Revisiting 70s film theory.
The Inflitrators
dir. Cristina Ibarra, Alex Rivera, 2019, US
Genre: character-driven, hybrid
Doc studies’ use of 1970s film theory has been on my mind lately, especially after a thought-provoking session on Beyond Story that I attended at the Visible Evidence conference. I’ll have plenty more to write on this, especially in the context of character-driven documentary.
But having recently watched The Inflitrators, I was reminded of John Hill’s excellent essay “Finding a Form: Politics and Aesthetics in Fatherland, Hidden Agenda and Riff-Raff” (in George McKnight, ed, Agent of Challenge and Defiance: The Films of Ken Loach). I’ve cited this essay before, but it’s worth revisiting its topic, the political thriller. Hill is writing in 1997 but about critical debates of the late 1960s (which then carried over into 1970s anglophone film theory).
Two directors, in particular, seemed to crystallize the choices at hand. On the one hand, the films of Jean-Luc Godard, especially from La Chinoise (1967) onwards, demonstrated an insistence on the need for revolutionary messages (or content) to be accompanied by an appropriate revolutionary form, and were characterized by a deliberate abandonment of the traditional Hollywood conventions of linear narrative, individual, psychologically rounded characters, and a convincing dramatic illusion (or ‘classic realism’). On the other hand, the films of Costa-Gavras, beginning with his exposé of political assassination, Z (1968), exemplified a model of political filmmaking which sought to bend mainstream Hollywood conventions to radical political ends. In doing so, they attempted to sugar the pill of radical politics with the ‘entertainment’ provided by the conventions of the thriller.
Hill has more to say but this quote is a pithy summary of the political thriller debate, sometimes seemingly one-sided.
The Inflitrators appears in a different historical and critical context and, after all, it is a documentary, not an industrially produced fiction film. But it, too, sugars the pill of radical, or at least committed, immigration-rights politics with thriller conventions. The film follows a group of college-aged undocumented immigrants to the US (Dreamers) who used their willingness to be open as a means to apply pressure against anti-immigrant policies and formed the National Immigrant Youth Alliance (NIYA). Alliance member Marco Saavedra self-deports to get access to the detention center where one Argentine immigrant, Claudio, is being held. As Marco gets deeper involved in his ruse, the film presents us a cat-and-mouse game in which ICE increasingly becomes aware of NIYA’s actions and as NIYA tries to communicate to the inflitrators from the outside.
The film interweaves fictional reenactment of Marco’s imprisonment with some interviews of the real subjects, Claudio included, and observational documentary footage of the NIYA members on the outside.
To be upfront, this docfiction exercised worked well for me as a viewer, in no small part because the editors did a terrific job with such a challenging task – the switch between two production value registers, as well as the tonal shift between the thriller fiction element and the character-driven issue doc. Moreover, they did so in a way that did justice to the moral imperative of the Dreamers’ actions and the complexity of immigration law.
Some of this judgment will be subjective. Other viewers may not like the film nor like it as much as I did. The bigger point I wish to make is that two sides of the political thriller debate are able to be right at the same time: The Infiltrators does individualize the story, since ultimately spectators spend much of the film worried about the non-deportation of a few people. In this there are tradeoffs, and other types of documentary might present complexities of immigration law or politics missing here. But I venture that any reasonably intelligent viewer would be able to place these cases in a larger context. (And of course, an anti-immigrant viewer would be highly likely to read the film as a resistant reader) Some of this comes from the structure, since the film gestures back to the current political moment at the very end. But even without this, I believe that viewers can watch individual stories and also understand collective, social, or political dimensions to those stories. In fact, documentary may be well-poised for this since real life resists some kinds of narrative recuperation, no matter how much three-act structure or thriller enigmas are imposed on the material.