Altenberg, Tilmann

Owen, Ruth J.

New Readings (E-Journal - School of Modern Languages, Cardiff University)

Truth Claims in Fiction Film: Introduction
Ruth J. Owen
(Cardiff University)
Tilmann Altenberg
(Cardiff University)
The historical basis of works in the Western literary canon has been a focus of en-
quiry for centuries. From Homer’s Iliad composed in antiquity, to the phenomenon
of documentary drama from the 1960s on, the extent of fact in literary fiction has
repeatedly been measured and assessed. The question of whether and to what ex-
tent legends are fiction or history reflected the rise of a hierarchy of truth value with
fact at the top. Truth value defined genre in the modern era and continues to do so
ordinarily today, but it was not always thus. An ancient or medieval text could pass
through historicity to fictionality and back. Fiction is made up in the imagination
and contains events which did not happen, perhaps alongside those which did—this
is what its audience is given to understand. Truth, within or outside fiction, is often
taken to mean conformity to fact or actuality; it involves reliable narration. Teasing
apart truth and fiction in film has been considered an obviously worthwhile task.
Philip Rosen’s study Change Mummified went further and argued for the centrality
of historicity to film. It asked what we make of the concern for recovering the past
in many modes of cinema, from Hollywood to documentary to postcolonial film.
As we are now long familiar with the constructed nature of all narrative, how does
connecting film and historicity affect the theorisation of fiction film?
Cultural production has always been in pursuit of the real, but its makers have
not always marked it or surrounded it with claims to truth. What this journal issue
is concerned with is protestations of veracity amid free invention. Some occur in
the framing of a film, at its opening or closing, others are embedded in the film,
whilst others occur in the sphere of fiction film but outside the recording itself.
Truth claims in fiction film often arise in gesturing towards sources, replacing en-
tertainment with “histotainment”, and pursuing history alongside emotional impact
and popular appeal.
What are the implications of cinematic truth claims? Are they a sign of defen-
siveness, of straining the bounds of credibility, or of directorial self consciousness?
Do they reflect a desire to have an impact on public memory? Do they indicate
propaganda? Are they even to be taken seriously or are they a parody? Mock truth
claims abound in literature; one need only recall the fictitious editor in Gulliver’s
Travels who makes claims to truth. As Natalie Zemon Davis has highlighted, “there
are more ways in which film can establish authenticity than is usually thought—
i
Introduction
some tried and unrecognised, some yet to be discovered” (Zemon Davis 464). This
issue of New Readings analyses unrecognised ways of establishing authenticity and
provides new readings of recognised ones. The varied approaches to the materials
studied reflect one of the key challenges any such discussion has to confront, i.e.
the lack of a tight notion of the very concepts of fiction, truth and authenticity.
Many of the films discussed in this issue we might want to term “factual fictions”,
to borrow the title of Lennard J. Davis’s book on truth claims and mock truth claims
in the early modern English novel.
The issue opens with Marco Grosoli’s article on a 1947 essay by the film the-
orist André Bazin who claims the truth of all film lies in it as a form offering both
hypnotising illusion and realism at the same time. Grosoli proposes a re-evaluation
of Bazin’s theoretical position by prioritising the idea of film as social documen-
tary. He draws on little known articles from Bazin’s theoretical oeuvre to argue
that the French critic claims that cinema is a social documentary insomuch as it
is inevitably a reflection of the collective unconscious at a certain place and time.
The article finds that Bazin believes cinema to be fundamentally about the reality
of appearance and not any kind of scaled copy of reality. He claims that truth can
be equally before or behind the camera, on screen or in the head as a psychological
reality. And that both cinema and criticism of it should be helping the audience
see something more true than reality itself. The ideas of claiming film as social
documentary and as more true than reality have resonance across the journal issue,
which offers case studies of truth claims concerning individual fiction films made
in a variety of European languages and cultures.
In his article, Dom Holdaway interrogates the engagement with historical ref-
erents in four contemporary Italian mafia films. He conceives of two of these crime
films as self-consciously “performing” historical accuracy and two as being histo-
riographic metafictions. The truth claim in the film Gomorrah, he argues, is made
through the use of intertextual citation of other films, through the press pack ac-
companying the film’s release, which declares that “[t]he stories you are about to
see were taken from real life”, and through the director’s statements concerning
the importance of verisimilitude. It is also made through filming on location in a
notoriously crime-ridden area and using local inhabitants as support actors. Fur-
thermore, Holdaway examines the use of epitaphic notes at the end of the film
and the incorporation of news footage in The One Hundred Steps to make a seri-
ous truth claim that denies the audience the option of reading the film’s reality as
simply fictional.
Carola Daffner’s article examines sinister truth claims made by means of visual
geographies in three Nazi-era German films. Her analysis suggests how they are
truth claims for a particular imagined community, as perhaps all truth claims are.
She shows that the manipulation of space and iconography in cinema can make a
claim for authenticity by being emotionally compelling. In Triumph of the Will,
she argues, Nuremberg becomes a Nazi fantasy of the “true” Germany. In Jew Süß,
it is Württemberg, another place that exists, which functions in this way and as
a space is contrasted with the Jewish ghetto, which the filming consigns to being
New Readings 11 (2011): i–iv. ii
Introduction
that which is not and should not be. Daffner’s article designates Triumph of the
