Now that the election season flood of agit-docs -- remember those Swift boats and WMDs? -- has subsided, it's definitely safe to get back in the documentary water. The current wave mixes plenty of entertainment value with attitude and information.
At the key places where documentarians preview their work -- the Toronto International Film Festival, International Documentary Festival at Amsterdam and Sundance Film Festival -- "theatrical docs" (designed as movies, not TV shows) is the new hot term, and no wonder. Last year, documentaries made 10 times as much money in theaters as they did in 2000, according to DVD distributor Docurama -- and that's excluding "Fahrenheit 9/11."
"Shakespeare Behind Bars," from Jilann Spitzmiller and Hank Rogerson, features prison inmates working on a performance of "The Tempest." Below, World War II footage in Eugene Jarecki's "Why We Fight," which won a documentary award at Sundance.
(Top: Sundance Film Festival; Below: Charlotte Street Films Via )
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These potential audience pleasers -- some with distribution deals and others still seeking them -- include "Rize," a street-level dance doc directed by celebrity photographer David LaChapelle; the extreme-sports doc "Murderball," all about quadriplegic rugby, but not the way you think; and "Inside Deep Throat," a cultural history of the popular porno film, which opened Friday in Washington.
But what's more impressive, and indicative of where docs are going, is the approach of documentarians with Something to Say.
Nobody wants to preach. "You have to fight the tendency toward political correctness," legendary cineaste Werner Herzog said at Sundance. "Pamphlets don't work." He'd come there with "Grizzly Man," his arch, close-up portrait of a mad naturalist who wanted to be a bear, filmed them and himself incessantly, and eventually got eaten by one -- camera running (sound only). The film is marked by classic Herzogian moments, including a rant on nature as dominated by "chaos, hostility and murder."
"It's in extreme experiences that we understand what it means to be human," Kirby Dick said at Sundance on the day he heard that his film, "Twist of Faith," was nominated for an Academy Award. The film takes on the front-page issue of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and follows a handsome, emotional firefighter who seeks an apology from an abusing priest and the church hierarchy. Dick gave the family camcorders, so that the violent emotional saga of Tony Comes and his wife, Wendy, is punctuated by middle-of-the-night soul-seeking. It's not the camcorder footage that nails audiences to their seats, though; it's a tightly paced narrative that takes us right along on the Comeses' marriage-mangling journey.
Of course, built-in drama can't hurt a doc's chances. In "Shakespeare Behind Bars," Jilann Spitzmiller and Hank Rogerson borrow heavily from the Bard as they trail prisoners working on a performance of "The Tempest" -- a play pervaded with themes of forgiveness, repentance and redemption. Each must come to terms with himself, his crimes and his future as he struggles to shape the character.
Wall Street scandal hardly seems cinematic, even when it's the mega-bankruptcy of Enron. "So I structured the film like a heist film, from the point of view of the criminals," said Alex Gibney about his film "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room." Gibney has made an issue into a story before; he wrote and co-produced "The Trials of Henry Kissinger." In "Enron," Gibney tracks the rise and fall of the company through the delusions of its key executives.
"Docs can become victims of the seriousness of the subject matter," which is why hard-hitting arguments need compelling craft, noted Eugene Jarecki, whose "Why We Fight" won the top jury award for U.S. documentaries at Sundance. "This film has an agenda," Jarecki told a Sundance audience. "It's to get people thinking. We have to ask ourselves, 'Is this who we want to be?' "
The film turns a spotlight on the familiar phrase "military-industrial complex," and argues that corporate priorities drive us to war. To push beyond the abstractions, Jarecki introduces us to an angry, post-9/11 dad who wanted his son's name on a piece of ordnance in Iraq until he found out there were no WMDs, and to an Army lieutenant colonel who says she'll never let her sons serve in the military, after she allegedly was ordered to lie in her press releases. He also employs a driving soundtrack, tight editing and cleverly redeployed historical footage -- including some from Frank Capra's legendary propaganda series, also called "Why We Fight."
Characters also drive story in other hot docs. Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire, who the tragically headed the United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide and later tried to commit suicide out of guilt and despair, appears in "Shake Hands With the Devil," by Peter Raymont. The film, which created a stir in Amsterdam and won the World Documentary Audience Award at Sundance, follows him back to Rwanda, where he continues to ask why developed countries let the genocide happen. In a three-hankie scene, he talks to Rwandan college kids in a stadium where slaughter had occurred.
And then there's Shelby Knox, a 15-year-old Republican Baptist girl who lives in Lubbock, Tex., where any sex education but abstinence is outlawed and teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease rates are among the highest in the nation. In "The Education of Shelby Knox," Shelby pushes for sex education in school and gets a political education -- and we get an introduction to Bible Belt political culture. Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt's fly-on-the-wall approach fulfills one of the glorious promises of documentary -- to put us in the middle of situations we otherwise might never be in. (Their cinematographer, Gary Griffin, won a Sundance award.)
"We live in a world where documentary film -- independent documentary film -- has truly become the last bastion of free speech," Morgan Spurlock, the director of "Super Size Me," recently declared to a cheering audience at Aspen Filmfest. And it's also a world where, as Spurlock's own entertaining and lucrative film demonstrates, docs have become a very real option for top-quality entertainment.
Pat Aufderheide is a professor at the School of Communication at American University, where she directs the Center for Social Media.
