How important is artistic licence?

[penfold]

name='GRAEME']

Artistic truth versus historical accuracy? You seem to be arguing for both, to give you the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes that just isn't possible or desirable.

Thanks for the benefit of the doubt....I'm simply arguing that they're not mutually exclusive. And both possible and desirable.

[GRAEME]

name='penfold']I do wish you would stop attaching to me opinions I don't have and didn't state....



Failing that, can we agree to disagree, and move on??

Thank you for that. Your positions are clearer to me now with these further explanations. I didn't wish to attach opinions to you that you do not hold - I was merely responding to the position I had thought you had taken. I apologise for any offence caused.



I think the distinction - "Nor did I claim that a film is artistically dud because of inaccuracies...but it does compromise it, by deflecting attention away from the artist's intended focal point" - is one of degrees and , yes, we shall have to agree to disagree over where that line is drawn.

[penfold]

name='GRAEME']Thank you for that. Your positions are clearer to me now with these further explanations. I didn't wish to attach opinions to you that you do not hold - I was merely responding to the position I had thought you had taken. I apologise for any offence caused.



I think the distinction - "Nor did I claim that a film is artistically dud because of inaccuracies...but it does compromise it, by deflecting attention away from the artist's intended focal point" - is one of degrees and , yes, we shall have to agree to disagree over where that line is drawn.

None taken at all, Graeme, it was a good healthy debate....pity we couldn't have had it over a pint..

[silverwhistle]

name='fooboo']I agree with that. I think it's important not to stifle creativity but if you want to write a work of fiction you can do that without basing it on a real event or using the names of real people.



If you want to write a supposedly non-fiction story then it should be accurate enough to not cause offense unnecessarily. If I published a history book it would be scrutinized for it's accuracy (and I'd expect that to be more so than a film). I think any film maker that makes a film claiming to depict history should themselves feel obliged to make sure it's accurate but I think any attempt to force them to do so would potentially damage the art.



It should be down to the conscience of the filmmaker with perhaps a little bit of social pressure :P

I think too many film-makers and writers think that the claim "based on a true story", even if spurious or stretched beyond credibility, gives their work greater weight. It's as if they no longer trust the validity of pure fiction to give insights into the human condition, which (of course) it can do. They should have faith in the power of fiction, and not just try to piggyback their stories on to reality. And if they're trying to use real stories, to do them properly.

[fooboo]

name='silverwhistle']I think too many film-makers and writers think that the claim "based on a true story", even if spurious or stretched beyond credibility, gives their work greater weight. It's as if they no longer trust the validity of pure fiction to give insights into the human condition, which (of course) it can do. They should have faith in the power of fiction, and not just try to piggyback their stories on to reality. And if they're trying to use real stories, to do them properly.

I think you are right there. Ironic really that for me and I'm sure many others it does the opposite, when you watch something that is supposed to be "true" and find it's far from that the work loses it's weight and become just light entertainment.

[silverwhistle]

name='fooboo']I think you are right there. Ironic really that for me and I'm sure many others it does the opposite, when you watch something that is supposed to be "true" and find it's far from that the work loses it's weight and become just light entertainment.

Exactly. If the 'historical' films I complain about most were set in fictional realms, and had characters with fictional names, and dropped all pretence about being "true stories", they'd work better as stories. It's the fact they are pretending to be about real people, while in many cases merrily dispensing with everything that is known about the nominal subjects, that weakens them, because you immediately start comparing them with what you know about the subject.

[sippog]

I think you will always find an anomaly between what is factual and what is truthful when it comes to any form of artistic representation. This is why biopics so rarely succeed: because they're always trying to reconcile what is dramatically effective with the historical details of a life.



Is there such a thing as historical objectivity? Given frequent revisions of an "official" perspective on historical facts and the inevitable distorting lens of contemporary culture, maybe not. At least the movie industry is unabashed in pursuing its main objective: to entertain mass audiences.



