The Authenticity Feeling: Language and Dialect in the Historical Film

Abstract

The Authenticity Feeling film-history.org/approaches/authenticity-feelingLanguage and Dialect in the Historical Film 1The pursuit of authenticity is film's dominant mode of historical representation.For the overwhelming majority of historical film makers and audiences, authenticity signifies a realistic historical experience, an effective suspension of temporal-spatial disbelief.Authenticity, as the engine of mainstream historical filmmaking, has three chief functions: as an aesthetic strategy, a reception discourse and a marketing discourse.A feeling, a form of perception and (supposed) knowledge, the aesthetic success of authenticity, and thus the mainstream historical film, is assessed via the following question: Has the past been conveyed in a way that the spectator can reconcile with his or her perception of the historical reality?Audiences speak of films that "bring history to life".2I call this condition -this sensation of a media-produced, purportedly successful historicity -the ‚authenticity feeling'.To be sure, authenticity and the authenticity feeling are products of particular domains and styles of representation, including costume and music.Precisely because authenticity remains, among many audiences and critics, the most important benchmark in the evaluation of historical filmmaking, however, it must be understood and examined as a chief characteristic of marketing and reception discourses.Interviews with actors, directors and other film personnel, advertising campaigns and Making Of featurettes frequently and consistently refer to the quantity and quality of pre-production historical research.The producers of ZODIAC (David Fincher, USA 2007), we learn for example, used helicopters and cement to plant trees on a barren California island in order to precisely reconstruct a murder scene due for a mere smattering of shooting days.On the ‚San Francisco Chronicle'-set, production designers sourced painstakingly elaborate replicas of every page of each day's newspaper, even though they never appear on camera.Such meticulous forms of realism, the prop master Hope M. Parrish explains in the Making Of, help the actors slip into their roles.The screenwriter and other personnel justify this obsessive degree of historical reconstruction with auteurist appeals: according to them, David Fincher is no mere perfectionist, but above all the consummate, uncompromising artist, and the pursuit of visual authenticity represents a sort of method acting for sets, props and locations.(Fincher himself never speaks; the production designer, costume designer and make-up artist admire him from the distance as talking heads.)Furthermore, and above all in recreating instances of human suffering -ZODIAC revolves around a serial killing spree in northern California in the late 1960s -filmmakers appeal to a sense of moral duty to stay as close as possible to known and knowable facts, as a gesture of

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