Red Right Blog |
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Rants, Rates, Slags, Slates. Manic-depressive posts from Red Wright-Hand. Because there are thousands of worthless blogs out there and who am I not to add to their number?
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Monday, July 21, 2003
For those of you left writhing in suspense by my last remarks, here is your relief, a few words on today's enhanced documentaries. By now, it's no secret that Bowling for Columbine, last year's most successful documentary was a concoction of, uh, fact-based opinion masquering as objective truth. Filmmaker Michael Moore's supporters don't seem to care how much he tweaks and pokes and turkish-taffyizes the facts so long as he aggravates the "right people." That casual attitude appears to have leaked into the approach of other documentarians, not to mention their audiences, and this bothers me. I saw a festival screening of Winged Migration back in April, with director Jacques Perrin Q&A-ing afterward, and he blithely admitted that dramatic scenes of birds in peril had been staged, even though the film contains a notice that no special effects were used. In fact, he said some of the birds had been raised from birth for the explicit purpose of being in the film. Did the sell-out crowd rush the stage? No, though I heard some tsking of tongues. Meanwhile, Stone Reader, which moved me almost to tears, has some rather obviously "re-created" scenes of the director's buddies getting packages from him in the mail...these are perhaps so goofy as to not be worth criticizing. As for Capturing the Friedmans, I am literally at a loss as to where to begin. Director Andrew Jarecki is hailed by some critics for having captured the essence of a "who-do-you-believe" investigation, and accused by others of having "crafted a market strategy based on ambiguity," that is, deliberately omitting exculpatory evidence from the film that would "prove" Arnold and Jesse Friedman completely innocent of all the molestation charges made against them in the 1980s (to many of which charges, however, the father and son pled guilty and received heavy jail sentences). Jarecki's film left me with the strong impression that the police and prosecutors piled on to the Friedmans...but also that the latter were hardly untainted. (And of course, many viewers would likely believe that Arnold, as a proven trafficker in child porn, should have gone to prison anyway, and the molestation charges, true or not, were only poetic justice.) I guess I'm arguing not against the admittance of ambiguity in a fact-based film, but against the cynical manipulation of an audience as per Moore and Perrin. And CtF, if nothing else, proves the volatility of child molestation as a topic; emotions are such that there is no plain objectivity. I'm done. |
