Film Studies

Reality Effects and Truth Effects

Reality Effects and Truth Effects

An alternative way to describe realism (and formalism)To discuss realism (and formalism) in terms of effects which a film (or art and literature) create on the audience.

Reality Effects and Truth Effects

• ‘Reality Effects’ - they come into being when representations in moving images give the audience the impression that they mimic the ‘facticity’ of the world around us, or surface appearance. Roland Barthes

Reality Effects and Truth Effects

• ‘Truth Effects’ - they come into being when representations in moving images agree with viewer’s ideas of what is true about the world in a general sense. They have to do with whether texts conform to what she generally believes about experience. Michel Foucault

Reality Effects

• Richard Attenborough’s biographical film, Gandhi, imitates how Mahatma Ghandi looked, how he spoke, how the world in which he lived looked like and what his life was like - creation of an impression that the film is mimicking facticity, that is, a reality effect.

Reality Effects

•Jinnah and Ghandi Hunger strike Opening Assassination Gandhi interview, Jinnah, 1.17 1.59

Reality Effects

• Film images create ‘reality effect’ among audiences when they are impressed that the images objectively mimic reality.

• Filmmakers must imitate reality as faithfully as possible.

• Filmmakers recreated Gandhi and the life of Mahatma Gandhi by carefully studying him or his life, and by closely referring to biographies, photographs and newsreels.

• Funeral newsreel Movie version Funeral Procession

Truth Effects• Moving images have ‘truth-effects’ even when

they are not true, because they only need to agree to what audiences believe true.

• Audiences do not have to have prior accurate knowledge about what a film represents or do not need to know whether it objectively reflect reality or not.

• Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo (US, 1955) display the images of Japan and Japanese women. False for those who know Japan and Japanese women but true for those who believe them true.

Reality Effects and Truth Effects

Reality Effects• Materialist approach

to our cognition• Things exist

independently of the individual’s knowledge of them.

Truth Effects• Idealist approach to

our cognition• Things do not exist in

themselves. They exist only as ideas that each of us has of them.

Reality Effects and Truth Effects

Materialist conception Idealist conception

Film Realism and Reality/Truth Effects

• Our impression of moving images being realistic or not depends on reality or truth effects, or both, that they exert on us.

• Reality and truth effects as alternative to film realism

Reality and Truth Effects• Analyse the reality and truth

effects that a film make on you.• Riso Amaro, Giuseppe de

Santis’s 1949 film.• Francesca and Walter are a

criminal couple. To avoid the police, Francesca joins a group of migration workers. She meets a rice worker, Silvana, and is later rejoined by Walter in a rice farm. Robbery, triangle love and murder takes place.

Riso amaro

Reality and Truth Effects

Reality Effects• Shot on location in the

countryside of Vercelli and in Veneria and Selve Farms in Lignana, Piemonte.

• Non-professional actors found locally.

• Local dialects used• Costumes worn by those

who worked in rice farms around 1949.

Truth Effects• Silvana Mangano as

Silvana, Miss Italia contestant, but she is a peasant woman, if you believe so.)

• Rice must have been planted as we see on the screen. We have never seen how rice was planted in Italy but we believe it was like the movies – men plough and women plant, songs and supervisors

Reality and Truth Effects

• Reality Effects• Social situation

- Reliance on

migration workers

- Their exploitation

- North/South divide• Customs • Lives of migration

workers in farms

• Truth Effects• Social situation• Peasants wishing to

get out of poverty• Peasants even

prepared to commit crimes (stealing and cheating)

• Italians are emotional and amorous

• Italian way of love

Analyse the reality and truth effects that Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algier exerts on you.Battle of Algiers

Reality and Truth Effects

Reality Effects• Record of Algerian

straggle for independence

• Shot on location in Algiers

• The film based on the accounts of Saadi Yacef, a FLN military commander.

Truth Effects• Record of Algerian

straggle for independence• ‘I have never been to

Algeria, but it looks like being shot in Algiers as the title says so.

• ‘I know that struggles for independence took place in Algeria and they must be as depicted in the film.’

Reality and Truth EffectsReality Effects• Cast is non-

professional except Jean Martin, who played Colonel Mathieu and all found in Algeria.

• Martin served as a paratrooper during the Indochina War and knew the French paratroop.

Truth Effects• Movie characters seem

to be real Algerian.• Colonel Mathieu looks

like a real French colonel.

Reality and Truth Effects• Against Reality Effects• Film deliberately shot

in black & white.• Reality does not come

with music or sound effects.

• Algerian music for Algerian actions and the sounds of gunfire, helicopters and engines for French actions

• Truth Effects• As if we were

watching a newsreel or documentary. American version has a disclaimer, ‘not one foot of newsreel was used.’

• Music and sound effects make emotional effects clearer