Doc or not?

"Michael Moore doesn't so much make documentaries as make movies with documents: if, that is, the term 'documentary' has any more descriptive precision than, say, 'nonfiction,'" writes Geoffrey O'Brien in the New York Review of Books in a piece that's best around its middle, where O'Brien discusses Moore as a collector and even as a casting director. "In his first film, Roger & Me (1989), Moore invented for himself - and more or less perfected - the genre in which he has continued to work: call it first-person polemic, or expressionist bulletin board, or theatricalized Op-Ed piece."

Not at all, counters Louis Menand in the New Yorker. Fahrenheit 9/11 is most certainly not "an outlaw from the documentary tradition," he argues, and retraces the history of the genre to drive his point home. Then: "What’s wrong with Fahrenheit 9/11 isn't the method. It's the thesis. Moore's big idea is that the war in Iraq wasn't about running the world; it was about money. This seems exactly backward."

Reviewing Robert Kane Pappas's new doc, Orwell Rolls in his Grave, Ian Williams writes, "The one unmitigated triumph of the Bush reign has been a liberal artistic efflorescence."

Also at or via Alternet: Michael Atkinson in In These Times on The Yes Men and Noy Thrupkaew in the American Prospect on Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train and on S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine.

Eija Niskanen interviews the team behind The Corporation for Film International.

That cover of L'espresso, by the way, is current. The interview was conducted (in Italian, naturally) by Javier del Pino, most likely before news broke that Fahrenheit 9/11 would be banned in Kuwait, and was found via Perlentaucher's Magazinrundschau.

Posted by dwhudson at August 2, 2004 10:03 AM