You can't really talk about Team Picture without mentioning Mumblecore at this point, which is unfortunate, considering how many things the film does as you watch it, and what an accomplished stylist the director clearly is. Mumblecore might have died a slow death as a conversational segue into a group of films and filmmakers Kentucker Audley has fallen in with, the most active verb of which has been Cassavettes, but Audley's Team Picture has a much wider array of precedents, and Audley especially seems too full of ideas and idiosyncratic talent to pitch his tent for very long in anyone's camp.

What people tend to say when they leave a mumblecore film, whether they get on board and sit through it or get fed up and leave early, is that nothing happens. And yet the directors of these films will tell you that they would rather present things as they happen than conspire to arrange dramatic incident and emotional theatrics. Certainly Audley talks about wanting to avoid rigging things in his films. "I don't want to make art films where you're waiting for a character to accomplish a specific thing." That's an interesting ambition within a culture where every word must mean something and every action must lead somewhere, but to say making this kind of film is closer to real life is probably more than a little disingenuous. Real life is full of incident, and people build narratives for themselves in order to understand who they are and what they're doing, and why. In real life, people talk more often than not, and bring to their conversations ever-shifting agendas and desires. In real life, you're performing from the moment you're aware of yourself, gauging reactions, reacting accordingly, modifying your demeanor and expression to steer interaction or events in ways which make you feel alive. In real life, narratives collide indiscriminately. It's true that not a lot is going on in Team Picture, not in terms of plot, at least in the way plot is generally constructed in films. That has more to do with film than with reality, and it might not be your thing. In fact, this kind of movie seems more like a reaction against the ceaseless, posturing emptiness of reality and its messy collisions of narrative than an investigation into the fantasy of what reality is alleged to feel like.

There's also the fact that to make a movie, even one made as cheaply as Team Picture reportedly was, one organizes and structures and controls. The impression one has watching a movie of Team Picture's pace and pitch is that the camera was simply set up and allowed to run. Often, the directors of these films contribute to this mistaken impression of cinema verite, not just by saying they aim to represent the real world and real people but because, like Audley, they often assert that they're merely playing themselves when they move from behind the camera and step in front of it. Being oneself in front of a camera is a contradiction of terms. It isn't easy to do, if it happens to be possible, and anyone who attempts to do it is immediately faced with the question of who he is exactly and what it is to be that. You're going to need a boom for this kind of film, if you want things to sound realistic, rather than merely videotaping the drama, and someone will have to listen for traffic. If a car passes and you can't work the car into the scene in a way which feels authentic to the narrative at hand, you'll need to back up and repeat the line. Try being yourself, whatever that is, after saying the same bit of dialogue ten times, let alone four. Try to imagine what a person like you would do in a situation like this without dispensing at least partially with fixed ideas about identity. To come across as oneself on film, as people tend to construe that, typically belies an out-of-body experience and involves a great deal of make-believe.

_{photo on this page: Andrew Nenninger as Kentucker Audley playing Kentucker Audley, meeting the girl next door}