The authenticity of the film beyond the truth

It is often said that an important reason for the decline of documentary photography is that its truthfulness cannot match that of video. However, truthfulness is a difficult term to define. Since Plato, people’s cognition of the world has been regarded as impossible to achieve omniscience and omnipotence. Therefore, truthfulness is not a complete difference to people but only a different degree, and this degree of difference should not cause the decline of an art form. It is obvious that the essence of the problem does not start with the truthfulness itself, but in another dimension, a dimension related to artistic expression. So, the question comes back to what the film is, and only the answer to ontological question that is answered is what it means to transcend photography at the level of truth.

What exactly is a film? To answer this question, it is necessary to go back to the time before the appearance of the film in order to understand what the film meant to the era before its existing. That is to drive people to find an art form has the most similar ideal core and closest approach to film before the birth of film which may be the “Gesamtkunstwerk” proposed by Richard Wagner that usually roughly translates as a “total work of art” is what could be used to describes an artwork, design, or creative process where different art forms are combined to create a single cohesive whole whose seemingly so closes to the common daily life understanding to the conception of film. And Wagner and his Gesamtkunstwerk really influenced the early film theorist such as Ricciotto Canudo who proposed Manifesto of the Seven Arts in 1911 that calling the film has become a brand-new “seventh art” through the comprehensive expression of the harmony of six ancient arts in time and space which shows similarity to Gesamtkunstwerk in thought. At the same time, many other artists also used other art forms to position films whom like the American poet Vachel Lindsay and French director Abel Survage while the former regarded film as a kind of “moving art” and the latter regarded film as “active painting”.

However, the feeling that the film brings to people is not just the expression of Wagner’s ideas under a higher level of technology. The film is not only a comprehensive phenomenon of many artistic types but has its own ontological point of view where is the beginning of the theory used to study the film itself whose be called film ontology. Although André Bazin’s ontology is outdated today due to its premature time, the ontology based on the film ontology has gone beyond the comprehensive view of film as it carries the synthesis of many arts thus become the art. It presents an important core to film audiences, one idea that makes films become films: movement, a continuous change based on the recurrence of space and time. Movement is a basic physical characteristic of films. No matter what themes and methods the film presents, no matter whether it is analog or digital, it must have the characteristics of movement: films always play at a certain ratio, which the film creator calls it is the “frame rate”, a concept of time-related motion picture presentation. Furthermore, the “truthfulness” of videos or films mentioned at the beginning of the article is closely related to this “movement”. Here, the word “truthfulness” should be replaced with “authenticity”, not only because no art form can fully convey the truth, but also because the expression of the film actually makes it more “reliability” which is a kind of less questioning “authority of the truth”.

There is no doubt that no matter what its inner narrative of the film is bound to be end in the time and space where the audience is, but at the same time, the film is filled with a time that belongs to it to runs freely in isolation from the time and space where the audience is. So, the most basic core of the film’s ontology is a system composed of light and sound (audiovisual language), and thus forms its own space-time system. that taking into account the basic methods of film what are the image and audio. It is this kind of spatial system that makes people feel willing to believe in everything that happens in a film or video. This is related to the most basic composition of human experience. We are always more inclined to believe in the continuously recorded space and time, because we live in this continuum. In fact, the views of Roland Barthes and Christian Metz made interesting comments on this. Christian Metz developed the relationship between movement and the film’s ontology with the help of Barthes’ viewpoints on photography, He believes that the movement of films adds a dimension of reality to people’s perception compared to still photography. At the same time, this kind of movement also makes the film separate from the “plane” and become three-dimensional. Therefore, the interdependence between time and space and movement constitutes the core element of the film ontology.

Movement but self-enclosed specificity makes the film just stay at a certain balance point. Compared with the absolute stillness of photography, the movement of the film cuts into the human innate perception structure in the dark, and compared to drama or opera, the film is closed enough to carry a new time and space in the mental concept. This may sound incomprehensible, but first think about it, how does a drama divide the audience and the actors? It is through the division of the area of the current space to consciously regulate the performance area of the actors. Therefore, the drama or opera is actually at the same time and space as the audience. For the audience, this relationship is completely open. The conscious division will only create the same sense of division in the mind at the same time, especially when the distance is close enough to even feel the air flow driven by the actor’s skirt. The film, as mentioned above, is an independent and closed space-time system, although this space-time system may not be in a real physical sense. But for the human mind, in the phenomenological sense, films will indeed construct a space-time system that humans can feel and understand a priori category. An independent space-time system felt by the audience’s transcendental concept. As a result, the audience’s transcendental and rationality are separated from each other, immersed in it, but kept alienated. Our hearts and the rhythm of the film remain in tune, and our reason ensures that we are restrained enough.

Based on the above statement, the reliability brought by movies is more directed towards the emotional level than the so-called judgment of reality (our rationality can always tell us that we are watching movies instead of reality), and this involves some concepts of “post truth”. I don’t intend to discuss the “post-truth” in detail here, but to put it simply, post-truth believes that emotional feelings are as important as knowledge of facts, especially in the current information explosion, people cannot confirm the reliability of every piece of the information. The introduction of post-truth largely explains the epistemological rationality of editing. Although film editing has never caused any major controversy like post-photographic processing (this also proves from the side that the concept of film and reality is actually unbound), the existence of film editing does make the film in the “natural” level. On the contrary, reality is not as good as photography itself, especially non-linear editing, which is a method of fundamentally modifying the structure of time and space. No matter how photography itself uses post-production techniques, it can never change the time-space relationship of the photo itself. Its reflection of time-space is an established and unchangeable segment, but the film itself constructs a time-space, which is naturally fake. However, the other essence of non-linear editing technology is the expression method of the film creator, and expression, except for the “real fragment” as the material (Kurishov effect), its core is always emotion or the conveying of creator’s intention.

The expression of the film is not actually about the essence of truth, but about the willingness to believe in its content, which is the belief in epistemology, and it is effective for creators and audiences at the same time. Therefore, a dialectical relationship is presented here: the truth of the movie is completely established on the false, but this falseness is the universal true emotional experience, so it is also true. The falsest creation has the strongest true emotional intention, which is the essence of the authenticity of film creation. When this dialectical relationship is unfolded by the independent space-time relationship carried by the movie, the audience will get a complete emotional experience in a closed system, making the audience willing to believe in the reliability of the movie.

The authenticity of the film beyond the truth.