This is what I’ve been saying all along
“Manufacturing Dissent”: Turning the lens on Michael Moore
By John Anderson
Published: February 26, 2007
Michael Moore, who carries around controversy the way Paul Bunyan toted an ax, has won legions of fans for being a ballcap-wearing fly in the ointment of Republican politics. For tweaking the documentary form. Even for making millions of dollars in the traditionally poverty-stricken genre of nonfiction film.
Many despise him for the same reasons.
The Toronto-based documentary filmmakers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk started out in the first camp. But during the course of making an unauthorized film about Moore, they wound up somewhere in between. In the process, their experience has added a twist to the long-running story of an abrasive social critic who has frequently been criticized from the right, but far less often, as is the case with Melnyk and Caine, from his own end of the political spectrum.
“We just wanted to take a look at Michael Moore and his films. It was only by talking to people that we found out this other stuff.”
In part the “stuff” amounts to a catalogue of alleged errors — both of omission and commission — in Moore’s films, beginning with his 1989 debut, “Roger & Me.” That film largely revolved around Moore’s fruitless attempts to interview Roger Smith, then the chairman of General Motors, after his company closed plants in Moore’s birthplace, Flint, Michigan: an interview that occurred, Melnyk and Caine said, although Moore left it on the cutting-room floor.
Calling the Melnyk-Caine film “unbelievably fair,” Pierson said it asks what really matters in nonfiction filmmaking: Should all documentary-making be considered subjective and ultimately manipulative, or should the viewer be able to believe what he or she sees? “I found it encouraging,” he said, “that my students were dumbstruck.”
I really loved Roger & Me, and then Bowling for Columbine. When I found out how many of Bowling for Columbine’s scenes for constructed (a large part of the Charlton Heston interview, where they insinuated that the same man who marched with MLKJ in 1963 was a racist, was fudged), I was really… disillusioned. I didn’t have the heart to watch Fahrenheit 9/11. Documentaries are supposed to expose lies, not tell them.
I’ll be watching this movie.
Fred K said,
March 3, 2007 at 5:06 pm
“Documentaries are supposed to expose lies, not tell them” is exactly the point. As viewers do we have a right to expect that what we see in “documentaries” is true? I think so. And this why although I loved Moore’s earlier films I will never shell out another penny for his tripe.
Eve said,
March 3, 2007 at 6:05 pm
ditto.