Word: chases
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...less spectacular fronts, younger film makers and students of film are reading between the newspaper lines and producing a whole crop of documentary experiments and shorts. Just released and playing this week in Boston is an 87 minute feature film by a Californian ex-newsman, Richard Chase. It should be seen, not only by those interested in documentary film but also by any who still happen to want their political fires fanned...
...Chases's film is titled No-Go after the No-Go district of a town in Northern Ireland, barricaded by its residents against the British Army. Shot on location, No-Go is the first feature film to be made inside the illegal Irish Republican Army. Chase and his crew spent ten weeks filming in close collaboration with the insurgent IRA. The filming conditions were not easy. The IRA never sought to exercise any editorial control over the film but required the same discipline and careful behavior from the film crew that it demands of itself. Chase was responsible...
...film took another six months to complete. Although the gun-running scenes, too dangerous to film on the spot, had to be recreated as inserts, the rest of the movie records life in the IRA in its diurnal and immediate aspects. Though most of No-Go was unrehearsed, Chase used three actors, actual leaders in the IRA, playing themselves. Each tells his story, gives his rendition of the struggle, and expresses his own hopes and doubts in monologues dubbed over the picture. They engage in argument, or guerilla practice, and sometimes they act, an occasional weakness in an allegedly unstaged...
...then No-Go is a reporter's and not an editor's movie. The film purports neutrality, but it deals with only one side of the struggle. In the very selection of his material, Chase makes a statement of his partisanship, and the film accents his position. One of the title cards reads: "This film was unrehearsed and shot totally behind the barricades. It's prejudiced. It's biased. It's personal. And it's the truth." No-Go is not trying to have it both ways, partisan and non partisan. There is no such thing as total objectivity. Truth...
...obvious contrast to Chase's film is Marcel Ophuls' documentary on the Irish Struggle, A Sense of Loss. More can be drawn from this comparison than Ophuls' obvious technical superiority, for Chase has not felt compelled to imitate the centralist humanist politics of his precursor. Using the same subject matter and the same documentary form as A Sense of Loss, No-Go is a dare, defying the definitions of documentary film-making. No-Go makes a bid for personal politics in documentation. This is a bid with some history, including the first Russian recipes for dogmatic cinema and the propaganda...