For me the most persuasive element in a film is not its historical veracity but the illumination it sheds on its subject. The best examples have been those which made me intuitively understand another period - to feel what it might have been like to be there or experience those events. This is obviously highly subjective and I can see why some of my enjoyment might have depended on my ignorance but isn't this true of any film? Experts will always be scornful of inaccuracy and nearly every film inevitably "dates "in some way as its audience changes and moves on.

[Steve Crook]

name='sippog']For me the most persuasive element in a film is not its historical veracity but the illumination it sheds on its subject. The best examples have been those which made me intuitively understand another period - to feel what it might have been like to be there or experience those events. This is obviously highly subjective and I can see why some of my enjoyment might have depended on my ignorance but isn't this true of any film? Experts will always be scornful of inaccuracy and nearly every film inevitably "dates "in some way as its audience changes and moves on.

Exactly. But what if you saw a film that appears to shed shed-loads of illumination on its subject and leave you feeling that you totally understand that other period - only to find that they made it all up and totally misrepresented the subject? Despite claiming in the advertising, or even on-screen, that it's all based on true events and real people.



How would you feel if you discovered that you'd been misled, or lied to, like that?



I don't just mean when they get one or two facts wrong or change something slightly for better dramatic effect. That's always understandable and forgiveable. I'm talking about when they claim it's true but everything you see on screen is made up.



Steve

[Moor Larkin]

I do wonder how many, if any, "fictitious stories" there have ever been. Most every other old movie seems to be researchable as being based on some real-life story or another. How many of these were coincidences I know not.



It strikes me that part of this trend of having the tag: True Story or based on one, is perhaps partly a misplaced attempt to be honest, which has then become a marketing tool.



I would tend to go with the notion that if characters are from an age long gone, then do what you like. That sort of history is easily accessible to anyone in a library or on t'internet. I had no interest in watching a sexed-up Henry VIII on the telly recently but couldn't care less if some of the watching public took it seriously. Ignorance is bliss, so leave 'em happy, I reckon.



More recent history is, I agree, more contentious. However movies are by no means alone in their misdeeds. Television has developed a nasty 'instant history' polemic: Diana Plays, Blair Plays, Hillsborough Plays, .... the list is endless. I almost never watch them as I know they will be presenting somebody's version of the historical truth. Some people see them as important journalistic exercises though...........



To tell a 'true story' as a fictional story but then just change all the names and places wouldn't necessarily solve anything because relatives/interested parties would just identify their subjects anyhow, and accuse the film-maker of sneakiness and deceit as well as falsifying history.



There are of course entirely specific-case-spurious 'true stories' like the Blair Witch Project or Wolf Creek, which seems to me to illustrate that the word 'True' in a film context is always a lie...... it's just a matter of degree how much is made up or to what degree you are really meant to believe it is true.

[Steve Crook]

name='Moor Larkin']I do wonder how many, if any, "fictitious stories" there have ever been. Most every other old movie seems to be researchable as being based on some real-life story or another. How many of these were coincidences I know not.

Well I can give a few examples from the films I know the best.

Every Powell & Pressburger film from Contraband (1940) to A Matter of Life and Death (1946) was an original "fictitious story". AMOLAD was partly inspired by a story of an airman who had jumped without a parachute and survived and by a Hungarian story about a man who was suffering hallucinations and the brain surgery he went through. The Red Shoes was loosely based on the fairy story by Hans Christian Andersen but the rest of it was an original story by Pressburger.



Compare those to something like The Password is Courage, my real bugbear in this area. That claimed on screen to be based on a real story - but appears to have been all made up with significant chunks of it that definitely happened to other people and not to the real person being portrayed. And they missed any mention of most of the amazing things that the real person did do.



That's taking any idea of "artistic licence" much too far



Steve

[silverwhistle]

name='Steve Crook']But what if you saw a film that appears to shed shed-loads of illumination on its subject and leave you feeling that you totally understand that other period - only to find that they made it all up and totally misrepresented the subject? Despite claiming in the advertising, or even on-screen, that it's all based on true events and real people.



