Donald Clarke on the current crop of documentaries, where balance seems to be the hardest word

HAVE a glance at the movie titles released this week. What would it say about you if, heaven forfend, you didn't care for Scary Movie 4 or The Little Polar Bear 2? We might, perhaps, assume you were neither a drunk teenager nor an easily pleased four-year-old. But we'd prefer to smell your breath or frisk you for cuddly toys before jumping to either conclusion.

By contrast, anybody speaking out against any one of the harvest of left-leaning documentaries that have taken root in the loose soil churned up by Michael Moore's mighty feet will almost certainly be taken for an angry conservative. Films such as Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, The Yes Men, The Corporation, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Super Size Me seem to proceed on the assumption that no person in their homogenously liberal audience wants to hear any arguments against the position he or she adopted long before entering the cinema.

A screening of the Wal-Mart film at the recent Jameson Dublin International Film Festival had something of the quality of a political rally about it. Robert Greenwald, the picture's director, suggests, quite persuasively, that Wal-Mart's huge stores annihilate all independent competition when they arrive in town. Satisfied festival punters, exhausted from throwing (metaphorical) rotten vegetables at the evil robber barons on screen, seemed unwilling to entertain any criticism of the film or its theses.

After the presentation, one gentleman ventured a qualification - no more - of the film's attitudes towards Wal-Mart's sweatshops in China. The savage rebuke he received from an enraged chap a few seats along made it clear that dissent was unwelcome.

Why, I asked, was nobody putting Wal-Mart's case in the film? It comes as no surprise that the company did not want to participate, but surely some third party - a conservative-minded economist, perhaps - could have laid out a partial defence.

Greenwald, a polite, articulate man, who, bizarrely, also directed Xanadu, the feared Olivia Newton-John flick, explained that Wal-Mart had millions of dollars to promote its cause in the media and, therefore, hardly needed or deserved equal time in his low-budget, cinematic samizdat.

This is fair enough (even if equal time wasn't quite what I was suggesting), but Greenwald's lack of willingness even to nod towards balance does point up some weaknesses in the current batch of political documentaries. In 2004, Louis Menand, the distinguished intellectual historian, mused upon the documentary tradition in the New Yorker. "People who make documentaries don't make them because they believe that 'reasonable people can disagree' or that there are two sides to every question," he wrote. "They believe that there are, at most, one and a half sides - a right side and a side that, despite possibly having some redeeming aspects, is, on balance, wrong."

Greenwald, like Michael Moore, does not allow his films even that half-side of opposition. Outfoxed, his documentary on the notoriously right-wing Fox News, featured no contributions from employees of that company, either.

These omissions, ultimately, have a counter-productive effect. Aware that such films are so unapologetically skewed, right-wing commentators can happily treat them as polemics rather than considered works of documentary film-making. And then there are the crude cinematic techniques that many display. In Wal-Mart, Greenwald offers us images of ruined shopkeepers packing up their belongings to the accompaniment of Bruce Springsteen's plaintive rendition of This Land is Your Land. The arrival of the retail giant brings grim, pounding chords. No wonder conservatives view these films the same way they view those photocopied screeds featuring pictures of George Bush with devil horns that crusties distribute outside McDonald's. Come to think of it, the poster for Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar's The Corporation, a study of the evils of conglomerate capitalism, did actually feature a suited businessman with a pointed tail.

Criticisms of these documentarists' methods rarely register, because such dissent is invariably viewed as politically motivated.

Cyberspace is buzzing with debates as to the worth of Michael Moore's films, but they are almost entirely carried out between right (against) and left (for). So politically divided is America that those who agree with Moore's position on, say, the war in Iraq, but who regard his films as disingenuous and tendentious, seem terrified to speak out, lest they give solace to their political enemies. Hell, there are surely people who will read this very article and assume that it has been written from a conservative perspective. They can assume what they like.

All this prompts a question. The 2004 election suggested that the United States is split down the middle politically. So, where are all the right-wing documentaries?

There have been a few cinematic counterblows against Moore and his people, but none have struck the target. Michael Moore Hates America, in which young Michael Wilson, aping his enemy's Roger and Me, unsuccessfully badgered the blue-collar blowhard for an interview, was laughed out of the few cinemas in which it played. Why Wal-Mart Works, released on the same day as The High Cost of Low Price and, despite denials of any input from the retailer, widely viewed as the corporate response, was similarly unsuccessful.

One explanation depends upon the assumption that the new wave of leftist documentaries is, like so much political art, driven by its opposition to those in power. Moore's Bowling for Columbine, whose success demonstrated that such films could play in commercial cinemas, emerged in 2002, just as George Bush was settling into the Oval Office. The film-makers who followed in Mike's wake often see themselves as speaking up for those disenfranchised by the irregularities in the 2000 election.

A comparison with the recent history of American talk radio proves useful. The rise of the right-wing shock jocks was facilitated by the dissolution of the Federal Communications Commission's Fairness Doctrine in 1987, but was properly accelerated by the election of Bill Clinton five years later. Rush Limbaugh and his angry colleagues were then able to argue that they spoke for all the decent conservative folk appalled by the shenanigans of that radical libertine in the White House.

There you are then. The Limbaugh and Moore tendencies are, in their separate media, both reactions against the ruling class. There are currently no right-wing documentaries because conservatives, the reins of power clutched firmly in their hands, feel no need of them.

But the argument doesn't really hold up. In truth, with the notable exception of Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi's fearsome propagandist, the most lauded political documentarists have always come from the left: think of John Grierson, Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles brothers.

Conversely, despite the rise of Bush Jr, the right has continued to dominate the more furious corners of talk radio.

The two media just seem inherently suited to the respective political factions that have colonised them. There is rarely anything funny about warm, cuddly liberal sentiments, whereas the transgressive, ill-tempered rants of right-wing zealots, however appalling, invariably make for good radio.

Unless your second name is Moore, you are unlikely to make much money from documentaries, so the form has never really seemed appealing to those whose interests tend towards commerce and the glorification of free enterprise. Meanwhile, despite aberrations such as March of the Penguins, the audiences for non-fiction pictures, whether political or not, tend to be the same sensitive souls who go to arthouse pictures. The genre, like performance art or squawky jazz, still doesn't quite feel mainstream. Look around you the next time you attend a Cambodian film. See the corduroy. Enjoy the berets. Any documentaristable to sell a pro-Bush film to us lot really deserves an Oscar.