EXPECTATION & THE (ANTI)VERISIMILITUDE OXYMORON : Genres are distinguished and systematized based on expectations imposed upon narratives, and verisimilitude is the mode through which an individual narrative is determined to have met or challenged those generic expectations. In other words, any time a viewer watches a film, they enter with expectations for the film’s narrative and formal elements, whether consiously or unconsciously. The viewer’s expectations are founded upon the genre(s) that the film claims itself a part of, and throughout the film, the viewer must determine how the film interrogates the conventions of its genre. This process of interrogation is the verisimilitude apparatus; questioning the plausibility of the film’s proposed reality, not based on standards of the ‘real-world,’ but based on generic expectations.
Theorist Tzvetan Todorov highlights the ‘whodunnit’ murder mystery genre as a case study for the oxymoronic aspiration to perpetually challenge and re-define generic conventions :

Verisimilitude is the theme of the murder mystery; its law is the antagonism between truth and verisimilitude. But by establishing this law, we are once again confronted by verisimilitude. By relying on antiverisimilitude, the murder mystery has come under the sway of another verisimilitude, that of its own genre... There is something tragic in the fate of the murder-mystery writer; his goal is to contest verisimilitudes, yet the better he succeeds, the more powerfully he establishes a new verisimilitude, one linking his text to the genre to which it belongs. Hence the murder mystery affords our purest image of the impossibility of escaping verisimilitude: the more we condemn verisimilitude, the more we are enslaved by it.

While Todorov tends toward near-pessimism in regard to verisimilitude, it is important to note that he goes on to apply these ideas onto discourse, in general :
The murder-mystery writer is not alone in suffering this fate; all of us do, and all the time. From the very first we find ourselves in a situation less favorable than his: he can contest the laws of verisimilitude, and even make antiverisimilitude his law. Though we may discover the laws and conventions of the life around us, it is not within our power to change them--we shall always be obliged to obey them... To know that justice obeys the laws of verisimilitude, not of truth, will keep no one from being sentenced... Verisimilitude lies in wait for us at every turn, and we cannot escape it-any more than the murder-mystery writer can. The constitutive law of our discourse binds us to it. If I speak, my utterance will obey a certain law and participate in a verisimilitude I cannot make explicit and reject without thereby utilizing another utterance whose law will be implicit.
- from “An Introduction to Verisimilitude,” in The Poetics of Prose (Cornell, 1977)
Todorov’s pesimism builds, until he writes himself into a hole where all systems, all writing, all discourse cannot escape verisimilitude. You may or may not agree with the idea that we are powerless in changing systems larger than ourselves in the ‘real world’, but even though Todorov may consider the murder-mystery writer sisyphean in his attempt to re-write the reader’s expectations, he also clearly envies the forthrightness with which the writer can defy convention.
Filmmaking and film-viewing is a discursive practice between the film and its viewer. Inherent to filmmaking is the desire & need for capital -- filmmaking and distribution are expensive. Film is also arguably the most profitable creative industry. Wider appeal, wider accessability, wider profits. This is why many commercially viable films appear to ruffle as few feathers as possible, perhaps posturing as though they take a stance, maybe genre-bending X and Y traditions together, but always without challenging systems of representation. With (anti)versimilitude, the aspiration to challenge generic conventions is only oxymoronic when the film is committed to the suspension of disbelief. These films ultimately reify the system of representation that they appear to challenge, successfully defying the viewer’s narrative expectations, but in ways that conform to the generic tradition (ultimately re-presenting a genre’s base verisimilitude). Verisimilitudinous representation is often commercially viable as it confirms what the viewer likely already believes, beliefs that are foundational to the commercial success of the genre (i.e. the horror fan believes in the power of catharsis, the noir fan may be a nihilist, etc). The solution to the (anti)versimilitude oxymoron is therefore to allow for pause in the suspension of disbelief, to leave room for the viewer to consider an alternative.

3

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF & REALISM IN FILM : The desire to interrogate (anti)verisimilitude is born from the desire to uncover a dialectic (alluding to or presenting an alternative verisimilitude). The ability to truly engage with reference material, undermine formal expectations, and offer an alternative, requires a break in the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. There must be a moment where the viewer breaks from the self-contained reality of the film to interrogate not only their narrative expectations, but their beliefs outside of the film, their worldview, pre-suppositions, morals. Breaking the suspension of disbelief can be ugly, awkward, and not commercially viable. We go to the movies to escape reality, but is a film truly art if it doesn’t challenge you?
Art is born from the desire to express onself, to share one’s worldview, to challenge others to reconsider what they believe and how they think. The (anti)versimilitude oxymoron captures the spirit of attempting to appeal to an audience while also trying to say something true. We go to movies to escape reality, but we know even the realist of realist films are not ‘real,’ they are constructions, manipulations of source material to guide the viewer through certian thoughts. Returning to Todorov’s murder-mystery writer, there are distinct reasons for why he may contest the laws of verisimilitude : to keep the viewer engaged by defying their expectations, or to encourage the viewer to question why they have certain expectations in the first place. A good film challenges the viewer to consider things outside of the film, outside of themselves, outside of what they already know or believe. The art of filmmaking permits the viewer to dialectically uncover new beliefs, by intentionally manipulating formal and narrative expectations.
In conclusion, the key to understanding the mission of Festival de Vraisemblance is in how a film engages with the suspension of disbelief and (anti)verisimilitude. We showcase rising filmmakers who construct a distinct reality within the world of their film that discursively engages the viewer by subverting generic expectations and encouraging internal dialogue. In simplest terms, we showcase films that don’t tell you how to feel.