“Manhattan. July 26, 1990. 15:45 ~ 16:45.”
One of the longest handheld tracking shots in film history, It’s Real documents an hour in the street life of downtown Manhattan. Not only is it a unique record of a particular time and place—July 26, 1990, from 3:45 to 4:45 p.m. in the Lower East Side near Robert Frank’s studio (we note in a Daily News headline that after some 20 years the Zodiac killer still hasn’t been identified)—it’s also an experiment in fragmentary language, gesture, and life caught unawares. Snippets of dialogue captured in passing at phone booths and crosswalks, in alleyways, subways, and diners—chance encounters, only presumably, with people going about their day—have something of the aleatory cut-up technique of the Dadaists in the 1920s and William Burroughs and Byron Gysin in the 1950s, an effort to divine new and deeper meanings in ordinary life. — Museum of Modern Art
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Cast
9 people
Taylor Mead
Also in
Coffee and Cigarettes
Midnight Cowboy
Peter Orlovsky
Also in
Pull My Daisy
Chappaqua
Robert Frank
Also in
The Present
Hit Parade
Odessa Taft
Also in
Last Supper
Jerry Poynton
Jim Stark
Gangster
Known for
The Middle Man
Michal Rovner
Kevin J. O'Connor
Known for
11.22.63
There Will Be Blood
William Rice
Also in
Decoder
Coffee and Cigarettes
Robert Frank Director · Jerry Poynton Screenplay Michal Rovner Screenplay
First release January 1, 1990 · Produced in France · Original title C'est vrai
Production
France
Produced in
Languages
Original title
C'est vrai
Original language
English
Spoken on screen
English
Release dates
France · January 1, 1990
Theatrical
No release date listed for United States.
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Some details come from TheTVDB.