All the dancing on the head of a pin going on around here on the part of the “F9/11-is-too-a-documentary” crowd, and all the tortured explanations about how “documentary” doesn’t mean what the dictionary says it is, illustrates to me the type of thinking that leads to someone like Bill Clinton to question “what the meaning of is, is.” Everybody knows what the meaning is except the people who want to distort it to suit their own purposes.
Still waiting for the example of the perfectly objective documentary.
Ooooh, those scurillous lefties! Thank Heavens we have the Shining One in the Oval Orifice, to present an impeccable example of perfect candor and veracity. And that lying hound Michael Moore! Do you know he has the audacity to suggest that The Leader is not telling us the whole truth, despite his demonstrated willingness to alter the truth to fit whatever circumstances arise?
Jesus Christ, read your own cite, you jackass. There’re two definitions listed for “documentary,” and only one of them refers to objectivity. Documentaries do not have to be objective. The only reason you can find a dictionary that says other wise is becuase assholes like you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about when it comes to the subject. No documentary ever made has been objective. Not. One. Single. One. Ever. It’s not fucking possible to create a documentary that doesn’t advocate a specific point of view. Even if it doesn’t have any fucking words in it. The decisions made on the editing table throw any pretense of objectivity out the window.
You know, it occurs to me after reading this that some people are using ‘documentary’ as a synonym for “100% true” or something similar, which is just not the reality of filmmaking. People lie, mislead and influence all the time in documentaries. You can’t film someone offering an opinion in a film without advocating his or her position, even a little bit. A doc without a point of view is a very boring film indeed.
Objectivity is something to strive for in documentaries, but as I said before, cannot be reached. A less-objective doc may not be a particularly good documentary (though not neccesarily), but it is still one, just like a boring action film is still an action film.
Well, actually, there is such a thing as an objective documentary, it is a web cam. It is simply on, and reveals the events exactly as they occur, without viewpoint. It is the nature of the subjects that makes a documentary a documentary. Hell, its even a documentary if events are staged, so long as they are staged as nearly as they occured. Triumph of the Will is a documentary, she filmed events as they occured. It is also a work of propaganda, the two are not mutually exclusive.
Seems to me, what annoys Bushiviks more than anything is the footage from the cutting room floor, the stuff that never got onto the nightly news, stuff that seems to show the Prez as a doofus. This is wide of the mark, of course, the Prez is a dangerous doofus.
But someone decided to point the web cam, no? I understand what you’re saying, and that’s close, but it’s still got subjectivity to it.
Ahem…
Hey, Miller, old buddy! How ya’ doin’? Long time, no see. 
I think the question as it pertains to the meaning of objective is, does the film reflect a certain point of view based on the subject (such as, say, Muhammad Ali’s side of the lead-up to a fight and the fight itself), or does it reflect a certain point of view deliberately slanted to favor the film-maker’s viewpoint?
One could make a film about Ali that dispassionately focuses on his day-to-day life in preparation for a fight – and it could show footage of the fight taking place along with dispassionate commentary about the action. To me, this would be a documentary.
If, on the other hand, a passionate film was made that was slanted to make Ali look like either a hero or bum, his opponent as a either bum or hero, and the film-makers bias pro or con regarding Ali, his opponent, and/or boxing itself, was readily apparent, it would fail to meet my definition (and apparently, the dictionaries’ as well) of a documentary and would fall IMHO, into the category of propaganda.
Obviously, it could be argued that the first type of film is not “objective” because it only focuses on Ali, and that the film maker chooses what to include and what to exclude. This is the type of argument being put forth here by the people who favor calling Moore’s film a documentary.
However, the term “objective” as I have always understood it to mean in the context of film-making, is that the film does not assume a particular point of view pro or con toward the subject itself. “Documentary” film-making has nothing to do with giving equal coverage to each side, and its objectivity has nothing to do with what is included or left out unless such decisions are being made with the specific intent to portray the subject in such a way as to reflect the film-maker’s personal point of view.
With regard to what some people here are saying about there being, in effect, no such thing as an “objective” documentary because someone has to point the camera, to me this is tantamount to saying there is no such thing as non-fiction because a book is never published that doesn’t contain some fiction, even that which may be inadvertent.
It is precisely this kind of hair-splitting that I mean by “dancing on the head of a pin.” I think most people can discern when a subject has been approached dispassionately with the intent of providing satisfactory but neutral information about a subject, as opposed to being presented with information that is clearly intended to try to persuade the audience to the point of view of the film-maker.
I would think that it’s more due to the influence of the way it’s presented. The portrayal in TPotC is how it’s taught to a lot of christians. It’s possible then that Gibson was under the same misconceptions, so the movie is no more anti-semitic than Airman’s post, unless Gibson had an intent to make the Jews look bad.
This is speculation and not really an argument, but if they did that, it’s because they wanted to get him on something. These guys thought God would be so pleased, but someone who was claiming to be God rebuked them often. Perhaps they knew deep down that he was for real, and created a trumped up charge of blasphemy.
Of course, it still wouldn’t work because of the other stuff you mentioned, but perhaps the motivation was there.
I have to admit, I find it appealing in a tragic way the version that the Jews had a hand in it. God’s own people unwittingly killing Him (or wanting him to be killed) when He came to save them. Kind of a repeat of the mistake of Adam and Eve, but different.
I’m waiting for somebody to come out and go “National Geographic! BOO-YAH!!!”, but even then, one side of a “documented” debate often comes out looking like a giant jackass. Which side that is generally depends on a particular viewer’s own point of view.
