Procession
Directed by Robert Greene
Running time: 1hr58 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Procession, a film by Robert Greene
The term “hybrid documentary” is overused to the point of redundancy these days, broadly applied to just about any nonfiction film that incorporates dramatised or reconstructed elements into the supposed usual order of documentary business. But even within this rapidly expanding genre, the films of Robert Greene remain outliers, genuinely radical and disorienting in their meshing of realities.
Greene is the first name in what you might call a documentary of performance, one where interpretive acting and writing are employed not to seamlessly blur our distinction between fiction and nonfiction, but to draw connections between past and present. In Kate Plays Christine, a contemporary actor’s process aided our empathy with the mental illness of her late real-life subject; in Bisbee ’17, a historical atrocity is presented both as dramatised period Western and its own making-of doc, querying the ways in which we digest and repurpose history. In his latest, Procession, Greene’s techniques are brought to bear on history in a more personal, fragile sense, as a kind of therapeutic undertaking for six American survivors of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
But the filmmaking that challenges, needles and potentially heals these middle-aged men is not Greene’s: instead, they are invited to write, direct and perform in their own films recreating their traumatic childhood experiences, and Procession mingles their raw, fraught creations with Greene’s own observation of their process. It’s a daring, difficult experiment, removing the distance inherent to the performances depicted in Kate Plays Christine and ‘Bisbee 17; though he previously documented self-performance in his film Actress, the psychological stakes here are higher, and the vulnerability of the non-professional participants more acute. This is no tidy exercise in catharsis: Greene’s subjects, who vary significantly in temperament and philosophical outlook, respond very differently to the task of having to make physical their most unhappy memories, running into emotional blockages and unforeseen floodgates along the way.
Yet for all the wound-opening discomfort they encounter, the project proceeds strictly on their terms, and it’s this crucial distinction that keeps Procession, rattling as it is, from crossing the line into exploitation. Greene uses his lens not to capture or steer his subjects, but to enable their own possession of their narrative. It’s a reminder that, depending on who’s telling the story and controlling the camera, drama can just as easily be a form of documentary — a reflection of someone’s truth, sometimes more easily performed than spoken in a talking-head interview. Call it hybrid if you want; in Procession, it feels painfully pure.
PROCESSION (2021) | Shot by Robert Kolodny | Edited by Robert Greene
In cinemas now, and on Netflix from 19 November.