Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary (Film and Culture Series) - Softcover

Jonathan Kahana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0231142072 ISBN 13: 9780231142076

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Intelligence Work establishes a new genealogy of American social documentary, proposing a fresh critical approach to the aesthetic and political issues of nonfiction cinema and media. Jonathan Kahana argues that the use of documentary film by intellectuals, activists, government agencies, and community groups constitutes a national-public form of culture, one that challenges traditional oppositions between official and vernacular speech, between high art and popular culture, and between academic knowledge and common sense. Placing iconic images and the work of celebrated filmmakers next to overlooked and rediscovered productions, Kahana demonstrates how documentary collects and delivers the evidence of the American experience to the public sphere, where it lends force to political movements and gives substance to the social imaginary.

About this title

About the Author:

Jonathan Kahana is assistant professor of cinema studies at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

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Excerpt from the chapter: "Tense Times: Documentary Aporias; Or, the Public Sphere of Suspicion

THE “US” IN QUESTION

Toward the end of Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), director and narrator Michael Moore engages in one of the theatrical confrontations with power that established his reputation as a provocateur. On the premise that politicians would not be so eager to support the so-called war on terror on its Middle Eastern front if their own children were in the military, Moore goes to Capitol Hill with a U.S. marine, a stack of enlistment forms, and brochures on different branches of the armed services, hoping to coax congressional representatives into volunteering their children for duty. Of course, no representative takes him up on his offer, and Moore is led to pose a series of rhetorical questions over a closing montage of young, smiling American soldiers, movingly and skillfully edited. “Who would want to give up their child? Would you?” Moore asks, and, over an image of George W. Bush and his children, “Would he?” The young men and women shown in the montage expect that they will be sent to war only when it is “absolutely necessary,” says Moore. He closes his series with one last question: “Will they ever trust us again?” The montage of official perfidy that follows, in which Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Dick Cheney offer long-discredited justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, implies that the young people depicted in the first montage would have good reason to be cynical, although the sequence leaves somewhat ambiguous who is identified by “us,” the despised state officials, the mass public addressed by Moore, or both. The film’s final line plays on this ambiguity in a dialogue that Moore and his editors construct from a piece of footage of the president making one of his iconic public speaking gaffes. On this occasion, Bush mangles the saying “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” substituting “... can’t get fooled again,” a misremembered Pete Townshend lyric, for the correct ending. “For once,” Moore deadpans, “we agreed.” Few will miss the sarcasm and irony of this line: by re-presenting and remarking on footage of Bush’s embarrassing slip of the tongue, Moore articulates the frustration of all those who disagree with the president but have no platform from which to express it. Underscored by the triumphal sounds of “Rockin’ in the Free World,” the Neil Young song that kicks in after Moore’s last line, a song recorded in 1989 as a protest against the George H. W. Bush administration, the ending of the film suggests that popular frustration can be channeled into the anarchic energies of laughter and resistance.

This ending leaves no doubt that Moore and the president are on different sides. At the same time, it reminds viewers that “us” and “we” are constructions about which the producers, subjects, and audiences of documentary alike should maintain a vigilant suspicion. Indeed, given the degree to which the film has, by this point, employed techniques of irony and parody, together with Moore’s habitual manipulation of historical narrative, the question of “us” can be heard as a reflexive expression of doubt. The distrust Moore attributes to the cheerful young soldiers—or, rather, to the future projected in their images—seems to be directed at all Americans in positions of responsibility and authority, even those critics of power, like liberal documentary filmmakers, who are clearly on the side of the innocent. By concluding in these skeptical and somewhat ambivalent terms, Fahrenheit 9/11 leaves open the question of whether its own commercial success could be taken to prove that a significant transformation of the cinematic public sphere was taking place.

