i certainly apologize to kevin boon for misunderstanding and thus misrepresenting his views, though his claim that i have misrepresented him suggests that indeed he does think a representation can be more or less adequate to [if not a completely accurate reflection of] the thing represented . . . but let that go, because i really am eager to understand kevins argument, especially since i expect that its widely shared . . . and heres where i get hung up . . . kevin says: "In my last post, I argued (perhaps unclearly) that the film cannot remain faithful to some objective t ruth, or, perhaps more accurately, whether it remains faithful to some objective truth or not is a moot question because the objective truth is not reliably accessible in any totalitarian sense. But this does NOT discount the validity of the film. As I believe I stated, the film does remain faithful to something, and that is the filmmaker's perception. Representation is always subjective. "True" and "False" are judgments, not palpable realities." . . . now I'm not entirely sure i understand this, and am worried by the introduction of the notion of "totalitarian" into the debate, with the implication, i suspect, that anything definitive, by constraining the hermeneutic horizon, necessarily counts as totalitarian . . . but what i really dont follow in kevins message was the relationship of this argument to his closing statement: "It is precisely this, trendy relativist pseudo-problem that allows human beings to recognize Hitler's propaganda films as subjective representations rather than truth." . . . i dont quite know what to make of this but it seems [though i suspect that kevin does NOT mean this] that since hitlers propaganda was indeed faithful to his own perceptions that it must count as being as "true" as anything else in a flawed discursive universe . . . in other words the only thing that could count as a lie is something that was told in bad faith and intended as a lie, thus misrepresenting the perception of the teller . . . and that as long as the teller [or filmmaker] believes it, it counts as true . . . i, on the other hand, would think that what we need is a frame of reference that allows us to recognize certain representations as lies even if they are "subjective representations" kevin would seem to agree, at least in part . . . he "literally stated that some representation can be truer than another. [snip] There is a difference between narrative truth and narrative fiction." . . . if so i dont see why we cant say that hitlers narratives fall in to the latter category . . . for even if we want to take a radically relativist position and say that the ONLY difference between truth and falsehood is one of mode [that the audience reads one and not the other as if it were an accurate reflection of something outside of the text], we still have to allow that the notion of accurate reflection is itself ontologically presupposed by that discursive difference in mode, that the difference in mode is literally unimaginable without that presupposition . . . so no matter how we slice it, some kind of distinction between accurate and inaccurate representations is thus ultimately inescapable mike frank ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/screensite