How would you feel if you discovered that you'd been misled, or lied to, like that?



I don't just mean when they get one or two facts wrong or change something slightly for better dramatic effect. That's always understandable and forgiveable. I'm talking about when they claim it's true but everything you see on screen is made up.

Yes: when they change people's social backgrounds, nationality, age, relationships, & c… I've seen it happen too often.



And very, very few historical films – certainly mainstream ones – are actually good at giving the 'feel' of another historical period, because everything is compromised to fit present-day sensibilities. There's a very good American article on this here:

Writing Backward: Modern Models in Historical Fiction.

The author is talking primarily about historical fiction aimed at young readers, but it is equally true of film-making:

It isn’t that contemporary writers of historical fiction do not research the topics and the times they have chosen. They do, and they often include information about those facts and about the sources they have used. Yet many narratives play to modern sensibilities. Their protagonists experience their own societies as though they were time-travelers, noting racism, sexism, religious bigotry, and outmoded belief as outsiders, not as people of and in their cultures.



…Formulas deny the complexity of human experience and often the reality of it as well. Most people in most societies are not rebels; in part because the cost of nonconformity is more than they want to pay, but also because as members of the society they share its convictions. Most people are, by definition, not exceptional. Historical fiction writers who want their protagonists to reflect twentieth-century ideologies, however, end by making them exceptions to their cultures, so that in many a historical novel the reader learns nearly nothing — or at least nothing sympathetic — of how the people of a past society saw their world. Characters are divided into right — those who believe as we do — and wrong; that is, those who believe something that we now disavow. Such stories suggest that people of another time either did understand or should have understood the world as we do now, an outlook that quickly devolves into the belief that people are the same everywhere and in every time, draining human history of its nuance and variety.



But people of the past were not just us in odd clothing. They were people who saw the world differently; approached human relationships differently; people for whom night and day, heat and cold, seasons and work and play had meanings lost to an industrialized world. Even if human nature is much the same over time, human experience, perhaps especially everyday experience, is not. To wash these differences out of historical fictions is not only a denial of historical truth, but a failure of imagination and understanding that is as important to the present as to the past.

[silverwhistle]

name='Moor Larkin']I would tend to go with the notion that if characters are from an age long gone, then do what you like. That sort of history is easily accessible to anyone in a library or on t'internet. I had no interest in watching a sexed-up Henry VIII on the telly recently but couldn't care less if some of the watching public took it seriously. Ignorance is bliss, so leave 'em happy, I reckon.

Would it were that simple, and other people so diligent as to look things up. But most are not. Compare the 1970 BBC Henry VIII series, or 1971's Elizabeth R, which made an effort, and were memorable dramatically There was no excuse for the recent farrago.



I take it you've no experience working in education? Even in adult education, it can be difficult to dislodge misconceptions people have 'learned' from films.



Also, in the US – as I have gleaned from IMDb discusssions – some high school teachers will show a historical movie to children in lessons. No, not to dissect its inaccuracies and manipulations, but as a history lesson.



Ignorance can be dangerous. Historical myths can be used to bolster all kinds of prejudices and general unpleasantness.

To tell a 'true story' as a fictional story but then just change all the names and places wouldn't necessarily solve anything because relatives/interested parties would just identify their subjects anyhow, and accuse the film-maker of sneakiness and deceit as well as falsifying history.

I was thinking of allegedly 'historical' movies where nearly everything was made up, bar the names. To go that one step further, and make it real fiction, without labelling/libelling real people would have been wiser and less duplicitous.

[Moor Larkin]

name='silverwhistle'] I take it you've no experience working in education? Even in adult education, it can be difficult to dislodge misconceptions people have 'learned' from films................ – some high school teachers will show a historical movie to children in lessons. No, not to dissect its inaccuracies and manipulations, but as a history lesson.

