Sightlines · a concept

story-telling / legending

the legend-making speech-act that brings a not-yet people into being.

On screen: subjects caught "in the act of legending" themselves

Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968) — The chronicle is a Straub-Huillet invention with no real memoir behind it, yet built entirely from authentic documents — Anna caught in the act of legending the life.
Nanook of the North (1922) — Allakariallak, cast and renamed 'Nanook,' enacts a version of his own ancestors' world — real people legending themselves under direction, shaped by the on-site rush screenings.
Mrs. Miniver (1942) — An England built on a California soundstage speaks a people into being, and the sermon is then reprinted as a leaflet, dropped over occupied Europe and broadcast on the Voice of America.
Fort Apache (1948) — York caught in the act of legending the dead Thursday into a hero for the reporters, the film making the audience complicit in the myth's construction
The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) — Casting actual Franciscan friars, reportedly from the Nocera Inferiore community, to perform their own order's founding stories drawn from the fourteenth-century Fioretti, with clergy also serving as…
The Strange Ones (1950) — Cocteau narrates the film as recalled myth in his own voice, the children caught legending themselves; the voice seems to summon the images
The River (1951) — The retrospective voice-over turns the remembered girlhood into a told story — the subject caught in the act of legending her own past
Johnny Guitar (1954) — The forced denunciation as the mob fabricating the very 'truth' that condemns — characters caught legending under duress
Bob le Flambeur (1956) — The wry, fond, omniscient voiceover narrates Bob's tale in retrospect, addressing us as initiates and turning the man and his milieu into legend already passing into memory.
Nights of Cabiria (1957) — Cabiria's 'willed self-confidence that keeps collapsing and reconstituting itself' — her self-deception reframed as a self forged truthful enough to keep going, sealed by the smile turned to the lens
Pyaasa (1957) — Society canonizes the dead poet, forging a saint it can sell and needing the man to stay a ghost — subjects caught in the act of legending
Rio, Northern Zone (1957) — The film does not chop its songs into montage; it lets them run, giving Espírito's self-authorship full duration precisely because the industry will strip his name from it.
Black Orpheus (1959) — Samba schools and favela community performing themselves in real 1958 Carnival footage — caught in the act of legending — which is also the seat of the film's touristic-gaze controversy.
The 400 Blows (1959) — The interview sequence: untrained Léaud improvises answers to off-camera questions about his mother and ambitions, the boundary between actor and character collapsing into the Doinel cycle
Primary (1960) — The candidates are performers acutely aware of cameras, caught in the act of legending themselves — Kennedy's magnetism performed in real time before the lens
Shadows (1960) — The closing title card — 'the film you have just seen was an improvisation' — frames actors inventing identity out of themselves, caught in the act of legending, even though the film was actually…
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) — Holly singing 'Moon River' on the fire escape in jeans and a towel — telling herself into being with a small, untrained, undefended voice
Chronicle of a Summer (1961) — Non-professionals playing themselves, caught in the act of inventing the selves they present; the film films them story-telling their own lives
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) — The framing-device structure (death, then strangers repeating only the reputation) presents Lawrence as a subject caught in the act of legending himself.
The Given Word (1962) — Zé's elevation, by the very crowd around him, into an inadvertent martyr: his body borne into the church atop the cross, the crowd completing on the spot the sanctification the institution refused…
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) — The reporter tears up the truth to 'print the legend'; the soundstage-bound, monochrome West is shown as remembered tableaux, a community caught in the act of legending itself
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) — casting real faded legends Davis and Crawford to play faded legends; Jane trying to revive her vaudeville act before the mirror, caught legending her own younger self
Take It All (1963) — A largely non-professional cast drawn from Jutra's own circle appears as versions of themselves, following the Rouch protocol of Moi, un noir and Chronique d'un été that Jutra had written up for…
The House Is Black (1963) — The schoolroom sequences are openly staged — a boy naming beautiful and ugly things, another writing 'the house is black' — with the film declining to resolve whether the children were prompted, so…
A Hard Day's Night (1964) — A wholly staged documentary in which the Beatles' real personas are 'shaped by celebrity into legible comic archetypes' — the band caught in the act of legending themselves into their own myth.
Black God, White Devil (1964) — Othon Bastos's Corisco delivers his frenzied speeches claiming to contain two men, himself and the dead bandit Lampião; the blind balladeer's narration explicitly frames events as legend and prophecy.
I Am Cuba (1964) — The declamatory 'I am Cuba' narration that legends scattered figures into a single national subject swept up into revolt
Darling (1965) — the film positions Diana as caught in the act of legending her own ascent, narrating her story as if for a magazine profile
Kwaidan (1965) — "In a Cup of Tea" is framed as an unfinished fragment left by an author and stops mid-haunting, foregrounding the act of telling and the made-up status of the tale
