Cinema Theory: Truth

Cinema Theory:  Truth

Jean Luc Goddard has a famous quote:  "Film is truth at 24 frames per second."

Any one who makes films knows after a while that this can't be true.  Everything you do to create a movie is manipulation.  Even in a documentary.  How you shoot your subject, what you leave in, what you cut out, the order you assemble your footage - everything is manipulation.  

Even once all the footage is shot, the context of each shot creates a comment on it's  neighboring shots.  Hitchcock gives this an example which I'll heavily paraphrase here:  A shot of an older man looking at something.  You cut to what he's looking at.  If it's a baby you think he is perhaps thinking about the process of life.  A kind old man.  A woman his age, he seems like he is looking at his wife of many years, a kind old man.  If you cut in a teenaged girl in a bathing suit though then he seems dangerous.  In every shot - he has the exact same expression, so context is making the comment on the subject.

In fact, the closer you come to seeming like the truth, the closer you are to lying because you are presenting something as the truth.

Therefore, it is possible that the further away from presenting "reality" you move, the closer you can come to presenting something truthful.

I work a lot in the realm of science fiction, fantasy, and surreality yet the idea that I am most striving for when writing or directing is honest moments.  How would a human respond in this moment?  How would the culmination of millions of human responses create this society?

I find David Lynch's surreal film Eraserhead to be one of the most honest films I've ever seen precisely because it strips away any responsibility for representing a world you recognize and focusing entirely on a world you might feel instead.

I have to assume Goddard's observation about cinema was meant, therefore, in the sense that this is the goal of cinema - not it's inherent quality.