In his excellent new documentary about the 2016 US presidential election and its aftermath, Fahrenheit 11/9, Michael Moore reserves his most weary anger for what he sees as the progressive establishment – Obama, both Clintons, the Democratic party and, most sharply, a complacent left-of-centre media. The film highlights the uncomfortable relationship that documentaries have with journalism and news media, the genre often being dismissed by the media as too partial and opinionated. The Washington Post summed this up recently in an article headlined “Documentaries aren’t journalism, and there’s nothing wrong with that”, which attempted to create a firewall between documentaries and “real” reporting.
This argument is illogical – that because documentaries often have an opinion, sometimes provoke an emotional response, and want to tell powerful visual stories with some artistic licence, they don’t deserve praise for reporting accurately or reflecting usefully on current events. Fahrenheit 11/9 is a good riposte to this, skewering the idea that print journalism doesn’t also come with opinions: it particularly criticises the New York Times for belittling the democratic socialist wing of the Democrats.
Fahrenheit 11/9 is an argument based around historical research, political theory, contemporary testimony and on-the-spot investigation – particularly strong in its sections on the Flint water crisis in Michigan. Moore slims down the pranks and instead does some real in-depth reporting.
Laura Poitras, who made the Oscar-winning documentary about Edward Snowden, Citizenfour, has referred to her films as “journalism plus” and it’s understandable that journalists in other media might feel threatened by documentaries appearing on their turf. However, some of the most revelatory recent documentaries have their roots firmly in investigative journalism – as reflected by the documentary category of the Academy Awards, which has seen films such as Ava Duvernay’s The 13th, Ezra Edelman’s OJ: Made in America and Orlando von Einsiedel’s Virunga nominated in the past three years.
More current examples include Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar’s The Silence of Others. Shot over six years, it documents the victims of Franco’s dictatorship fighting for justice in a Spain – including its mainstream media – apparently determined to forget the horrors of the past. While it must have been tempting for those involved to release some of the shocking material at various points in those six years, its impact and news value is greater by being presented as a whole story of that period of filming. It has been touring film festivals and is released in Spain next month.
Also on the festival circuit is a German documentary called The Cleaners, by Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block, about the people who clear social media of offensive content such as hardcore pornography and beheadings. It’s a good example of the particular qualities that documentaries can bring to a story also being covered by the news media. The film’s glum palette evokes a mood of menace and trauma in the Philippine offices of content moderation sites located next to rubbish dumps where employees spend their days looking at pictures and videos that have been flagged as objectionable. It’s designed to show us, rather than tell us about, the misery of the people making these judgment calls – and to trap the viewer in their grim work environments. Creating empathy for people hidden halfway across the world is a particular skill of this kind of observational journalism, where our relationship with those on screen is unmediated by a narrator.
There’s a more direct parallel with Fahrenheit 11/9 in Astra Taylor’s impressive state of the world essay, What Is Democracy?, in which the writer and film-maker tours the globe meeting people to try and figure out why many of us feel we don’t have a political say even though we can vote. Less of a wail of despair than Fahrenheit 11/9, it’s a useful companion piece for a political theory of what could replace democracy in the US.
No one would claim that documentaries are consistently more effective than other forms of journalism – they can be as hit and miss as any other reportage or comment. But they deserve respect for being part of civil society’s ability to hold people and institutions to account, and for reaching significant audiences over an extended period of time rather than disappearing with the news cycle. As Fahrenheit 11/9 shows, they’re both part of the journalistic landscape and a critical eye on journalism itself.
