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My all time favorite American documentary is probably Harlan County, USA (1976) by Barbara Kopple. It's about a coal miners strike in Kentucky during the 1970's. More suspenseful than any Hitchcock thriller and at the same time heartbreaking and hopeful. I cry every time I watch it.
There is an absolutely fantastic Swedish documentary called Kamrater, motståndaren är välorganiserad (1970) by Lars Westman (there's no English title but it would be something like: Comrades, the Opponents are Well Organized). As in the case of Kopple's film, "Comrades" is about a miners strike. It took place in 1969-70 and is known in Sweden as The Great Miners' Strike.
It's interesting to compare the two films. In the case of Kopple's film the miners are protesting against a private company, while the strikers in Westman's film are protesting against a big state-owned company AND the union who view the strikers as too radical.
I watch a lot of documentaries. If the documentary is a genre and I had to pick a favorite genre that one would probably be my choice.
Other great documentaries I've seen pretty recently are Man on Wire (2008) by James Marsh, Winnebago Man (2009) by Ben Steinbauer, Standard Operating Procedure (2008) by Errol Morris and Until the Light Takes Us (2009) by Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell.
Right now I'm looking forward to seeing the Danish Armadillo (2010) by Janus Metz and the French Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (2009) by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea.
About Michael Moore, I think that mostly he's got something important to say and, at best, he does it effectively through a mixture of satire and seriousness. His ambition to always put as much as possible in his films and his habit of showing only the most controversial or sensational sides of the story make things too easy for his critics though.
Since Bowling for Columbine, which I think is his best film, I haven't seen a film by him that was great. They always have great moments or sequences in them, but you always have the feeling that you're not getting the whole picture. Unlike his right wing critics, I don't think this is necessarily because Moore is trying to hide the real friendly humane face of war or capitalism from the audience. My guess is that Moore's aim is to make entertaining movies and that he's afraid that if things get too serious or too complicated, big parts of his audience will be bored and find him uninteresting. What he considers to be the most obvious proof of his theses are possibly sometimes the weakest links in the chain of facts leading to the truth. Sometimes you have to dig deeper and ask more complex questions to reveal irregularities of power, but Moore mostly shies away from these questions.
Personally, I think his chances of once again becoming an interesting filmmaker is to do a Woody Allen - remove himself from his own films. The subjects are often too important to be overshadowed by the clown-like Moore persona. I will see his next film as well though...
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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".
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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.
Last edited by Piddzilla; 01-17-11 at 03:55 PM.
Reason: Sloppiness
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And after Fahrenheit 9/11, I just started to feel like I understood Moore's way of doing things, and that films after that would just be the same formula attached to a different issue. That, and his films seem to generate a bit less press and interest with each successive effort, so it feels less "important" to be arguing about them. But I will definitely see both.
