By Richard Brody April 27, 2017 In the guise of granting auditioners a sort of actorly freedom, the director Kitty Green turns the film into the "Jackass" of reflexive documentaries.
In the guise of letting the participants talk freely and granting them, in the auditions, a sort of personal agency and actorly freedom, Green hides behind the camera and turns "Casting JonBenet" into the "Jackass" of reflexive documentaries.
If you like the reflexive style of VICE documentaries, or the hyper-referential pastiche of Tarantino and Wes Anderson, then you like the work of Raoul Coutard.
Sucking it down is a reflex, our first reflexive gratification.
Sly Stallone, not terribly au fait with self-reflexive cinema, thought it was a documentary and withdrew an invitation to that orgy of meat-headedness, The Expendables.
The fourth section highlights the most commonly used photographic methods – documentary and landscape photography, photo-elicitation, reflexive photography, repeat photography, and paired comparisons – and briefly discusses each.
Visually precise and politically amorphous, the absorbing documentary "Abendland" opens with a self-reflexive image of a surveillance camera perched over a green field.
Rouch, a documentary filmmaker whose work of the late fifties veered toward reflexive fictions, was an inspiration for the New Wave.
Seated between his interlocutor, the critic Serge Daney, and the documentary's director, Claire Denis, Mr. Rivette -- a slight, thoughtful man who punctuates his answers with reflexive shrugs and bashful smiles -- declares, "It seems that Scheherazade is our patron saint".
This is as true of ostensibly observational documentaries, in which the filmmaker stays off the screen and the soundtrack, as it is of reflexive ones, in which the filmmaker appears.