Loves of a Blonde (1965) — The Chronique d'un été method of provoked real speech reworked: dialogue scripted to sound overheard, non-professionals cast for face and manner who 'seem less to act than to be,' and Milda, the…
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1965) — Dialogue taken word-for-word from Matthew so Christ's words arrive as recited scripture, a legending voice rather than dramatized paraphrase
Alfie (1966) — Alfie's continuous spoken performance to camera — a man caught in the act of legending himself.
Andrei Rublev (1966) — Boriska bluffs an entire workforce into casting a bell that works, conjuring a truth he does not possess
King of Hearts (1966) — the patients invent a living court and crown the bewildered soldier their King of Hearts — subjects caught in the act of legending themselves
Masculin Féminin (1966) — Chantal Goya, a real yé-yé singer playing an aspiring one, is caught performing herself in interview scenes where acting and actual reaction blur
The Battle of Algiers (1966) — Ali's arc from street criminal to fighter as the colony producing its own resistance, and the coda leaping to the leaderless 1960 uprising — a people brought into being.
The War Game (1966) — Non-professional Kent residents play themselves in their own streets, giving direct-address testimony about a catastrophe that has not happened to them; actor and witness become indistinguishable.
Tokyo Drifter (1966) — Tetsu sings the 'Tokyo Drifter' ballad as self-narration, the wandering hero narrating his own condition into existence — the genre hero caught legending himself
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) — Bonnie writes verse about their exploits to be printed and the gang stages portrait-snapshots — subjects caught in the act of legending themselves into myth while still alive
In Cold Blood (1967) — Perry's 'dreamy self-mythology' — the injured legs and childlike grievance folded into a story he tells about his own life; the confession composes a self rather than reporting a fact.
Invasion (1969) — Borges's own framing — "the legend of a city, imaginary or real" — and the milonga's lyric of a man contemplating his own execution, which supplies the defenders the account of dying the war…
L'Amour fou (1969) — The Rouch inheritance named in the lineage — non-actors playing versions of themselves for an acknowledged camera — extended by casting an existing Marc'O troupe (Kalfon, Ogier, Moretti) and letting…
Medium Cool (1969) — Verna Bloom in her yellow dress, a scripted character, walks unprotected into the real 1968 convention riot searching for her son, caught in the act of legending herself into history
Patton (1970) — Patton reciting his belief in reincarnation and narrating his own myth in the opening monologue — caught in the act of legending himself
The Emigrants (1971) — Karl Oskar's restless younger brother Robert, the America-dreamer (Eddie Axberg), for whom the rumor of America is a story told about himself before it is a destination.
Jeremiah Johnson (1972) — The Rubinstein/McIntire score 'includes sung narration that frames Johnson as an emerging legend... it tells us we are watching a figure passing into folklore even as we watch him suffer.'
Pink Flamingos (1972) — Divine's manifesto to the assembled reporters, 'filth are my politics, filth is my life,' played straight as a claim to a tabloid-given title, in a film that 'sits after Stonewall but refuses the…
Amarcord (1973) — The intermittent lawyer-narrator addressing the audience directly, and the town's fond complicity with Fascism rendered as a community narrating and mythologizing itself.
Belladonna of Sadness (1973) — The film is narrated 'with the distance of a folk tale being recounted rather than a drama being enacted,' structured as hagiography-in-reverse, and closes by proposing the burned witch as precursor…
F for Fake (1973) — De Hory, Irving and Welles each caught inventing themselves on camera, and the viewer caught doing the same to them by the Kodar episode.
Fantastic Planet (1973) — Terr's first-person voice-over frames events as remembered history, "lending the film the cadence of a legend or origin myth," compressing his life from pet to organized resistance.
O Lucky Man! (1973) — the final audition in which Anderson (as himself) directs Mick — the protagonist caught in the act of legending his own redemption as a performed role
Sambizanga (1973) — Work songs passed hand to hand among prisoners and militants — a people caught in the act of inventing itself
Soleil O (1973) — Colonial schooling's catechism of 'our ancestors the Gauls' set against the title's Antillean Middle Passage song and the choral music built from it — one legend issued by a state, one carried across…
The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973) — The film legends a vanished collective back into provisional existence — the revived dead going about their business in rooms where the news of their murder has not arrived.
The Mother and the Whore (1973) — Alexandre's self-mythologizing, amplified by Léaud's imported Doinel persona — a subject caught legending his own life in real time
The Wicker Man (1973) — The overwhelmingly diegetic songs — 'Corn Rigs,' 'Willow's Song,' the Maypole Song, sung by the islanders themselves — a community 'singing its theology into being,' caught in the act of legending…
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) — Burstyn (who initiated the project) plays Alice 'improvising a self in real time,' authoring a life with no script — a subject caught in the act of legending herself rather than recovering a real…
Badlands (1974) — The dossier describes people arranging themselves into images of themselves; Kit and Holly narrate and stage their own myth
Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) — Céline and Julie turn spectatorship into intervention, legending themselves into the fiction they love and rewriting its ending.