As I was finishing this book, the trade journal Variety announced the end of the commercial boom in feature documentary ushered in by the unprecedented box office revenues of Moore’s 2002 film Bowling For Columbine, which grossed $21.6 million in domestic ticket sales and $58 million worldwide. The occasion for this announcement was the release of Moore’s latest film, Sicko (2007); Variety wondered whether Sicko could revive the flagging theatrical market for nonfiction. Since 2004, the year that Fahrenheit 9/11 led a cycle of politically themed documentaries into theaters, total domestic box office for documentaries had dropped steadily, from $171 million in 2004 to $116 million the following year, to $55 million in 2006, and only $2 million at the midway point of 2007.(On its opening weekend in wide release, ticket sales for Sicko more than doubled the last figure, and after four weeks the film had grossed more than $22 million.) Suggesting that the fortunes of documentary in mainstream theaters in recent years had been a fluke, Variety explained the slump of the last eighteen months as a “market correction” and a “return to rationality.” The magazine made little attempt to explain the shift in consumption patterns, other than to note that a “fatigue factor” had set in with the movie-going public, owing to the “hard subject matter” of war, suffering, and natural disaster that filmmakers were said to have focused on of late. This explanation overlooked the obvious fact that many of the films of the boom, and those that earned the most money, had been concerned with exactly these themes.

The brief recent window of opportunity for documentary filmmakers in the mainstream was initially seen by many commentators as evidence of a collective embrace of truth, rejection of entertainment, or “hunger for the real” on the part of North American audiences after a series of national debacles: the Clinton impeachment crisis, the election crisis of 2000, the September 11 attacks, the consequent ramping up of national security anxieties, and the increasingly disastrous and unpopular Iraq war. Although the attention of mainstream media outlets was predictably focused on the success of those films that were in wide national release and had the financial backing sufficient to generate national publicity, the more interesting phenomenon was the distribution of documentary themes and dispositions across various levels of the culture, from the capital-intensive preserves of network television and the contemporary art scene to the cottage industries and desktops of nonprofessional filmmaking. Released in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and during the opening of the new American wars in Central Asia and the Middle East, Bowling For Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 seemed to initiate a political documentary cycle, a tide of feature-length films concerned directly or indirectly with presidential politics ( Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Elections [Richard Ray Perez and Joan Seckler, 2002], Bush’s Brain [Joseph Mealey and Michael Shoob, 2004], Bush Family Fortunes: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy [Steven Grandison and Greg Palast, 2004], Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry [George Butler, 2004], and The Hunting of the President [Nickolas Perry and Harry Thomason, 2004]); terrorism and national security ( Control Room [Jehane Noujaim, 2004], Persons of Interest [Alison Maclean and Tobias Perse, 2003], The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear [Adam Curtis, 2004], Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War [Robert Greenwald, 2004], WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception [Danny Schecter, 2004], Why We Fight [Eugene Jarecki, 2005]); and the experience of the war in Iraq from the perspective of its planners ( No End in Sight [Charles Ferguson, 2007]), ordinary soldiers ( Gunner Palace [Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, 2004], Occupation: Dreamland [Ian Olds and Garrett Scott, 2005], The War Tapes [Deborah Scranton, 2006], The Ground Truth [Patricia Foulkrod, 2006]), and civilians ( Iraq in Fragments [James Longley, 2006], My Country, My Country [Laura Poitras, 2006]). These films found audiences in theatrical venues, on the film-festival circuit, on home video, on the Internet, or in art spaces, where the avant-garde was showing renewed interest in documentary strategies. Other filmmakers found support for similar work from cable television networks like HBO and Discovery Times—which produced a documentary miniseries, Off to War (Brent Renaud and Craig Renaud, 2005), about the training and deployment of Arkansas national guardsmen— and from the few PBS series that contract with independent producers, such as Frontline, P.O.V., and Independent Lens.

Most of these films found ways to suggest, explicitly or implicitly, that traditional news sources had not provided truth about political events, or at least not an effective truth, one on which citizen-viewers could act. This argument was present in the work in ways other than the straightforward statement of it as a premise. In the ABC television miniseries The Path to 9/11 (2006), the methods of docudrama allowed the producers to suggest that the Clinton administration had failed to act on numerous occasions when it had the chance to eliminate the threat posed to Americans by Muslim terrorists. (The liberties that the series took with its source materials, including the final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, drew the wrath o...

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0231142072
• ISBN 13: 9780231142076
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 436