[Oblivion437]

Originally posted by The Hierophant: I want to know what you think is the fundamental essense of a real documentary.

Essentially, I liken it to Andy Warhol's Empire. There's no slant in that film. No editing. 8 hours of raw footage of the empire state building. Not very interesting, I'll grant you. You just plop the camera in front of the phenomena. This basically shows something *real* and from there shows all the stuff surrounding it. The History Channel's piece on Fowling pieces (shotguns) was a documentary. Their pieces on just about anything qualify as documentary. Even Mail Call, which I call Gonzo Documentary as an insider joke of sorts.

How many 'sides' to an issue do you think there can be?

Well, there's often more than one, at least. If you only show one on fair ground, you're being biased, especially when you actively demonize the other side/sides through manipulative editing.

How exactly do you define objectivity?

Before we get into the serious moral bankruptcy of solipsism, let's get to the issue at hand.

Objectivity is the straight presentation of any factual data. Deliberate deception, going right ahead and piecing together a presentation that allows the viewer to turn his own heuristic process on himself to come to false conclusions at your vindication, is defintely far from objective. It's outright malicious conduct, no doubt about it.

I ask this mainly because your statements that Moore is not a true documentarian seem to stem largely from a dislike of what he says, rather than from any clear idea of what a 'real' documentary is.

Deliberate deception may be entertaining, hell, watch Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Entertaining as anything, really fun to watch, even if you want to tie everyone on screen to a pillory and arc-weld their ass shut. That entertainment doesn't make it a documentary.

Now, a documentarian would film things, and show them, in singular, long takes. Removing the possiblity of perceptual distortion. Furthermore, a documentarian would take the more straight shot over the better one. So if he had to take down a less cinematically effective shot in service to honesty, he would. Moore fails to do this more than once, preferring fictional film and dramatic style editing techniques over documentarian techniques.

One of the best documentarian edits that I can think of, the most famous, isn't even in a documentary. It's in Goodfellas.

Now, this is a famous scene in the movie: Henry takes Karen to the Copacabana club for the first time. The whole thing, from them getting out of the car, to them being seated at the table in the club right up front to watch Bobby Vinton courtesy of the house, is filmed in one take. Over 180 seconds long. Well, it's also filmed entirely from one camera, so there's no cuts. Just the camera following them through. A documentarian would prefer this shot, for its ability to capture the event as faithfully as possible, (let's not forget how damn cool it was to watch) despite the awkwardness such a shot would present, in terms of equipment and the crew.

However, Moore uses a short-track edit, combined with an audio track not from the original event, but from the staged version of those events, during one scene. The Heston Walk-out. Heston did walk away, why exactly is unknowable, considering that, in another anti-documentarian move, Moore omitted 3/4 of what happened during the interview. The walking out itself is shown in very fast back-and-forth editing, real heavy turn-around type stuff. Well, nowhere do we see a second camera, considering the pace of the editing, it can't be anything less than it being filmed in at least two takes. Then there's the fact that the optical sound track matches up with the front (second, staged) take, and we don't have, from a veridic proof test angle, any sort of way of knowing what Moore said to Heston, if Heston responded in any way, if Heston was running away defeated, or if Moore just had to pare the crap out of a couple of scenes and add his own staged versions to avoid looking like the biggest horse's ass in the world. Considering the underlyingly deceptive quality of the film as a whole (akin to propaganda, as opposed to real documentary) I'm lead to believe, and this is my conjecture (the rest is fact, fact in that you have to start talking about purple moons and temporal distortion to get away with disagreement) that what is missing is enough to make Moore look like a redundant, maybe even stupid man, who pestered a guy multiple times after answering a question quite thoroughly, from a position more experienced, more realistic, and more intoned to reality than his attacker. Then he follows him out, yells "Wait!" "Hey!" or what have you, waves him off, nods him off, or whatever, and then, in the cutting room, he throws the second optical sound track over it to make it look like Heston responded to something that he didn't even hear Moore say.

But Cerek, please don't tell me that at your age you still believe in such things as objective facts

Tell this to your kids for me, if you have them, or if you ever do:

"All truth and lies are the same! Now all that matters is if you're good at it!" See what kind of person they turn into. Why wouldn't you do that? Because it's a morally bankrupt idea and if you do this, what you're doing is criminal!

Next up is the fact that, if Moore shows what he wants to show, fine, but what if in the process he is showing you something, allowing your heuristic process to assemble something, that isn't real? Before you go into what is real, this is clearly a violation of any concept of truth...

I find it interesting that people had a more concrete grip on the world (or were more willing to) when they couldn't even prove that wood was in any way different from steel, other than they reacted to getting hit differently.

Swap interesting with pathetic at your disposal.