Re: Documentaries

***Originally Posted to Modern Politics and You***

Hmmm...I have a class to get here, so I'll make this quick.

I think the root of my problem with F9/11 is not the politics of the movie (I mean, all Moore wants us to do is vote for Kerry, and I'm already doing that for my own reasons). My real problem is that my intellectual life has been very much shaped and molded by excellent documentaries...Cosmos, Connections, The Day The Universe Changed, Ascent of Man, and many others have all been very important influences for me. All of those series, while they merely stated a series of facts, did so with the purpose of advancing the notion of a more secular, science based society...The idea of trusting in technology and not theology. In that respect, they are all very controversial works.

The beauty of them though, is that they were, under microscopic inspection, right with the details. They create a sort of thread with fact and history and weave it into a tapestry of a worldview. You can challenge the message, but you can't challenge the facts. It works like any well reasoned argument.

There's a bond of trust there between the viewer and the filmmaker.

Morris's Fog of War does something similar in the realm of political dissent. There were very obvious parallels there between the historical view he presented of the Vietnam War, and the mistakes that were being made then, and then the mistakes that Morris saw happening with our current policy in Iraq.

Michael Moore rips all that to shreds. All he cares about is the message, and he will make any accusation, use any innuendo or mold any circumstancial evidence that he needs to produce that message. "Documentaries" like that belittle and soil the legacy of the documentary format by breaking the bond of trust with the viewer. Moore doesn't even make an attempt to establish that trust with the viewer.

Moore has defended this problem by claiming that his works are comedy, not documentary. That, in itself is bullshit. He won an Oscar for a "documentary" (somehting that confoundes me to this day). Everyone knows he makes "documentaries"...He cannot simply change that by claiming a different format. As long as he is making "documentaries", he still soiling the format, no matter what excuse he uses.

If Moore wants to make brilliant, brilliant comedy, he can go right ahead. But as of yet, he has not. He's still making these petty "documentaries".

Now, the people who have decided to counter Moore with Moore-like material, are just as much part of the problem as Moore is. They are solving nothing.