I was going to move on but Tom Hall made a post about SiCKO 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 Moore 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.