A Cafe Society Great Debate: Are movies inherently simplisitic?

Cafe Society
1

A movie can do some things much better than a book can, but telling a true story isn’t one of them. It seems to me that a book can at least try to convey the actual truth of a situation–even if that truth is hard for the writer to understand fully, or takes a long stetch to convey in its full complexity, or something like that, the writer can at least try to get it across. But a movie will abandon that goal from the very start. It’s hard for me to imagine a movie that an expert in the field would say, “Yes, it captured the full truth about that subtle, complicated experience” about (while it’s easy to imagine that response about a book.)

Is this a given of the mass-market nature of movies? Am I not giving movie-makers enough credit here? Can you suggest movies that tried (and succeeded at) conveying the truth, not the equivalent of the truth?

2

You question can’t be answered until we answer a more important one:

What is truth?

3

Hmmm, interesting question. I guess my first reaction is to think about how truth is related to complexity. I think I’m getting your gist about an author’s relative freedom to meander around various aspects of a truth he is trying to convey. But there is such a range of experiences that are the subjects of both books and films, and I don’t think there is one single path that is necessarily the most truthful approach to all subjects.

The first example that comes to mind is Night and Fog. That film communicates a very powerful truth about the holocaust in a way that is difficult to transmit via the printed page because the visual medium is so well suited to creating an emotional response to the horrors of Auschwitz. Seeing is believing, and all that. You can get a lot of factual truth from books, and many books delve much more deeply into individual experiences of the camps. Neither such books nor the film capture the ENTIRE truth of the subject, but each medium puts forward a truth that is equally valid, and equally important.

In a more upbeat vein, film is also good at conveying truths about sports. I’m a little hesitant to say that film is better suited, or at least has an edge, over the written word in terms of sports, because anyone could list countless examples of excellent sports writing that illustrate many truths about sport and society. But I would say film at its best is just as good as sports writing at its best. Take something like The Bad News Bears, which manages to sneak a lot of truth into a movie that is essentially a feel-good movie for kids. It does a neat job of handling issues about the dynamics of little league, the social mechanisms created by children, gender clashes, parenting issues, and a little bit about baseball as well.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that as a medium, film does a better job with slapstick comedy. Sure, there’s a truth to slapstick comedy – we recognize thing that we have experienced, and thus know to be true, in a way that is extremely difficult to describe verbally. The famous stateroom scene in A Night At the Opera trumps just about any written description of a crowded space because a large part of experiencing that sort of thing is the notion that many things are happening at the same time. This can be demonstrated visually much more effectively than in prose which is by nature linear. An author must present things in a certain order, even if he is telling you they have all happened at the same time. Although the stateroom scene is exagerated and completely over the top, it sparks an immediate recognition in anyone who has ever found himself in a comic negotiation of a crowded room. In some ways, it’s more true than the actual experience – when I find myself humorously “trapped” in a crowded room, trying to navigate my way to the ladies room while holding a cocktail weenie, a drink, and my purse, I’m only seeing the people immediately around me. The movie shows that everyone in the room is simoultaneously feeling the crunch at the same time, and each are trying to move against the current to achieve their own goals.

I should mention that I’m a complete bibliophile, when in search of truth, my first instinct is to go to a book. But I want to be honest in my personal quest for truth, and think about other ways that successfully communicate true ideas and concepts. I’m not convinced that there is a heirarchy of truth – that more complicated ideas and explorations are essentially more true. I’m not on the other side either, that all great truths can be boiled down to a simple, essential, universal truth. Movies are certainly more visual than books, and I think there is an innate simplicity in some visual images, but I wouldn’t go as far to to agree that movies are inherently simplistic as a result.

(I would like some sort of Dubious Achievement Award for writing a serious post that deals with both Night and Fog and The Bad News Bears.)

4

Is truth unchanging law?
We both have truths.
Are mine the same as yours?

Sorry for the hijack, but you put the tune in my head. :slight_smile:

5

said jesting Pilate.

For the purposes of this discussion, shall we posit that “fact” = “truth”? IOW, “truth” means “that which the teller believes to have actually happened in substantially the way that he portrays it.”

We don’t need to get very fine here, semantically speaking, because I’m addressing knowing distortions of the facts. In the movie, Hurricane, for example, the fight with Joey Giardella (that the film makes out to be a blatently corrupt decision, and which Giardella sued the filmmakers over) was almost certainly known to be a gross distortion of the truth, but seemed to the filmmakers to be a good occasion to implicate the corruption in boxing generally, and to imply racism, and the general biases that Hurricane Carter went through. It seems to me that a prose account might have had to use less clear examples, and certainly more of them than just one boxing match, to make (or to imply) the same point, while in film the rule seems to be “Oh, hell, that’s close enough to what really happened for our purposes–I know this never actually happened, but that’s fine with me.”

