ABSTRACT
Jean-Luc Godard famously said that ‘Photography is truth, and the cinema is the truth twenty-four times a second’. Photography can be a kind of truth, but it is never the whole truth, and it can often be very misleading; for example, the ‘magic of Hollywood’ is not any straightforward kind of truth. Cinema can make a soundstage in the suburbs of Sydney conjure up a vision of fin-de-siècle Paris (in Moulin Rouge) or Pinewood studios look like the Himalayas (in Black Narcissus). 1 These are highly artificial ‘constructions of place’, and involve using models of parts of buildings as well as painted backdrops, photographic back-projection and digital effects. The sheer artificiality of the traditional Hollywood film-making process is extraordinary. Even something that looks like a simple conversation when we watch it play on the screen might have been filmed over several days, with the voices dubbed on afterwards, to give proper continuity in the soundtrack.
