Shot with a hand-held camera and black-and-white stock, the film documents the exploits of a killer, Ben, in a style paying homage to the work of cinema verité proponent Jean Rouch. Rouch claimed that the garnering of truth on film requires the filmmakers' onscreen involvement with their subjects. Thus, from the beginning of Man Bites Dog, the film crew's presence is acknowleged as they ask questions, make comments, and respond to Ben. The interaction between the filmmakers and their subject steadily increases such that Ben is soon directing the action and paying for film stock and the filmmakers are carrying bodies and helping hold down victims. The line between the filmmakers and subject has been dissolved -- Rouch would be proud.

But Man Bites Dog is not a documentary, and this fact ripples throughout the rest of the film. Secure that the images on screen are not real, we are quite content to tolerate almost anything; the images are somehow sanctioned. Because this is not a documentary, Ben's brutality is humorous rather than appalling, the filmmakers are endearing for their sincere efforts rather than demented, and the film seems to be a slick parody of documentary style and audience gullibility.

But Man Bites Dog is not just a simple parody either. Instead, through the manipulation of spectator identification and the straddling of the line between the filmic and profilmic, the film causes an extraordinarily unnerving recognition of spectator complicity. The filmmakers spark this remarkable insight through very subtle manipulations of their material; it only comes after we have been completely drawn into identifying with the filmmakers.

This process begins with a scene in a bar in which Ben demonstrates how to make a Dead Baby Boy, a drink which featuress an olive that, like Ben's innumerable victims dumped in the water-filled quarry, slowly rises from the bottom of the glass in a flurry of bubbles. We view the drinks from the crew's point of view, close-up on the olives in the shimmering gin. Like Rémy and André in the film, we marvel at the incredible beauty of the "dead baby boy" and the sublime ability of film stock to capture something so simple and marvelously beautiful. We are primed, then, to praise the merits of cinema with the filmmakers, who stumble drunkenly from the bar singing, "Cinema, cinema..."

But before we can catch our breath, we are bursting through someone's door, assaulting a naked woman, and participating in rape. Ben and the crew take turns between the victim's legs, with the camera and sound equipment being clumsily handed back and forth. The space between the action and its recording has collapsed, and our pleasure in watching the images with the security that this is fiction turns to horror as we suddenly realize that it does not really matter. We have been enjoying ourselves. It is at this moment that we recognize our complicity as spectators in the spectacle that we are viewing. We are as much present in and responssible for this ode to cinema as the characters onscreen.

Perhaps due to this insight, Man Bites Dog sparked tremendous controversy upon its release. Exhibitors in various countries felt compelled to censor something -- the French altered the film's one-sheet, changing the pacifier floating above a splash of blood to false teeth, replacing the horror of child-killing with the apparently more acceptable horror of executing the elderly. The Italians chose complete discretion and removed both objects, leaving the implied victim anonymous. American exhibitors were most nervous and chose to completely cut the rape scene from the film, effectively negating the film's fundamental objective. The film was also assailed for its brutality, a criticism that completely misses the film's point, summed up simply by Bonzel: The film is not about violence, but about filmmaking.
-- Holly Willis

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