Direct to Camera, Pt. 1 — Real Life (1979)

As co-director of You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder is unusually present in front of the camera, arguably overshadowing the film’s ostensible subject, disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. That’s just the start of the film’s unconventionalities, which we’ll get into more next week, but first we’re revisiting a 1979 comedy that predicts Fielder’s turn as the stealth protagonist of his own documentary. As a prototype of the mockumentary form, as well as a satire of the then-nascent genre of reality television, Albert Brooks’ deeply meta debut feature Real Life encourages the audience to recognize an essential fact about documentary filmmaking, which is that cameras inevitably affect the behavior of those in front of it. And this week in Feedback, we correct an oversight in our recent discussion of The Social Network, and touch on some of the other titles we considered for this pairing.

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