Madonna's Truth or Dare

Film gives the illusion of being real to a much greater degree than the stage or any other dramatic art form, and yet the audience is aware that the film is not real, that it is created, and that there is a point of view behind this act of creation. With a documentary film, however, the audience is more inclined to accept whatever is seen as real and to fail to realize that there is a point of view shaping the material in a certain way. The experience of the film itself gives the viewer the illusion of direct knowledge. What the audience is accepting is determined by the form--the audience knows when a scene in a fiction film has been staged but accepts that a documentary is "real" and not staged, even though it may be. The artifact Truth or Dare (1991) is a hybrid documentary, utilizing different documentary styles and mixing them with the somewhat different tradition of the concert film. However, close examination shows that much of what appears in the experience is questionable as knowledge either because it is staged or because the intelligence shaping what is seen and intentionally working to project an image is that of the central figure, Madonna, the performer rather than the filmmaker. She shows what she wants and goads others into serving her image needs throughout the film, thus bending the meaning of representation and reality in the documentary form.

The concert film is not a documentary in the usual sense, though it is about a real event. It differs in t

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audience because of many years of black-and-white news and documentary footage and because of the idea that it is less formal to shoot in black and white than in color and so less likely to have some external sensibility interposed between viewer and image. This documentary wants to seem to be completely spontaneous and thus to gain credibility as a real account of a real situation. However, there are a number of ways in which is it clear that this material was shaped and where it has been influenced by the desire of the makers (and the subject) to project a certain image. There is no doubt that Madonna is always aware of the camera following her around, of course, but in addition there are comments throughout the film as she takes note of the camera, sometimes directing the cameraman toward certain events or people, sometimes chasing the camera away. To the extent that she can control the actual shooting, she is imposing a certain vision on the material even as it is being formed. Clearly, though, there are limitations to the control that the subject can exercise in this fashion. The decision to allow the cameras to follow her around in the first place creates a certain distance between what might be the normal reality and

Category: Film - M