By Eleftheria Thanouli

Wag the Dog is a movie that grew to become a media occasion and a cultural icon since it inadvertently short-circuited the space that's alleged to separate truth and fiction. The film's narration demanding situations the demonstrated obstacles among the fiction and nonfiction culture, as Barry Levinson, the director, embeds his curiosity in documentary filmmaking and complicates the difficulty of narrative organisation within the means he frames the tale.
The exam of the ancient and social context within which it used to be produced, exhibited and obtained around the world allows the writer to light up a sequence of alterations within the approach a fiction movie displays and interacts with fact, urging us to reassess a few of our crucial and long-standing suggestions or perhaps paradigms in movie thought. Eleftheria Thanouli offers new insights right into a sequence of concerns from either classical and modern movie idea, just like the conceptual and ontological stakes within the use of electronic know-how, the influence of mass media on public reminiscence and the political function of cinema in a globalized and conglomerated world.

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17 Without a doubt, the narrative characteristics of a film could guide us towards one particular direction but, as we saw in the case of Zelig, the shape of the narrative was not sufficient to convince us that Leonard Zelig was a real personality. Despite the omniscient voice-over and the interviews with famous personalities, such as Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow, the average viewer would hardly succumb to the truth claims of Woody Allen’s film. Part of the reason surely entails the absurdity of the subject matter as well as Allen’s star persona.

The-black and-white view of De Niro’s passage through the security control could be considered as a diegetic level of narration that shows us what a bystander would observe in the scene. indd 28 03/06/2013 13:28 Wag the Dog and Narrative Analysis 29 body-detected by the guard is not only pushed to the background but also appears in shallow focus, forestalling the direct presentation of the protagonist to the viewer. 8), which present him as the object of the gaze of other secondary narrative agents.

In Avalon Levinson chronicles the life a Polish-Jewish family that came to America at the beginning of the twentieth century. With Sam Krichinski (Armin MuellerStahl) as a leading character, the plot presents the story of his family from 1950s onwards, while recurrent flashbacks take us back to earlier times. e. of the celluloid itself. 41 The result is a slight jumping effect that distinguishes Sam Krichinski’s focalized images from the diegetic reality that unfolds in the main plot. indd 36 03/06/2013 13:28 Wag the Dog and Narrative Analysis 37 Even though Levinson maintains the subtlety of his stylistic interventions throughout the film, we cannot argue the same about the intrusion of TV in the lives of his characters and the devastating effects he attributes to the medium.

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