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In Mike Leigh’s 1996 film Secrets and Lies a black woman seeking her birth mother enters a white family, and shatters its walls of illusion. The family, and the audience, confront the questions of what distinguishes true from false marital and familial love. The film exhibits these distinctions in a thoughtful way, rather than preaching or arguing about them. It creates an object of enlightening contemplation rather than fuelling a sugar rush of feeling by violent sensory stimulation. This is what distinguishes art from propaganda or advertising. But film’s sheer sensory power makes it uniquely susceptible, among the arts, for perversion in the latter ways. So ironically, artistically serious film must exercise an almost anti-filmic restraint. The temptation to overwhelm the critical faculties of its audience, to pander to its prejudices or desire to be ‘thrilled’, must be resisted.

The “Desiring is Creating” metaphor in The Taming of the Shrew depends upon the generative power of words as erotic instruments. Petruchio’s blatant lies loosen the connection between words and the world they putatively reflect, and thus create the possibility of a different world—one that, for all that it is a lie, nonetheless can conjure a privately and mutually constituted truth. Or, it can do this if Kate confirms his untruths. Petruchio may believe that he must “tame” Kate if he is to secure her confirmation, but Shakespeare reveals that only their mutual erotic and affective experiences enable them to inhabit the shared reality that becomes their marriage. This shared reality is put to the test in Kate’s problematic final monologue in which she goes it alone, without Petruchio’s poetic flourishes to animate or invigorate her speech. Only when Kate and Petruchio’s words are placed in relation do the lovers generate friction and heat.

This chapter discusses three animated documentaries by filmmaker Jonas Odell: Never Like the First Time! (2006), Lies (2008), and Tussilago (2010). Comparative analysis establishes many of the criteria against which these films are generally considered to be examples of animated documentary practice. In all three works, documentary audio interviews are integrated as voiceover and form the foundations on which Odell as animator-filmmaker visually “packages” interviewees’ stories in ways that render them more interesting and attractive to audiences. As with many other animated documentaries, Odell’s stylistic and technical choices strike a balance between aesthetic aspiration and documentary responsibility to the sense and meaning of his interviewees’ stories. Odell’s filmmaking choices exemplify animated documentary’s distinctive capacity to translate complex communicational codes and data – for example, interviewees’ experiences of memory, the varied styles of their spoken narrations, and the subjective quality of Odell’s interpretations of their testimonies – into concrete, highly distinctive audio-visual forms.

Criminal investigations and the criminal justice system are popularly characterised as a pursuit of the truth. Underlying this is the notion that there is a single, objectively verifiable truth. Chapter 1 starts by situating the trial in historical context and reviews earlier means of ascertaining liability. Many of the processes described appear absurd (and often barbaric) to contemporary eyes, but, historically, there was an acceptance that the methods had probative value. There was also a belief in absolute truth, which these techniques would expose. However, the Chapter reveals truth to be conceptually complex and contested. Attention will also be given to lying, showing that falsity does not necessitate bad faith. This finding is vital to later Chapters as it shows that erroneous conclusions can be drawn despite all parties acting in good faith and believing in the veracity of their accounts.

In Body of Lies Ridley Scott explores the relentless clash of ideologies and religion in the Middle East. This realistic spy movie doesn’t take the usual dashing and romantic approach; it is gritty and violent. Roger Ferris, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is on dangerous ground differentiating those who want to help him from those who want to kill him. To further complicate his life, his CIA boss, Ed Hoffman, portrayed by Russell Crowe, who communicates with his operative primarily via telephonic communication, is working against Ferris behind his back for his own political and personal purposes. Although the film has a logic of its own, audiences found it confusing and critics gave it mostly negative reviews.

This chapter challenges the idea that the invocation of the Muses in early Greek Poetry means that poets saw themselves as reporting historical facts. Referring to Homeric epic, Hesiod, and archaic lyric poetry, it points to a variety of indicators that the authors were aware of their own invention of new material and expected their audiences also to be aware of this invention. Key examples include Hesiod's reported meeting with the Muses, Stesichorus’ two prologues on Helen and epodes by Archilochus referring to invented episodes. The overall implication is that there is a wide awareness of the possibility of what we call ‘fiction’ even if there is no genre which is explicitly presented as fictional and no term corresponding to the idea of fiction.

