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