| We live in an age of information and mass media; people tend to take in whatever is presented by the mass media without critical screening. Serving both as a blessing and a burden, film is one of the greatest tools that we have at our disposal, which is an especially powerful medium in providing visual representations of abstract and distant historical concepts. However, when viewed with an unsuspecting eye it can create overwhelming misrepresentations, misunderstandings, and false perceptions. This paper takes Kingdom of Heaven, a 2005 Hollywood epic film as an example to analyze its authenticity by comparing the film story with the original historical background, Crusades——Christians'failed ruthless military invasion and atrocity to holy city Jerusalem. As both an epic and romance, the film focuses on a legendary story of a historical person Balian during Crusades. In times when religious and cultural conflicts are sensitive now, the film is a real challenge, which inevitably leads to some changes over history. Therefore, whether the film's change on history is reasonable or not is analyzed in three angles:narratological features and performing techniques; ideological approach; audience-response approach.The findings indicate that such changes are inevitable, which can also be traced both to the ever-productiveness of text and the on-going nature of our understanding of it. Thus, from this particular case, arises an issue on how to determine the truth of text in general. Theoretically, hermeneutics is committed to the science and art of interpretation and is accordingly examined for its applicability to the case in question. Modern hermeneutics has undergone a long chain of development since the 19th century and has absorbed many important new elements from other branches of learning. It is found that all these new factors have contributed to the improvement of our understanding and can be effectively applied to a particular case like this. one. One of the lessons taught by hermeneutics is that the success of interpretative activity depends on not only objective examination of the factors of the text, but also objective examination of the factors of the interpreter herself and the methods she has adopted. In conclusion, the case study and the discussion involved in the paper have revealed, in some degree, the process and methods for exploring the truth of text in general, and given some enlightenment to critical examination of films or other mass-media-products on historic topics in particular.
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