For their first session with Columbia, in New Orleans in April 1927, the Revelers, or their producer Frank Walker, picked a safe foursome: two breakdowns and two waltzes, with nothing particularly out of the ordinary about them. The breakdowns “Johnson Gal” and “Leather Breeches,” coupled to form their debut release, gave a good introduction to Will Gilmer’s agile fiddling and the delicate sound of the band as a whole. “Johnson Gal” was unusual in having a vocal refrain by Gilmer, perhaps the only solo he committed to record.

This chapter examines James Cameron's True Lies (1994). True Lies depicts how digital and information technology can be abused. A significant part of the drama in the film is derived from the ease with which a camera can so readily satisfy peoples' voyeuristic impulses, and is crucial to the development of the plot and the film's presentation of a recurrent motif that is centred on the ‘screening’ and ‘filtering’ of reality through a captured image. The film critiques American imperialism, and how surveillance has become increasingly embedded in the material culture of so many peoples' daily lives. It also served as a catalyst for Cameron's conception not only as a ‘storyteller’, but also as a resource-intensive filmmaker.

This chapter begins by problematising the notion of cinematic identification with either perpetrator or victim and of witnessing, especially in technologically mediated form. The theme of the witness is key to both torture and to cinema. The potential to be or act as witness is explored for the protagonists, viewers, diegetic truth-telling machines, and the film itself. Close readings of Rendition (Gavin Hood, 2007) and Body of Lies (Ridley Scott, 2008) explore how the films address this key visual metaphor. Contemporary violence and the mediated forms in which it is witnessed are reflected through different media images.

This chapter examines the films of Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh's twenty feature films present a diverse range of subject matter and formal styles. They range from his 1989 breakthrough hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape, about the sex lives of four twenty-somethings, to social-problem films such as Erin Brockovich and The Informant! (2009). Even the cost of making his films has shown great variety, ranging from the six-figure budget for Schizopolis (1996) to the star-studded Ocean's series blockbusters (2001, 2004, 2007) that averaged nearly one hundred million dollars to produce. The eclecticism in Soderbergh's movies would appear to invalidate a claim to the distinctive style typical of film authorship. However, the chapter argues that the variety of his work and the commercial viability of some of his films are prominent aspects of his individual style.

This chapter examines science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s novel The Penultimate Truth and Lies, Inc. (formerly known as The Unteleported Man), which form a kind of portal for working through the one history without parallel or alternative. In The Penultimate Truth, it’s all a fair, a show, in love of war: to cut losses on the human side, the Terran population was provided vast mine-like shelters while total nuclear war commenced on Mars. A new world order of Yance-men rule the Earth from their vast estates. Mankind below must watch the show of ongoing total war, films made in the meantime by Eisenbludt of Moscow. The premier filmmaker is Gottlieb Fischer of West Germany. The simulacrum of the world leader, Talbot Yancy, was also designed by Fischer and made in Germany. The polarization between West and East was maintained for the captive audience in the underworld.

Gives a close analysis of two of Plato’s most controversial images: the analogy of the soul and state and the suggestion that the rulers will have to lie to the citizenry, including especially the myth of the metals. These are understood as images of justice (the form), and their limitations as images are revealed. The analogy of the soul and state conceives of each analog as composed of three parts. But the first city Plato has Socrates imagine in the Republic does not have three parts, and then when the arguments for partitioning the soul are given, the principle Socrates offers for finding different parts is misapplied. Alternative formulations of this principle bring other problems, and Plato’s own conclusion of his arguments seems to leave open the possibility that there may be even more parts of the soul than those he has identified. As for Plato’s lying rulers, the apparent problem derives from Plato having a very different conception of truth than the two-valued conception familiar to contemporary philosophers. Plato’s rulers seek to establish the best images of this kind of truth.