Truth and Telling - Point of View in Storytelling

"You will always have partial points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story that hasn't come out yet. And any form of journalism you're involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge."- Margaret Atwood

Following on from the 'What is the Truth' blog; I sought to find an understanding to documentary filmmaking by exploring one of its core aspects, which I believe is behind nearly every documentary ever made; POV (Point of view). What is POV? How is it linked to the truth? Is there a 100% truthful point of view? These are some of the questions I tried to discover answers for. Point of view, to put in the most basic terms is someone's opinion/interpretation of events/reality. This type of thinking puts POV into the Pragmatic/Subjective truth theory of storytelling; having your own viewpoint that you believe is true, is true for you. As mentioned in the last blog, truth can only be in the present as nothing is set in stone, circumstances may change, which could effect your overall way of thinking on a particular subject matter.

If we introduce multiple perspective storytelling, you can see where the cracks begin to form when relying on a single individual's POV in storytelling; a documentary can't be defined by anyone's individual POV, rather unifying multiple views together, can we try to form a bigger and more accurate picture. Just by changing the angle or sounds within a shot can drastically change the story or event witnessed by an individual. There is always more than one side to a story. Most documentaries/news are meant to gather multiple POV's to provide us with totally correct, truthful and unbiased viewpoints.... but do you really believe this statement to be true?

My answer to this would be no, there is no real truth! All people have differentiating views whether political/cultural/moral/religious/etc, we all have our own POV on the information being fed to us; this difference is reflected in all areas of the media, causing people to segregate usually into 2 different groups, a left or right wing spectrum of thinking. When media provides us with news, depending on who's broadcasting/producing the news, we will receive either a more left or right winged standpoint on the story being shown. This aspect reflects everything in our lives, we either agree, disagree or have no opinion on the matter.

A good example of POV storytelling could be the documentary 'Blackfish'. A great documentary, with its goal being the 100% abolishment of the use of orca whales as entertainment; providing 'factual' information on bad living conditions in tiny confinements, food deprivation and being ripped from their mothers at birth, along with human deaths, it's a very emotional film. In reality, from a neutral standpoint you would also speak on the positives of what the corporation does such as brings in jobs, money, entertainment and interest into the animals to public, cares for them and feeds them daily and the scientific research that is gained from studying them in captivity; going off memory alone, I recall it being only a one way biased documentary filled with 'facts'. Are all the facts they give you true? Who knows. The documentary in itself, a great piece of storytelling, so successful in fact that it has caused the business to lose millions of dollars, hundreds of jobs lost (with the potential of thousands going), all over the use of a handful of whales. The public got behind it so much the government has recently introduced a law which prohibits breeding of the orcas in captivity, which may be the final nail in the coffin for the company. BBC News Article.

This documentary storytelling is interesting, especially how it can change/influence so many people around the world taking everything they tell us as facts. The filmmakers are responsible for the loss of so many jobs, if they had skirted the truth and provided fictional elements to the storytelling should they be held accountable? Is providing facts that can't be proven not slander? If you really look at the 'Blackfish' documentary in depth, using the same structure, you could apply it to all zoo's/circus' around the world and even more intriguing, your very own pets. Is it not the same to have your pets kept in small enclosures, taught tricks, inbred and taken from their parents at a young age? The only main difference between your pet and Seaworld, is we are not making money from it.

It is so rare to come across a totally impartial news/documentary outlet, with the modern structure being compiled of a pyramid of POV's with only the people in charge choosing what to reveal to us as truth i.e. Government/Media tycoons. Granted with the emergence of the internet we have access to an unlimited supply of information but from now with so many different sources, we are no longer able to differentiate what is being told as the truth, or a fictitious truth. There is no 'Whole Picture', only a network of dots that we have to connect up ourselves. Knowing this, when constructing a story together, these are a few truth theories being used to construct a documentary film;

- Pragmatic Truths are used when gathering the individual stories in the documentary, usually given by the members of the public/interviewee's. Moral truth could also be linked into this category, as it's almost instinct to know when something is right or wrong like stealing or killing people.
- Scientific Truth is used to prove facts which is also known as empirical evidence, using the basis that if an experiment is conducted many times with the same outcome, then it is scientific truth. These facts are generally used in science/criminal/historical/nature based documentaries. 'What happened to whom, where, when,how, and who'?
- Historical truth seems self explanatory but a popular phrase attributed to Winston Churchill, "history is written by the victors" shows that not everything we read is to be taken for granted. This again is similar to science in the sense that, as we were not there to witness the event, archaeologists have to compile evidence by reading relevant material and conducting their own digs to prove what really happened. (Coherence Truth Theory).
- Aesthetic Truth, this is the most relevant truth when coming to any form of media given to us. That everything seen in pictures, read in novels or watched in films/tv is not always actually true however, we might say its 'believable'. That it is 'true to life' or could happen in reality - although it is not actually true itself, 'Fiction'.

So if I was to make a documentary using public opinions, I would have to find multiple story POVs to construct the film, while also unintentionally (or intentionally), adding my own personal opinions and views to the story. This makes it more difficult to the viewer to discern any real Truth; meaning i'm bringing my own interpretation of the truth to you. No matter how many scientific facts I use/POVs/pragmatic/coherence/correspondence truths, I am creating a work of fiction in the name of documentary film making. Do you care it's not true? Most don't. For many, the visual storytelling is never meant to be black and white, but more the story which grasps them. In a nature documentary a fully 100% truthful documentary of an animal would be boring, you would just have a series of unedited shots with nothing much happening. Add a story of survival, include predators, adventures, emotional soundtrack and a narrated story, then you have created a work of fiction, captured from the truthful footage and made it interesting to watch. You would not have created a 100% truthful film but neither is it a full fiction, we have just cut the boring stuff out. In essence we can only reveal so much to an audience and it's up to the individual to make their own interpretation of that media, to generate their own conclusions, an aesthetic truth.

Comment below with your views on the topic being discussed, be great to hear your opinion.

Chris Deakin