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I think I would spend the whole movie looking at the lip-syncing, which would be very distracting.

It looks like it's been done brilliantly though.

sorry, off topic. but i somehow felt like sharing this with you, doctor:

Two words in relation to truth in documentary: Werner Herzog

A play about the Buttershaw Estate, by Robin Soans, is done as Verbatim Theatre...the script is taken from interviews. Surely The Arbor is a cinematic version of this theatrical device. Instead of actors speaking the lines 'verbatim', the cinematic devices call for the next step which is the actor being seen to be 'speaking'/'demonstrating' the actual words.

It's good to see documentary films using more theatrical techniques to tell the story. The clip of 'Arbor' reminded me of the scenes in 'Man On Wire' in which the films hero- Phillippe Petit- recounted the story of his daring escapade in a room full of props. Instead of a talking head style interview, Phillippe whizzed around the room, hiding behind things as he told his story. I thought this was a very effective device which added to the drama of the story.

This looks like a fascinating way to present a biographical story. I'm already intrigued just from that small clip. It does have an air of creature comforts about it though which could be distracting.
I wonder if the filmakers have gone out of their way to find actors that look similar to the real people. It would make it all the more unusual if they hadn't, don't you think?
There's no telling if it will come to a cinema near me...I won't hold my breath.

I was fortunate enough to see this film at a festival in the Czech Republic. It is without any doubt a great movie and very moving - so far my best British film of the year.

I'll see it, then I'll have someone else write what I thought about it. It'll be like I'm participating in the film. In fact, someone else is writing this now. I'm type synching.

If you hadn't said that they're lip synching I doubt I would have noticed, particularly with the first girl. Interesting.

I watched Rita, Sue, and Bob too again recently, the last time I saw it was in the early 90s when it was shown on Channel Four, and I have to honestly say that I cringed all the way through.

It's the sort of film that wouldn't me made now in this current climate, as it's basically about a man in his mid to late 30s/early 40s, having sex with two 15 year old girls.

In one real creppy scene Bob hangs around the school yard to pick up Rita to have sex with, which is more shocking than Sue's drunken dad, who's racist towards her boyfriend.

If they decided to remake the movie, the ending would have to change to the two girls getting counselling from the social services, Bob's whole life and marriage ruined, jailed for 2 years, and put on the sex offenders register.

How times have changed.

It's only the truth if you want to believe it.

The Arbor looks very intriguing. I will definitely put it on my "must see" list for next week when I'm in the UK.

As for documentaries where actors speak the words of a person interviewed (rather than lipsynching), which in itself is a very interesting idea, the most notable and disturbing one for me was "Scars" with Jason Isaacs. The majority of people who saw this movie/doco, didn't realise it was an actor speaking. The words taken from the interviews with "Chris" are extremely powerful as well as frightening.

Surely Errol Morris's 'Thin Blue Line' is THE point of reference for truth in documentary?

Film looks interesting I'll check it out.

@lennyhope I was in A State Affair and The Arbor. Both are great works of art and yes there is some truth in what you're saying. But both are representations of the truth. The director of the Arbor however is more aware of this than the team behind A State Affair!

The Arbor also seems to kind of be an inversion of What's up tiger lily, the film that Woody Allen made by dubbing over new dialogue onto a pre existing Japanese movie. Not a great or particularly funny result, but an interesting idea nonetheless.

saw this at the london film festival. the lip synching thing becomes secondary to a very harrowing and intense story very quickly. its the narrative that makes it extrordinary.

I'm afraid that the short clip shown has made me very sceptical of the technique. I found the lip synching to be incredibly distracting, and no matter how well it's done the human brain still knows when something's not right. I doubt I could detach my feelings for the duration of the whole documentary.

The lip syncing in the clips you showed looked pretty perfect to me.

I guess without some attempt to dramatise the tapes of the interviews with Dunbar and those that knew her then you’d be left with a radio documentary attracting a minute audience, so I can see why they chose to involve actors and dramatise what we’re listening to.
I also understand it includes excerpts from one of Dunbar’s plays acted out on the estate where she lived.

For those that don’t know, Andrea Dunbar wrote the film Rita, Sue and Bob Too, as well as a number of plays, before an early death living on the council estate that she grew up on. Her life was often as raw and turbulent as the scripts she wrote. Interesting? I imagine very.