Do we just accept that such distortions will appear in films, and declare that to be a part of the medium?

6

Well, from my point of view, there’s nothing pejorative in calling any art form simplistic. But, as you stated, each art form has certain strengths in conveying information. A visual medium such as film can, of course, convey information about visual stimuli better than the written page (hence the old “a picture worth a 1000 words” adage). I’d much rather see a film about sky diving than read a book about it. I’d say a film about sky diving would probably get closer to “the truth” of the experience. But a film about, say, mathematics seems absurd.

Another thing to consider: remember at heart, every movie is simply a visual realization of a script. Most scripts are only somewhat longer than a typical short story. So, I’m not sure it’s fair to compare an hour and a half movie’s complexity to that of a four hundred page novel.

7

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Say your typical novel contains a 100,000 words, and your typical movie is 100 minutes long. At 24 frames per second, that comes out to 144,000 individual pictures in the film… which is 144 MILLION words!

Clearly, a movie is a far greater storytelling device.

:smiley:

8

Film is not an inherently simplistic medium. Mass market films and mass market books for that matter are ‘simplified’.

A film can be very complex and layered, just like a novel. It can reference other films, historical figures, philosophical concepts and do so by just showing an image. This forces the viewer to pay attention and be well versed in a variety of subjects.

Also consider that the true film experience is in a cinema. The viewer can’t stop the film, rewind it, or slow it down. A reader can reread a passage if they have trouble understanding it. A reader can look up a word they don’t know. However a film viewer must keep his eyes on the screen at all times. Perhaps this causes film makers to try to keep it simple and a writer may feel more free to create something complex because of the way the product will be expierenced.

I have not seen the film but I have heard that Capturing the Friedmans is excellent at showing both sides of the case in a dispassionate way. So apparently this is a good example of film telling a true story.

9

Film has at least one advantage over books. A film is capable of maintaining simultaneous seperate messages which a book generally cannot. A film can give one message via the central image on its screen while a different message is being conveyed through other background images or via the soundtrack. A book, on the other hand, is essentially a single linear message; you read the words as they come. This difference offers film several potentialities that a book lacks.

Books, of course, have advantages a film lacks. A book has a much easier time switching “voices” whereas a film is essentially locked into a single voice (virtually all movies are made in the third person). This is the reason why books are generally better than films at doing exposition or communicating a character’s thoughts.

A skillful author is also capable of using a book’s limitations to expand its possibilities. An author can utilize the reader’s imagination, in effect customizing the story for each reader. Readers being told a character is “the most beautiful woman in the world” or a creature is “so terrifying anyone who sees it goes insane” can add in their own personal details. A good author can also conceal important plot elements within the narrative shadow and reveal them when it’s most dramatic.

Overall, I’d say it’s the artist not the medium that determines the quality of the work.

10

I haven’t seen CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS, but I probably should. Nor have I seen either of the fine films Delphica mentioned.

But if you would like to discuss the gross factual distortions I have seen, look no further than JFK, and HURRICANE and ERIN BROCKOVICH and A BEAUTIFUL MIND and 8 MEN OUT, to stick closely to well documented history that got missynopsized.

I don’t think it’s a matter of superiority and inferiority. I’m really not arguing that books are better than movies. I’m trying to see if we all accept as a given that movies aren’t a great medium for conveying history with any pretense at accuracy.

11

Well I think it is a mistake to include JFK in your list.

First off the filmmakers believe JFK to be true.

Secondly, there are plenty of books on the JFK assignation that don’t come to the same conclusions as the Warren Report.

In other words books can be just as wrong about history as film. There is nothing inherent about books that make their version of history correct.

12

There’s that quote by Picasso: “Art is the lie that reveals the truth,” which is a good thing to keep in mind when going to a historical or documentary.

For example, history knows that the British soldiers at Rourke’s Drift sang a funeral hymn, not the rousing “Men of Harlech,” as they did in the movie “Zulu.” But the larger historical “truth” as opposed to “fact” is that 145 men stood up to 4,000 men, and the fake song illustrates this better. The filmaker has 100 or so minutes to pull you out of your daily life and make his or her point, so some artistic lisence is allowed.

As a filmgoer, I reserve the right to pull the movie over and revoke its license if its abused in the service of outright lie (JFK). I apply the same test here as I do in the SDMB threads we have on tastelessness: “Don’t worry about your sensibilities being offended; was your inteligence insulted?”

BTW, delphicia: did you know Buster Keaton wrote that gag in Night at the Opera? Since he was screwed out of so much recognition in his lifetime, and outrightly slandered by that Dick Van Dyke movie, there’s a counter-conspiracy to give him his props whenever we can.

