skippy on myers on moore - oh my!

we've posted this on our own website (on friday), and thought we'd share with the kossacks:

we just finished watching msnbc's "fact checker" lisa myers give her estimation of fahrenheit 911 (which is very unfortunate, because earler we had just finished lunch).

ms. myers started out saying she was going to examine the facts and how michael moore portrayed them in his film.  but, being a "reporter" in the 21st century, she of course didn't actually deal with the facts, but the spin.

our main complaint was that she said that they (we suppose meaning "msnbc's interns") checked the word "documentary" in several dictionaries, and all the definitions mentioned "objective" and "based on facts."

great.  too bad they didn't bother to check actual books about film-making.  as students of the cinema, the staff at skippy international have known since theater 101 in high school that there are different kinds of documentaries with different degrees of points of view implicit in each.

we agree wtih mediaknowall.com, which bills itself as "a webguide for film students," when it says

certainly, any images that are edited cannot claim to be wholly factual, they are the result of choices made by the photographer on the other end of the lens...such texts are often constructed from a particular moral or political perspective, and cannot therefore claim to be objective. other texts purport simply to record an event, although decisions made in post-production mean that actuality is edited, re-sequenced and artificially framed. the documentary maker generally establishes a thesis before starting the construction of their text, and the process of documentary-making can be simply the ratification of their idea. perhaps, to misquote eco, the objectivity of the text lies not in the origin but the destination?

the american studies program at the university of virginia, tells us that michael renov, in his book theorizing documentary, says

there are actually four distinct although sometimes overlapping purposes of documentary film:

•  to record, reveal, or preserve
•  to persuade or promote
•  to analyze or interrogate
•  to express

take a gander at the documentary film television & video page of definitions of the term "documentary" (from various reference guides and textbooks) and do a search for the word "objective."  you won't find it. finally, cinemasense tells us

the people and events on a documentary are real, i.e. the characters portray themselves (or tell about themselves) in events that are happening or have happened. yet all films are more or less fiction, pieces of composition, and their author's interpretation of the reality.

a documentary film is not the truth and it should not even aim to the one and only truth. rather, it should open possibilities for interpretation and viewpoints to the period that it is depicting.

we will attempt to deal with her so-called fact-checking in later posts.