Realism is fiction

In Sculpting In Time, Tarkovsky quotes Dostoevsky as saying, "They always say that art has to reflect life and all that. But it's nonsense: the writer (poet) himself creates life, such as it has never quite been before him ..."
If Dostoevsky said it, then it must be true! But this statement also resonates with my own sense, through my own minor creative work, that realism is fiction. Any attempt to describe, recreate or re-present an actual experience always results in subtle changes to the experience. This is partly to do with time and partly to do with editing.

All experience is gained in the moment, in time, while all description, recreation or re-presentation is reflection on what has passed. The act of reflection is qualitatively different from the act of experience involving, as it does, perspective on the event which it is not possible to have at the time. This difference in time subtly effects the description, recreation or re-presentation of the past event changing it, albeit slightly, in the process.

All description, recreation or re-presentation of past events also involves editorial decisions about what to include/exclude and what perspective to give. Actual experience is a constant flow in time but no description, recreation or re-presentation can mimic the constant flow of events in time and therefore decisions have to be made about where to start and end thereby disrupting the actual flow of events as they were experienced. Much of what is viewed on television purports to be actual experience (i.e. news footage or reality TV) yet editors have always made decisions regarding where and what to film as well as, often, what to show. What is seen is always a glimpse of the actual influenced by an editor's perspective rather than the whole of what occurred.

In this sense, realism - even, or perhaps especially, hyper-realism - is a fiction.

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Paul Weller - That Dangerous Age.