Will a fiction film disguised as documentary and Jew Süß a fiction film claiming
to show historical truth. Made in a time of total war, two years before the end of
Nazism, the fantasy film Münchhausen, by contrast, exposes Nazi landscapes to be
unbelievable and their truth claims to be false. Its spatial caricature, as interpreted
by Daffner, shows up the mechanisms behind geographical truth claims.
Andrew Wormald examines four so-called “event movies”, which have histor-
ical subjects and were broadcast to a mass audience on German television between
2004 and 2007. The production company for the melodramatic films has made
substantial truth claims for them through interviews and promotional documents.
The article highlights how the broadcast of documentaries on relevant history im-
mediately after the fiction films, the distribution of the films with educational
packs to schools, and the provision of educational resources online make truth
claims. It quotes the filmmaker Nico Hofmann as declaring publicly that he is pre-
senting German history authentically for the purpose of national psychoanalysis.
Wormald’s article interrogates what the publicised use of research and historical
advisers means for this inflated claim, as well as the involvement of eye-witnesses,
returning to original locations, and the imitation of historical photographs in film.
Karina von Lindeiner-Stráský’s article looks at four contemporary German fic-
tion films which make truth claims concerning events in the era of Nazism. It
is concerned with the incorporation of factual material from documents such as
historical film clips, memoirs and flyers, as well as with what role the audience’s
expectations play in the function of truth claims. The titles of the films, the use
of intertitles giving places, dates and times, and the use of music are further ex-
amined here as devices making truth claims. The biopic Sophie Scholl mounts the
following text as an explicit truth claim: “Dieser Film beruht auf historischen Fak-
ten, bisher unveröffentlichten Verhörprotokollen und neuen Interviews mit Zeitzeu-
gen.” [This film is based on historical facts, previously unpublished interrogation
reports and new interviews with eye-witnesses.] Lindeiner-Stráský’s article further
suggests that fiction films can make implicit truth claims through utilising a doc-
umentary aesthetic, including a reliable voice in voice-over or the actual person,
otherwise played by an actor, being interviewed in the framing of the film. The
article closes by considering that the effect of mounting a fact in a fiction film can
be to alter the original fact.
Maryse Bray and Agnès Calatayud analyse Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s
film Certified Copy, which has its main characters directly articulate concerns
about truth, authenticity, reproductions, fakes and forgeries. In this respect it
demonstrates a quite different approach to truth claims in fiction film, taking truth
claims as a theme discussed within a film. By juxtaposing the director’s recorded
view that in film “ce qu’on finit par voir est encore plus vrai que la réalité” [what
you end up seeing is truer than real life] with statements made within his film about
artworks, originals and copies, the article argues that the film’s construction claims
that it is true because it adds a reality to reality and not because it is a copy of
reality.
New Readings 11 (2011): i–iv. iii
Introduction
Anneli Lehtisalo’s article focuses on a 1940 Finnish biopic in order to reflect on
the wider issues of truth claims made in the reception of biographical fiction films.
She points out that the immediate newspaper and online reaction to a biopic makes
claims about the authenticity with which a known figure has been portrayed. She
links these truth claims—proclaiming the recognisability of a person and a life, in
this case of a national poet—to the pleasure of watching film. At the same time, the
article traces the truth claims in promotional materials, which involved declaring
how much historical research had been done and which in turn shaped the reception
of the film. Links are made to identifying and making intimate the cultural history
of a community.
Nadine Nowroth concludes this journal issue by analysing a German biopic
from 2004, which is based on the published diaries of a novelist in the German
Democratic Republic. At the premiere of the film, the subject’s brother publicly
attested that he found “über die Hälfte unglaublich authentisch, und dass er das
Gefühl habe, das sei Brigitte Reimann, die er sieht” [more than half unbelievably
authentic and that he felt it was [his sister] Brigitte Reimann that he was seeing
before him]. Nowroth’s article places this truth claim at the heart of the film’s
reception and works with a concept of adaptation that includes a shift in ontology
from the real to the fictional via the edited diaries. Truth claims within the film
are made by diary extracts read in voice-over and by the text inserted at the end
referring the audience to her unfinished novel and to her death in 1973. Outside
the film, the competing truth claims of the Stasi files raise wider questions about
the imagined community for whom the truth claims around this film were made.
Together the articles assembled in this journal issue suggest that truth claims
are always made for a specific imagined community and are part of building that
community’s identity. In film, truth claims are a serious business. Promotion and
reception of a film, the embedding of a film in public debate, tends to indicate an
impact on the original facts utilised in the fiction, or at least the aim to change
those facts. The truth claims analysed in this journal issue point to the centrality of
fiction film in the dissemination of living history to the public of a specific culture
and time.
Works Cited
Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origin of the English Novel. New York,
1983. Print.
Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Print.
Zemon Davis, Natalie. “ ‘Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead’: Film and
the Challenge of Authenticity”. Yale Review 86 (1986): 457–82. Print.
New Readings 11 (2011): i–iv. iv


Truth Claims in Fiction Film

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