They believe that there are, at most, one and a half sides-a right side and a side that, despite possibly having some redeeming aspects, is, on balance, wrong. People who make documentaries don’t make them because they believe that “reasonable people can disagree,” or that there are two sides to every question. They are people sufficiently committed to a point of view to go to the trouble of obtaining expensive equipment, carting it into the field, shooting miles of film under often unpleasant or dangerous conditions, and spending months or years splicing the results into a coherent movie. It’s not surprising that documentary-makers have usually worked in a spirit of advocacy. It was after the feature-length film became standard that the documentary acquired its distinctive political cast and became a medium of progressivism. They were also, like the dramatic films of the time, short. They were indistinguishable from propaganda. Early documentaries therefore had politics the way that tabloids have politics: they flattered prejudice. He got out of the production business, at which he had been fantastically successful, after two years. The first man to charge admission to a movie, the French industrialist Louis Lumière, thought that the cinema was a novelty without a future. They were, by cinematic standards, scarcely even filmmakers. Those early documentarians were not journalists. The Danish mogul Ole Olsen produced a safari documentary by buying a couple of aging lions from the Copenhagen zoo, moving them to an island, and, inter-cutting stock jungle footage, filming them being killed by hired “hunters.” Audiences didn’t seem to mind. Biograph exhibited a movie called “The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius” made nowhere near Mt. Thomas Edison made a documentary of the Russo-Japanese War on Long Island. The British producer James Williamson filmed the Boer War on a golf course. Finding that on film Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill looked more like a hike on a hot day, producers at Vitagraph reënacted the battle of Santiago Bay in miniature on a tabletop and added it to what they had shot in Cuba. The film and television historian Erik Barnouw, in his excellent survey of the documentary, lists a dozen cases from the early years where material was simply faked. The word suggests observational neutrality, a documentation, an unretouched record of what’s real and if that was the promise it was betrayed almost from the start. Documentaire was one of the names that early filmmakers, back when many of the prominent ones were French, gave to movies of ordinary life, exotic places, and current events. That’s why people make documentaries, and why people go to see them. The essential documentary impulse is the impulse to catch life off camera, to film what was not planned to happen, or what would have happened whether someone was there to film it or not. These movies do have one thing in common, though: they show you what was not intended for you to see. The “Documentary” section shelves Michael Moore next to National Geographic, movies about bad Presidents next to movies about butterflies, bodybuilders, and Eskimos. “The documentary tradition” sounds like a grand phrase for a genre that includes everything from “Nanook of the North” to “Girls Gone Wild.” There’s no doubt that it’s an eclectic form. Whatever you think of Michael Moore’s immensely satisfying movie about the awful Bush Administration and its destructive policies-and reasonable people can disagree, of course-one thing that cannot be said about “Fahrenheit 9/11” is that it is an outlaw from the documentary tradition.
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