Perspective

Lets pick any group of people and imagine four hours of film devoted to discussing them, but the film was put together by someone on the outside of the group.

For instance, let's say that you wanted to watch a film on American History put together by the Chinese. Ok. . . perhaps the Chinese are more antagonistic towards the US than most countries, so we choose maybe the British or Spain or Mexico. Or maybe the Native Americans. How about we let Canada do it?

See? No matter who is chosen, there will be certain biases brought to the table. One man's "terrorist" is another man's "freedom fighter". Lincoln's decision to send the Grand Army of the Republic to keep the South from seceding can be looked on as triumph of Union, or the death of State's rights.

A filmmaker's point of view will determine which facts they choose and in what light to place them.

Depending on whether you belong to the group or not, you may have differing feelings on an outsider presenting a particular group's culture, characteristics and beliefs. One may argue that in order to get a 'balanced' presentation, an outsider must do it, because in insider will tend to slant things their own way. This is perhaps true in almost all cases, but would not the converse equally be true? Won't an outsider slant things their way as well?

One of the best films I have seen is "Tora! Tora! Tora!" which showed both US and Japanese perspectives of events leading up to the attack of the naval base at Pearl Harbor. We got both points of view from separate film crews headed by US and Japanese directors.

Your point of view determines much of what you get out of a filmed presentation. By that same token, the point of view presented has a lot to do with the personal beliefs and biases that the filmmaker has.

So how do you know if a film presented as fact is actually fact? Consider: (for those of you who are Bible readers) The serpent in the garden told Eve a truth and accompanied it with a lie. Even if you are non-religious, or believe the story to be allegory, you can still see the value in this narrative. We learn that evil will often try to convince you of lies by packaging it alongside truths.

You should be skeptical. The commercials on TV with the Bill-Gates-alike as the "PC", and the younger, hipper kid as the "Mac" are a prime example of what I am talking about. The commercials imply that one of the advantages Macs have over PCs is that they are not susceptible to viruses or programming bugs. One simple search on Norton's product page will show you that they sell antivirus for Mac. Why would they do that if Macs are immune? And programming bugs can hardly be avoided no matter what platform a software is written for. Operating systems crash. It doesn't matter if it's Vista, OSX, some flavor of Linux or BSD, a human wrote it. Humans make mistakes. Humans write bugs into their code. The Mac commercials paint a picture of perfection, while making PCs seem like the stupid or boring choice.

Imagine how biased these films would be:
A Beef industry promo made by vegetarians.
A look at American benevolence made by Al Jazeera.
Taiwan's sovereignty discussed by the Peoples Republic of China.
Anything by Michael Moore

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Remember that 'facts' can be presented in a myriad of ways. The way things are worded can be in ominous tones or optimistic, the colorization can be washed out or vibrant, the music can be plodding along in a minor key or trip along brightly. Context can be omitted, motives can be implied, statistics can be quoted. A person completely ignorant of a particular subject matter can end up worse than ignorant after watching a skillful lie wrapped in truths. It is done every day on a number of subjects. Global Warming is just one example.

The old adage is true: "Don't believe everything you hear", but perhaps a better way to phrase it would be:

"Don't believe everything you want to hear."