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St. Cloud State University
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Documentaries: facts, lies and entertainment
By John Behling
Published:
Thursday, November 13, 2003
He walked up to us while we were trapped at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change.
"I love it when you lie to me. Hey, can you give me a nickel or a dime?" His pupils were burnt gray- black, offset by headlight-white corneas, black skin and black hair with spots of gray crusting from under the gray hooded sweatshirt. I said no.
"I love it when you lie to me," he repeated. "You see. I'm the devil. You keep on lying, just like that ... I'll see you again real soon."
That was Saturday when it was winter in Minneapolis and I had just finished eating a burrito with a friend of mine during a brief intermission from the CityPages "Get Real" documentary film festival. By Sunday, it was no longer winter - 50 degrees with no snow in sight - and my perception of documentary was demolished to say the least. Eleven films, many about lies and lying, some perhaps even made by liars, had me thinking not just about the biblical offense and about how it relates to the documentary, but also about the new dynamic visual presence of documentary films, and the "hot" marketplace for these films.
At the top of the list of interesting liars stands the elderly Robert S. McNamara in the Errol Morris documentary "The Fog of War," which screened Friday at "Get Real."
Morris, whose 1974 film "Fast Cheap and Out of Control" connected a topiary gardener, a man obsessed with mole rats, a retired lion tamer and a robot engineer, finds McNamara in some sort of industrial blue steel vault.
The elderly former Secretary of Defense and president of Ford Motors applies hindsight to World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam through 11 life lessons. During "Never Say Never," he imparts the advice "Never answer the question you were asked; always answer the question you wish you'd been asked" and then chuckles at the revealing nature of the statement. Although this film attempts to explain the man who sold LBJ's escalation in Vietnam, McNamara follows his rule, projecting his self- medication in a cautious monologue, while parrying Morris' more damaging questions. At one moment, Morris squawks from behind the camera "Do you feel any responsibility for Vietnam?" and McNamara refuses to go into it, citing he'd rather be "damned if he doesn't" try to explain himself.
The most moving thing about "Fog of War," is the fog itself. Morris patches archived audio tapes from the '60s, McNamara's heavily edited video interviews and poetic visuals: shots of ghostly figures in compressed time fading in an endless march with an eerie Philip Glass score. This stylized approach, coupled with its (at least attempted) political lean should find plenty of screens and plenty of college kids when it hits limited release in early December, perhaps bringing the documentary craze back to St. Cloud (it first appeared locally with packed on campus screenings of Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" last year.)
The new environment, as discussed by a panel of directors at "Get Real" Saturday afternoon, is perhaps a combination of reality TV fixation and the modest success of films like "Columbine," which grossed $20 million domestically. Since then, "Winged Migration" grossed $10 million, "Spellbound" $5 million, "Capturing the Freidmans" $3 million.
But with this new opportunity for "real" cinema comes serious questions. How can an unbiased film be made? (It can't.) How do we process the information from these films? As entertainment? As mere interesting information? As reason to go to war or to protest war? There are, of course, no answers. The new breed of documentaries: visually graceful, overtly political, shocking and entertaining, are sliding their way into our culture. And the least we can do is position ourselves to absorb it.
The result can be amazing "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," the best film I witnessed at "Get Real" details the coup that overthrew popularly elected Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and his subsequent return to power is both an adrenaline rush and a call to arms (don't expect it at Parkwood 18 anytime soon). However, this is the same way I felt after "Bowling for Columbine," a film that manages to discredit a convincing argument against America's "culture of fear," with an arrogant manifesto of manipulated images, exaggerated statistics and staged events. It's entertaining, and in some way useful, but it's far from "fair and balanced."
But maybe that isn't what all of us want.
"I love it when you lie to me," he said, as I was trapped, waiting at a street corner. And even though I can't stand being lied to, when he asked me for that nickel, I was lying. Of course I was.
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