I'd better add that at the same time I criticised Moore's films for concentrating more on making the audience feel rather than understand, it could also be said that the best moments of his films do the same - such as the example essrog brought up of the war footage in Fahrenheit 9/11 which also affects the audience primarily on an emotional, gut level response of horror to what they are seeing.
He is a filmmaker of the heart rather than the head, for both better and worse! I think at his best many of his stunts grab the attention and fix the issues in people's minds for much longer than they would if they were just given a dry delivery - and the success he has had with his films and television series is probably due to that way of removing some of the inaccessibility from the issues and making people think they might be able to play a role in changing things (while I might agree about laziness being a factor another thing that creates apathy amongst people is a sense of futility, of events rumbling on regardless of whatever they feel about the issue. The Iraq war is a big example of that, where the war was pursued with a single-mindedness that nobody, even people in positions to oppose it, could have stopped. At least Moore was able to suggest that on an individual level you could register your displeasure, even if it wasn't going to change things, and say "not in my name"! Even if it turned out it wasn't enough to change the election results!)
David Ehrenstein wrote:
Precisely. The "You've got to show both sides" fraud is a means of neutralizing protest to the point that its rendered meaningless.
Neither Moore, nor anyone else, is "obligated" to "show the other side" of injustice.
By such stands The Sorrow and the Pity is outrageous because Marcel Ophuls declines to represent the Nazi "side" of the story.
I hadn't thought about it that way! I don't want to suggest that an 'essay-film' is any better or worse than a classical 'documentary', more that they seem to be separate types of films using non-fiction material. I like the film The Corporation - it plays like a documentary and interviews people with different viewpoints on the issue, while at the same time leaving little doubt in the audience that it subscribes to the 'corporations are thieving scumbag psychopaths' point of view! (The When The Levees Broke film seems similar in not being ambiguous about whether its sympathies are with the government or the people of New Orleans!) A documentary as I'd loosely try to define it is not excluded from having a bias either through a voiceover or a choice of interview subjects, but often tries to interview as many people from all sides of the subject as possible to try and produce as much of a comprehensive overview as it can. Bringing up Nazi's, I'm reminded of a film like Shoah, or the BBC series The Nazis: A Warning From History which does feel an obligation to interview people involved in the events of the time in the Nazi regime. It doesn't mean that they are condoning Nazism by including interviews that allow people the chance to justify themselves (the title of the BBC series suggests the attitude they expect the audience to take, if they didn't already realise that Nazis were bad!), but it allows the audience to hear an often unheard perspective on the events. It also gives the audience a small opportunity to think about the subject for themselves and decide on their opinion of the person rather than being forced to see things only from the perspective of the omnipresent filmmaker telling us what to feel in essay films (though documentaries have their own subtler ways of suggesting to us what to feel about what they show and, as you say, to neutralise interaction by using a framework that suggests it is an 'offficial' version of a story). Without being told what to feel the interviewees stand and fall by their words and while essay films have a purpose in spurring a viewer to action a classical documentary in a way depends on the viewer already being able to interact and say "I don't agree with what he said" or "I think that person had a point, but...."
Essay films have just as important a place in non-fiction filmmaking. Not just Sorrow and the Pity, but we could also think of Night and Fog, Letter To Jane (and from the sound of them the Dziga-Vertov group films) and the Adam Curtis films such as Pandora's Box, The Century Of The Self, The Power of Nightmares and this years The Trap. They add accessibility, give the subjective take on events, give important insights into the way people think and feel about the issues rather than debating issues on a more impersonal level, and can even call for action or change.
Hearts & Minds is interesting as it takes a 'classical documentary' structure with interviews from all across the range of people involved in the Vietnam war, but also at times uses an essay film format mostly in the scenes involving the Vietnamese people reacting to the camera or the emotive way some of the accounts are spoken by the translators (very different to the impassive BBC-style way of just translating what is said without a nuance in tone or emphasis in the speech to create emotion). I would probably put this with the documentary group, but I realise my groupings are arbitrary and not representative of an official cannon, just my attempt to order essay films and documentaries in a way that doesn't denegrate either.
Really the main criticism of the films by Moore that I have seen so far is less that he takes an antagonistic stand or doesn't bother to fully represent both sides of an argument (that is sort of a given in an essay film that is not pretending to impartiality). It is more that he can sometimes be sloppy and disregard and manipulate certain events in his journey to the larger point he is trying to make - that often ends up weakening that larger point through it being built on not the most stable of foundations!
The House Next Door article I linked to above compares Moore with Adam Curtis, but I think the nearest British equivalent to Moore was
Mark Thomas. I suppose Thomas got his Channel 4 series off the back of the success of Michael Moore's TV Nation series (which I think was screened and partly funded by the BBC), but from 1996 to around 2000 his Mark Thomas Comedy Product show was a similar combination of scathing political comedy stand up, calls for viewers to do their part and large scale stunts. I still remember the stunt where he flew a hot air balloon over the restricted airspace of the
Menwith Hill listening base!
Strange how the heightened security and tensions now that we are in the 'war on terror' completely prevents stunts of that kind occuring any more. That seems a way that increased security has protected governments from dissent.
The show finished around the time Channel 4 started showing Big Brother. Make of that what you will....
EDIT:
An episode of the Mark Thomas Comedy Product programme.