We could do with some writers of her caliber today.

Abit of a bump on the head youve got there Dr K.

I understand that one reason for the technique of the film, is to protect the identity of Dunbar's eldest daughter, who has a new identity after leaving prison, she served a sentence after her young child died after ingesting some methadone.
Dunbar's eldest fell into heroin and prostitution, after a hard early life, including racism (she had a Pakistani descended father), her mother's drink problem that was to be a factor in her death at 29 and from that estate just getting worse with hard drugs supplementing the problems of alcohol abuse.

Dunbar was clearly a major writing talent, also a tragic illustration that the cliche of having a talent recognised does not always mean a way out of poverty and other problems.

Rita Sue and Bob Too is one the best films the UK made in the 1980's, it is bleak, it is also often, despite the circumstances of the story, very bleakly funny at times.
It is not the product of socially concerned liberalism, you don't need to lay it on thick when seeing the actual estate, the real one, it was filmed on.
Also, you cannot really transpose today's concerns about the married man's sexual relationships with two under age girls, it was as illegal then as now, it is very autobiographical of Dunbar's real life, the later mixed race relationship that goes sour, the poverty, violence and booze filled lives of the girl's families.

It is a far better account of underclass life in the 1980's than the silly 'Sammie And Rosie Get Laid' from around the same time, a far less well remembered (if it is remembered at all), film.
And that was by an established and much feted writer.

Creepy and immoral as 'Bob' is in Rita Sue and Bob Too, it was an unforgettable performance by George Costigan, which the actor himself remarks he is still remembered for nearly 25 years on.
It did suffer on it's release from being billed as a sex comedy/farce, it did have that but also a lot more.
Some who laud it now, slated it on it's release.

I saw The Arbor this evening at the Phoenix, East Finchley and it was extremely easy to get past the lipsynching of the actors to heart of a truly incredible and harrowing life experience of not only Dunbar, but both of her daughters, especially her eldest. I vaguely recall seeing Rita, Sue and Bob Too, many years ago but can recount little of it. I loved the filmed scenes from The Arbor played before the locals, it made the play seem even more real in such a setting.

A tragic, saddening docu-drama which doesn't give a good report on our society. However, it was very brave of Lorraine to be so open and honest about her life and her relationships.

On the subject of I'm Still Here :

Oh for goodness sake, The Good Doctor! First you listen to everyone say it's real and then cry out, "It's totally fake." They admit it's all made up and then you go, "Well hang on." Stop whinging and make up your mind!

I had my concerns. Firstly I am one that believes that documentary should be treated with respect and avoid trickery. I was concerned that this was just a gimmick and also I was not of the understanding why the 'real people' were were not seen , even if they were not in sync. I can not help feeling that the if the movie holds up it should hold up with or with out the concept of having actors lip sync. Surely the real people are far more interesting than these actors. I strongly point out that this is a work of fiction rather than documentary and would hate to see this sporn a world of 'good idea concepts in documentary.Yes people have agendas in documentary to make something into a story but I feel it is upto a documentarian to have the taste and honour to hold the mantle. I like to believe what I see and this film plays too much with that and make it impossible to feel anything for it. A very british film. If this film was put out as a work of fiction I could have respected it in a different way, but as documentary it misses the point that it seems to be trying to say. I also think it is very disrespectful to honest documentarians and the real cast who were subbed by actors.

just going to add to my last comment.
More than any other media documentary is about trusting the director. I invest and trust the honour and integrety and sensitivity of the director to guide me through a film. To mess with this is to loose the trust which is for me the only thing that exists in documentary and if i don't trust the director I loose the film. I trust the great documentary film makers EVEN if they were making propaganda or films for oil companies indirectly, it doesn't matter .. I am investing my trust into a person - The Director and I like the director. Now to point something out which if I am correct The Arbour is suggesting docs are not honest and manipulative like fiction... so the arbor goes ahead and messes with this trust to prove that point.. it misses the true fact that to be a great filmmaker you should not be up to to trickery and you should be spending your time in proving to the viewers of your heroic sensitive qualities. There is a great responsabilty in being a documentarian and I just hope this doesn't open the gate to add more of these kind of statements in documentary. Orson Wells made something on the same lines with 'F for Fake' but that was much better explained and a much better film, and we all trust and buy what ever Orson did even with all the trickery going on and he was happy to make it very clear.
I think actually reversing the arbor to having the real people lyp sync the actors which would have been much more kind hearted and interesting and would certainly make the arbor into an undoubted fictional film would have been more of an honourable thing to do.

