Say goodbye Michael Moore and hello to a new breed of manifesto documentary that's bucking the system. TARA BRADYgives it up for the grassroots movie
BY 2005 IT LOOKED as though the documentary – cinema’s eternal bridesmaid – would finally get its big day out. For decades, the form’s finest practitioners – Errol Morris, the Mayles Brothers, Frederick Wiseman – had beavered away on the fringes of upscale, arthouse emporia and film festivals.
But the box office takings for Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11– $222,446,882 plus an Oscar statuette – promised a bright new future for a documentary sector. The new politicised docs on the block were taking on the big issues and bringing them to a cinema near you. The multiplex was duly trumpeted as an alternative to mainstream media outlets and establishment interests.
For a time, even smaller, issue-driven films found international distribution deals. Projects as varied as Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, The Corporationand The Price of Sugarmade it into regular fleapits. Elsewhere, Al Gore and Leonardo Di Caprio took on climate change in starrier vehicles An Inconvenient Truthand The 11th Hour.
But the boom was over almost as soon as it began. Despite being fronted by one of the most profitable movie stars on the environmentally challenged planet, the 2007 Di Caprio doc grossed less than a million dollars worldwide. Studios and major distribution houses, dismayed by the notion that not all docs make $200 million, soon lost interest.
A string of highly regarded, high-profile pictures broke important stories but failed to attract audiences. The decline was understood as public apathy and Bush administration fatigue but the industry’s dwindling faith in the agit-doc ensured that the public would have little say in the matter.
Taxi to the Dark Side, Alex Gibney's Academy-award winning expose of torture and extrajudicial detention at the Bagram Air Base, was released on no more than 20 screens in the US ; Standard Operating Procedure,Errol Morris' startling 2008 account of practises at Abu Ghraib prison, made it into 21 theatres, down 90 per cent on the rollout afforded the same filmmaker's 2003 bio-portrait The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.
Luckily, the political documentary has survived and adapted to its lately straitened circumstances. Earlier this year Inside Job, Charles H Ferguson's chronicle of "the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption" topped $7,870,000 in ticket sales and proved that the subgenre is still viable as a studio property.
Elsewhere and far away from the big players a new, fly agit-doc has emerged to buck the system. The internet, long the home of such wacky conspiracy docs as Zeitgeistand Loose Change,is currently playing host to grassroots Greek sensation Debtocracy.
A scholarly dissemination of the Greek financial crisis, Aris Chatzistefanou and Katerina Kitidi’s doc argues that the euro was a fallacy from the get-go, that it could only be ruinous for southern states and that the austerity package imposed to service a €110 billion loan from Europe and the International Monetary Fund can only end in anarchy.
The bailout, say the filmmakers, was never about rescuing Greece, but “about saving the German and French banks which would collapse if Greece went bankrupt”.
Debtocracyis typical of a new breed of manifesto movie and a very old breed of political pamphleteering. The impressively assembled, not-for-profit film is not simply highlighting the issue of the week; it's proposing a radical solution. Over 74-minutes, the doc coalesces into a compelling argument for the formation of a committee for the analysis of national debt. In 2006, a similar committee in Ecuador dismissed loans taken for projects that benefited only a "few" on the grounds that the public should not service debts that were not in the public interest.
“We cannot expect anything from the European Union and the IMF,” insist Chatzistefanou and Kitidi. “It will be too late if we wait for them to take the necessary measures. We believe we should stop paying the debt, exit the euro zone, and nationalise the banking system.”
Debtocracyis not just another net-doc. Since making its YouTube debut in April, the film has been watched and downloaded in English and Greek more than two million times, disseminated at town square screenings and on DVD copies across Greece.
Next week, Ali Samadi Ahadi's The Green Wave, a moving account of the Iran's 2010 Green Revolution, reaches Irish cinemas and confirms a new post-internet vogue within the doc sector. A handsomely presented collage of animations and phone footage, Green Waveunfolds as an exchange of Iranian tweets and blogs posted during the disputed re-election of ultra-conservative Mahmud Ahmadinejad in June 2009.
“We had to find a special narrative style for this,” explains Ali, “because there existed only fragmentary or poor quality pictures taken with cell phones. A re-enactment was out of the question especially since it was clear to me that as long as the regime in Iran was in power I could no longer visit Iran. But Iran is a nation of bloggers. If it was no longer possible for me to shoot my film in Iran, to interview the people there, these blogs were exactly the right source to reach the inner voices of the people.”
The film’s day-by-day account of the suppression of Mir Hossein Mousavi’s Green Movement is both immediate and elegiac. “I am leaving a small prison for a much larger one, a prison called Iran,” reads one tweet; “Endurance is the only option Iranians have,” reads another.
The animator-director's most impressive achievement goes beyond reportage. The Green Waveis a film by the cloud for the cloud. Its record of an internet storm has far more potency than the spotty tweet-spotting found in rival media.
“We created a motion comic from 15 blogs chosen from 1,500 websites,” says the filmmaker. “And worked in archive material, recent interviews, photographs, 42 minutes of animations and mobile phone footage.”
Emily James's Just Do It,a new portrait of direct environmental activism in the UK, is equally collective in its consciousness. Crowd-funded, impeccably democratic and filmed over two years of embedment around Climate Camp and Plane Stupid, the film offers a blueprint for taking action on what old timers call global warming.
“In fact, the film doesn’t really talk about climate change at all,” says James. “I wanted to let the protesters speak for themselves. They’re clearly intelligent people who’ve done their reading and put a lot of thought into their positions. The focus was always on their individual stories not the broader issues.”
As with The Green Wave, James' subjects are guided by a flurry of mobile phone messages and sim card changes. The tone, however, is rather different."I'm really pleased people are coming out of the screenings feeling elated," says James. "It's a hard thing to do with such a depressing subject. I've come out of some really important films like Gaslandfeeling down. I haven't eaten sushi since watching The End of the Line.I know these stories need to be better known. But I also know that it's hard dragging someone to a cinema to watch them."
Cinema, nonetheless, represents the best chance for alt-docs to find an audience, not to mention funding. “I hadn’t intended to make a feature film at all,” says James. “I’ve worked in television for 10 years so when I started filming that’s where I assumed it would end up. But as soon as I started to take the idea to broadcasters I became really concerned about the kind of conversations I was having with them and the type of film they seemed to want which was much more tabloid. Words like objectivity and balance kept been thrown around when really they were asking for something diluted. Not every story has equally weighted sides to it. The climate change movement has been undermined from the beginning by an insistence about giving the other side equal time.”
A Wall Street Sit-In doc, replete with guerrilla instructions on stock exchange baiting, is almost certainly due early next year.
* The Green Waveopens October 21; Debtocracyis at www.debtocracy.gr; see justdoitfilm.com for details on upcoming screenings
