Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/619377
P E R S P E C T I V E | J A N UA RY / F E B R UA RY 2 0 1 6 9 editorial CAN FICTION BE TRUE? by Michael Baugh, Editor In her article on Black Mass in this issue, Production Designer Stefania Cella raises an issue that all artists face, especially those of us in the narrative arts, on a continuing basis: What is the difference between a fact and the truth? And, more importantly, what is our responsibility as artists when it seems we must choose between historical fact and what we call (for lack of a more precise term) dramatic truth. Most people probably believe that facts and truths are the same thing; the dictionary thinks so, too. But I believe there are fundamental differences between the two constructs—they most certainly are both intellectual constructs—and those differences lie in the area of context. I submit, by way of example, a random violent act: a certain person pulls the trigger of a gun and kills another being. That may be an incontrovertible historic fact, but it is devoid of meaning or value without a fleshed-out and nuanced context. Was the person struggling with an attacker, and by using prodigious will, turned the gun on the villain to save her own life, or that of her loved ones? Was the shot an accident while cleaning a mistakenly loaded weapon? Was the person cruelly coerced to complete the violent act like the child soldiers in Beasts of No Nation? Was the victim a cow or sheep, killed humanely in a packing plant to provide food for hungry people? Any of these scenarios creates a deeper context and materially changes—not the fact—but the truth of what actually occurred. Appreciating these differences is crucial to a designer, because a deep understanding of truth doesn't exist without context; and that is the designer's highest calling: to provide the visual context for a film, to tell the story in images alone, as if there were no dialogue, to find the dramatic truth. At least five of the films whose designs are profiled in this issue of PERSPECTIVE are based on historical events that actually happened, and yet for all of those—and for the purely fictional films as well—the designers took liberties with history, changing and enhancing the look of the environments that actually surrounded the facts. To truly understand a history, whether that history is fictional or actually happened, people need to make a value judgment, to embrace the context. In every well-designed film, history is changed to make the underlying motives more clear, to clothe the story with context that may not be explained by the naked facts alone. Jack Fisk, in The Revenant, created dream images such as the decaying church shown on the cover and the towering mountain of bison skulls on page 39, to expose the deeper experience of Hugh Glass' isolation. Judy Becker rigidly altered and controlled the color palette of the 1950s to bring into clearer focus the difficult journey behind Therese's growing love for Carol. The Madoff offices in architect Philip Johnson's Lipstick Building in New York were completely reconceived by Carlos Menendez, using floor-to-ceiling plate glass walls, to suggest Bernard Madoff 's obsession with watching the entirety of his operation from his desk. In each instance, historical drama changed historical fact. One of the dictionary definitions of truth is "a transcendent fundamental or spiritual reality," and that particular use of the word is often capitalized. This is the dramatic reality that narrative visual artists seek, far beyond any desire to reproduce simple historical facts. The films in this issue all illustrate the power of design to create context, to make value judgments on the events of history, to find Truth.