How would Ai WeiWei’s film be different if he had chosen to isolate certain personal stories into a “fiction”?Explain

Cinema & Reality – Discussion

400 words are for the post, and 30 minutes are to check the movies mentioned in the instructions

Is there a such thing as “telling the truth” in cinema?

Early in the semester, we focused on a collection of films from really different socio-cultural and -historical and -political contexts and really different ideological leanings – most of which have been “fiction.” More recently, we’ve been adding to our repertoire films which deal with the “real story” more directly, either as explicitly biographical interpretations (Motorcycle Diaries), creative personal memoir (Persepolis), socio-political/historical fiction (Daughters of the Dust), immigration narratives (The Namesake, La Misma Luna) and very large scale journalistic accounts of global crisis in our documentary selection, Human Flow.

Human Flow is a massive film about scale, visually and narratively accumulating the stories and images of the millions and millions of people who are actively displaced by war and hardship, sometimes over generations.

As a genre, the documentary film explicitly asks us to think self-consciously about stories that are true; however, how does truth work in films that filter it through a dramatic narrative?

For instance, how would the impact of Motorcycle Diaries or Persepolis be different in documentary form with interviews of those whose real lives the films bring to life?

How would Ai WeiWei’s film be different if he had chosen to isolate certain personal stories into a “fiction”?

In contemplating our most recent films, to what extent do you think it is possible to capture “the” truth, “a” truth, anything “true” on screen?

Is a documentary always more real than a fiction film? Can a fiction film sometimes be more real than a documentary?

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