Filmmaking Fictional Film
The aim of this essay is to discuss the difference between fictional and non-fictional filmmaking. How can we tell what the message of a film is? A considerable amount of documentary writing has recognised that these waters are far murkier than most would want to believe when saying that fictional films are considered invented forms and non-fictional films are based on actual reality. The link between truth and reality in filmmaking is often considered to be a very thin line since most stages of a film production apparently misconstrues this subject in one way or another. Not only are the artistic devices such as editing, framing and narration forced onto film production to give it a sense of arrangement or consistency, but there is also the choice of subject and the filming. If fiction and non-fiction films both share the same techniques to reach similar ends then wouldn't documentaries therefore be considered to be fictional constructions? If both of these forms were not combined together in this fashion then surely any approach to documentaries would most definitely cast deep doubts over such a claim that a documentary film might express towards stating some form of truthfulness. This is rather true especially when a statement of such fact being expressed is not only controversial but also strongly disputable. Would it be miscreant to bicker that these demands to actuality or reality in documentary films are in fact illusive if they are the nature of the form? In this essay two films will be the context of this debate, The Thin Blue Line (1988) directed by Errol Morris about a man that was wrongly convicted for a murder by the corrupt justice system in Dallas County, Texas, and Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) about a New Orleans district attorney who discovers that there was far more to the Kennedy assassination than the official story people were led to believe. These two films can be considered as being dissimilar when compared to fiction and non-fictional procedures, but most people would agree that The Thin Blue Line (1988) is ultimately a documentary film while JFK (1990) is in fact fiction. These two films take real events as the main plot and they both tell a story that reveals certain truthfulness about the real events that happened. Both films have a quest for the truth and that is the central motivating point in each film as they both make ideal studies when compared to fictional documentaries. This essay explores the similarities and differences between both films and the forms, and how fictional and non-fictional filmmaking attributes move from one type of form to the other. It also focuses on how cinema represents this as being real. Both films show the different ways that fiction and non-fiction films handle true events as both of them bestride the two forms of cinema and actually make similar truthful claims. Although considered as being mirror images of one another and strangely similar in other ways they are somewhat at the same time opposed in other ways too. Both of these films share the same comparable subject, assassinations and verdicts, and each film builds a case for the implausibility of official explanations and evidence which is crucial to the persuasive power of the films and becoming an aesthetic device in itself.
In conclusion The Thin Blue Line (1988) maintained a somewhat stricter separation between inner narratives and re-enactments of events which were shown through interviews at the events. Morris maintained a strict approach to style and allowed his audience to differentiate between the styles. The participants who are being interviewed are conversing with an audience through a downward locked camera and all of the frames are immovable. Stone's JFK (1991) begins with an assassination and then he constantly adds detail into further re-enactments in the film, whilst Morris takes a somewhat similar approach by restaging the horrific murder of the officer repeatedly and altering the events each and every moment. The Thin Blue Line (1988) can be understood as being not only an illustration but also a demonstration of at least one possibility. Audiences are able to question this type of elucidation and are rather encouraged to do so. With so many different versions of events told by the witnesses, it is hard to accept the versions portrayed by the film's re-enactments. There are a range of possibilities and the film doesn't encourage any view of the actual accounts as being equally valid. But the narratives that are heard throughout the film are not a range of fictions that can be afforded a fictional position. The assassinations were real but who did it? This question can be answered by looking at the way the film was structured. It leads the audience to find the answer for themselves and come to their own conclusion as to whose different account of the events should be believed. Can documentary films maintain its links to truth and reality and be considered as a separate object to fiction? There are numerous distortions of reality when documentary films are created and the end results can still present arguments about our world and they become open to an interrogation by audiences with views to finding out the truth. JFK (1991) was a film that received numerous questions while at the same time it failed trying to replace accounts with one single theory that had an insufficient amount of evidence which could be considered as counter-myth or fiction. Both films show an amalgamate of fictional and non-fictional methods and at the same time they don't attempt to negate the possibilities of an ultimate documentary truth. Stone's JFK (1991) and Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1988) are two films that slowly build towards a culminating revelatory instant of documentary substantiation. JFK (1991) is considered the Zapruder film of it's time as it's repeatedly played and in slow motion with a somniferous voiceover on the scene that emphasises John F. Kennedy's bloody head falling back and rolling the left. Stone's most convincing major point was that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a bullet that appeared from the front him and not from behind. But similar to that would be the concluding scene of The Thin Blue Line (1988) that spools the film with an audio recording of David Harris's confession. Although these two films display different types of veracity, they demonstrate facts using recorded evidence and thus reaching an ultimate point which shows the distinction that lies between fiction and non-fiction styles. Non-fiction filmmakers hold true that non-fiction will make claims to such truths in ways that fiction never will.
Bibliography:
ARNHEIM, R. 1958. Film as Art.
ROSENSTONE, R. 1997. JFK: Historical Fact / Historical Film.
TOPLIN, R. 2000. Film, History and Controversy.
EASTHORPE, A. 1993. Contemporary Film Theory.
MACKEY, S. 1996. Oliver Stone's America.
MAST, G. 1992. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings.
CARROLL, N. 1996. From Real to Reel: Entangled in Nonfiction Film.
CARROLL, N. 1996. Nonfiction films and Postmodernist Scepticism.
BARNOUW. E. 1993. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film.
NICHOLS, B. 1983. The Voice of Documentary.
NICHOLS, B. 1991. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary.
Filmography:
STONE, S. 1990. JFK.
MORRIS, E. 1988. The Thin Blue Line.
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