The Truth of Fiction: Accounts of Actuality in Social Realist Film

Public opinion is largely shaped by mass media communications. The number of conversational canvases from which we source media has proliferated since the democratization of content distribution made possible by digital. While on the surface this may seem as though more perspectives give rise to a more informed society, in fact what has been demonstrated is an expansion of contrived and controlled messaging, misinformation and disinformation. As vehicles of the moving image television, cinema, digital media, and even forms of surveillance video, are of the most influential and addictive apparatuses for content consumption of the 20th and 21st centuries. Audio-visual mediums have an immersive quality capable of persuasive extremities: able to effectively falsify historical events, reprogramming our understanding of history; and, on the contrary more capable than any other medium to render the lived condition, or life as it is. In relation to the later, the domain of documentary is typically recognised as being ‘the’ genre advocating truth, given its heritage to the referential, the indexical, and the direct record. This research, though, concerns itself with the revelation of truth in the fiction of social realist cinema. It is the argument of this dissertation that the realist attitude, which has an impulse to focus on stories of marginalization, and is less encumbered by virtue of being made independently – that is outside of the film studio system - is a necessary art form to balance the biased conscious purported by the agenda of mass media