Albert BrooksReal Life “hammers on a conundrum ducked by most documentaries, An American Family included: no matter how unobtrusive a filmmaker tries to be, his subject is still likely to react to the cameras by subtly altering his behavior, thereby making existence into a kind of performance, infusing life with fiction’s DNA and creating a hybrid monster that’s at once real and unreal.” — from a “Press Play” essay on this 1979 film by Robert Nishimura and Matt Zoller Seitz.