13

None of the films you mention in your above post claim to documentary. They are all fiction film ‘based on a true story’.

I think what we need to discuss here is the issue of authorship, bias and subjectivity. For this discussion we will assume a set of event’s that actually occurred. The first problem here is that it may not be a know set of events, but that takes us to a discussion of the accuracy of history and historians, which although entirely relevant I will leave to one side.

So we begin with a known set of true events, or facts. We give the same set of event to a filmmaker, and to a novelist. We then ask them to produce a story from these events, a work of fiction ‘based on a true story’ (as per the films you cited).

What happens next? The filmmaker has a script produced, the novelist sketches out a plot. What this has done is introduce an author to the set of facts, neither of which has an objective viewpoint. And that is the entire thrust of this argument. An objective viewpoint is an impossible position to hold, the amount of bias may vary, (the difference between Michael Moore and the BBC news) but it still exists. Especially when the aim is to make a ‘story’ based on the set of facts, not matter how much research the very nature of the art work makes it necessary to introduce elements from within yourself.

Because of this, no one piece of art can be 100%fact only. In fact if it were it would cease to be art.

In this article http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1165870,00.html Charlotte Higgens examines why even an art form, perhaps considered the most truthful, is still a subjective viewpoint. By selecting a frame for an image you immediately have bias, you exclude elements of the scene focus on others.

Every author looks through a window of their own experiences and feelings which distorts the ‘truth’.

Even so called documentary books, or films have bias, simply by excluding some facts and highlighting others the author puts his own spin on events (consciously or not).

[quote]
from the OP A movie can do some things much better than a book can, but telling a true story isn’t one of them. It seems to me that a book can at least try to convey the actual truth of a situation–even if that truth is hard for the writer to understand fully, or takes a long stetch[sic] to convey in its full complexity, or something like that, the writer can at least try to get it across. But a movie will abandon that goal from the very start.[/qoute]

This is just silly. Do you have any evidence to back up the statement that filmmakers abandon the search for truth from the start.? It’s a gross generalisation and a misapprehension.

Even if you limit the debate to films to those produced by the Hollywood machine, it’s still false.
I hope you can understand the element of bias in any authored work, and that even the most fully realised novel still may not grasp the truth completely.

The experience of truth you mention? This is already authored, by the source, then passes through the mind and imagination of the artist, removing it again from the ‘facts.’

Have you seen The Pianist?

I’m sure others will be able to suggest many more films to see.

Just try and remember both art form are equally valid, and may have something different to say (and a different way of saying it) about any give truth.

On the other hand I do believe there is a problem in the Hollywood in that too many cooks are spoiling the broth. There is of course the other issue that executive may be afraid of taking risk with investment, for fear of loosing their jobs, and this leads to a homogeneity in the movie industry. Perhaps you should try looking at more films than just those breaking box office records?

14

Gartog: “Do you have any evidence to back up the statement that filmmakers abandon the search for truth from the start.? It’s a gross generalisation and a misapprehension”

Well, yes. Have you read William Goldman’s books on scriptwriting? In them, he makes plain that in his quest to render the truth of a story, he will portray events in his screenplay that have not actually happened–not as an unfortunate sideeffect that accidentally occurred as he was trying to be factual, but as an almost casual “of course” effect of writing a screenplay. Or when Oliver Stone inserts a fictional character into JFK–he isn’t trying to present a historically valid (or even arguable) event but rather is serving a higher truth .

I’m not putting these techniques down. I think Goldman’s a brilliant screenwriter, and JFK is a powerful film, and these artists are fully entitled to do what they do. But in “imposing a narrative” (Nora Ephron’s phrase) onto history, they’re doing what a writer of prose cannot let himself do, namely grafting details they know full well to be fictional onto a work they mean to be interpreted as history. (Stone has given many interviews where he defends the essential factuality of JFK, and notes that only some details are telescoped or omitted in the service of truth.) A prose writer can say, “Suppose Jack Ruby said such-and-such to such a person” --that okay because we’re being alerted that the author is speculating here. But Stone has no way of saying in JFK that “X [Donald Sutherland’s character] is a composite of several characters, none of whom said the things that X is saying here, but it’s possible that someone somewhere did say these things.” That would be a foolish, tedious way to make a film, and Stone isn’t a fool.

But are we fools to think we can get anything other than propaganda from a non-documentary film?

15

I think “simplistic” is perjorative by definition; simplistic is oversimplified.

