Nearly True: Forking Plots, Forking Interpretations: A Response to David Bordwell’s “Film Futures”

I would like to examine what is “nearly true.” This phrase is not meant to characterize David Bordwell’s exceptional essay, “Film Futures,” which I would summarize with Orson Welles’s film title, It’s All True. However, since Welles never quite finished that film, perhaps I might supplement Bordwell’s argument with a few thoughts about the matter of interpreting film, specifically, about interpreting what is “nearly true” in a plot. I believe that what is “nearly true” is an important kind of “fork” in a plot and has an impact on a film’s future, that is, how a film acquires value after having been seen.