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Rebecca Prime
The power of the image, as Jean-Claude Carrièrehas noted, is ???often stronger, oddly enough, in the excesses of fiction than in the supposedly objective honesty of the documentary--as if ???real??? reality were harder to convey than the artificial kind??? (50). In order to convincingly convey the ???truth??? of lived experience--that combination of objective observations and subjective impressions--could it be, to paraphrase Robert Flaherty's famous dictum, that sometimes you have to lie? Pointing a way out of this apparent oxymoron, Toni Morrisonsuggests that the ???crucial distinction... is not between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot??? (303). A camera can record facts, but facts alone do not guarantee a meaningful depiction of the human condition.
In the discussion to follow, I compare two very different approaches to the enduring problem of how to relate the cinematic representation of reality to the reality of social change. Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Michael Winterbottom's In This World (2003) are two recent British films that address a pressing social issue: the plight of refugees and asylum seekers in the West. However, the aesthetic choices and formal strategies these filmmakers adopt in order to communicate their messages could not be more different. Frears, whose career has taken him from the gritty realism of My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) to the Hollywood gloss of High Fidelity (2000), embraces mainstream genres--specifically the thriller and the romantic drama--in his attempt to attract a wider audience to his tale of illegal immigrants in London. The prolific and iconoclastic Winterbottom, whose taste runs the gamut from Thomas Hardy adaptations (Jude, 1996;The Claim, 2000) to Manchester music culture (24 Hour Party People, 2002), opts for a more documentary, vérité approach, working on location with a minimal crew, no script, and non-professional actors. However, despite a generally positive critical reception, neither film succeeded at the British box office.1While subject matter was undoubtedly a significant factor in diverting the Saturday night multiplex crowd towards other, less taxing diversions, I believe that genre, and more specifically, genre-crossing, also played an important role in determining the fates of these films. Dirty Pretty Things...