The Toronto Star's Geoff Pevere on the proliferation of the first-person doc, something not invented by Michael Moore, but someone who did give it commercial legs. And he did it all, say his critics, by putting compelling story before truth.
While the focus of Manufacturing Dissent is Moore's sometimes hair-raisingly casual relationship with the truth – among other eye-openers, the movie reveals that the filmmaker actually did interview Roger Smith but left the footage out – there's another aspect of Moore's legacy it questions: the issue of reconciling the first-person narrative and traditional documentary values like objectivity, truth and the integrity of the subject. When you're onscreen, can your movie be about anything but you? And when it's about you, what story isn't it telling?
Which introduces more questions: can the use of the first person compromise one's commitment to capturing the truth – or at least the pursuit of it? When Moore cast himself as the driving narrative sensibility in Roger and Me, how did that influence his decision not to use interviews with Roger Smith that Manufacturing Dissent claims he had but omitted? If not getting the interview made for a more entertaining, if less than truthful, story, then what are we to make of the implication that the material was dropped because it didn't suit the plot? Is this an instance where the first person and the commitment to telling it like it was are at odds? Does – and should – subjectivity cancel out objectivity?
While Moore certainly didn't invent the first-person documentary style, with movies like Roger and Me, Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 he made it into a pop cultural phenomenon. In framing leftist social issues within a personality-hosted, TV-friendly format, he created an immensely approachable form of popular agitprop. Unlike such filmmakers as Marcel Ophuls (The Sorrow and the Pity), Michael Rubbo (Waiting for Fidel), Claude Lanzmann (Shoah), Ross McElwee (Sherman's March) and Nick Broomfield (Kurt and Courtney), all of whom worked in the first-person form long before him, Flint, Mich.'s most famous son played to the popcorn crowd: the kind of people who probably rarely watched documentaries, and certainly not of the kind that tended to predominate before he brought them to the multiplex.
Zweig, whose films (Vinyl, I, Curmudgeon and Lovable) alternate long interviews with people on specific subjects with baldly confessional sequences of the filmmaker shooting himself talking into a mirror, recalls that distinctively different time.
"When I first started making films," he recalls, "there was, especially in documentary, a huge taboo against – forget about appearing in your film – in any way acknowledging in the film that you as a director exist at all. Even leaving the odd off-camera interview question in the film was considered kind of bad form. You had to hide your presence and your point of view."
"That is over," he adds.
While Zweig defends his personal practice and differentiates it from what has become the standard use of the documentary first person – for one thing, Zweig's movies are really only tangentially about him – he has misgivings about the rampant proliferation of the me-first nonfiction mode.
"I would say, just as an observer of filmmaking, that I wish some people were more aware that there ever was a taboo (against appearing in your film)," says Zweig. "Because it seems to me now that putting yourself in your film just seems like another choice, a stylistic choice, that some people take when even really there's no reason for it."
While filmmaker Kevin McMahon – whose work (The Falls, Intelligence, McLuhan's Wake) is being honoured in a Hot Docs retrospective this year – doesn't do first-person, he certainly understands why it's become such a common documentary trope in the post-Moore era. In the current issue of the Canadian documentary journal POV, McMahon writes at length on the use of first person and why it doesn't figure in his own practice.
"I admire Michael Moore," says McMahon. "To me he's a guy who's trying to deal with things that are complex and complicated. Seemingly not connected but actually are connected. That's the job, and always has been the job, of the social critic."
"In film that's a very hard thing to do," McMahon adds, noting first person is just one means of articulating complex matters in an accessible, narrative-driven fashion.
"I see the value of the first person as a structural conceit," he says. "But I think it also gets in the way. If you're Michael Moore or you're Morgan (Super Size Me) Spurlock, and your real motivation is to be a social critic, but the only device you can come up with to do that is your own persona, it becomes like the line in that Laurie Anderson song: `Everybody was saying, Look at me! Look at me!
"That's sort of what it becomes," McMahon adds: "`Look at me.' And that totally overwhelms the social/critical function."
While McMahon worries about the impact on documentary's sociological potential as a result of all the look-at-me moviemaking going on, he's equally concerned about seeing it imposed for commercial reasons. The fact is, as Moore is also the most financially successful American documentary filmmaker ever, it isn't just filmmakers whom he inspires.
"I have to blame Michael Moore for this," McMahon says. "For years now I've seen broadcasters pushing and encouraging people to do first person. Because it's easy to say `This is my story. This is what my mother was like.' The broadcasters encourage it because they understand that's the language of cinema. Even more so, they understand that confessional is the language of television."
"Faced with any kind of complexity," McMahon adds, "it's the default of both the broadcasters and the filmmakers. The easiest way to do it."