Anna Funder’s book, Stasiland, has a terrific reputation – it won the £30,000 Samuel Johnson award, the most valuable non-fiction prize in the world. The work confirms the public career of an excellent writer with a sharp mind and a lawyer’s passion for thoroughness. For The Guardian, she looks at The Lives of Others, a German film about the Stasi by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. She is not happy.

This is another one of those films that makes claims to historical authenticity. As Anna says –

“The publicity notes to the film claim “the greatest authenticity” and “never-before-seen accuracy”, and cite many prominent historians of the GDR. It may well be the first realistic portrayal of the GDR.”

Von Donnersmarck never claims this is a true story, or in any way typical. But the film is embedded in research:

“My research took four years. I went to many places where you can still feel the spirit of the past. .. Places can store emotions and these visits often gave me more than the many books that I read, and the documentaries that I watched. What was decisive however, were the conversations with eyewitnesses.. I was advised on historical matters by a number of experts…

… I tried to get as many perspectives as possible and heard many contradictory stories – but in the end, I felt I had obtained a very definite feel for the era and its problems. The last and most important element was provided by my work with the actors and crewmembers. Most of them came from the East and brought with them many personal experiences and viewpoints.”

It is easy to make a film of great accuracy which doesn’t tell a true story. Easy to make a film around a fictitious story that participants will embrace – “It was just like that”, they cry, coming out of the cinema. Indeed, they may well reject a film that is based on confirmed documentary evidence because it doesn’t tell the truth according to their particular narrative. “Confirming their prejudices” as the saying goes, but a culturally constructed point of view is more nuanced than this, embraces more secrets, rustles with more contradictions.

Kokoda, produced last year, is such an example. Many people really liked it; the producers claimed that veterans of the campaign celebrated it; to me, a generation younger, it felt inauthentic, and many other people share my opinion. It is a serious debate, which would take some unravelling, but it does serve to illustrate how the notion of accuracy is tricky.

I had an example just last week in which a survivor of the Shanghai camps in World War Two attested to the accuracy of Frank Capra’s propaganda evocation of fascism. She was telling us that the experience we received as an audience – caused by craft – evoked in us something of the feelings she felt as a witness of the terrifyingly dangerous Japanese army beyond the wire.

Anna’s argument goes one step further. She is saying that the story of the film is not only untrue – despite the claim to accuracy – but actually impossible.

“No Stasi man ever tried to save his victims, because it was impossible. (We’d know if one had, because the files are so comprehensive.) Unlike Wiesler, who runs a nearly solo surveillance operation and can withhold the results from his superior, totalitarian systems rely on thoroughgoing internal surveillance (terror) and division of tasks. The film doesn’t accurately portray the way totalitarian systems work, because it needs to leave room for its hero to act humanely (something such systems are designed to prevent). It’s worth looking at the reality of what the Stasi did, and the current relations between them and their victims, to get a sense of where this beautiful fiction sits over that uglier truth.”

The nature of the regime, the kind of people attracted to Stasi, the structure of the organisation and their indoctrination all combined to make any kind of compassion impossible. And this is a film about the growth of just such compassion.

This is probably not important to the audience, and Anna celebrates the film’s artistic qualities. But it is a central problem for the artists involved in the construction of a drama. We know that characters are contradictory, and that stories are incomplete and internally illogical. But there is some strange edge beyond which imagination ought not to take us. Actors will say “My character wouldn’t do that”. Writers will find a story impossible. There is a constant tension between the direction the creators want to take a film for the audience, and the line the artistic entity itself wants to take.

There is a space of courage in story construction, in which the creators need to drive a story to a particular end, but they have to let each individual scene dictate it’s own direction. “What would these people really do here?” Oops… So often this is resolved by the use of a deus-ex-machina, some external element which crashes into the narrative.

Anna’s objection speaks to this dilemma. Everything about the situation – Stasi, the people, the dilemmas.. – points in one direction. Again and again, Stasi agents demonstrated the limits to their characters, and yet it is precisely this edge which the film steps over. To make a larger point about art, hope and decency, but the non-fiction writer in me wants to say we can’t make that point with that story, unless it contains some core authenticity.

How did the artists working on this film deal with the issue? They obviously managed it, because the film is well received. We should remember that the dilemma I have articulated varies hugely between forms. Not even gravity matters in Spiderman 3, but United 93 runs to much tighter rules about credibility. Indeed, there is a German passenger in this film who is such an extreme stereotype it leaps out and destroys our collective disbelief.

It is a lot easier to deal with if you think of a film as a myth in a true place. A kind of fairytale.

But this fairytale is important in the real world. I am not talking about an academic problem, though I pounce on any example of this tension between the true and the imagined. Stasi veterans are pushing their way forward, rehabilitating themselves by political and actual thuggishness. They are barefaced liars and they attack their victims yet again. In the process they distort and suppress the memories we need in order to learn from history.

The truth matters.

Here is a picture of an exhibit at a Stasi museum, which seems to deny the very possibility of a fairytale:

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 1:30 am and is filed under history, ideas and society, visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.