I don’t think movies are inherently simplistic so much as inherently eye-candy. They’re simplistic if they take on something they can’t justifiably treat; but, that is a product of bad writing. Two hours of time really isn’t much time to treat a subject of any depth, so one must choose between narrowing the topic or simplifying it. Shogun was a good miniseries, but can you imagine it as a feature film? That would be simplistic. Zulu wasn’t simplistic at all, but it did focus on a very narrowly defined subject, almost entirely neglecting any element not specific to the plot. We don’t learn anything grand or sweeping; we don’t know the causes or context with any breadth; we don’t see the lessons learned and how they affected the march of history; but, we do get a damn-good, and IIRC fairly accurate, representation of one tiny bit of history in a visually exciting and engrossing manner.

16

Ah ok. I wasn’t quite understanding your OP, and ended up going off in a bit of a different direction. Oddly enough, the issue you raised about “based on a true story” films is related to a complaint that I have about books. Or, probably more accurately, the publishing industry.

With film, I am pretty comfortable knowing the difference between a film presented as a documentary, and one that is “based on a true story.” I expect different things, and different levels of fact checking, from Ali and When We Were Kings, or Thunderheart and Incident at Oglala. Frankly I expect a bit of propaganda even from a documentary (hey, everyone has a platform).

There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent category for “based on a true story” for books. One of my current peeves is the number of books that get shelved with the non-fiction because they’re not exactly fictional, yet IMHO they’re not straight-forward non-fiction either. Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil comes to mind, which is a book that I enjoyed very much, and I think the writing is excellent, but it is a little too lyrical and crafted to be firmly in the non-fiction camp. I have no complaint with the book, my issue is in the way it was marketed. More offensive (to me) are the books that put words into the mouths, or thoughts and emotions into the minds of real living people (or formerly living) and are still presented as history or biography. Of course the title is escaping me right now, but a recent book about the Cold War is really blatant about that.

So anyway, I agree there is a great deal of fact-mangling going on in film, but it’s certainly going on in the book world as well.

PS Thanks for the info on Night at the Opera, Slithy Tove!

17

Listen, Newt, just because you can cite a few egregious examples of bad movies doesn’t mean you should condemn the whole medium.

You need to watch a lot more movies. But then, everyone needs to watch a lot more movies. I watch an average of 300-500 movies a year, and I need to watch more movies.

18

A writer of prose can do this. I suspect the difference is in the phrase ‘mean to be interpreted a history’ While you have provided anecdotal evidence the Stone intended his JFK to be an essentially factual account, it is unfair to say this is true of all filmmakers (In fact I suspect a part more guilty of this to be publicists). I can provide anecdotal evidence to the opposite.

In Black Hawk Down, at least one of the characters (I’m thinking specifically of Ewan McGregor’s character) was a composite of more than one actual character, and the filmmakers freely admitted such.

Many prose books distort history and try to present them as actual events (I’m not defending the practice here or in films, but it happens) Bravo Two Zero, the story of a SAS mission during the first gulf war, was presented as a completely factual account by it’s author, a different version of events was then written by another member of the SAS team, who disputed the events in the first book (novel, based on a true story). Now a third book has been written, by a third member of the team, dismissing both the other accounts (presented as 'truth) as fiction. Claiming a different set of events happen.

This is exactly the type of stuff you claim happens in films, I’m not disputing it happens, just that it only happens in films

Not fools, but perhaps we are engaging in hyperbole, among film academics it’s a widely held belief that a ‘historical’ film tells us more about the time and society in which it was made, than the historical event itself.

As long as audiences are aware of the bias inherent in any authorship, (and perhaps the degree of such bias, with some artists) they should be fine.

This goes for documentary films as well, which are also untruthful, biased films, sometimes even to the same degree as the ‘fictions’ you cited.

19

Delphica–If you think you understand what my OP is, I’ll be grateful if you’d explain it to me. Seriously, I’m trying to work out an idea for a book, or at least a course, on the subject of “Adaptation,” (including the movie of that name, which was the loosest possible adaptation of “The Orchid Thief”). Somehow, I think this idea is about adapting “non-fiction” books for the screen, and the liberties taken with the facts by the adaptors, and how those liberties exceed any conceivable liberties which the original authors could have taken with the facts in writing their books. Of course, I want to examine the reasons for those liberties, rather than just point out that they’re there (although it may be edifying to some naive viewers, who watch ALI and think they know about Muhammed Ali’s life, or who see JFK and think they’ve gained understanding of the assassination, or who watch ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN and think they 've been insight into Watergate. God forbid anyone should see A BEAUTIFUL MIND and think he knows almost as much about mathematics or the life of John Nash or mental illness as someone who read the book.)

I’ll also have something to say about the adapation of fictional works for film, just to show how the problems of compression, telescoping, distortion,etc. apply to film in general, but I wonder if I’ll need to do that. I certainly will enjoy discussing that.

20

Newt, you’re conflating truth with literalness (literality?); not the same thing.