Controversy
The film focuses on the incident of Artemisia's rape and its immediate aftermath, and was initially advertised as "a true story" by Miramax Zoe, its American distributor. However,
In the transcript (of Gentileschi's testimony at the trial, based on records preserved in an archive in Rome), Gentileschi describes the rape in graphic detail and states that Tassi continued to have sex with her... with the understanding that he would protect her honor by eventually wedding her..... In the movie, by contrast, she's a willing partner in lust. During the trial, she says only that "I love him"; "he loves me"; "he gives me pleasure." In the movie, Gentileschi refuses to testify that she was raped, even under torture, a sacrifice that prompts a devastated Tassi to make a sham confession..... Just as problematic, says Garrard, is the way the movie ascribes Gentileschi's creative maturation to the influence of, of all people, the man whom history records as her assailant.... At the same time, many inconvenient details -- most glaringly, Tassi's relentless campaign during the trial to smear Gentileschi as a slut -- didn't make it into the movie....
Art historian Mary Garrard and feminist Gloria Steinem, incensed by the misinformation in the film, organized a campaign to inform audiences for "Artemisia" that what they were seeing was not, as was promised in early advertisements, "The Untold True Story of an Extraordinary Woman.". They put up a website attacking the film as untruthful in presenting what they say was Artemisia's rape by her teacher, Agostino Tassi. At the New York premiere screening of the film on April 28, Gloria Steinem and other women in the audience circulated a fact sheet prepared by Steinem and Garrard. This intervention led Miramax to retract its claim that that film presents a "true" story. Steinem and Garrard's intention was not to interfere with the filmmaker's creative freedom, nor with Miramax's distribution of the film, but rather to counter its historical distortions with concrete factual information about the subject.
Read more about this topic: Artemisia (film)
Famous quotes containing the word controversy:
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)