Documentaries have even taken over the headlines. The controversial films of Australia’s Dennis O’Rourke (The Good Woman of Bangkok, Cunnamulla), Japan’s Hara Kazuo ( The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, Goodbye CP) and—until he was murdered in Amsterdam by an Islamic viewer enraged by his film’s criticism of the treatment of women by Muslims—the Netherlands’ Theo van Gogh (Submission, 0605) sell newspapers and get on TV talk shows.

Why the sudden popularity of documentaries? Perhaps one reason is that documentaries have become more accessible at the same time as a whole generation is hungry for what they have to offer. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that in a democracy like America’s, the people are not governed by inherited traditions, but instead make judgments based on their own observations and information. Today, the young everywhere understand this. The fragmentation of the market and the multi-channel universe have given documentaries an unprecedented opportunity to reach the public, and the fact that, by Oscar night this year, Fahrenheit 9/11 had grossed more than each of the Academy nominees for Best Picture marks a fundamental change in the culture. A generation has grown up on the Internet and sees Hollywood as only another form of entertainment and TV as just another utility. It is not that the young have deserted movies or television; it is just that many are looking elsewhere for information and entertainment.


Like broccoli and Latin, fact-based films have always claimed the higher ground. Having accidentally taken a vow of poverty, documentary filmmakers like to see themselves as the high priests of cinema—unbiased observers struggling to reveal pure truth. It is no coincidence that documentaries thrive in cultures with Calvinist tendencies, although today this single-minded quest for truth seems quaintly evangelical. After a whole century of movies, and hours spent each day in front of the TV, audiences have become too desensitized to care. Jayson Blair’s made-up stories in the New York Times, cnn’s self-aggrandizing presenters, the planted flaks in the White House press corps, Ben Affleck’s protestations of undying love to whomever—isn’t it all just entertainment? How does truth come into it?

Perhaps in response to media that seem to prefer opinion over information, we have become a society obsessed with personal documentation. We step off the bus with a camera pressed firmly to our eye, concerned with capturing the moment. We can hardly wait to hurry home to relive an experience we have yet to truly enjoy. Things, and our reaction to things, do not seem to exist unless they have been captured in an image. Our most recent creation, the Internet, has quickly become a vast record of an age infatuated with itself. Millions no longer find it necessary to wait for their fifteen minutes of fame, as the video messages, on-line docs, personal homepages, visual diaries, web-cams, and home movies filling cyberspace clearly demonstrate.

Jonathan Caouette’s award-winning film Tarnation, about his troubled childhood, draws from all these sources. His chaotic video diary seems both more and less than a documentary. Abused and unloved, Caouette began to compulsively record his life as a lonely, gay teenager. Super 8, family snaps, recorded conversations, home videos, answering-service messages, and clips from favourite movies were obsessively collected to shore himself up against the blows of society. Much later, he would download his collection of images and sounds into an inexpensive computer and begin the long process of making sense of the fragments. Ostensibly about his institutionalized mother, the film is really a cry to be noticed—“This is me. I am special.” With hardly a shot in focus, or a sequence that can be held for more than a few seconds, the film is a victory of need over form. The avalanche of images and the manic editing scheme always feel truthful despite the clumsiness of the craft. Caouette is relentlessly self-dramatizing, but never self-pitying. Jonathan and his mother, Renee, have led horrible lives but the filmmaker does not blame anybody for their fates. The wry, third-party narrative that scrolls across the flickering images reads like a medieval morality play, without a moral. In the end, Caouette’s generosity of spirit and obvious joy in making the film gives a delightful optimism to the chaotic footage.

I saw the film at the Toronto International Film Festival with Caouette. After the screening, the director was surrounded by young people asking questions, both technical and confessional. Familiar with the mechanics of image transfers, Java-based software, frame manipulation, and digital editing, the audience clearly understood how central to the modern experience editing has become—not just one’s own material but the shuffle button on your iPod, the channel changer on the TV, sampling in hip hop, the delete button, the use of Internet material for class essays, etc. I felt that at any moment, Caouette and his questioners could take out their laptops and start exchanging editing notes. I could not help thinking that Tarnation was just the tip of an iceberg, the first of an avalanche of therapeutic documentaries. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 cost more, and made more money, but sprang from many of the same impulses. To both filmmakers, you feel like saying, “There, there, dear, just get it off your chest!”

Politically, both the right and the left distrust the mainstream media, whose claims of objectivity are patently belied by the perceptible biases of their owners. Documentary makers make no such claim. Indeed, it is the pleasure of a good rant and a clearly defined enemy that make Michael Moore’s films and Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me so popular. Sure, these films can be factually sloppy, ridiculous, and often too slick, but the energy and talent of their attack is invigorating. While many of us feel the old forms of film drama have become moribund, and slowly starved of intellectual energy, these documentaries are bursting with dramatic creativity. Accustomed to the artistic paralysis of Hollywood, many theatregoers are surprised to see that film is still experimenting with the possibilities of visual storytelling. Unlike most films found at our neighbourhood the theatres, documentaries feel as if they belong to the twenty-first century and at least on nodding acquaintance with other contemporary arts.

Like Jonathan Caouette, Moore plunders the whole history of documentary to make his point. Whether you agree with his message or not, Fahrenheit 9/11 is filmmaking at full throttle. Like a mixed tape given to you by a crazed lover, the film promises that even if you hate one cut, you will love the next—a touch of agitprop, a scene or two of purest cinéma-vérité, the World Trade Center collapse handled with the sensitivity of an art movie, Bush’s early days in power treated with the excesses of reality TV, the rest cut, shaped, and layered to live up to National Film Board founder John Grierson’s command to use film as a hammer. For many, it was a reminder of why we loved movies in the first place—the sheer pleasure of experiencing an art form that would use anything to grab our attention.

As was amply demonstrated by the anti-Kerry campaign created by a group called Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, documentaries can powerfully convey the opposite viewpoint as well. After first releasing short, weird docs on the Web, the Veterans then incorporated them into an ad campaign, and eventually packaged all the materials into a more formal documentary. This was political propaganda at its most paranoid and powerful, surely more influential than either Moore’s noisier film or George Butler’s moving but traditional documentary, Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry.