The following apeared in the London TIMES on Friday. It covers more aspects
than just music but I think it is, for members of the List, none the less
interesting for that. North American readers will have to allow for various
comments that are of a particularly local nature to UK.
"The camera often lies" by Simon Jenkins
I can see it already. "Paddy and Jane" is the true but tormented tale
of a soldier turned politician. This Wellingtonian figure is a man of
dazzling but flawed genius. Told through the eyes of his former
secretary, the film uses their affair as a metaphor of political
turmoil. Paddy, portrayed by Kenneth Branagh, is caught between wife
and mistress, Labour and Tory, Charles Kennedy and Tony Blair. He draws
on his SAS training to survive each crisis. We are assured that the sex
scenes are "courageous and explicit . . . intended to convey a deeper
kind of truth". Ten provincial reps are closed to supply the Arts
Council grant.
The film Hilary and Jackie, initiated by the sister of Jacqueline du
Pre, is a similar melodrama of rivalry and love. It is rescued from
sentimentality only by Emily Watson's acting and frequent mercy dashes
by Elgar. Whether the remorselessly unpleasant scenes are all true
cannot be judged, since du Pre is dead. Most of her friends and
admirers believe she has been defamed by an angst-ridden sister and
brother-in-law. Certainly any shred of dignity or niceness has been
edited out. This being a film, much is made of sex and the whole
confection is called "true", a word almost devoid of meaning in movies.
The film was incomprehensibly subsidised by the British taxpayer.
This is a road much trodden, and much littered with cant. Scholarly
pens are sharpened over Shakespeare in Love, a film of Tom Stoppard's
charming fiction that a randy Elizabethan poet called William
Shakespeare had writer's block during a play called Romeo and Juliet.
From this he was deliciously rescued by Gwyneth Paltrow, leaving us for
ever in her debt. There is no evidence that any of this happened, but
so what? Stoppard makes no claim to veracity. Nor does the dazzling
designer-Tudor floorshow, Elizabeth, currently on general release.
Some myths are invulnerable to correction.
There is no evidence for half of history, and even less for the hack
history of the film industry. Gandhi was a travesty of the British Raj.
Amadeus was not about the real Mozart. The Music Lovers was not about
the real Tchaikovsky. Closer to our time, Oliver Stone's JFK gave a
false account of the killing of Kennedy. Jim Sheridan's In the Name
of the Father was a false account of the Guildford Four. The "true"
portrait of C. S. Lewis in Shadowlands was mostly fiction. The "true
story" of Schindler's List was unrecognisable to those who were present
at the scenes depicted. The whole genre of docudrama, of faction,
reconstruction and "based on" stories, treats real people and incidents
as a mere raw material for directorial fancy. Yet such is the power of
film that these versions will determine for ever how most people view
their patch of history. Sir Thomas More will always be the Man for All
Seasons.
The film-makers blow a raspberry to any complaint. We are artists, they
cry. We can use facts any way we like. They are slaves to our talent,
worker bees to be exploited and discarded. The monstrous regiment of
historians, fact-checkers and pedants can get lost. Art need recognise
no laws but those of its own genius. "What the imagination seizes as
beauty must be truth." Or as Keats would have said today, you can
whinge, we have the Arts Council grant.
I once wrote an article in which I unwittingly told an untruth about a
public figure. I had suggested that he was present at a meeting when he
was not, and thus wrongly attributed to him an unworthy decision. The
accusation was not grievous and no great harm was done. But I was
wrong. Both the law and the code of practice required me to apologise
and make amends. Even when racing the clock, journalists must build on
a foundation of truth. I might have dismissed the complaint on the
ground that mine was a work of art. I might have pleaded that my prose
strove not after a spurious and small-minded accuracy, but after the
"divine melodious truth" of the nightingale that is forever Fleet
Street. I would have been carted off to the Clink.
Carlton was recently fined an astonishing GBP 2 million by the
Independent Television Commission for including fabricated material
in a documentary on drug trafficking. "The deception," said the ITC,
"involved a wholesale breach of trust between the programme-makers and
the viewers." The company did not disagree, gulped and paid up. Film
journalists who make offerings at the altar of history are tested by
stern standards. Not so feature film-makers. I venture to suggest that
if Carlton had sent its work round to Channel 4 and claimed it to be a
"true story" art film, it would not have been fined for fabrication, but
showered with praise and lottery cash.
The cobbler should stick to his last. Art's contribution to history is
to reveal its hidden strands through the prism of fiction. The wrongs
of British policy in Northern Ireland were more effectively exposed in
The Crying Game than by Mr Sheridan's Guildford Four faction. The best
study of Watergate was the fictional Washington Behind Closed Doors, not
the many films depicting Nixon as a monster and purporting to tell "the
truth". Admirers of du Pre know that the most moving evocation of a
musician's struggle against multiple sclerosis was in Tom Kempinski's
fine play, Duet for One. For all the interviews given by the makers
of Hilary and Jackie, their motive is unclear. If it was meant as a
fictional study of the agony of genius, why drag a real person's
character through the mud? If it was to be a biography of du Pre - as
it seems to the public - surely there was some obligation to accuracy
and balance?
When art thus moves its tanks on to the lawn of truth, the defenders
seem to turn and run. The so-called drama documentaries by Stone and
Sheridan were far more culpable acts of public deception than the
Carlton documentary. They used fabricated scenes and dialogue, intercut
with documentary footage, to imply as fact what they knew was fiction.
Such falsity was said in both cases to be avowedly propagandist, to
expose the falsity of others. These artists demand a licence to expose
the lies of others. This is the ultimate trahison des clercs. In my
view the same goes for the portrayal of du Pre as a genius of unredeemed
nastiness.
When art has exhausted its imaginative powers and has to borrow real
people from real life, it should accept the disciplines of history
and journalism. These are not only the laws of libel, but codes and
protocols of accuracy, fairness and respect for the dignity and privacy
of individuals, both living and dead. Of course journalism often falls
far short of these disciplines, but it at least acknowledges a framework
of self-discipline. Film-makers respect nothing. Constrained only by
laws against defaming living persons (letting Daniel Barenboim off the
Hilary and Jackie hook), they can lie with impunity and without redress.
Art's rejoinder to this purism is to cry Censorship! It depends what
we mean by the censor, a wolf who comes in many disguises. The ITC was
"censoring" Carlton in fining it for its drugs story. The laws of libel
and racial and religious discrimination are censorship. So too are
those controlling copyright, advertising and public deception. On this
basis alone the British Board of Film Classification should surely
demand the removal of the words "true story" from films which are
blatantly nothing of the sort. At very least it should have a new MU
certificate, meaning Mostly Untrue.
Yet censorship is not the best defence against artistic mendacity, it is
the worst. The best defence is to declaim its lies from the rooftops.
By all means let Hilary give her version of her sister's sad tale, if
she must. By all means add in the sex, the profanity, the terminal
illness and Elgar's Cello Concerto, if they are the only means to an
audience. By all means call the product art. But the rest of us need
not stand on the ceremony of that art. Truth comes first. If
film-makers claim a licence to damn the living and the dead, they must
get damnation in return.
John G. Deacon
Home page: http://www.ctv.es/USERS/j.deacon
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