Let me add a little clarity to the intent.

First, I do not include film as art in my thesis, but film (both still and motion) that can be considered as primary source material. Let's call it archivable imagery.

If not familiar, primary source material is unedited and uninterpreted, such as that famous photo of the Hindenburg burning, the original Magna Carta, or a Martini Henry rifle. The last is an artefact, one that is pretty impervious to my thesis so we can rejoice in that, then put it aside for the discussion.

Secondary source material would include stuff that has been interpreted at the time of the event, such as newsreel, newspapers, letters, and the like. Still useful but more useful to ferret out the person interpreting the events (as in biography) rather than the event itself. Importantly, secondary source material is great for context.

Beyond that, any history book or documentary film only is one person's interpretation of events and the context of events, using and citing primary and secondary material to support his/her interpretation. No more. That's what historians do, whether academic or popular. Some of it is good stuff well proven, some of it weak, and some of it revisionist (a nice way of saying "bullshit")

Art, being Hollywood, books of fiction, paintings, stage-plays, whatever, weren't intended to be even considered in this. Art exists to appeal to the emotions, not to record events and context; a completely different and disassociated field of human endeavour. Forget art for the purposes of this.

With that in mind, go back and give the first posting a reread then come back. Your're back? Good. The thesis is this in a very large and complicated nutshell.

First, for any event recorded in "The Present" there is no more primary source material. The existence of AI, "deepfakes", digital manipulation in all its forms and importantly its difficulty in calling out, has destroyed the notion of primary material.

Second, for any event that happened prior to "The Present", any primary source material retrieved from the internet must likewise be considered polluted. The only material that retains any primacy is that previously recorded in some other form before the internet and held for interpretation directly from that pre-internet form.

Third, secondary source material has to be considered for its value in the same way. While a film of Churchill addressing Commons doesn't make what he says fact, it does prove that Churchill said what he said at the time. It is contextual. Today, the Pope has been "made" by AI to say any ol' bullshit on Youtube and people believe he actually made that speech, for example. AI can make Churchill say something in that same clip we talked of earlier far different than what he really said, but because that clip is archived before and away from the internet, that AI version can be disproven.

Without those building blocks of primary and secondary material upon which an interpretation of an event can be made, "history" no longer can be recorded with any believability or value whatsoever for interpretation.

That brings me back to the belief that the human story must now consists of three eras; The Pre-historic era, The Era of Recorded History, and the Post-historic era.

Interesting aside; both the Pre-historic and Post-historic eras have one thing still largely unaffected as matters of record, which is the artefact we spoke of.