Like OMG I Can't Believe Cinema Verité

Just gonna state the obvious example here for the first part of Dharmik's prompt

I, Tonya was based on true events. If you recall, a surprising amount of the source material was recreated word-for-word (or triple-axel-by-triple-axel) in the film. Or, to quote sports writer Katie Baker: "Rogers combined both stories into a fast-moving meta-narrative “based on irony free, wildly contradictory, totally true interviews with Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly,” as the I, Tonya title card puts it." This is an important point to consider: even within factual events there can be information that doesn't add up. Heck, the real Tonya Harding's interview about the film in New York Times alone is full of inconsistencies (my favorite would be her take on how often she is portrayed cursing). These antithetical points in reports of an event have to be combed out into a consistent narrative for a theatrical work. Similarly, some parts of the story need to be condensed, altered, etc. to move the plot along. That said, it isn't as if more exact tellings of an occurrence don't contend with the same issues. Even in accurate recounting of an event, you will have biases, a focus on a certain person or group of people over others, etc. You can read incredibly compelling histories of the American Revolution that laud it as a remarkable fight against tyranny but also find equally convincing narratives of it being an inevitable event for when a colonial power overreached itself. Both varieties will be impeccably sourced.

Or, you know, sometimes we make musicals about one particular founding father. Whatever works.

Wait wait wait but not like alternative facts or anything

No! But it is hard to wrestle with the issue that you will often run into with verbatim works/documentaries is what constitutes the ever elusive "capital T" truth. Honestly, sometimes I think it's better to lean into the fact that you are trying to be persuasive or expressive than to try to present something as a 100% precise recounting. The best way I can think of to get into this in a snappy blog format is to focus on Werner Herzog and his concept of "ecstatic truth."


His famous Minnesota Declaration makes some fascinating and insightful points about the limits of Cinema Verité and what truth is in cinema.

"Minnesota declaration: truth and fact in documentary cinema
1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."

Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn't call, doesn't speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue."

He has since provided six addendums to these points. These were predominantly inspired the recent discourse on post-truth/truthiness/fake news/what-have-you.

"I. With the arrival of the new term “alternative facts” in the political arena, the question of facts and the question of truth have acquired an unexpected urgency.
II. Facts cannot be underestimated as they have normative power. But they do not give us insight into the truth, or the illumination of poetry. Yes, accepted, the phone directory of Manhattan contains four million entries, all of them factually verifiable. But do we know why Jonathan Smith, correctly listed, cries into his pillow every night?
III. The argument of rearranging facts constituting a lie points only to shallow thinking and the fetish of self-reference.
IV. Patron Saints of the Minnesota Declaration:
William Shakespeare: “The most truthful poetry is the most feigning.”
V. André Gide: “I modify facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality.”
VI. Michelangelo:
Taking a good look at his statue of the Pietà, we notice that Jesus taken from the cross is a man of 33, but his mother is only 17.
Does Michelangelo lie to us? Does he mislead us? Does he defraud us?
He just shows us the innermost truth about the Man of Sorrows, and his mother, the Virgin."

These points resonate with me to a certain extent because I struggle to imagine a documentary devoid of politics, immune to bias, and always in the habit of providing completely accurate context. To err is human. Also, I don't think anyone can every be truly objective.

But the longer I go down that rabbit hole, the closer I get to being a full-on participant in Philosophical Truth or Dare.

Mini play because eff it

"Queer Eye, Sex, and Taxes"

1: Oh my goddd I was supposed to leave for coffee twenty minutes ago but this awful comedian one has me glued! (A beat) I need to see his hair cut. (Pause) He's so awful.

2: Oh yeah that one is really something. I got a kick out of when they were testing the room to see if he could have sex (awkward giggle).

1: Oh yeah! The kicker was "mom just fast forward through this next part please"

(2 laughs.)

1: Their fucking redecorations and extra things are tens and tens of thousands-- I need a show that gives me thousands of free money in redecorations and makeover and photoshoot and website.

2: (A beat) I wonder if they have to claim any of it on their taxes.