Is it important for factual films to get their facts right

[MichiganJ]

Sorry, tis the season for the Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs. Don't mistake the cups for the eggs. The ratio of peanut butter to chocolate in the eggs approaches perfection.

[Mr. Arkadin]

Sorry, tis the season for the Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs. Don't mistake the cups for the eggs. The ratio of peanut butter to chocolate in the eggs approaches perfection.

Is that opinion based on fact?

Anything can happen in a movie and often does. If you are the kind of person who gets your history from the movies--you deserve whatever you get.

[klondike]

If you are the kind of person who gets your history from the movies--you deserve whatever you get.

How about Romance ?
If you learn the art of romance from the movies--do you also get what you deserve?
And how often?

[mrsl]

.
Klondike:

It depends on whether you're learning romance from Dark Victory or Debbie Does Dallas, doesn't it? Regarding this thread, we all seem to have forgotten that line from the editor in Liberty Valence about truth and legend. I'm happy with any bio or other film portraying a real figure, whether historical or present, as long as it states somewhere that the story is based on the life of whoever. Even an autobiography can't be 100% correct unless that person has kept dated notes of every single day of his or her life. A person doesn't usually have that great a memory for ordinary names and places to have them stand out for over 50 or 60 years.

[MissGoddess]

Take your pick:

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second. -- Jean-Luc Godard

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world. -- Jean-Luc Godard

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. -- Jean-Luc Godard

A film is a ribbon of dreams. The camera is much more than a recording apparatus; it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret. Here magic begins. -- Orson Welles

I love these kinds of discussions. Right and wrong are a function of approach, and there are multiple approaches.

I love all those quotes, they reflect how I feel about the chimerical nature of movies...I would even toss in Hitchcock's rebuttal: "Cinema is a lie 24 frames per second".

[ChiO]

MissG wrote:
I would even toss in Hitchcock's rebuttal: "Cinema is a lie 24 frames per second".

I knew someone said that, but couldn't remember who. Thanks for the reminder. One wonders what Godard said to Truffaut at the next Cahiers meeting.

[movieman1957]

MissGoddess wrote:

chimerical

I get to learn something every day.

[stuart.uk]

Helen Mirren's film The Queen helped the real Royal Family get back on track, after several lean yrs, such was its influence

[klondike]

I tend to judge modern English history films in a very cynical light, so I agreed to go see The Queen with, & strictly as a favor to, my best friend, who is UK-born.
And I was blown away, by one of the best mainstream, modern films I've seen.

[CharlieT]

With the recent passing of Fess Parker, it reminds me that both he and John Wayne stood about a foot taller than the real Davy Crockett. Even Arthur Hunnicutt, who played Crockett in The Last Command, stood at an even 6 feet tall. I guess sometimes the facts don't measure up to the legend.

[ChiO]

Q: What did you mean when you said many of your documentaries are feature films in disguise? Do you script your documentaries?

A: I stylize. I invent. Script sometimes, yes, sure. But not in order to cheat you. It is in order to give you moments of illumination, moments of a much deeper truth than just the factual existence there. And that's the stupidity of cinema verite, to trust too much in the facts....

The Mystery of Werner Herzog: The DGA Interview (DGA Quarterly, Winter 2010)