As the time drew near for the American release of the movie Enemy at the Gates, about a duel between two snipers during the battle of Stalingrad, director Jean-Jacques Annaud told the studio he didn't want it to go out with the tag "based on a true story". "I wanted it to say 'based on a legendary duel', as we're saying for the publicity in France," he recalls. "Paramount said: 'You may laugh, but for our publicity we have to tell them Stalingrad was a real battle.'"
You could understand Annaud, best known for The Name of the Rose and Seven Years in Tibet, feeling aggrieved. He has brought to western cinema screens a rare dramatisation of one of the second world war's greatest battles, which saw armies hurled against each other by stubborn dictators, a city destroyed, and Nazi Germany exposed at last to the nature of its folly. Although the film has no US, British or French characters, Annaud managed to wring enough money from backers - $90 million, according to one report - to make Enemy at the Gates the most expensive non-US movie ever.
But if the director and his co-writer, Alain Godard, expected praise from historians for countering the US-skewed Hollywood version of world history with a Hollywood-style treatment of the Soviet role in beating Hitler, he was expecting too much. The best-known modern western chronicler of the battle of Stalingrad, Antony Beevor, has denounced the film as yet another piece of tawdry multiplex fodder, enticing punters with the come-on line of historical accuracy but adulterating it with lies. In an article in the Sunday Telegraph, Beevor conceded that he thought the combat sequences and sets better than Saving Private Ryan but went on: "The film's visual verisimilitude does not overcome that basic clash of interest between historical truth and cinematic priorities."
The story that Annaud believes is true and Beevor believes is false involves a young Soviet sniper in besieged Stalingrad, Vasily Zaitsev, played by Jude Law. Zaitsev's brilliance at picking off the enemy is seized on by a Soviet political officer (Joseph Fiennes), who turns him into a national emblem of defiance in the face of German might. While Zaitsev and his mentor compete for the affections of a beautiful woman soldier, Tania (Rachel Weisz), the unsettled Wehrmacht send for an ace sniper of their own, Major Konig (Ed Harris), to silence the Russian, and the two men duel to the death.
Annaud's critics accuse him of naively - or cynically - accepting a classic piece of Soviet propaganda as true. While Zaitsev did exist, they say, he was not the best sniper, just the best-looking for picture purposes. More to the point, there is no evidence of a Major Konig in any German or Russian archives. The duel never happened: the Soviet propaganda machine invented it.
Annaud, who says Beevor is a good friend, insists that he respects history. He and Godard based their script on an American book of the Cold War era and selected Russian sources. Annaud said he would not necessarily have stopped shooting the film if he'd read Beevor's book, but it is clear he is less certain now about the absolute truth of the Zaitsev-Konig duel. "My intimate conviction is that there was a side of that story that happened, though part of it may have been invented by the commissars," he says.
Beevor brackets Enemy at the Gates with two recent egregious examples of Hollywood lying - U-571, where US forces, rather than the Brits of reality, seize a Nazi code machine from a U-boat, and The Patriot, where the enslaved blacks of revolutionary America are portrayed, absurdly, as willing brothers in arms of non-racist white comrades.
The comparison is unfair. There are no US heroes showing the Red Army how to snipe in Enemy at the Gates. We don't see friendly Nazi soldiers handing out tea and buns to captured Soviets. In historical terms, the degree of assumed inaccuracy in Enemy at the Gates is altogether more trivial - about on a par with the kind of criticism levelled at Hollywood when it makes "real" gangsters more beautiful and lovable than they really are.
Annaud can't be accused of unquestioningly accepting Soviet propaganda when he portrays the slaughter of Red soldiers by their own side when they try to retreat. Even the Zaitsev story itself is full of ambiguity: the character resents his role as a propaganda creation, and Annaud never makes clear how many men he really killed.
Which leaves the Konig story. There Annaud does seem to have fallen victim to fact-laundering - the hallowing of a falsehood by its passage through another, supposedly "cleaner" medium, in this case the American book.
The debate over the veracity of Enemy at the Gates will not be the last in the series of spats between a mass-market cinema that craves the cachet of actuality and a sceptical corps of journalists and historians that cannot always tell the difference between an outrageous distortion of history and getting the number of buttons right on a stormtrooper's uniform. Saying an insignificant historical figure really existed when he didn't is not the worst of artistic crimes, but may be a symptom of creative poverty. What we need is fewer films based on a true story and more based on a true world.
Annaud believes he can mix imagination and truth. "I feel I'm like a person building a bridge. The pillars are history books and the spans between the pillars are invention. I believe this is what happens with history in general. You have an element of truth and after that it builds into a legend. This is the legend of Charlemagne, of Joan of Arc. We know the legend: what do we know about the life of Jesus Christ? It's written hundreds of years later by people who never met the guy."