.

Sounds to me like I'd best keep away from the teachers then......



Cheap shot..... but then that's what forums are for.......



I expect we're in agreement that people are wilfully 'thick' sometimes but I would put myself in their company on subjects I couldn't care less about. It will always depend on how interested people are in a subject. Some films do seem to have had an inordinate real-world political effect but even when they think they're being diligent, they often seem to still get it badly wrong.



I am perfectly willing to accept that Hook in Zulu was defamated as an individual but that 'unfairness' can make no difference to the importance of that film, in my view. I also know that, in real-life, the Zulu's just went home for dinner, rather than honouring the men of Rorkes Drift, but it still makes no difference to my appreciation of the idea of that ending in the film.



I thought Alec Guinness's character in Kwai was very honourable and admirable 'by his own lights' and I cannot understand why people should think ill of the real person for the way his character's 'reality' was portrayed. But whoever the real person was (I haven't read up on him), I suppose if he'd been my grandad I might see things differently.



I expect Churchill might not have viewed Blimp as being as fictious as Powell&Pressburger intended him to be......



but I know relatively little about any of the four of them..........



We'll fight them on the beaches..........

[GRAEME]

name='silverwhistle']



I take it you've no experience working in education? Even in adult education, it can be difficult to dislodge misconceptions people have 'learned' from films.



Also, in the US – as I have gleaned from IMDb discusssions – some high school teachers will show a historical movie to children in lessons. No, not to dissect its inaccuracies and manipulations, but as a history lesson.



Ignorance can be dangerous. Historical myths can be used to bolster all kinds of prejudices and general unpleasantness.

The logic of your posts would seem to be that writers/filmakers shouldn't be allowed to distort history in their work. Because it is socially irresponsible in some way. Is this the point you're making?



That some kind of censor/thought police should take charge of this for us - to protect us from the willful ignorance of the unwashed masses or something?



As if there was anything new in distorting history? It is almost what histroy is for, some would say! Most of our founding myths - and those of every culture, religion and country - are mostly pure bunk and wishful thinking.



Why should filmakers be uniquely held responsible? Why not leave artists and writers alone and focus on crap history teaching in schools - and the still far too low level of literacy in our culture?

[silverwhistle]

name='GRAEME']The logic of your posts would seem to be that writers/filmakers shouldn't be allowed to distort history in their work. Because it is socially irresponsible in some way. Is this the point you're making?



That some kind of censor/thought police should take charge of this for us - to protect us from the willful ignorance of the unwashed masses or something?

As Penfold has already observed, you seem very keen to attribute proscriptive views to us, which go beyond anything we have said. I suspect this says more about your mind-set than it does about ours. It is precisely because of what political censorship and propaganda – and the dictates of the marketplace – do to representations of history that writers, artists and film-makers need to exercise their consciences in treating real subjects. If they don't want to apply their consciences, there's no reason why they can't tell stories that are open about being pure fiction, not pretending to be something they're not.

As if there was anything new in distorting history? It is almost what history is for, some would say! Most of our founding myths - and those of every culture, religion and country - are mostly pure bunk and wishful thinking.

Which doesn't make it right, does it? Down with bunk!

Why should filmakers be uniquely held responsible?

No-one has said that they are. But they are a significant ingredient in the mix in contemporary culture.

Why not leave artists and writers alone and focus on crap history teaching in schools - and the still far too low level of literacy in our culture?

The two are closely linked, you'll find. The 'artists and writers' are often a product of under-education, who then go on to disseminate what little knowledge they have at a wider level in their work, which, unfortunately, fills the gaps for other under-educated people, with the additional problem that by then it's all about 30-40 years out of date.



It's also difficult for educators to battle against the amount of marketing hype that accompanies historical movies: the companion books and DVD supporting features that are very selective and deliberately avoid material that directly challenges the film interpretations.