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| Pol t cal Documentary: Fahrenheit 9/11 and the 2004 Elect on

D. Cohen, ed., News Incorporated: Corporate Media Ownership and Its Threat to Democ-
racy. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005; Vigil, Jose Ignacio Lopez, and Mark Field,
trans. Rebel Radio: The Story of El Salvador’s Radio Venceremos. Willimantic, CT: Latin
American Bureau, Curbstone Press, 1991; Yoder, Andrew. Pirate Radio Stations: Tuning in
to Underground Broadcasts in the Air and Online. New York: McGraw Hill, 2002.
Kate Coyer

PolitiCal doCuMentary: fahrenheit 9/11
and the 00 eleCtion
For many, the year 2004 was a watershed moment in documentary history.
Never before had so many documentaries, from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11,
to Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, to Jehane Noujaim’s Control Room, played to
packed houses in multiplexes across the country. What seemed most compelling
about this spate of documentaries was not only their popular appeal, but their
political nature. Whether aimed specifically at the presidential election, or look-
ing critically at the war in Iraq, documentaries in 2004 worked not only to docu-
ment, but to persuade. For some critics, this was a welcome countermeasure to a
media that many believed had failed in its mission to inform the public. For oth-
ers, however, this was a sign that a once venerated tradition had become tainted
by a new media landscape driven by strident partisanship and geared towards
the production of “infotainment.” But is political documentary really something
new? And, more to the point, should documentary be “political” at all?
The reality is that political documentary has been around for as long as docu-
mentary itself. Indeed, documentary’s earliest pioneers put the form to explicitly
political uses, whether it was the agitprop of Dziga Vertov, meant to communicate
the values of revolutionary Russia to its people in the 1920s, or the advocacy
films of John Grierson, geared towards educating the British public about issues
of social concern in the 1930s. And in the U.S. context, political documentaries
have always played a central role in the development of the form. For instance,
in the 1930s, progressive film collectives such as the Workers’ Film and Photo
League formed to champion political causes and expose the devastating effects of
the Great Depression, while government-sponsored films, such as Pare Lorentz’s
The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), constructed power-
ful appeals on behalf of the Roosevelt administration. In the 1940s, Hollywood
filmmakers such as Frank Capra (the Why We Fight series, 1943–44) and John
Ford (The Battle of Midway, 1943) were recruited to make the case for the U.S.
government’s decision to enter World War II.
Later on, in the 1950s, journalist Edward R. Murrow took the government
on with TV documentaries that advocated against the injustices of McCarthy-
ism (See It Now, 1954) and exposed the mistreatment of migrant farm workers
(Harvest of Shame, 1960). The 1960s and 1970s saw an eruption of political work
by independent documentarians. Filmmakers like Emile de Antonio (In the
Year of the Pig, 1969) and Peter Davis (Hearts and Minds, 1974) criticized both
the effects of the war in Vietnam and the rationale for it, while women film-
makers tapped the powers of documentary to bolster the burgeoning feminist