However, we are not talking about reality, but ideals. Not what real ‘documentaries’ used to be, but what a documentary film must be.
To paraphrase your statement to describe war:
Once you make a choice where to point a gun at whom to shoot and whom to spare to achieve military victory, you have made a subjective act of violence. It is impossible to have violence that is objective. Even if you have no propaganda going, you still have a message by what you do.
So, why people bother to insist on having wars that are just and less bloody?
It isn’t that tough a concept, folks: movie categories don’t always neatly match up with dictionary definitions. But movies apparently have to be placed in some sort of category so that everyone from the Academy to IMDB knows what to call them, and Hollywood has no category for “polemic” or “op-ed in cinematic form”.
So they place F9/11 in the “documentary” category, and michaelmoore.com acknowledges this: “Michael Moore, the acclaimed filmmaker and #1 best-selling author whose latest movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, is the highest-grossing documentary of all time.” And this means Moore’s claiming that F9/11’s a documentary in the dictionary-definition sense, or somehow “having it both ways”?
Of course not. He’s calling it a documentary with respect to how Hollywood categorizes its films for purpose of comparison, but that’s because it fits no other existing category better. And he’s apparently been clear that it’s not a documentary in the dictionary-definition sense. So what’s the problem? There’s no contradiction here.
It is nice to have ideals on what something should be, but the claim is that Moore’s film was not a documentary not that documenaties should try to reach some ideal asthetic.
My claim is that if one uses that ideal to judge his film as not being a documentary then we have to discount every film under the heading documentary for also failing to meet that criteria.
Now if you want to set up some system that judges what degree a film meets that criteria you still have trouble, because that scale is also subjective based on how much you believe what the film maker is saying is the truth.
What those who hate his film fail to grasp when they say stupid things like it is not a documentary is that most of us who appreciate the film are not mindless morons accepting everything as the absolute God’s own truth.
It reminds me of Creationists who believe that if they attack one bit of an evolution argument the whole Therory should be thrown out.
Michael Moore is biased, yes, does it change the fact that the United States is now fighting in a war that they entered for a reason which proves to be wrong? (Remember this was sold as a defensive war agaisnt a nation building up WMDs threatening the saftey and security of the world)
By the way your war analogy is just nonsense. As there is no definitive definition of a Just war so what is it you trying to prove to me?
Clearly, Moors film did nothing to improve the genre, quite the contrary. F911 utterly fails in comparison to other documentary films, however imperfect, that were listed here before. Including even “Triumph of Will”.
By what criteria do you make that claim? What is it that other Documentaries have that Moores film doesn’t aside from an opposing view point to what you believe?
Wait forget that, give me the breakdown of why “Triumph of the will” is a superior documentary to F 9/11. I know this ain’t great debates but Aside from a blanket statement why don’t you just go and back it up?
Because within its limits, “ToW” is honest film. It shows what was happening in Germany in 1930-s. There is no insinuation, no conspiracy hints, what you see is what you get. The film is open to interpretation. Fascist apologist can look at it and say, “What a magnificent spectacle!” Anti-fascist can see it and say, “This is ant hill on acid! We need to fumigate, but quick!”
If Moore did something comparable to that, if instead of concocting conspiracy theories he would go to anti-war rallies and shot continuous honest footage, that would be honest film. But many wouldn’t like that, because it would open the anti-war protestors to independent evaluation. It would show them as a deluded bunch of pathetic, incoherent, utterly stupid overfed slimebuckets they are. That Moore couldn’t allow himself to do.
Indeed. My fourth-grade Virginia history textbook conveyed the notion that the slaves were happy as slaves, and freedom only made them discontented.
And I’m trying to remember what, if anything, we learned in shcool about the history of the labor union movement. We certainly didn’t hear about National Guardsmen shooting union activists.
Ah yes, all the explorations into racial and political oppression that were part of the National Socialist movement. That’s always been my favorite part of the Riefenstahl film.
:rolleyes:
Even the title of the film is dishonest, as it implies (as does the whole movie) that people from all corners of Germany were unified into following a man who rose to prominence from the unilateral will of the people (whereas I suspect there were some pretty significant percentages of the population who weren’t exactly falling into lockstep quite so easily). The film works terrifically as propoganda because there’s very little in the movie that anti-fascists can actually cling to as “evidence” devoid of any context, and TotW reductively eliminates all context quite effectively. This is why it’s as remarkable as it is insidious.
Ok now I’m guessing you haven’t seen Triumph of the Will and are talking out of your ass.
The film was designed to show the solidarity and might of the Nazi party under Hitler. Also it was to present German support for the movement and its might before the world. Critic of Nazi party or not, the film gave the same impression to each viewer when it came out.
And it just used one rally to do this.
If it were objective on the level you hold Moore to then it might have also showed Germans who didn’t support Hitler at the time, the Jews living under the repressive laws and the fear they lived under. They could have also shown that the Depression actually did have an effect on the nation and that its military might, at the time of the filming was not what they pretended it was. Of course those facts are left out because it counters the message.
Oh that explains it. He didn’t want to show Decent God fearin’ Republicans that anyone who was against the war was some “pathetic, incoherent, utterly stupid overfed slimebucket” lest it keep them from questioning the War and the methods of the administration.
Well thank goodness you are so objective on the matter that you can see past Moore’s B.S.
It is obvious in your world an objective documentary = “supports your world view”.
And it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize the quality of the film on that point, but it still doesn’t remove it from the documentary category. “Objectivity” is not the sole measuring stick of the greatness of a doc, though it can certainly have a profound effect. This comes far more into play when the filmmaker tries to deliberately disguise their subjectivity. I don’t think Moore did this, which doesn’t neccesarily excuse it, but must be taken into account. In fact, I think it’s far more honest to lay it out there. Of course, the effectiveness of the film is then directly tied to how much you agree with the filmmaker’s assertions, but it’s a deliberate risk he took.
Would you rather have filmmaker’s motivations in things like Triumph of the Will hidden, or laid out for you to see, as in F 9/11?