All Posts Tagged With: "outreach"

More on Moore

July 5th, 2007 • Agnes Varnum • 3 comments • Related Posts • Tags

I was going to move on but Tom Hall made a post about that I have to respond to, as I fear my previous post may be misleading. (No worries Tom, debate is healthy and no offense taken…)

Tom writes, “What John Pierson and Agnes Varnum get wrong in their separate pieces on and his work is this earnest belief that documentary is reportage, that the ultimate goal of making a film and telling a story by way of documentary is somehow beholden to a literal presentation of events as they happened.”

For the record, I don’t believe that documentary is reportage. There is an expansive history of films that are called documentaries that use an equally expansive toolbox of technique and form. This wide spectrum of possibility is at once the form’s strength and weakness, for each piece must be approached on its own terms, not by some predefined rules of the form.

I’ve expressed admiration for Werner Herzog who continually espouses Truth over form, and I find myself aligned to some degree with this thinking. There are some films, even ones marketed as narrative/fiction (American Splendor comes to mind) that to me are more true than many documentaries. If I have an earnest belief, it is in media literacy, as in, some way to tease out elements of the form and to understand the point of view as well as the larger Truth.

How do you feel about Michael Moore?

March 16th, 2007 • Agnes Varnum • 6 comments • Related Posts • Tags

There was a lot of buzz going into SXSW about Manufacturing Dissent, a new documentary by Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine. They are doc filmmakers based in Toronto and the perception of the project, as intimated in John Anderson’s Feb. 25 article, “Michael & Them: Filmmakers Chase ,” in the NY Times, was that they are progressives yet the project would somehow expose (as what, I’m not quite clear). The very idea seemed enough to irritate lefties who think that whatever might be bad about , he does more good than harm in film and politics and shouldn’t be a target of progressives. Of course, the righties have been on to for a long time and abhor the fact that he wields so much influence when he fictionalizes items in his films. They have tried unsuccessfully to discredit him by uncovering half-truths and fictional elements of his movies.

My position going into the film is that of a passionate advocate for media literacy: thinking critically when viewing any media; so while I tend toward progressive ideals, I also think that no media message is exempt from critique. What are the modes of production? How does the message influence our collective consciousness? Who is paying for the production? It doesn’t matter whether the media is Fox News or , I see them all as targets for critique.