Page 378 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

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

movement through films that were experimental in form and political in con-
tent. In recent years, political documentary has flourished in a variety of forms
and venues, as institutions such as PBS and HBO have created new exhibition
possibilities for nonfiction filmmaking. In 1988, PBS created P.O.V., a series
devoted to the development and exhibition of independently produced films.
With funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, P.O.V. has become a landmark showcase
for nonfiction work that, in their words, “express[es] opinions and perspectives
rarely featured in mainstream media.” In the 1990s, HBO also established itself
as a major contributor to the political documentary scene, working regularly
with such filmmakers as Barbara Kopple, Spike Lee, and Rory Kennedy, among
others. In 2006, HBO premiered Lee’s critically acclaimed When the Levees
Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, his poetic treatise on the aftermath of Hurricane
Katrina.

Can DoCumEnTary BE PoLiTiCaL?

It can be easy to forget how prominent political documentary has been in the
past, however, because the phrase itself seems to be an oxymoron. How can a
film claim to be both political and a documentary?
Most people still consider “documentary” to be an objective style of filmmak-
ing whose primary purpose is to record “life as it is” from a relatively neutral
perspective. Film scholar Bill Nichols argues that, in popular parlance, docu-
mentary is understood to be what he calls a “discourse of sobriety.” In this vein,
documentary is thought to have a kind of “kinship” with other serious systems
of thought, such as science or economics, because they all claim to have an ob-
jective and transparent relationship to the real world. As media scholar Brian
Winston has argued, this common understanding has led to the valuation of
specific kinds of documentary over others. Certain generic conventions, such
as the educational tone and journalistic style of documentaries in the Grierso-
nian tradition, or the fly-on-the-wall aesthetic of “verite” filmmakers like Albert
Maysles and Frederick Wiseman, have become markers of what constitutes a
“real” documentary. Genuine documentaries, it is often claimed, are those that
stand apart from their subject, observe reality from a distance, and through this
process produce a neutral document of the world.
This notion of documentary as neutral observation is complicated, then, when
we add the term “political” to the mix. Film scholar Thomas Waugh defines po-
litical documentary as displaying a commitment on the part of the filmmaker.
According to Waugh, committed documentaries are films that claim solidarity
with a specific group or coalition, take an “activist stance” towards certain issues
or goals, and work within and alongside political and social movements. In this
way, political documentaries would seem to constitute the very antithesis of the
documentary form as it is popularly understood. The idea that documentary
should be an objective, neutral discourse stands in opposition to films that claim
a commitment to particular groups and specific goals. Meanwhile, the notion
that the documentarian should stand outside and apart from his or her subject,