I mean, how many documentaries on the History Channel about Pearl Harbor also mention the Japanese Internment? How many on the Internment also mention, say, the Rape of Nanking?
“Documentary” seems to me to be the film equivalent of “non-fiction.”
I understand that. And I’m saying that all documentaries - all of them - contain the latter definition of objective to a greater or lesser degree. Moore uses it to an excessive degree, which is one of the reasons I don’t bother with his movies any more. I know what he’s going to say, and I know that it’s going to be pretty muche exactly what I want to hear, and that’s very boring to me. It’s absolutely propaganda. Hell, you could almost call it pornography. That doesn’t mean its not a documentary.
But your first example has a bias, too. At the very least, the bias is that “Mohammed Ali is an interesting person involved in an interesting pursuit.” The execution of such a film would, no doubt, entail further biases. What does the editor include? What gets left out? These decisions, which are totally invisible to the viewer, have a huge effect on how the subject is going to be perceived by the audience. Hell, the very concept of what “objective” means is ultimatly going to be subjective. What gets left in by one director in the interest of “objectivity” might get cut by another director in pursuit of the self-same goal.
I would say that that is the type of argument put forward by people who actually understand the documentary form. Your phrasing of that sentence belies your own bias.
See how tough this objectivity thing is?
And I’m saying that it’s impossible to make a film that doesn’t do that. It’s implicit in the very act of pointing a camera at something and pressing “record.”
Close. There’s such a thing as non-fiction, of course. There’s no such thing as objective non-fiction. All a documentary is, is the cinematic equivalent of non-fiction. It’s about stuff that actually happened, based on sources that actually exsist. Wether or not its used to forward a particular agenda is entirely beside the point.
I agree, which is why people ranting about how Moore “isn’t really making documentaries” as if they’ve discovered some great secret is so fucking ridiculous. There isn’t a person on Earth, Michael Moore included, who thinks his documentaries are dispassionate or neutral. It’s the most stupid argument against his work you could possibly mount.
And just for shits and giggles, here are the first two Google hits for ‘national geographic documentary’:
Journey of Man: A Genetic Odessey:
By analyzing DNA from people in all regions of the world, geneticist Spencer Wells has concluded that all humans alive today are descended from a single man who lived in Africa around 60,000 years ago.
Anybody want to bet that this film isn’t particularly sympathetic to the Creationist argument?
But, actually, some same-sex birds do do it. So do beetles, sheep, fruit bats, dolphins, and orangutans. Zoologists are discovering that homosexual and bisexual activity is not unknown within the animal kingdom.
Or that this one doesn’t give a lot of weight to those who argue that homosexuality just ain’t natural?
Is anybody willing to argue that those two films are not, in fact, documentaries, because they do not objectively explore both sides of the debate in two current controversies?
Only by your definition of objectivity, which is in itself subjective (as is mine). You don’t move a non-fiction book to the fiction aisle because it contains an error, especially if it’s a quote of someone saying something that’s in error. It’s a document of that person saying the erroneous quote.
The point I think you’re missing, or which perhaps has become lost, is that I’m not talking about whether or not people think Moore is dispassionate or neutral; I’m talking about the misappropriation of a word to mean something that it doesn’t really mean. You may recall I took a similar stance on the word “homophobe.” Words have meaning. You don’t just decide that you want to use them in some new way because it happens to suit your purpose, and ipso facto, that meaning becomes legitimate. Look at what has become of “diva.” Any successful female performer now is a “diva.” It’s ridiculous.
Except in this case, it’s those who are demanding the unrealistic (IMO) standard for documentaries who are changing the definition to one that didn’t exist. Which is not to say words can’t change meaning (gay, for the prime example), but if you’re into being consistant…
What was factual about portraying the subject line of a letter to the editor of the Pantagraph as a news headline from said paper?
Unrealistic? We’ve cut and pasted from dictionaries whose definitions are quite clear…or at least would be to the average fifth-grader. But here? Noooooo…instead we get hair-splitting and dancing on the head of a pin such as I’ve described, or we get “dictionaries are descriptive, not proscriptive,” etc. In other words, it doesn’t matter what the dictionary says, you’ll just find some way to deny it.
Or is it your contention that words have no specific meaning and that dictionaries should serve mostly as “guidelines.”
(In the case of the word “gay,” I suppose I find it less egregious because it doesn’t fly in the face of what the word previously was known to represent. Words often have more than one meaning. But when you have a film that is the exact opposite of the traditional, dictionary-defined meaning of documentary claiming to be one, that is when it becomes a problem.
The point you’re missing is that the word “documentary” has never meant “objective.” The term is misused by those who do not understand the genre. Much like the term “theory” is misused by those who do not understand the scientific method. The fact that this misuse is so widespread as to merit mention in a dictionary does not make that misuse correct. Dictionaries do not, after all, necessarily provide the correct definitions of words, only the most popular. And no one here is arguing that the perception of documentaries as “objective” is not widespread. Here’s a fairly good introduction to the history of the genre. Note that the original documentaries involved a fair bit of outright, deliberate falsehoods and a significant amount of stagery. Compared to the first documentarians, Michael Moore is a model of probity and even-handedness.
What Miller said.
“Cleave” can mean either “to bring together” or “to break apart”.
Words fail me.
Starving Artist, I gave you a definition from an online dictionary of the noun “documentary” which did not contain the word “objective.” I am not surprised to note that you are pretending I did not.
I’m dropping out here. It’s abundantly clear that this thread is turning into a rehash of all the threads we’ve had before, with all the posts we’ve had before. Y’all have fun storming the castle!