I think perhaps people are making too big a deal out of this. On crimewatch you get an actor mimicking someones actions, or a sillouette, while the real person's voice is spoken over the top. It also common place to have historical documetaries where an actor reads the exact words of someone else, whether from a taped interview or the written word. This is just an extention of those two things. I think the director has probably started off with the idea that since the subject matter is so difficult, the victims have to be allowed to speak for themselves so that the documentary cannot be accused of over dramatising or fakeness. Given that you are going to include the real voices, then what image do you place with it? A reconstruction? Part reconstruction? An acting performance that put's across the emotions without making the victim feel exposed or self concious?
....Inserting an actor is basically a more artistic way of blacking out the victims face.
...nice idea, but it didn't work too well for me because the lip sinking was so obvious. Just became a bit distracting and drew your attention to anything in the acting performance that seemed 'over acted' - it must have been incredibly difficult for the actors to try and get the facial expressions right.
...better idea would have been to do something more like the Ö÷²¥´óÐã2 fly-on-the-wall-docu-comedy "Doubletake", made by Alison Jackson:

in terms of the genuineness of something, I think film should develope some sort of convention for displaying the source of it's information - in books you have numbered references at the bottom of the page and you can check them easily of the net, if you have access to the right online journals etc. Perhaps film could use the internet in a similar way. It might actually make some well researched 'based on true events' stories MORE convincing, because it would seperate the wheat from the chaff - for instance, I think 'Zodiac' was a well researched crime thriller, but some people probably just thought it was mainly made up. C4 documentaries like Dispatches usually include little easily remembered report references and suchlike if they are doing a doc on a government department (to cover themselves legally I think).

Right. I watched The Arbor yesterday. I think we have to make a new genre up for this one. 'Live Animation' possibly..? Within five seconds I'd said, 'Wow, Creature Comforts - but ALIVE!' to 'er indoors. I think the real question The Arbor poses is... how can Max Stafford-Clarke, and all the other leeches at the Royal Court, who to this day attain mucho credibility and cash from 'discovering' Dunbar, allow her to rot on the Buttershaw Estate whilst they live it up in whatever swanky area of Knightsbridge/Chelsea they inhabit..? Were they expecting that if they kept her in that environment she would come up with more black comedy gold.? They wouldn't have treat John Osborne like that or he'd have ripped their faces off. Was it because they recognised Andrea's frailties and exploited her enormous talent for (filthy) language.? Of course. I'm not one for generalising but Southerners never really GOT Dunbar's work. R,S+B2 was an accurate and highly political film reflecting the social effects of poverty under Thatcher in the North; something of an amusing curiosity to Southerners in the 1980s, but f*cking depressing if you lived here (I'm from Mexborough, South Yorkshire, and, I can tell you, it wasn't much different from Bradford after the Miner's Strike; probably worse in fact). I remember it getting panned by critics.The baby that died from methadone od was, imo, the knock-on effect of their curiosity; an almost Pygmalion-like attempt to turn a piece of coal into a diamond with tragic consequences.

There's a scene in 'Sullivan's Travels' that imo stands alongside Dickens' best...

Butler (to the wealthy film director, dressed like a tramp, about to set out on his voyage of discovery to find out what it's like to be poor) - "I have never been sympathetic to the caricaturing of the poor and needy, sir... the subject is not an interesting one... the poor know all about poverty, and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous... rich people and theorists - who are usually rich people - think of poverty in the negative, as 'the lack of riches'; as disease might be called 'the lack of health'. But it isn't. Poverty is not the lack of anything but a positive plague; virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of it's symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned."

Sullivan - "Well, you seem to have made quite a study of it!"

Butler - "Quite unwillingly, sir"

I still have trouble with some of 'Rita, Sue and Bob Too' but that's mainly down to how that amazing script, in the hands of the great Alan Clarke, turned into a piece of 'entertainment'. Hands up all those that laughed at the delivery of the line, 'It's not my fault I'm a Paki'. Precisely my point.

Oh, btw, see The Arbor. It's quite brilliant.